Their Little Cowgirl

Steven reluctantly admitted what he had refused to allow himself to think thus far. In another lifetime, he would have wanted to pursue her and take a good long taste of those lips. As it was…

He wanted her out of his life completely, to hell with those vulnerable blue eyes. He had thought Jackie was most likely a woman who wasn’t interested in children. But the way she’d looked when she’d said the word baby…

How could he have thought anything would be easy with a woman like that?

But what he wanted right now was to get himself out of this tangled mess. He needed to stop thinking about how she looked and start thinking about how to get her to sign away any rights she had to him and his child.

Their Little Cowgirl

Myrna Mackenzie

To my mother, a living example of what a strong heroine

should be. Thanks for always being there for me, Mom.

MYRNA MACKENZIE,

is the winner of the Holt Medallion honoring outstanding fiction, and was a finalist for numerous other awards, including the Orange Rose, the National Reader’s Choice, the Romantic Times Reviewer’s Choice and WisRWA’s Write Touch. She believes that humor, love and hope are three of the best medicines in the world and tries to make sure that her books reflect that belief. Born in a small town in southern Missouri, Myrna grew up in the Chicago area, married her high school sweetheart and has two teenage sons. Her hobbies include dreaming of warmer climes during the cold northern winters, pretending the dust in her house doesn’t exist, taking long walks and traveling. Readers can write to Myrna at P.O. Box 225, LaGrange, IL 60525, or they may visit her online at www.myrnamackenzie.com.

The Tale of The Ugly Duckling

When Mother Duck saw the sixth egg in her nest was oddly shaped, she knew one of her children would be different from the rest. Sure enough, that summer, when the ducklings hatched, one was bigger and uglier than the others.

After being kicked aside by his siblings, the ugly one ran away from the pond. But after not much time away, he missed the water and yearned for his true home. As autumn covered the countryside, he headed out into the wide world.

One day, on his journey back to the water, he heard the sound of great flapping wings. In the air, he saw a flock of birds flying high. They were as bright as snow and their long necks were stretched southward. He dreamed of going with them, though he knew he was no fit companion for such beautiful birds.

After a hard, cold winter and plenty of adventures the duckling again saw the flock of beautiful creatures. With his heart in his throat, he decided to follow them. He would risk rejection rather than pass up the chance to take flight with the heavenly beings.

To his surprise, they welcomed him! And when he looked for his dull, awkward reflection in the water, he saw a beautiful swan instead.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Prologue

Merry Montrose, known in another life as Princess Meredith Bessart of Silestia, put her hand on the small of her back and rubbed. She was the manager of La Torchére, an island resort in southwestern Florida, and in early May the island should have been paradise. Many people would have deemed themselves lucky to be here, and she knew that, but Merry just felt rather used up and slightly panicky. She frowned at her companion, Lissa Bessart Piers, the resort’s concierge.

“If you had to put a curse on me,” Merry told Lissa, “did you have to make me a crone? I think I’m starting to creak.”

Lissa smiled slightly. “As your godmother, I have a duty to make sure you either turn out to be a good princess for the people back in your homeland, or that you end up being no princess at all. There was a reason for the curse, as well you know, and there’s a way out, as you also know.”

Merry wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t even do that much. I don’t deserve to look and feel so old.”

Lissa didn’t react.

“All right, maybe I did insult Prince Alec a little.”

“He was your betrothed and you did more than insult him a little. And that wasn’t the only thing you did, either.”

Merry shrugged. “I suppose you mean that teensy little incident where I tried to break up my father’s engagement. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“It was a very big deal. He’s a king.”

“She was older than my father.”

“She was his choice, and you not only tried to sabotage the engagement, you took it a step further when that didn’t work and did your best to interfere with the wedding itself. You were out of control. Those were hardly the acts of a princess.”

“I’m not sorry.”

“Even though you’re getting older and grayer every day?”

