Courageous

Courageous
Diana Palmer

A Man of Action…The life of a paid mercenary makes sense to Special Forces Officer Winslow Grange. The jungles of South America are nothing that the former Green Beret can’t handle. A woman’s heart, however – that’s dangerous territory. Back in Texas, Grange’s biggest problem was avoiding Peg Larson and all the complications of being attracted to a live-in employee.Now Grange needs all his training to help regain control of a tiny South American nation and, when Peg arrives unannounced, she’s a distraction he can’t avoid. If she breaks through his armour, traversing the wilds of the Amazon will be easier than defending himself against her feminine charms…

Praise for the novels ofNew York Timesbestselling 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 byDiana 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 (http://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.