Courageous

Praise for the novels of New York Times bestselling author Diana Palmer

‘Nobody does it better.’

—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

‘Palmer knows how to make the sparks fly.’

—Publishers Weekly

‘Diana Palmer is a mesmerising storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.’

—Affaire de Coeur

‘Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.’

—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz

About the Author

The prolific author of over one hundred books, DIANA PALMER got her start as a newspaper reporter. One of the top ten romance writers in America, she has a gift for telling the most sensual tales with charm and humour. Diana lives with her family in Georgia.

Novels by Diana Palmer

NIGHT FEVER

ONE NIGHT IN NEW YORK

BEFORE SUNRISE

OUTSIDER

LAWMAN

HARD TO HANDLE

FEARLESS

DIAMOND SPUR

TRUE COLOURS

HEARTLESS

MERCILESS

TRUE BLUE

COURAGEOUS

Courageous

Diana Palmer

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Mel and Syble,

with all my love

PROLOGUE

Peg Larson loved to fish. This was like baiting a hook. Except that instead of catching bass or bream in the local streams around Comanche Wells, Texas, these tactics were for catching a large, very attractive man.

She missed fishing. It was only a couple of weeks until Thanksgiving, and much too cold even in south Texas to sit on a riverbank. It was wonderful, in early spring, to settle down with a tub of worms and her tried-and-true simple cane fishing pole. She weighed down her line with sinkers and topped it with a colorful red, white and blue bobber that her father had given to her when she was five years old.

But fishing season was months away.

Right now, Peg had other prey in mind.

She looked at herself in the mirror and sighed. Her face was pleasant, but not really pretty. She had large eyes, pale green, and long blond hair, which she wore in a ponytail most of the time, secured with a rubber band or whatever tie she could lay her hand to. She wasn’t really tall, but she had long legs and a nice figure. She pulled off the rubber band and let her hair fall around her face. She brushed it until its paleness was like a shimmering curtain of pale gold. She put on a little lipstick, just a touch, and powdered her face with the birthday compact her father had given her a few months earlier. She sighed at her reflection.

In warm weather, she could have worn her cutoffs—jean shorts made by cutting the legs off an old pair—and a nicely fitting T-shirt that showed off her pert, firm little breasts. In November, she had fewer options.

The jeans were old, pale blue and faded in spots from many washings, but they hugged her rounded hips and long legs like a second skin. The top was pink, made of soft cotton, with long sleeves and a low, rounded neckline that was discreet, but sexy. At least, Peg thought it was sexy. She was nineteen, a late bloomer who’d fought the wars in high school to keep away from the fast and furious crowd that thought sex before marriage was so matter-of-fact and sensible that only a strange girl would feel disdain for it.

Peg chuckled to herself as she recalled debates with casual friends on the subject. Her true friends were people of a like mind, who went to church in an age when religion itself was challenged on all fronts. But, in Jacobsville, Texas, the county seat where the high school was located, she was in the majority. Her school had cultural diversity and protected the rights of all its students. But most of the local girls, like Peg, didn’t bow to pressure or coercion where morality was concerned. She wanted a husband and children, a home of her own, a garden and flower beds everywhere, and most of all, Winslow Grange to fill out the fairy tale.

She and her father, Ed, worked for Grange on his new ranch. He’d saved the wife of his boss, Gracie Pendleton, when she was kidnapped by a deposed South American leader who needed money to oust his monstrous nemesis.

Grange had taken a team of mercenaries into Mexico in the dead of night and saved Gracie. Jason Pendleton, a millionaire with a real heart of gold, had given Grange a ranch of his own on the huge Pendleton ranch property in Comanche Wells, complete with a foreman and housekeeper—Ed and his daughter, Peg.

Before that, Ed had worked on the Pendleton ranch, and Peg had spent many long months building daydreams around the handsome and enigmatic Grange. He was tall and dark, with piercing eyes and a nicely tanned face. He’d been a major in the U.S. Army during the Iraq war, during which he’d done something unconventional and mustered out to avoid a general court-martial. His sister had committed suicide over a local man, people said. He was a survivor in the best sense of the word, and now he was working with the deposed Latin leader, Emilio Machado, to retake his country, Barrera, in the Amazon rain forest.

