Valerie Parv - The Princess's Proposal

“I’m a rancher, not an oil sheik,” he’d reminded her, his hands full of accounts emblazoned with the crests of foreign fashion houses.

“You resent me spending money but you’ll squander millions on that horse—Caravan, or whatever its name is.”

“Carazzan Liberte,” he’d supplied, knowing it was useless to try to explain the horse’s importance to their future. Ever since his last foster father had dragged him outside and challenged him to a fist fight that had settled once and for all that Hugh wasn’t as tough as he pretended, he had finally found out what he was—a rancher who belonged to the land as he belonged nowhere else.

Hugh would always be grateful to Big Dan Jordan for showing him that, and for recognizing the potential in a kid nobody else wanted. Until Dan took him in hand, Hugh had been thrown out of a string of foster homes for being uncontrollable. He bitterly regretted Dan’s premature death from a heart attack and had set out to justify the faith Dan had shown in him by leaving him the land that gave him his start.

Dan had passed on to Hugh his dream of breeding the world’s best riding horses. He’d known that Carazzan was the key after seeing a news story about an old horse trainer who had spotted the young stallion leading a wild herd on Nuee and had come out of retirement to catch and tame this one fantastic horse. Hugh knew how the man must have felt. He had wanted Carazzan from the moment he saw the story.

He had hardly been able to contain his excitement on hearing that Carazzan was for sale. But Jemima had drained their account of the money Hugh had set aside to buy the horse and took off to Paris with it. As a result Carazzan was bought by a member of the Carramer royal family. Maybe trying to buy the horse from them was a fool’s errand, but Hugh had been a fool before and would be again. He only knew he wouldn’t rest until the horse was where it belonged, in his possession.

Even so, he could have forgiven Jemima for taking the money. What he couldn’t forgive was her taking another man with her then flaunting it when friends mentioned to him having seen them in each other’s arms.

“It was a fling with an old flame. It means nothing,” she had said when he confronted her.

It meant a lot to Hugh. Having lost the first person in the world he’d been able to trust, he couldn’t believe his own wife could betray his trust without realizing the damage she’d done. He had quietly asked for a divorce, offering to take all the blame himself and to give her whatever she required for a comfortable life without him.

He had reckoned without her fury at being, as she put it, cast aside. Jemima had set out to spread rumors that his finances were in trouble, he was about to lose the ranch and he was impotent to boot. He could laugh about it now, but eighteen months ago she had nearly achieved her aim and finished him. As the baseless rumors spread, business associates began to avoid him, his credit dried up, and land he needed for expansion became mysteriously unavailable.

It had taken every ounce of street-cunning he possessed to ride out the crisis and to show the world that, not only was he not in trouble, he was prospering. Little by little, confidence in him was reestablished and he could get back to business-as-usual.

About the slurs to his manhood he could do nothing, but he had never cared what others thought of him and didn’t plan to start now. After his experience with Jemima, he wasn’t about to get tangled up with another woman, especially the pedigreed kind who lived in a different world from the one he inhabited.

Like the woman with the balloon, he told himself as his thoughts came full circle. He was no expert on fashion, but Jemima had taught him to recognize couture when he saw it. Although her clothes were ordinary enough, the woman with the balloon yelled couture from the top of her designer sun hat to the manicured toes of her sandal-clad feet.

She was also trouble with a capital T, he sensed. What was behind those big dark glasses? Every one of his survival instincts, honed while growing up in foster homes and institutions, told him she was hiding something. He would give a lot to know what it was.

He had no business even wondering, he told himself as he flashed his pass at the entrance to the members’ pavilion and was ushered inside. Until that brief encounter, he’d come to the show only to check out the Nuee horses. Found nowhere else on earth, they were a spectacular hybrid of the Lipizzans that the Spaniards had brought to the island long ago and a hardy native breed. The combination had proved extraordinary, and the most extraordinary of them all was Carazzan Liberte, a stallion capable of siring the perfect riding horses Hugh dreamed of breeding.

Carazzan wasn’t on show here, but he hadn’t expected it any more than he would expect to run into the stallion’s royal owner in the crowd. Later would do for that, when he attended a gala charity affair at the palace. He wasn’t looking forward to overdosing on so much pomp and ceremony, a legacy of his misfit youth, he supposed. But attending was the only way he could get close enough to the princess to convince her that Carazzan belonged at the centerpiece of Hugh’s new ranch.

A cheer went up from the crowd, and Hugh focused his attention on the arena, seeing the roughriders surge in at full gallop, stirring up clouds of dust and filling the air with their bloodcurdling cries. This was what Hugh had come to see.

Adrienne’s heart picked up speed as the roughriders galloped past, crossing and recrossing one another’s paths in impossibly tight formation. She knew the routines were inspired by centuries-old scenes depicted on cave walls throughout Nuee. The Mayat, ancestors of the modern-day Carramer people, had been legendary riders, training their wild horses to perform feats such as leaping from a cliff into the seething surf with a rider aboard, then carrying them safely back to the shore.

What she wouldn’t give to have seen that, Adrienne admitted. The riders supposedly had no other obligations but to ride to the glory of the gods. According to legend, they had lived with their horses and sometimes died with them. Then some of the famous Lipizzans had been brought to Nuee by their Spanish owners, the native horses interbreeding with the Lipizzans over time to produce horses of spectacular beauty as well as high intelligence and ready trainability.

The proof was in the demonstration in front of her. Fast, furious and exacting, the mock battle routines demanded split-second timing and hair-trigger reflexes. But the rough-riders and their mounts lived up to their name, and although a couple of carefully executed near-misses brought the crowd to their feet, there were no mishaps. By the time the thrilling display ended, Adrienne felt wrung out, as if she had ridden the course instead of watching it.

From force of habit she turned left out of the arena, toward the stables, which she made a point of visiting whenever she attended an event at the showground in her official capacity. She realized her mistake when she rounded a corner and found herself in a side alley with a cowboy barring her path. He wore a roughrider costume, but she hadn’t seen him in the show. And he was drunk, she discovered as soon as he opened his mouth.

“This area’s off-limits to the gen’l public,” he mumbled, swaying slightly.

“My mistake,” she said, backing away.

He followed her. “I’d be glad to give you a private tour.”

“No, thank you, I’ll just go back the way I came.”

He closed the distance between them. “No hurry. Nobody here but us. You like cowboys, little lady?”

His beefy hand closed around her arm, and he yanked her roughly toward him. The smell of alcohol bloomed on his breath, making her gag. “Please let me go,” she said as calmly as she could, although her heart was pounding.