Taming a Texas Devil - Katie Lane Page 0,5
York City. . . until he’d fallen in love with the owner of the only hotel in Simple. Now that he and Reba were married, he’d become a small-town business owner who spent his time baking for the guests at the Dixon Boardinghouse and writing ghost stories for middle school kids.
Cru leaned over and punched Lincoln in the arm. “Then it looks like it will just be you and me eating s’mores and sleeping beneath the stars, Linc.” His cellphone pinged with an incoming text. He pulled it out of his shirt pocket, and as soon as he looked at it, a dopey smile spread over his face. He glanced at Lincoln and winked. “Sorry, dude. I got a better offer.”
Lincoln knew exactly where the better offer had come from. He laughed. “That’s okay. I’d take your pretty cowgirl wife over me any day. Besides, this is my first night at the Double Diamond, I figure I should spend it with Lucas and Chester.”
Lucas and Chester Diamond owned the Double Diamond. Sixteen years earlier, the brothers had decided to open it up to six troubled teenagers. It had only taken the two old cowboys one summer to turn the bunch of delinquents into roping and riding cattle herders. And Lucas and Chester didn’t just teach them how to rope, ride, and herd cattle. They taught them how to be good men. All the boys owned them for that.
Lincoln most of all.
Until he came to the ranch, he hadn’t known what a good male role model was. His dad had died in an oil drilling accident when he was only three and his mother had dated only one man after that. A man who had turned out to be the opposite of a good role model. After his mother passed away when he was thirteen, Lincoln had gone to live with his grandmother, who didn’t know what to do with her punky grandson when he skipped school, drank, smoked pot, and got in fights.
Thankfully, Lucas and Chester had known what to do. They looked past the punk kid and saw a good person. They pulled that good person out of him with love, attention, and a hard day’s work filled with plenty of life lessons: Satisfaction from a job well done is worth more than gold. If you take care of the land, the land will take care of you. Your best days are spent working alongside friends. A man is only as good as his word. It’s easy to make the wrong choice and so much harder to make the right one. Good always prevails over evil—so be smart enough to be on the winning team.
Lincoln had chosen the winning team. He was one of the good guys now. Although, lately, he hadn’t felt that good. His caseload kept growing, and no matter how many hours he put in, it felt like evil was winning. His boss had pushed him to take a week off, but even on his vacation, he’d been doing a little investigating work on the side.
Sam Sweeney had been a ranch hand on the Double Diamond. Instead of helping the group of troubled boys become cowboys, he’d pulled mean-spirited pranks on them. When Lucas and Chester had found out, they fired him. Everyone assumed Sam left town. But a few months ago, his daughter had shown up looking for him. Sam had disappeared and no one had heard from his since leaving the Double Diamond ranch. Which made Lincoln and the rest of the boys uneasy. Especially when Chester had threatened Sam if he ever came back to the ranch.
“I haven’t found out anything else on Sam Sweeney’s whereabouts,” Lincoln said.
Holden turned to look at him. “Neither has the private investigator I asked to help. He hasn’t been able to find one piece of information on where Sam went after he left here.”
Silence settled over the group of men, the only sounds the squeak of saddle leather and the clomp of hooves on hard red earth. Lincoln knew they were all thinking the same thing: Sam Sweeney was dead. He also knew that not one of the boys felt any sadness. He certainly didn’t. Sam was a bad person. Something Lincoln had known long before coming to the Double Diamond. As much as he would love to let Sam’s disappearance go and forget about the man, he couldn’t seem to do it.
“Tell me again what happened the last time you saw Sam, Val.” Lincoln had already