The Queen of Honduras Came to Texas to Buy Bulls, and Fell for the Shortest Cowboy in the Arena novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: A Ring I Never Saw

Elena lays out the engagement and the bank's grip on the drought fund in front of the staff, so Isabella skips the airport and drives to the Bennett ranch at dawn, where Clyde's mother meets her with a shotgun.

I didn't say a word until the car doors shut.

Then I turned to Elena in the back seat.

"I am not engaged."

"You are as of Tuesday," she said. "Congress approved it. The bank approved it. The announcement goes out tomorrow at noon."

"Nobody asked me."

"I'm asking you now to put your hair back up. There's a photographer at the guest house."

She handed me a fistful of pins.

I threw them on the floor of the car.

Strother's guest house was a stone hacienda with a red tile roof, built by a man who'd seen pictures of one.

My staff was waiting inside. Two secretaries, a dresser, the press aide, and my guard captain, who'd come to me from my father.

Elena walked into the middle of them and opened her leather folder.

"Change of schedule," she said. "Tomorrow, Midland airport at nine. Her Majesty greets Señor Montenegro on the tarmac. Ring at nine fifteen. Photographs after."

The press aide wrote it down.

Nobody looked at me.

"Elena," I said. "Not in front of them."

"Saturday, the engagement party here at the ranch. The Crown signs the Strother contract at the party, as a gift to the couple."

She turned a page.

"Wardrobe. The navy dress with the long jacket for the airport. It's slimming. Nothing sleeveless. Her Majesty's arms photograph heavy."

My dresser's pen stopped.

"Food card," Elena went on. "Broth tonight. Fruit in the morning. Nothing at the party. A queen who eats at her own engagement party looks greedy, and this one can't afford to look greedy."

One of my secretaries was staring at the floor.

I'd been twelve the first time Elena read my food card aloud in a room full of people.

I was thirty-two now.

It still made my face go hot.

"Why Andrés Montenegro?" I asked.

Elena finally looked at me.

"Because Banco Montenegro holds the Olancho Drought Fund. Twelve million dollars. The bank can call that loan any time it likes."

"It wouldn't dare."

"It wouldn't need to. Your ranchers will get their bulls when the bank is family." She shut the folder. "Your father understood that a crown is a business, Majesty. You'll learn."

"My father loved my mother."

"Your father married your mother on a contract, the same as this one. Love came later. Or it didn't. Nobody checked."

She tucked the gold pen behind her ear.

"Broth is in your room."

I didn't touch the broth.

I sat at the window in the dark and watched Strother's yard lights.

I thought about the short man in the gray hat.

The way he'd stood in front of that horse with his hands low.

The way his ears went red when three hundred people laughed at him.

The way he'd said, those are Bennett bulls.

At four in the morning I knocked on my guard captain's door.

He opened it fully dressed.

He'd guarded my father for nineteen years and me for six. I don't think he'd ever slept.

"I need to see a ranch," I said. "The Bennett place. Before nine."

He looked at me a long moment.

"The chamberlain will have my job."

"The chamberlain doesn't hire you. I do."

He picked up his keys.

The Bennett ranch was forty minutes south on a road with no lines painted on it.

The sun came up pink over the mountains.

Everything else was brown grass and black fence posts and sky, more sky than I'd ever seen in my life.

A tin sign hung crooked on the gate. A B with a rocker under it.

My captain drove over a cattle guard, and the car rattled.

The house at the end of the road was small and white, with a deep porch and a windmill clanking beside it.

There was a pickup in the yard with one door a different color from the rest.

There was a dog asleep under it that didn't bother waking up.

I got out.

The air was cold and smelled like dust and cattle and coffee.

I'd taken my hair down and pulled it back with a rubber band from the car.

I was wearing jeans, a white shirt and my grandmother's emerald earrings.

I had never in my life arrived anywhere without someone announcing me.

I walked up the porch steps and knocked on the screen door.

Inside, a radio was playing a country station.

Then it switched off.

The kitchen door opened, and a small woman with short white hair looked out at me.

She had reading glasses hanging on a cord around her neck.

She had a shotgun in her hands.

It wasn't pointed at me.

But it wasn't pointed anywhere else, either.

She looked up at me, a long way up, and then past me at the black car and my captain beside it.

"I saw you on the news last night," she said.

"Good morning, ma'am. I'm looking for Clyde Bennett."

"I know who you're looking for."

She didn't move out of the doorway.

"So you're the queen," she said. "The one who flew all the way from Honduras to buy our stolen bulls."

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