Peg didn’t know much about foreign places. She’d never even been out of Texas and the only time she’d even been on a plane was a short hop in a propeller-driven crop duster owned by a friend of her father. She was hopelessly naive about the world and men.

But Grange didn’t know what an innocent she really was, and she wasn’t going to tell him. For weeks, she’d been vamping him at every turn. In a nice way, of course, but she was determined that if any woman in south Texas landed Grange, it was going to be herself.

She didn’t want him to form a bad opinion of her, of course, she just wanted him to fall so head-over-heels in love with her that he’d propose. She dreamed of living with him. Not that she didn’t live with him now, but she worked for him. She wanted to be able to touch him whenever she liked, hug him, kiss him, do … other things with him.

When she was around him, her body felt odd. Tight. Swollen. There were sensations rising in her that she’d never felt before. She’d dated very infrequently because most men didn’t really appeal to her. She’d thought something might be wrong with her, in fact, because she liked shopping with girlfriends or going to movies alone, but she wasn’t really keen on going out with boys like some of the girls did, every single night. She liked to experiment with new dishes in the kitchen, and make bread, and tend to her garden. She kept a vegetable garden in the spring and summer, and worked in her flower beds year-round. Grange indulged her mania for planting, because he enjoyed the nice organic vegetables she put on the table. Gracie Pendleton shared flowers and bulbs with her, because Gracie loved to garden, too.

So Peg dated rarely. Once, a nice man had taken her to a theater in San Antonio to see a comedy. She’d enjoyed it, but he’d wanted to stop by his motel on the way home. So that was that. The next man she dated took her to see the reptiles at the zoo in San Antonio and wanted to take her home to meet his family of pythons. That date had ended rather badly as well. Peg didn’t mind snakes, so long as they weren’t aggressive and wanted to bite, but she drew the line at sharing a man with several of them. He’d been a nice man, too. Then she’d gone out with Sheriff Hayes Carson once. He was a really nice man, with wonderful manners and a sense of humor. He’d taken her to the movies to see a fantasy film. It had been terrific. But Hayes was in love with another local girl, and everybody knew it, even if he didn’t. He dated, to show Minette, who owned the local weekly newspaper, that he wasn’t pining for her. She bought it, but Peg didn’t. And she wasn’t about to fall in love with a man whose heart was elsewhere.

After that, she’d stopped dating people. Until her father accepted this job working for Grange. Peg had seen him around the ranch. She was fascinated by him. He rarely smiled, and he hardly ever talked to her. She knew about his military background, and that he was considered very intelligent. He spoke other languages and he did odd jobs for Eb Scott, who owned and operated a counterterrorism school in Jacobsville, just up the road from Comanche Wells where Grange lived. Eb was an ex-mercenary, like a number of local men. Rumor was that a number of them had signed on with Emilio Machado to help him recover his government from the usurper who was putting innocent people in prison and torturing them. He sounded like a really bad sort, and she hoped the general would win.

But her worry was about Grange heading up the invasion army. He was a soldier, and he’d been in the thick of battle in Iraq. But even a good soldier could be killed. Peg worried about him. She wanted to tell him how much she worried, but the timing had never been right.

She teased him, played with him, made him all sorts of special dishes and desserts. He was polite and grateful, but he never seemed to really look at her. It was irksome. So she planned a campaign to capture his interest. She’d been working on it for weeks.

She waylaid him in the barn, wearing a blouse even more low-cut than this one, and made a point of bending over to pick up stuff. She knew he had to notice that, but he averted his eyes and talked about his new purebred heifer that was due to calf soon.

Then she’d tried accidentally brushing up against him in the house, squeezing past him in a doorway so that her breasts almost flattened against his chest on the way. She’d peeped up to see the effect, but he’d averted his eyes, cleared his throat and gone out to check on the cow.

