Taming a Texas Devil - Katie Lane Page 0,67

“No. I don’t need your apologies. I wanted what happened to happen. I have no regrets.” She forced a smile. “We both knew it wasn’t forever. You made it clear you’re not interested in a relationship.” She paused. “And neither am I. So it’s for the best that it ends now.”

He stared at her for a long moment as if he wanted to argue with her. But there was no good argument and they both knew it. He grabbed his cowboy hat from the table and pulled it on. Before he walked out the door, he hesitated. When he looked at her, she finally saw emotion in his eyes. Frustration and pain and something she couldn’t name.

“Not everything was a lie, Dixie.”

He walked out the door.

Chapter Eighteen

Lincoln learned a long time ago that the best way to deal with pain was to focus on something else. But this time, it didn’t seem to be working. He’d spent all morning mucking out stalls, stacking hay, and raking the paddock. But no matter how hard he worked, he couldn’t stop seeing Dixie’s stunned face when her father had told her the truth. She’d turned those pretty green eyes on him and it had felt like a sharp kick in the gut. He’d read every one of her emotions: Confusion. Disbelief. Hurt. It was the hurt that almost brought him to his knees—that almost had him confessing something he had no business confessing.

He had fallen head over heels in love with Dixie Leigh Meriwether. He loved how she could talk to anyone about anything. He loved her mama’s quotes and the cute way she wrinkled her nose when she was giving something hard thought. He loved her girlie outside and her tough as nails inside. But mostly he loved the way she looked at him as if he hung the moon.

Or the way she used to look at him.

She wouldn’t look at him like that anymore. And that was a good thing. It was the reason he hadn’t confessed his feelings to her. Dixie deserved a better man than he was. She deserved someone who wasn’t emotionally handicapped by his past. Someone who not only knew how to feel love, but also knew how to show it. It was the showing love that Lincoln struggled with. That was the reason his wife had wanted the divorce. Although now he had to wonder if he’d ever really loved Mary Lou. When their marriage had ended, he’d been able to lose himself in his work. He hadn’t felt this raw. This gutted. This feeling of losing something he could never replace.

“What’s goin’ on, boy?”

He stopped raking and turned to see Chester and Lucas standing at the fence. He’d been avoiding them since he’d gotten back yesterday—and wanted to continue to avoid them. “I’m almost finished here,” he said. “And then I thought I’d patch that hole in the roof of the old shed.”

Lucas rested his arms on the gate. “Chester wasn’t talkin’ about your plans for the day. He was talkin’ about what’s goin’ on in your head. Ever since you got home yesterday, you’ve been working like a man possessed. And we want to know what’s wrong.”

Chester hooked his arms on the fence next to Lucas. They had never looked more like brothers with their cowboy hats tipped back from their sun-wrinkled faces and their aged blue eyes pinned on him. “If it’s Sam Sweeney’s case that has you so wired up, boy,” Chester said, “you need to let it go. The truth always comes out in the end. I figure it will this time too.”

Lincoln wasn’t so sure. He had hit a dead end on the case. He had spoken to almost everyone in town about Sam. While a few remembered the night Sam got in the bar fight, no one remembered the exact date or who Sam had been fighting with. For all Lincoln knew, the fight could’ve happened before Sam got fired. But he had a gut feeling that wasn’t the case. It made sense Sam would be pissed about Chester shooting at him. His ego would be bruised and he’d want to prove himself. Bullying someone at Cotton-Eyed Joe’s would be a way to do it. Lincoln knew from experience when Sam was ticked, he wanted to use his fists on someone smaller. It also made sense that whoever he got into the fight with might have met up with him later and taken his own revenge.

But after sixteen years,