For Now and Forever Read online

  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 how to buy and sell cattle from him 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. One of them, an older cowboy named Bill, 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 cousin was one of his best friends. 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 gave her a unique voice that went over well with her reading public. 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 Mina, at twenty-four, 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 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 easy 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.

  Don’t miss Wyoming Heart by Diana Palmer, available in October 2019 wherever Harlequin® books and ebooks are sold.

  www.Harlequin.com

  Copyright © 2019 by Diana Palmer

  ISBN-13: 9781488053641

  For Now and Forever

  Copyright © 2019 by Harlequin Books S.A.

  The publisher acknowledges the copyright holder of the individual works as follows:

  Dark Surrender

  First published in 1983 by Dell. This edition published in 2019.

  Copyright © 1983 by Diana Palmer

  Color Love Blue

  First published in 1984 by Dell. This edition published in 2019.

  Copyright © 1984 by Diana Palmer

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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