Merry touched her wrinkled face. “All right, I’m a little sorry, and this way out you’ve discussed, I’m—” She covered her face completely with her hands. “I’m just not sure I’m going to make the deadline. If I don’t…”

“You’ll always be a crone. Silestia and your ties to your family will be a thing of the past.”

“But there’s so little time left, and the task is so great. To get twenty-one couples to fall in love and marry, it’s almost impossible.”

“You only have five to go.”

“Yes, but less than a year to do it in.”

“You wasted a lot of time when I first put the curse on you. I gave you seven years, all the way to your thirtieth birthday, and the first couple of years you didn’t do a thing.”

“I know,” Merry admitted, surprising herself. “And once I began, it was so difficult. It took me four years and several mismatches to get things straight. I’ve been doing this long enough now to be realistic. One year is not enough time to ensure that five couples will meet, fall in love and marry. Could you—”

“What?” Lissa asked, her eyes kind, but her voice firm.

“Give me a little more time.”

Lissa shook her head sadly. “A princess wouldn’t ask for more time.”

“So, it’s hopeless.”

“If you just stand around talking, yes, it is.”

Merry let out a sigh. She looked down at herself, at her once beautiful body, now ravaged by age and riddled with aches that even the warm winds of this Florida island couldn’t take away. To be like this forever, to never go back to her lovely pampered life…

“All right, I’m working on it,” she said. “I just have to keep taking it a step at a time, a couple at a time. Let’s look at who’s due at the resort this week.” She sat down at her computer and called up the schedule of guests. A groan escaped her. Lissa looked over her shoulder.

“I see what you mean,” Lissa said. “There doesn’t appear to be anyone very promising in this batch. You might have to wait until next week.”

But by next week she would be that much closer to losing her youth and beauty and life of royalty forever.

“No, if there aren’t two people in this group who are likely to fall in love, well then, I’ll just have to choose two people who are unlikely to fall in love and work a little magic.”

“Your magic is limited, you know.”

“I know.” Of course, she knew. She had discovered that time and time again. But all she had was her subtle magic. And, oh yes, she did have one thing more.

“If they won’t fit, I’ll make them fit,” she said defiantly. “I may not have much, but I have determination.”

She ran her finger down the list. “There. Him. And her. She’s already here, which might make it easier for me to persuade her. And as it happens, the two of them already have a connection of sorts.”

Lissa crossed her arms. “It’s not a positive connection. They’re likely to be adversaries, not lovers.”

Merry crossed her arms in kind and glared at her godmother. “You set me a task. I’m tending to that task. You may want me to fail, but I don’t intend to do that if I can help it. Now, if you don’t mind, I have business to see to. If I’m going to attempt the nearly impossible, I have to rest up. There’s matchmaking to be done, whether the man and woman want to be matched or not.”

She took a deep breath and stalked off.

Behind her, Lissa smiled. “Oh, I don’t want you to fail, my dear. I very much hope you succeed, but, you’re right—this is a difficult task. And you’ve chosen to make it more difficult by trying to match two people who won’t appreciate your efforts. For the first time, even I am beginning to doubt that you might make it.” And she sighed and went back to work.

Chapter One

“Darn it!” Jacqueline Hammond said to the four walls that surrounded her. She was here in this lovely resort on this lush island to do business, but business wasn’t going well at all right now. And Parris, her half sister and business partner, was nowhere to be found.

“I’m not sure we’re going to make it,” she muttered out loud to herself. “And if we don’t make it, we’re going to lose the business before we’ve even gotten started. And then that man, our father, is going to win. He’s going to say that we can’t do anything right.” Which was exactly what he had been thinking ever since Jackie had been born.

And for today, that just might prove to be the truth. Nothing had gone right all morning.

“Well, at least not much more could go wrong,” Jackie reasoned out loud.

The telephone on the desk in the temporary office that the resort had provided rang loudly. Jackie groaned. She picked up the receiver.