Since physical enticements didn’t seem to be doing the trick, she tried a new tack. Every time she was alone with him, she found a way to inject sensual topics into the conversation.

“You know,” she mused one day when she’d taken a cup of coffee out to him in the barn, “they say that some of the new birth control methods are really effective. Almost a hundred percent effective. There’s almost no way a woman could get pregnant with a man unless she really wanted to.”

He’d looked at her as if she’d grown another pair of eyes, cleared his throat and walked off.

So, Rome wasn’t built in a day. She tried again. She was alone with him in the kitchen, her father off on his poker night with friends.

She’d leaned over Grange, her breasts brushing his broad shoulder, to serve him a piece of homemade apple pie with ice cream to go with his second cup of black coffee. “I read this magazine article that says it isn’t size that matters with men, it’s what they do with what they’ve got … Oh, my goodness!”

She’d grabbed for a dishcloth, because he’d knocked over his coffee.

“Did it burn you?” she asked hastily, as she mopped up the mess.

“No,” he said coldly. He got up, picked up his pie, poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and left the room. She heard him go into his own room. The door slammed behind him. Hard.

“Was it something I said?” she asked the room at large.

That tactic obviously wasn’t going to attract him, either. So now, she was going to try demure and sensuous. She had to do something. He was going away with the general, soon, to South America. It might be a long time until she’d see him again. Her heart was already breaking. She had to find some way to make him notice her, to make him feel something for her. She wished she knew more about men. She read articles in magazines, she looked on the internet, she read books. Nothing prepared her for seduction.

She grimaced. She didn’t really want to seduce him completely. She just wanted to make him wild enough to feel that marriage was his only option. Well, no, she didn’t want to trap him into marriage, either. She just wanted him to love her.

How in the world was she going to do that?

Grange didn’t even date. Well, he’d gone out a time or two with a local girl, and there was gossip that he’d had a passion for Gracie Pendleton which was unrequited. But he was no rounder. Not in Comanche Wells, anyway. She imagined that he’d had plenty of opportunity to get women when he was in the military. She’d heard him talk about the high-society parties he’d been to in the nation’s capital. He’d been in the company of women who were wealthy and beautiful, to whom he might have looked as attractive and desirable as he did to poor Peg. She wondered how experienced he was. More so than she was, certainly. She was flying blind, trying to intrigue a man with skills she didn’t possess. She was stumbling in the dark.

She gave her reflection a last, hopeful look, and went out to impress Grange.

He was sitting in the living room watching a television special on anacondas, filmed in the Amazon jungle, where he was going shortly.

“Wow, aren’t they huge?” she exclaimed, perching on the arm of the sofa beside him. “Did you know that when the females are ready to mate, males come from miles around and they form a mating ball that lasts for …”

He got up, turned off the television, muttering curses under his breath, walked out the front door and slammed it behind him.

Peg sighed. “Well,” she mused to herself, “either I’m getting to him or I’m going to end up under a bridge somewhere, floating on my face.” That amused her, and she burst out laughing.

Her father, Ed Larson, came in the door, puzzled. “Winslow just passed me on his way to the barn,” he remarked slowly. “He was using the worst range language I ever heard in my life, and when I asked him what was wrong, he said that he couldn’t wait to get out of the country and that if he ever got his hands on an anaconda, he was going to pack it in a box and send it home to you special delivery.”

Her eyes popped. “What?”

“Very odd man,” Ed said, shaking his head as he went into the house. “Very odd indeed.”

Peg just grinned. Apparently she was having some sort of effect. She’d aroused Grange to passion. Even if it was only a burst of anger.

She made a coconut cake for dessert the following day. It was Grange’s favorite. She used a boiled icing and sprinkled coconut on top and then dolled it up with red cherries.

After a quiet and tense dinner, she served it to the men.

“Coconut,” Ed Larson exclaimed. “Peg, you’re a wonder. This is just like your mother used to make,” he added as he savored a bite of it with a smile and closed eyes.

