Princess in Disguise

Sox was a terrific dog.She was born to work with sheep, the kind of dog you thanked your lucky stars for over and over again. Brant could send her up the hill and she would muster the mob down to him all on her own. She would tear back and forth, ever alert for breakaways, pushing them toward the yard with scarcely a bark, and working on a level of instinct that training could never fully replicate.She jumped fences like a kangaroo, and sometimes her eyes begged him with an almost Shakespearean eloquence for more work to do. Ple-e-ease, are we mustering sheep today?She loved it.Brant relied on her, and right now hers was the only ear he could confide in."Tell me those three lame ewes don't mean anything, Soxie," he said to her.They were both riding the four-wheeler down the hill at a considerable clip. It was a beautiful afternoon, unseason-ably warm for mid-May. Fluffy white clouds floated in a blue sky, birds sang and in the distance on the road from Holbrook Brant glimpsed the red flash of a fast-moving car heading in this direction. The bright color toned with a pair of crimson rosellas who flew past, weaving an intricate flight pattern in the air and twittering as they went, then the car disappeared behind a stand of breeze-tossed, sunlit trees.It wasn't the kind of day for bad news about his sheep. Brant straddled the four-wheeler's wide seat, his hands and feet working the controls, and Sox sat crosswise on the back, craning around the side of his body, panting at him, waiting to find out what sheep-related adventure the two of them were going to have next.Unfortunately, she couldn't reassure him about the lame ewes."It's not foot rot," he told her. He'd taken a good look at the hooves in question, had cleaned them out and pared them back, taking care not to draw blood or expose soft tissue. There had definitely been some inflammation and underrunning. "Don't tell me it's foot rot, okay, because I don't want to hear it. I am not contacting the Pastures Protection Board yet."It could be foot rot.After a long, crippling drought, there'd been a warm autumn with good rains, the right conditions to activate and spread the bacteria, and if any of those four thousand pregnant ewes he'd just paid top dollar for had been infected when they'd arrived here recently, then his entire acreage could soon harbour the disease.The implications were too expensive to bear thinking about, and the worst-case scenarios could play out for almost a year.Sox nudged her compact black-and-tan body closer to Brant, as if she could tell he was worried. He felt her warmth and her panting motion against his back. They swooped down the green, rolling terrain, over a well-worn metal grid and along the fence line toward the house.Brant kept thinking about sheep feet, thinking about the ghastly prospect of disease, of a third of his stock's value and his year's income getting slashed down at a single stroke -- six figures' worth of loss -- thinking of all those months of extra work and expense and concern......None of which he wanted to share with his sister, because Nuala and Chris were getting married in a few months, Chris had his own stock and acreage to think about and Brant didn't want to rain on their parade.And then he saw the bright red car again, just inside his main gate and definitely heading this way. It was a zippy little machine, gleaming and well maintained.Not a farmer's car.His spirits sank even further. He knew what kind of a visitor this would be.Female.A stranger.A city girl.Over the past few months he'd met enough women like this to last him a lifetime, and even the nicest of them hadn't struck any meaningful sparks. Recently, one of them -- not the nicest -- had spread his address around to some of her friends and now he had new ones dropping in unannounced at the most impossible times.Such as when he'd just discovered that at least three of his newDarcy, Lilian is the author of 'Princess in Disguise', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373247660 and ISBN 0373247664.