“Hammond Events,” she said, amazed that her voice sounded cool and calm even though she was mentally preparing herself for more bad news.

“Jackie?” The now familiar voice of Merry Montrose, resort manager, flowed crisply through the lines.

“Yes, this is she.”

“I’m at the front desk with someone who wants to see you. A rather…interesting someone. I just wanted to let you know that I’ll be escorting him to your office.”

Ugh, not another celebrity coming to reclaim some family heirloom that yet another family member had tried to sneak into the auction Hammond Events was organizing. Didn’t people just donate things out of the goodness of their hearts anymore? Didn’t donated items stay donated anymore?

“All right, thank you, Ms. Montrose,” Jackie said, trying to keep the weariness and frustration from her voice. It was getting more and more difficult to smile the longer the preparations for the auction went on.

She looked around the room at the collection of items that were starting to stack up. Which precious item was this person going to want to take back? She was beginning to wonder how well any of the donors actually knew the woman who had commissioned Hammond Events to run the auction. Victoria Catherine Smith seemed to have money and the ability to preen with the best of them, but she didn’t appear to have any true friends, not when everyone was taking back their stuff. For a minute, Jackie regretted taking this project on, but then she remembered what was at stake—this business, the only thing that had ever been close to belonging to her, even if she had to share it with a half sister she didn’t know very well. If this auction failed, so would the business. There had been no question that they would take on Ms. Smith’s auction to raise money to build the Victoria Catherine Memorial Aquarium, slated to showcase some of the local marine life but mostly, Jackie guessed, to showcase Ms. Smith’s name to the wealthy who flocked to La Torchére.

The problems with the reluctant donors made it a difficult task, and no doubt it was going to get more difficult within the next few minutes when the unknown man finally made it to her office. She wondered if he was the owner of the Pollock hanging on the wall. She hoped not. It was one of the items most likely to draw crowds to the auction. She frowned at the painting.

“It doesn’t look that bad to me,” a male voice said.

Jackie whirled and found herself staring up into the face of a tall, dark-haired, broad-shouldered man. His face was tanned, his eyes nearly black and unreadable. And though he’d seemed to be making a joke, there was no trace of levity in his expression. Indeed, the way he was studying her made him look a bit like a hunter, and she felt more than a bit like his prey.

With great effort, she forced herself to smile and ignore that ridiculous thought.

“Is it yours?” she asked.

He blinked. No, it obviously wasn’t. “It’s hanging in your office,” he pointed out.

“Yes, but it’s an item for the auction I’m hosting and…well, never mind. How can I help you, Mr….”

“Rollins. Steven Rollins.”

His voice was deep, the words rolling off his tongue in a soft, sexy drawl. Jackie couldn’t help noticing that he seemed too big and masculine for the room. Even so, he looked very much in control, as if this was his office rather than hers.

The thought made her angry. She had been forced to share almost everything of importance all of her life.

Jackie frowned, then realized how silly she was being. This was business. She had to be nice. “How can I help you, Mr. Rollins? Are you here about the auction, or is there some other business you would like Hammond Events to handle?”

He stared directly at her—those dark, compelling eyes seeming to gaze into places no man had ever looked before. “I don’t want to buy anything from you, Ms. Hammond, and I certainly don’t want to sell you anything that belongs to me.”

He said this last part with just a bit too much emphasis.

Jackie blinked and took a deep breath for courage. “Perhaps you should just tell me what you do want, Mr. Rollins.”

“Perhaps I should, but I think you might want to be sitting down when I tell you what I want with you.” His voice dropped lower, and for a minute Jackie felt slightly disoriented. To her surprise, Steven Rollins walked behind her desk and pulled out her chair. He nodded to her and, like an obedient puppy, she slipped around behind the desk and sat. He still stood behind her.

She started to turn the chair, but he circled it and leaned against her desk beside her. A seemingly casual pose, but there was nothing casual about this man.

