Page 6 of Wyoming Heart

The cowboy chuckled. “The sort where anybody’s welcome,” he replied. “So I guess I’ll clean my boots and see if I can find a clean change of clothes, and I’ll present myself to the single ladies present!”

“Good luck with that, McAllister.” Bart grinned. “You’d do better to pin fifty-dollar bills to your shirt and go date-fishing at a mall. You are a disaster when it comes to women.”

“I noticed,” the cowboy sighed. “But then, miracles happen every day, they say. I’m waiting for mine with both hands outstretched!”

“Uncomfortable posture,” Bart returned.

“What’s a little discomfort in pursuit of love?” the cowboy said with a laugh.

“When is this mythical party?” Bart asked.

“Saturday night.”

“I’ll bring my cousin,” Bart told him, indicating Cort. “A night out will do him good.”

“It won’t do me any good,” McAllister said in a sad tone. “He’s prettier than all the rest of us combined. I reckon the pretty ladies will trample us to get to him.” He pointed at Cort, who laughed uproariously.

MINAMICHAELS,MEANWHILE, wasn’t laughing. She was dreading an upcoming party that she was being forced to go to. A lot of people wouldn’t even recognize her as an author, because she wrote under the pen name of Willow Shane. The hosts, the Simpsons, were kind people who read her books, so she felt obligated to go. Besides, many of the local citizens who’d been so kind to her would be present. Her life had been a hard one. It was better now that she lived alone at the ranch that her father had owned. He’d left her mother when she was nine, and her mother had a rich boyfriend who kept things going at the ranch afterward.

The rich boyfriend, however, eventually got tired of Anthea Michaels. She found a married man and seduced and then blackmailed him into keeping her up. Men came and went in the house all the time Mina was growing up. She saw things that turned her stomach. Her mother thought it was hilarious that she was shocked. She chided Mina about her stupid morals and her infrequent trips to church whenever Mina could get a ride.

Despite the boyfriend who paid the bills, her mother had slept with a lot of other men, including a boy Mina had a painfully fervent crush on. She’d cried for days. The boy was too ashamed afterward to even speak to Mina, and of course, all the kids at school knew what her mother had done. Her mother chided her about it long afterward. It amused her that she’d taken away Mina’s one chance at puppy love.

Cousin Rogan Michaels had taken on the responsibility for the ranch soon after Mina’s father left. He hired and fired cowboys and kept the livestock healthy. But he wouldn’t give Anthea one penny for her lifestyle. He did give her money to spend on Mina. Of course, Mina never saw a penny of it, or even knew about it, until after Anthea was dead and gone.

Anthea’s married boyfriend’s wife finally found out about the affair and threatened to leave him. It seemed that she had the money, and her husband was taking it out of their savings account to give to Anthea. So that was the end of that gravy train.

But soon afterward, her mother had brought home a man who promised to help pay the bills. He turned out to be not only a liar, but a raging alcoholic. Her mother seemed obsessed with him. Mina hated him on sight. He spent weekends getting drunk on whiskey and pills. He went from weekends to every day, and her mother tried to sell off the livestock—until Cousin Rogan found out and threatened litigation and charges of attempted theft. So Anthea quickly decided not to pursue that plan.

She started drinking heavily, too, and locking herself in the bedroom with their new houseguest most nights and sometimes all weekend. She was crazy about the drunk, whose name was Henry. He didn’t work, but he made a good job of turning Mina’s life to hell. She’d complained about him, just once, to her mother. Henry had beaten the hell out of her and dared her to go to the law about it.

Mina, bruised all over and hurting, took the dare, feeling that her life couldn’t be any worse than it already was. She was sixteen and sick and scared to death of Henry. So a sheriff’s deputy, a newcomer to the community, had come out to the house to answer Mina’s call.

Mina’s mother got to him first. She swore that Mina had fallen down the steps and blamed it on poor Henry. Her teenage daughter didn’t like her mother’s boyfriend, she said. Mina called him names and threatened to have him put in jail on fake charges all the time, she added. Anthea cried and sounded so convincing that the sheriff’s deputy believed her and went away. Afterward, Mina caught hell. Henry left more bruises on her, along with a few lacerations from the edge of his belt. Anthea didn’t say a word. She poured herself and Henry another drink.

Cody Banks, the sheriff, read the deputy’s report. He didn’t buy Anthea’s explanation. He kept a watch on Mina. But he couldn’t catch her mother’s boyfriend in the act, and Mina’s mother wouldn’t have testified, anyway. It would be Mina’s word against Henry’s, and Mina’s mother had already spread it around town that Mina was a terrible liar.

Life had been so hard. Mina didn’t do well in school because she was shy and withdrawn and bullied. Her home life was even worse. Her only escape had been her writing, a secret she shared with very few people. From the age of thirteen, writing had obsessed her. Cousin Rogan had encouraged her. Her mother wasn’t told, ever.

Mina didn’t date, so she was ridiculed by the other girls. Only one of them, Sassy, had been kind to her. It was why she and Sassy were such good friends. Bart had met Mina when her mother had got her a job after school in the local restaurant as a waitress, to help bring in money, because her mother and her alcoholic boyfriend were too stoned to work. Despite Cousin Rogan keeping the ranch up, there was no food without money, no utilities, either. Her mother had made threats when Mina protested that she didn’t want to work as a waitress. They were sickening threats, and Henry smiled at her while they were made. She didn’t protest again. Henry liked to try and fondle her when her mother wasn’t looking. Not that her mother would have cared. She’d hated Mina her whole life. Mina had never known why.

Mina’s little paycheck took care of groceries and the power and water bill, with nothing left over. Mina gritted her teeth and studied hard so that she could graduate and get away from home as soon as possible. She would have thrown herself on Cousin Rogan’s mercy, but he’d spent a couple of years in Australia, in partnership with the local cattle magnate, McGuire, working on their big cattle station there. He had a man assigned to act as foreman of the ranch in his absence, but the man was cold as ice and Mina was as nervous of him as she was of Henry.

Bart was kind to her. He took the place of the brother she wished she had. He was encouraging, and optimistic. He reminded her that she was almost old enough to graduate and then she could get away from her mother and her mother’s awful boyfriend. He’d help, he added, anyway he could. It had really touched Mina, whose life had been a daily torment.

Then, when Mina turned eighteen, just days before she graduated from high school, her mother’s boyfriend, high as a kite, drove the two of them out to a local bar in the country to buy more liquor. On the way, he ran the car into a telephone pole at a high rate of speed and killed them both instantly.

Mina felt guilty for the relief that overwhelmed her. She and her mother had never been close, and since Henry had moved in with them, nothing had gone right.

She had Bart to help her with the funeral arrangements and finding an attorney to help with the administration of the estate. Luckily, Mina’s cousin Rogan had come home from Australia about the same time, and he was a tower of strength. He was outraged when he heard what Mina had gone through, and sorry that he hadn’t been near enough to help. He took care of everything and set Mina up with a computer and enough money to keep the ranch going while she did what she’d dreamed of all her life—write books. He’d read some of her work. He was convinced that she’d go right to the top. He was the first person who’d really believed she could. Well, he and Bart.

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.

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