Mina’s life was better, after the funerals. She had horrible memories about the past few miserable years, but she put one foot in front of the other and went ahead in spite of her pain.
Her cousin had a ranch of his own, much bigger than Bart’s, and he’d been keeping the Michaels ranch going for several years, with men and money that Mina’s vicious mother couldn’t touch. The men he’d had on the ranch answered to him, not to Anthea, so the ranch stayed solvent. Mina learned from him how to buy and sell cattle when she was barely in her teens. She used that knowledge after graduation to help with expenses. The cowboys were patient with her and helped teach her how to keep the ranch going in Cousin Rogan’s absence. One of them, an older cowboy named Bill McAllister, was her part-time foreman. She learned a lot from him. He’d worked on ranches all over the West, and he knew ways of doing things that saved both time and money. Her friend Bart was one of his other employers. The little profit that she managed from her efforts was more than enough to pay the utilities and grocery bills and even give her a little extra to spend on clothes. She loved cattle.
But what Mina wanted to do more than anything on earth was to be a writer. She loved romance novels. She was also crazy about soldiers of fortune and people in law enforcement. She found a way to combine those preferences and put them into a book. The first one she tried to market wasn’t well received. She put it away and tried again, slanting the book more toward romance than hard fiction. And she made her first sale.
Two years later, after her graduation, Mina was selling novels and garnering praise from reviewers and readers. Her old-fashioned attitude and small-town slant on life, besides the realistic action scenes, gave her a unique voice that went over well with her reading public. She’d attracted a group of mercenaries through a friend who gave a copy of her book to its leader. The group adopted her and taught her all about covert ops, even taking her on missions with them. She achieved a realism in her novels that made them stand out, especially when her research group was known.
It was like a dream come true, especially considering what her life had been like. Her cousin Rogan was proud of her. So was Bart.
So now at twenty-four, Mina was selling novels to a major publishing house and she was hitting bestseller lists. Her latest novel, about a gunrunner who reformed, had made the USA TODAY bestseller list. She was hoping that it would move to other lists as well. Reviewers had been kind. She had a bright future.
It was just that her past haunted her. That mean cowboy who was staying with Bart made her angry every time she thought of him. He was handsome and attractive and looked as if he knew more about women than she did. He made her uneasy, because she knew she’d be fair game for such a man if he turned up the heat. So she was going to avoid him like the plague. Because she was never going to let a man into her life. She knew what men were like from the ones her mother had brought home, especially Henry. She knew that when men drank, they were dangerous. She’d had quite enough of dangerous men. Well, except for her tutors, she mused.
* * *
Don’t miss
WYOMING HEART
by New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer,
available now wherever HQN Books are sold!
Copyright © 2019 by Diana Palmer
ISBN-13: 9781488074349
Long Tall Texans: Boone
First published as Heart of Stone in 2008. This edition published in 2020.
Copyright © 2008 by Diana Palmer
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises ULC. 22 Adelaide St. West, 40th Floor Toronto, ON M5H 4E3 Canada.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
www.Harlequin.com
