She couldn’t resist slipping the photograph out.
It was a picture of a man, a woman, and a little boy. But the man wasn’t Lincoln. Even though the man was much younger in this picture than the other pictures Dixie had seen, she recognized Sam Sweeney immediately. He was smiling and had his arm wrapped around the woman. Standing in front of the woman was a little boy.
A little boy with straight raven hair, a dimple in his chin, and a cut on his upper lip.
Chapter Twelve
“Go find another bone, boy.” Lincoln patted Boomer’s head before he released his collar. The dog raced off and Lincoln mounted Doris to follow. They had been doing this same thing every morning since the dog had discovered the femur. Holden would drop the dog off on his way into town and Lincoln would run him around the Double Diamond ranch for a few hours to see if the dog would go back to the place he’d found the bone.
So far the dog had found four gopher holes, a cow skull, a dead crow, and a bike inner tube. But no more human bones. Lincoln was starting to believe that it was a fruitless exercise. Boomer hadn’t been trained to be a tracking dog. He was still an easily distracted young pup who enjoying racing around the ranch and getting into whatever caught his attention. Still, Lincoln was hoping to get lucky. He wanted more evidence of who the person was.
He had been so certain the bone was Sam’s, but now he wasn’t so sure. Sam’s truck had been found a good ten miles away. If someone had murdered him, why would they bring the body back here? Why wouldn’t they have buried it somewhere close to the truck? Or in a lake or spring where it wouldn’t be easy to find? Even if Sam had run out of gas and something had happened on his hike to a gas station, like a heart attack or a snakebite, there was no way his body could’ve made it back to this area. Someone would’ve had to bring it here. Someone who had a connection to this land and a strong motive.
The only person who had both was Lincoln.
As a kid, he had daydreamed constantly about how he would kill Sam Sweeney. Running over him with a monster truck. Pushing him off the Empire State Building. Carving out his heart with a machete. Filling him full of holes with a machine gun.
But Sam was long gone by the time Lincoln got big and strong enough to execute any of his plans. It wasn’t until he ran into an old friend of Sam’s and found out where Sam was working that his hatred for the man had resurfaced. At the time, he’d been a troubled teenager giving his grandmother all kinds of grief. It had been easy to convince Granny Hayes that a boy’s ranch was the perfect place for her delinquent grandson to spend the summer. His grandmother had probably looked at it like a God-sent reprieve.
On the drive to the Double Diamond, Lincoln had gone over and over his plan to make Sam pay for all the physical abuse he’d dished out. But mostly he wanted to punish him for leaving his mother so brokenhearted that she’d never recovered. His childish fantasy of running over Sam with a truck had evolved to just beating the shit out of him. But as soon as he came face to face with Sam, he’d turned back into a frightened little boy and chickened out.
Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, Sam hadn’t recognized him. Not even with the scar he’d put there. Lincoln had just been another punky kid Sam had pulled pranks on. Before Lincoln could get up the courage to confront him, Sam was gone. Leaving Lincoln to hate Sam even more . . . and himself for not being brave enough to do what he felt he should have done.
It was Lucas and Chester’s love that had saved Lincoln from being consumed by that hate. They taught him being brave didn’t mean throwing the first punch. Being brave was facing your own weaknesses and doing the right thing even when the wrong thing was much easier. They had taught all the boys that. The last night before they left, he and his friends had sat around a campfire and made a pact that what Chester and Lucas had taught them wouldn’t be in vain.
The bad boys would become good men.
But Lincoln didn’t feel like a good man. A good man would’ve told people about his connection to Sam Sweeney. A good man wouldn’t hold a grudge against Maisy just because she looked like her father. And a good man wouldn’t be lusting after a woman he was supposed to be protecting.
And he was lusting after Dixie. His mind was constantly filled with thoughts of touching her, kissing her, and making love to her. For the last few days, he’d had a perpetual hard on just from watching her sit at her computer. She had all kinds of sexy little habits while she worked: twirling a strand of hair around her finger, chewing on her bottom lip, unbuttoning and buttoning the top button of her shirt. They drove him wild with the desire to take over for her—except he didn’t want to be as gentle. He wanted to fist those glorious golden locks in his hands, devour that plump bottom lip, and rip the shirt right off her body. If her phone hadn’t rung the other day at Mesquite Springs, he had little doubt they would’ve ended up on the ground in a tangle of naked limbs and sweet sighs. His desire for her had become a needy ache he couldn’t get rid of no matter how much he tried. And