Jackie felt her breath catch. She had always been a quiet person, and until she had taken on this business with Parris she had considered herself a behind-the-scenes kind of woman. It had taken a lot of work and practice and effort to teach herself how to appear bold and outgoing when inside she was often shaking. It was quite a task to hide her nervousness and make people feel at ease, but she had learned to push past her anxieties and concentrate on the customer and the task. Now this man was making her forget all her hard-won lessons. More to the point, he was making her aware of herself as a woman, which was totally unacceptable.

“What do you want from me, Mr. Rollins?” she asked.

He stared into her eyes and then shook his head. “Ms. Hammond, I regret to tell you that we have a problem, a big one, and it doesn’t involve paintings or auctions, either. The fact is that it has just come to my attention that you are the mother of my baby,” he said. “We need to do something about that.”

Jackie’s eyes widened. Her breathing stopped. She slipped one hand over her throat.

“What?” she finally managed in a whisper.

He shrugged and rubbed the back of his neck. “I probably should have led up to that a bit more slowly, but…you donated eggs at one time?”

Her eyes widened. She gripped the arms of her chair as if squeezing something hard could turn back time. “Yes, once, but only to my cousin,” she said weakly. Her cousin, Trish, had given birth to a girl, and Jackie’s four-year-old niece, Chloe, was a sweetheart. And she was the only result of Jackie’s donation. “You’re not trying to tell me that you and Trish…I wouldn’t believe that, no matter how good looking you are. She’s madly in love with her husband.”

The man’s left brow had raised slightly when she told him he was good looking. “Never had the honor of meeting the lady,” was all he said. “And it was my late wife who gave birth to my little girl.”

Jackie felt suddenly sick. “I don’t understand.”

“That makes two of us, Ms. Hammond.”

“There must be some mistake.”

“There was. Apparently your donor eggs were implanted in my wife without your permission. I’m terribly sorry about that.”

A baby. There was another baby with her DNA, another child she would never get to hold as her own. Chloe had been one thing, she had been voluntary, but this…

Jackie pushed her chin up, her hair falling back as she gazed up at the man with the unreadable eyes. “Why should I believe you, Mr. Rollins?”

“Why should I lie to you?”

“I don’t know, but I…there might be a reason that hasn’t occurred to me yet.”

“I assure you that I’m telling the truth, even though I wish it weren’t so. I do, of course, have proof.”

He reached into the pocket of his navy sport coat, the movement making the muscles bunch beneath his white shirt.

Jackie blanched. How could she even notice such a thing at a moment like this? She turned her attention to the paper Steven Rollins was holding out.

“What is that?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

“It’s the paperwork showing which eggs were used to bring about my wife’s pregnancy. And this other paper matches those very eggs to you.”

Jackie’s hand shook as she took the crisp white pieces of paper. She read the words, which blurred before her eyes.

“How could this have happened?” she asked herself out loud.

“I’ve asked myself that, but there just aren’t any good answers.”

Biting her lip, Jackie nodded and dared to glance up into the dark eyes of the tall man beside her. He didn’t look happy.

“It’s very…very generous of you to come to me with this news. You didn’t have to. I would never have known.”

“Possibly.”

She could tell by his expression that he had considered not coming to her.

“Why did you come?”

“Believe me, my reasons for being here today are anything but altruistic, Ms. Hammond. Suzy isn’t a lost puppy that I was willing to return to the original owners if they showed up when I placed a sign in a store window. I would have liked nothing better than to leave you in the dark. But other people knew. At least a few at the hospital did. These kinds of things have a way of leaking out.”

“So here you are.”

“Yes.” The word seemed to have been forced out of him. He leveled a long, dark stare at her. She noticed that his jaw was hard and square, the skin taut over the bone. He had the look of a man’s man about him, the kind of man many women would have paid to have stare at them. But she wasn’t like most women, and being studied this closely by Steven Rollins made her breath kick up hard in her chest. Her heart was doing sprints. She wanted to squirm.