Her mother had died of cancer years before. She’d been a wonderful cook, and one of the sweetest people Peg ever knew. Her mother had the knack of turning enemies into friends, with compassion and empathy. Peg had never had a real enemy in her life, but she hoped that if she ever did, her mother’s example would guide her.

“Thanks, Dad,” she said gently.

Grange was digging into his own cake. He hesitated at the red candied cherries, though, and nudged two of them to one side on the saucer while he finished the last bite of cake.

Peg looked at him with wide, innocent eyes. “Don’t you like … cherries?” she asked, with her lips pursed suggestively.

He let out a word that caused Ed’s eyebrows to reach for the ceiling.

Then he flushed, threw down his napkin and got up, his sensuous lips making a thin line. “Sorry,” he bit off. “Excuse me.”

Ed gaped at his daughter. “What in the world is wrong with him lately?” he asked half under his breath. “I swear, I’ve never seen a man so edgy.” He finished his own cake, oblivious to Peg’s expression. “I guess it’s this Barrera thing. Bound to make a man worry. He’s having to plan and carry out an involved military campaign against a sitting dictator, with a small force and out of sight of most government letter agencies,” he added. “I’d be uptight, too.”

Peg hoped Grange was uptight, but not for those reasons. She blushed when she remembered what she’d said to Winslow. It had been a crude comment, not worthy of her at all. She’d have to be less blatant. She didn’t want to drive him away by being too coarse. She cursed her own tongue for its lack of skill. She was making him madder by the day. That brought to mind another possible complication. She could cost her father his job here if she went too far. She was going to have to rethink her strategy, once again.

So she puzzled on it for a couple of days and decided to try something a little different. She curled her hair, put on her best Sunday dress and sat down in the living room to watch a recording of The Sound of Music when she knew Grange was due in from riding fence lines.

He walked in, hesitated when he saw her sitting in his place on the sofa and paused beside her.

“That’s a very old film,” he remarked.

She smiled demurely. “Oh, yes. But the music is wonderful and besides, it’s about a nun who has a fairy-tale romance with a titled gentleman who marries her.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Isn’t that a little tame for your taste?” he asked, and in a rather sarcastic manner.

She looked up at him with wide green eyes. “Why, whatever do you mean?”

“Whatever happened to balls of anacondas and birth control?” he asked.

She gasped. “You think that anacondas should use birth control?” she asked, aghast. “Good heavens, however in the world would a male anaconda use a prophylactic … Hello?”

He left the room so quickly that she imagined a trail of flame behind him. But just as he went out the door, she could have sworn she heard a deep, soft chuckle.

1

“I don’t want to go to the Cattleman’s Ball.” Winslow Grange was emphatic about it. He glared at the other man. His dark eyes were hostile. Of course, they were usually hostile.

His boss just smiled. Jason Pendleton knew his foreman very well. “You’ll have a good time,” he said. “You need the break.”

“Break!” Grange threw his big hands up in the air and turned away. “I’m going to a South American country with a group of covert ops specialists to retake a country under a bloodthirsty dictator …”

“Exactly,” Jason said blandly. “That’s why you need the break.”

Grange turned back to him, with his hands deep in his jeans pockets. He grimaced. “Listen, I don’t like people much. I don’t mix well.”

“And you think I do?” Jason asked reasonably. “I have to hobnob with heads of corporations, government regulators, federal auditors … but I cope. You’ll be able to deal with it, too.”

“I guess so.” He drew in a long breath. “It’s been a while since I led men into battle.”

Jason lifted an eyebrow. “You went into Mexico to liberate my wife when she was kidnapped by your current boss.”

“An incursion. We’re talking about a war.” He turned back to the fence, leaned his arms on it and stared blindly at the purebred cattle munching at a rolled-up hay bale. “I lost men in Iraq.”

“Mostly due to your C.O.’s idiotic orders, as I recall, not to your own competence.”

Grange said grimly, “I loved his court-martial.”

