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.