Saving Cinderella

Lying in bed in a darkened room, Trixie had overwhelmed Jill with advice and instructions, in a pained, croaky voice. “And don’t forget that publicity thing afterward. The ‘Cinderella Marathon’ thing.”

“What?”

“The ball thing, the contest, with the cable channel.”

“I don’t know anything about that.”

“You just have to stick around the hotel. It’s in the big function room. You’re the so-called ‘Celebrity bride.’ They’ll tell you what to do. You haven’t heard about it? There’s been a lot of publicity about the rules and prizes, and all.”

“No, I haven’t heard about it.” I’ve been too busy crying into my pillow, missing Sam and wishing I’d never come.

“It’s no big deal, but you know management will kill you if you don’t show.”

“I know.”

So she had “shown” for the “Cinderella contest thing” in the big function room just as she was supposed to do, without the slightest idea what it was all about….

“This is it,” Gray said, wheeling the pickup to a halt in front of a big metal shed.

Jill was impressed by the sizeable collection of buildings grouped nearby. She could only guess what they were used for. Milking? Did the McCalls run the kind of cattle that got milked? Somehow, she thought not.

In the distance, she could glimpse the large new house on the hill, the place that the McCalls were renting out in order to stretch their cash flow a little. It was separated from this section of the ranch by three fences and a line of healthy young trees, their leaves ablaze with fall color.

Gray jumped out of the truck, and she watched him for a moment before getting out herself. He was such a capable looking man, as upright and sturdy as a tree trunk, both in body and heart, but she had known from the moment they met that he was hurting. Something in his life wasn’t right, and he had his back to the wall as he fought his circumstances.

She didn’t know the whole story, but she knew some of it, thanks to the way they’d talked that night in Las Vegas six months ago. His father had overstretched their finances with the purchase of a neighboring ranch immediately before his death. As a result, Grayson, his newly widowed mother and his fit but elderly grandfather were in danger of losing the land that had been in the McCall family for over eighty years.

Until seeing the place for herself today, Jill hadn’t been able to grasp what that meant. Now, she was just beginning to understand. This place was substantial, beautiful, and expensive to run—rewarding of success and dramatically unforgiving of failure.

And somehow the thought of Gray failing, of losing the fight to save his family ranch after the blow of his father’s death, suddenly mattered to her. It mattered in a way that made her throat tighten and took her breath away. She didn’t want to think of him failing after such a struggle, through no fault of his own.

This was what the word “real” meant, she understood.

“Real” wasn’t the bewildering whirl of their publicity-stunt Cinderella marriage, under the glare of TV lights. The marriage was legal, as Jill’s lawyer had advised, but it wasn’t real. “Real” wasn’t even the unexpected moment of stillness in the midst of it all. The moment when she and Gray had said their vows, still believing them to be a meaningless charade, and had looked into each other’s eyes and felt…magic.

None of those things were real. But this…This was real. Gray’s struggle to keep his ranch and the life he loved was real. No wonder he just wanted to sign those divorce papers, watch Sam get quickly well and wave them goodbye.

Alan was right, she thought. He knew I couldn’t get the magic of that night with Gray out of my head. He knew I had to come here and feel the reality for myself.

Chapter Three

“You don’t have to work so hard, Jill,” Gray said.

He had been glancing up from beneath the hood of the pickup to watch her every few minutes for the past hour and a half. He hadn’t seen her take a break yet.

When they reached the shed, she had insisted on a “real job.” Hiding his skepticism, he’d taken her at her word. It hadn’t been hard to find one for her. She was chipping off rust-blistered paint and coating a derusting treatment onto the bale retriever. The vehicle was falling apart but it had to last out a whole season of winter feeding. There was no way he could afford to get it replaced as his father had planned to do this year.

Some of those rust patches were getting downright dangerous. They had begun to eat into and weaken the metal, and she was taking it seriously. He was amazed at how hard she was prepared to work. She had chips of yellow paint all over Louise’s old red sweater, and a streak of rust across her cheek. The air smelled of the acrid chemical treatment. The noise she had made as she chipped was like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Jill’s neat hips moved in rhythm as she worked. Her pert derriere stuck out when she bent to reach an awkward spot with her brush. Louise’s sweater hugged her figure soft and close, showing her curves. The sight once again affected Gray in a way that was both delicious and uncomfortable.

From time to time she shook her glossy dark hair back out of her eyes. Once she wiped her hands on a rag and re-wound the piece of pink elastic around her jaunty ponytail to keep it more securely out of the way. The movement lifted the neat swell of her breasts, and lifted the sweater to briefly show an inch of silky skin around her waist.

Gray knew women—ranchers’ wives and daughters included—who would have thrown up their hands at the job long ago, but Jill was taking it all in stride. Or maybe she was just releasing pent-up tension. This situation couldn’t be any easier for her than it was for him. She was stuck here on the ranch with a sick child, when all she wanted was to make an arrangement about the divorce and get on with her life.

He closed the hood of the pickup and went over to her.

Short of investing in parts he couldn’t afford—like a whole new engine, maybe—he’d done all he could to make the truck worthy of a grinding ride into one of the roughest sections of the entire ranch. He had gone out on horseback this morning, hoping for a quick fix with a few coils of wire. Instead he was going to need new posts, new holes and half a dozen heavy tools.

It was just one more task he didn’t need, with all his ranch hands laid off and his grandfather working way harder than an old man should. Not to mention Mom.

“I’m doing fine here,” Jill told him.

She straightened. He could see a tiny yellow paint chip on her jaw line that his fingers itched to brush away. He remembered all too clearly how soft her skin was in that spot.

