So why did he care?

He wished he knew. He turned out his bedside lamp and went to bed. But he didn’t sleep.

In the distance were big guns firing. Closer, there was the sharp ping of bullets hitting nearby. His friend called a greeting to him just as another bullet sang and the man’s head exploded in a spray of blood. Cort closed his eyes and shuddered. He wondered if he would ever be free of the war he fought in, so long ago.

MINA WAS PLANTING FLOWERS. She was also working on the next book, in her head. It was how she furthered plots, by doing mundane tasks that didn’t require much brainwork while her mind grappled with complicated scenarios. Some fit, some didn’t. By the time she started writing at the computer, it would all resolve into a comfortable scene.

She was still astonished at how quickly her novel, SPECTRE, was rising on the bestseller lists. Her agent had called the day before to tell her with unbridled excitement that SPECTRE was climbing the New York Times hardcover bestseller list and had already landed in the top ten on the Publishers Weekly list—one much harder to hit. It was a contemporary romance, but with so much drama that even men read it. The plot followed a group of commandos who were trying to liberate the wife of a well-known billionaire from a minor bunch of terrorists looking for a quick way to finance their objectives.

Few people who saw Mina in her garden would ever connect the shy Wyoming cowgirl with the sweeping, violent and passionate drama of her novel. Not that she used her own name. She wrote under the pseudonym Willow Shane, and only a handful of people knew.

Bart was one. Mrs. Simpson was another. There were people in Catelow who had known Mina all her life who had no idea what she really did for a living. She liked it that way. If fame came—and it seemed likely that it would, now—she didn’t want her precious privacy invaded. The pen name, hopefully, would assure that.

She thought about Bart’s cousin and laughed inwardly as she considered how he was going to feel when he found out what she did for a living. Eventually, she was sure, Bart would tell him. Right now, Bart was enjoying himself as he kept the secret. And so was Mina. That arrogant cowboy could use a little shock in his life, she thought, considering how disparaging he’d been about her knitting and her romance novels.

Well, technically they were romance novels. But they were filled with action and suspense, and SPECTRE had been marketed as a suspense novel, not a category one. It had made Mina so proud when she knew that. It still gave her a massive thrill to go to signings at bookstores and see her novels on the shelves. It never got old.

She finished planting the flower seeds and moved to another manicured plot to start planting herbs.