Wyoming Heart
By: Diana Palmer
Cort Grier is no ordinary rancher. Despite his vast wealth, he still works the land with his own bare hands, unlike his troublesome new neighbor, Mina Michaels. Fiery, beautiful Mina infuriates and entrances Cort, awakening feelings he’d thought long buried. But he knows falling for a city girl can lead only to heartbreak...
Bestselling author Mina hardly expects to meet a man like the ones in her novels. But roguishly handsome Cort is an alpha hero through and through, from his stubborn streak to the fierce way this rugged cowboy protects his heart. When one sizzling kiss leads to another, can Mina convince Cort to open his world to her—now and forever?
For Robert
Who keeps our computers and printers going, even when they don’t want to!
Dear Reader,
Cort Grier showed up for the first time in Lawman. His second substantial appearance was in Undaunted, where he flirted with my heroine.
I thought he was a complex character even then, and I wanted to write about him. So here is his story.
He’s at his cousin’s ranch in Wyoming pretending to be a poor cowboy. He meets his cousin’s female friend, who hates him on sight when he ridicules her for liking to knit and read romance novels. He doesn’t know that she’s a successful novelist who researches her books by going out in the field with a group of commando mercenaries.
Expect fireworks when they discover the truth about each other, LOL.
I really enjoyed writing this book, although I must confess that it took paths I didn’t dictate along the way. I hope you enjoy it!
Your biggest fan,
Diana Palmer
CHAPTER ONE
CORT GRIER WAS disillusioned with life. He owned a huge Santa Gertrudis breeding stud ranch in West Texas. He was thirty-three now, in his prime, and he wanted to have a family. His father had remarried and moved to Vermont. His brothers, except for the second youngest, were all married with families. He wanted one of his own. But every woman he thought might be the one turned out to be after his money. The last one, a singer, had laughed when he mentioned children. She was in her own prime, she told him, and she had a career as a rising star. No way was she giving that up to live on some smelly ranch in Texas and start having babies. She wasn’t certain that she was ever going to want a child.
And so it went. Women had been a permissible pleasure for many years, and while no playboy, he’d had his share of beautiful, cultured lovers. The problem was that after a time, they all looked alike, felt alike, sounded alike. Perhaps, he told himself, he was jaded. Certainly, age hadn’t done much for his basically cynical nature. He found more pleasure these days in running the cattle ranch than he did in squiring debutantes around El Paso.
The ranch was a bone of contention with prospective brides. Every one of them enthused about his vast herds of Santa Gertrudis cattle, until they actually saw the ranch and realized that cattle were dusty and smelly. In fact, so were the cowboys who worked with them. One date had actually passed out when she watched one of the hands help pull a calf.
Not one of his dates had liked the idea of living so far from the city, especially around cattle and hay and the noise of ranch equipment. Park Avenue in New York would have suited them very well. Perhaps a few diamonds from Tiffany’s and an ensemble from one of the designers who showed their wares during Fashion Week. But cattle? No, they said. Never.
Cort had never liked the girl-next-door sort of woman. In fact, there were no girls next door when he was younger. Most of the ranchers around where he lived had sons. Lots of sons. Not one female in the bunch.
The point was, he reminded himself, that the kind of woman who’d like ranch living would most likely be a woman who’d grown up on a ranch. Someone who liked the outdoors and animals and didn’t mind the drawbacks. He probably shouldn’t have been looking for a bride in the high-rent districts of big cities, he decided. He should have been looking closer to home. If there had been anyone closer to home to look at.
He’d had a brief encounter with a pretty young woman in Georgia, during a visit with Connor Sinclair, a multimillionaire who had a lake house there. The woman’s name was Emma, and her zany sense of humor had interested him at once. It was one of the few times he’d been paying attention to what a woman said instead of how she looked. Emma was Connor’s personal assistant, but there was more than business there, or he missed his guess. Connor had separated Cort from Emma with surgical precision and made sure there were no more opportunities for him to get to know her. Not too many months later, he heard from his brother Cash Grier, who was a police chief in South Texas, that Connor had married Emma and they had a son. He’d actually thought about going back to North Georgia and courting her, despite her testy boss. That was no longer possible. He balanced Emma against the girls with diamonds in their eyes and greedy hands who’d filed through his life. He’d felt suddenly empty. Alone. The ranch had always been the core of his existence, but it was no longer enough. He was in a rut. He needed to get out.