“What exactly do you want from me, Mr. Rollins?” She managed to keep her voice reasonably firm, even though she knew her knuckles were clenched on the chair so hard that they were undoubtedly white.

He pushed off the desk and rose to his feet, intimidatingly tall. “I want your name on a different piece of paper, Ms. Hammond, stating that you relinquish all rights to my daughter,” he said quietly, in a voice that brooked no arguments. “And I want your word that you will never try to see her or contact her. And you, in return, will have my word and my name on a legal document stating that I will never darken your door again. That’s why I’m here. That’s exactly what I want from you. Now, do we have a deal, ma’am?”

Jackie had never been a person who argued. She had spent her life being accommodating. She had spent her girlhood trying to please a man who could not be pleased and jumping to do his will in the rare moments when he even noticed her. She had never had anything or anyone who truly belonged to her in any real sense. So yes, she had donated her eggs to Trish and been happy to do so. Chloe was worth the hurt of knowing she could never call the little girl her own. But now here was this man, trying to stare her down, trying to force her yet again to give in and be good, to do the easy thing as she had always done.

Somewhere there was a child, a baby, who through accident had come from her body, Jackie thought. A child she would never even have the chance to see the way she saw Chloe.

She stared up at Steven Rollins.

“You think you have the right to do this.”

For a moment his eyelids flickered. Then it was as if his whole body turned to steel. “I know I have the right. Suzy is mine. You didn’t even know about her. I didn’t have to come here.”

Jackie studied the rigid line of his jaw. “But you would have had to live with the fear that someday I might find out.”

“Yes.” He bit the word off, and she understood that it was hard for him to admit as much to her. It was obvious that his child meant a great deal to him.

“How old?”

“What?” A muscle twitched in his jaw. He shook his head.

“How old is…is Suzy?”

He hesitated, as if even sharing that much was too much. “She’s one.”

“A baby. Still a baby.” With all the things that came with a baby—smiles and giggles and soft skin and a baby powder scent. Unconditional love and acceptance of those who cared for her. Sweetness. Innocence. A child who wouldn’t exist if not for those eggs she had donated. A part of herself. Jackie almost closed her eyes, the longing was so overwhelming.

“You’ll sign?” Steven Rollins’s strong voice broke into her thoughts and she looked at him. For a moment she thought she saw a flash of fear and pain in his eyes.

He had lived with his baby for a whole year. She was precious to him. She was, in fact, his and his alone. Suzy Rollins was out of reach for the woman who had unwittingly helped to give her life. Suzy would never know Jackie, and that was the way it had to be.

An unexpected pain sliced through Jackie. She knew she had to sign the papers. And she would.

“Have you come far? Where do you live?”

“I don’t see how that has anything to do with anything.”

“Please.” Her voice caught, and she hated that sign of weakness. She’d spent so much time learning to disguise her weaknesses.

But Steven Rollins seemed to soften at her tone. “I live on a ranch. Around Claxton.”

“Not that far.”

“No.”

A tiny hope filled Jackie’s soul. “I understand why you want me to sign, Mr. Rollins. I would do the same.” To have to share a loved one could be horrible and very difficult. “I don’t expect you to share your daughter with a stranger, especially one who didn’t even know of her existence before today.”

The man relaxed even more. A small smile turned his face heartbreakingly handsome, making Jackie’s breathing kick up a notch. No doubt he’d had a beautiful wife.

“Thank you, Ms. Hammond. You’ll sign then?” He held out his hand, a conciliatory gesture.

“Yes, but I have a condition.”

Immediately his hand stilled. He pulled back. “What kind of a condition?”

“I want to meet her.”

“What do you mean, you want to meet her?”

His tone was thunderous. Jackie should have been shaking in her shoes. Under other circumstances, she would have been, but for some reason she wasn’t as scared of Steven Rollins as she should have been. Maybe because he seemed to genuinely care for his daughter.