“I know you are,” he answered instead. “You’ve done a great job. I never thought you’d get that far in a couple of hours. But we should pack up now and head back. It’s getting dark out.”

She blinked. “That late?”

“Time flies when you’re having fun.”

“Ha ha.”

“While we’re clearing up, shall we grab a coffee and talk a little bit?”

“Sure. About the divorce?”

“And about the marriage. Square our stories. How much do you want to tell Mom?”

He went over to a bench at the side of the shed, where there was a sink and a faucet and a propane camping stove.

“It’s your decision, Gray,” she answered.

“I’m inclined to keep it simple.” He added water to a kettle and instant coffee granules to two cups as he spoke. “Let’s just say you got in trouble with a contract in Las Vegas that I was a witness to, and now there are some legal papers for me to sign so you can get out of the situation. That’s…kind of the truth.”

She laughed. “Sort of kind of, I guess.”

“Okay, I admit it.” He spread his work-roughened hands and gave an upside down smile. “I’m embarrassed to tell my mother that I actually married a woman I hadn’t even met purely because I felt sorry for her!”

“You didn’t know it would be legal.”

“Might have done it anyway, under the circumstances,” he growled.

She raised her eyebrows. Didn’t quite believe him.

“Well, I’m grateful,” she said. “I’ll never forget how it felt to escape from those other guys, Gray, when I realized they weren’t prepared to go over five hundred dollars and you were.”

“How’d you know I wasn’t a creep, too?”

It was something he had been wondering on and off for six months. How they had both known, actually, that it was a good deed on his part. That he was saving Cinderella, not kidnapping her.

She went still at his question, and her jewel green eyes rounded. “I—” She stopped, and laughed her pretty, golden laugh. “Lord, you know, I never even thought about that. I…just knew.”

She looked at him and frowned. Her head tilted slightly to one side as if she was tallying his attributes. He met her gaze steadily, but felt self-conscious. He wasn’t sure what she would think about what she saw.

He was a simple man, big, strong, but with no airs and graces. He wore work clothes six and a half days a week, and he had rough hands like two fresh offcuts of wood. There was no glamour attached to him. He couldn’t be the type she was used to—like the man in Pennsylvania who wanted to marry her, for example.

“I guess because you were just sitting there quietly,” she said finally.

“Yeah, I’d just come in for a beer,” he agreed, remembering…

He had made the journey to Las Vegas in desperation. He wanted to see his older half-brother, Mitch, who was the only person he could think of who might lend him the money he needed to put capital into the expanded. Thurrell Creek, owned by Wylie Stannard for thirty years since he’d won it from Ron Thurrell’s father in a bet, was run down and neglected and in very bad shape.

If he could put some money into Thurrell Creek, if the weather was kind to him, if he didn’t lose too many calves, then he’d have cattle to sell and could hopefully claw himself up out of the hole the ranch was buried in.

Why had Dad suddenly bought Thurrell Creek from old Wylie Stannard last December, when Wylie had blown into town from back east, ready to sell? Had Dad stopped to think about quite how much it would stretch their cash flow? Did he have a strategy for making it work?

Nine months later, Gray still didn’t know.

By a chilling coincidence, which still sent prickles up his spine whenever he thought of it, Frank McCall had died that same day. He and Stannard and the McCalls’ lawyer, Haydon Garrett, had finalized the purchase of the ranch. Afterward, on his way home, Frank had suffered what would prove to be a fatal stroke, at the wheel of his pickup in Blue Rock’s main street. He’d never been able to talk about the purchase of Thurrell Creek, and how he planned to manage.

But if Dad thought we could do it, then we should be able to do it. Gray had thought this way in Las Vegas, and he was still thinking this way now. Is it my fault? Was he that much better a rancher than I am? We had a tough winter. We lost more stock than I’d hoped. We had to replace the generator, and we had that fire in the feed store. But Dad was the one who taught me to allow for contingencies like that. Why did he think we could stretch ourselves so thin?

Gray had not told Mitch any of this when he made his desperate plea for funds. It didn’t change the outcome. Mitch refused to help.

Sitting defensively behind his desk in his big office in downtown Vegas, Mitch had told his half-brother angrily, “Your father told me to stay out of your lives.”

“Yes, because—”

“Now, suddenly, when Frank is gone—” Mitch plowed through Gray’s words “—and you need my money, the money I made in business with my own father, it’s a different story.”

“It’s not like that, Mitch. Dad spoke in anger that day.” Gray didn’t add his opinion that Frank McCall’s anger had been more than justified after the years of hurt Mitch had inflicted on the family, both before and after his departure from the ranch at the age of nineteen. “You know they both wanted to heal the rift. Mom hoped so much that you’d come to Dad’s funeral. She phoned you. She begged—”

“It was too late for that,” Mitch cut in, his mouth tight. “Mom’s always been too sentimental. She may believe that anger shouldn’t last beyond the grave, but that’s not my opinion.”

What could Gray do at this point but accept defeat? He didn’t know which was worse—that he hadn’t found a way to save the ranch, or that Mitch and Louise were still so deeply at odds, with himself, as Frank’s son, locked in the middle. Both facts had his gut tied in knots, and he hadn’t trusted himself to drive after he left Mitch’s office. Had decided to stay overnight, start heading back at first light.

By that time, it was late afternoon, and he’d wandered into the gaming and entertainment section of his hotel, emotions stretched tight as a fiddle string. He’d fed five dollars into a slot machine, purely for the release of hearing the strident noise as he pulled the handle. He had received six hundred dollars worth of winnings from his last pull with an absent sort of surprise. At least it covered the cost of the trip.

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