Courageous

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 …”