“Served him right.” Jason leaned against the fence beside him. “Point is, you lead well. That’s a valuable ability to a deposed head-of-state who’s fighting to restore democracy to his country. If you succeed, and I believe you will, they’ll erect a statue of you somewhere.”

Grange burst out laughing.

“But the ball is a local tradition. We all go, and donate to important regional causes at the same time. We get together and dance and talk and have fun. You remember what that is, Grange, don’t you? Fun?”

Grange made a face.

“You ex-military guys, honest to God—” Jason sighed.

“Don’t start with me,” Grange told him. “You just remember that my military experience is why Gracie isn’t lying dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Jason shook his head. “I think about it every day.” He didn’t like remembering it. Gracie had almost died. Their courtship had been rocky and difficult. They were married now, and expecting their first child. Gracie had thought she was pregnant soon after their marriage, only she’d been mistaken. She wasn’t this time. She was six months pregnant and beaming. They were happy together. But it hadn’t been an easy path to the altar.

“I was going to ask her out, just before you married Gracie,” Grange said to irritate the other man. “I even bought a new suit.”

“It wasn’t wasted. It’s still in style. You can wear it to the Cattleman’s Ball. Besides,” Jason added with a grin, “you have no cause for complaint. I gave you a tract of land and a seed herd of purebred Santa Gertrudis.”

“You really shouldn’t have done that,” Grange told him firmly. “It was overkill.”

“It wasn’t. You’re the most valuable employee I’ve got here. It was a bonus. Well deserved.”

Grange smiled. “Thanks.” He made another face. “But you didn’t have to throw in Ed Larson and his daughter.”

“Peg’s sweet, and she cooks like an angel.”

The dark eyes glared. “She’s after me. All the time. She says things …”

“She’s barely nineteen—of course she says things …”

“She’s trying to seduce me, for God’s sake!” he burst out, and his high cheekbones flushed.

Jason’s eyebrows lifted. “You do know that the Victorian Age is over and done with?”

“I am not about to start playing games with a nineteen-year-old,” came the curt reply. “I go to church, pay my taxes and give to charity. I don’t even drink!”

Jason shook his head. “I give up. You’re a lost cause.”

“You want to see a lost cause, look around you,” Grange began. “We have the highest divorce rate, the ugliest economy and the greediest corporate entities on earth….”

Jason held up a hand. “I’m sorry, but I’m due in New York the week after Thanksgiving,” he said drolly.

“I wasn’t going to take that long to get my point across.”

“You’ll have to plant your soapbox someplace else. As to the ball, if you don’t take Peg, who will you take?”

Grange looked hunted. “I’m going alone.”

“Oh, that’s going to put you on everybody’s front page for a month.”

His sensual lips made a straight line. “I’m not taking Peg! Her father works for me! So does she, while we’re on the subject!”

“I can list all the people who took employees to past balls, if you like,” Jason mused.

Grange knew already what a list that would be, and many of those couples ended up married. He didn’t want to open that can of worms.

“It’s only for about three hours,” Jason continued. “What’s the harm? And aren’t you leaving the country two days later?”

“Yes.”

“Think of it as a happy memory to take with you.”

He shifted and averted his eyes. He ran a hand through his thick, black hair. “Peg won’t have the money for a party dress.”

“We have a new boutique in town. The designer, Bess Truman, is trying to drum up business, so she’s outfitted half the town’s eligible women with her stock. Remember Nancy, our pharmacist? She’s got a green gown that she wore for an event that was filmed on the local television station. Bonnie, her assistant, has a red one that stopped traffic. Literally. Even Holly, who works with them, got a gold one. So Bess, she’s the designer, she gave Peg one to wear also.”

“Going to tell me what color it is?” Grange drawled sarcastically.

“You’ll have to wait and see.” Jason grinned. “Gracie said it’s the most gorgeous of the lot.”

Grange still hesitated.

“Ask her,” Jason said, and he was solemn. “You’ve been walking around alone for a long time. You don’t date anybody. It’s time you remembered why men like women.”