my word, ma’am.” Adrenaline searing through his blood vessels, Lyle shuffled to the final album. Selma Barker aka Sadie Gilmore.
His heart stopped. No. Not possible.
“Yes,” Rhoda countered.
Lyle hadn’t realized he’d uttered the word aloud until the woman still sitting next to him spoke.
“That one lives right here in Copperas Cove.” She tapped the photo of the young woman touted in the newspaper clipping as an animal rights activist. “Do you know her?”
Lyle stared at the face he hadn’t seen in seven years, except in his dreams, his gut twisting into knot after knot. “Yes, ma’am. I know her.” If he lived a hundred lifetimes, he couldn’t forget this woman.
Chapter Three
May 21, Second Chance Ranch, 6:30 a.m.
“Get off my ranch.” Sadie Gilmore held her ground, feet spread wide apart, the business end of her shotgun leveled on that no-good Billy Sizemore’s black heart. Maybe he thought just because he played straw boss for her equally no-good daddy that he could tell her what to do. Not in this lifetime.
Sizemore laughed. Threw his head back so far if he hadn’t been holding his designer cowboy hat it would have hit the dirt for sure, and he hooted. This wasn’t the first time Sadie had been blazing mad at her daddy’s henchmen, especially this knucklehead. Well, she’d had enough. She poked him in the chest with the muzzle of her twenty-gauge best friend. The echo of his laughter died an instant death. A razor-sharp gaze sliced clean through her. She gritted her teeth to conquer a flinch. “Three seconds,” she warned, “or I swear I’ll risk prison just to see the look on your sorry face when this ball of lead blasts a great big hole in your chest.”
“You stole that horse,” he accused. “Don’t even try denying it.”
Sadie was the one who laughed this time. “Prove it.”
The standoff lasted another couple of seconds before he surrendered a step. “You’ll regret this,” he warned, then turned his back to her. It took every speck of self-control she possessed not to shoot him before he reached his dually. But then that would make her the same kind of cheating sneak Gus Gilmore was.
Sadie lowered the barrel of the shotgun she’d inherited from her Grandma Gilmore and let go the breath that had been trapped in her lungs for the past half a minute or so. Sizemore spun away, the tires of his truck sending gravel and dirt spewing through the air and the horse trailer hitched to it bouncing precariously.
“Lying bastard.” Billy Sizemore might be a champion when it came to bronc riding, but as a human he scarcely hung on the first link of the food chain, in her opinion. Cow flies had more compassion. Could damn sure be trusted more.
Sadie swiped the perspiration from her brow with the sleeve of her cotton blouse and worked at slowing her heart rate. Usually she didn’t let guys like Size-more get to her, but this time was different. This time the stakes were extra high. No way was she allowing her father to get his way. She’d bought old Dare Devil fair and square. The gelding was done with his rodeo career. Too old to perform for the bronc riders and too riddled with arthritis for chuck wagon races or anything else. Just because Gus claimed the former competition star had been shipped off to the auction by mistake was no concern of hers. Sadie knew exactly what happened to those horses in far too many cases, and she couldn’t bear it. Gus didn’t need to know that she still had a friend or two on his side of the five-foot barbed wire fence that divided their properties.
“What you don’t know won’t hurt you, old man,” she proclaimed with a hard look to the west before visually tracking Sizemore’s big old truck and trailer roaring down the last leg of her half-mile-long drive.
When the dust had settled and the dually was long gone, Sadie walked back to the house. Three furry heads peeked out from under the front porch, big soulful eyes peering up at her hopefully.
“Worthless.” She shook her head at the mutts. “That’s what you three are.”
Gator, the Lab, Frisco, an Australian shepherd mix, and Abigail, a Chihuahua, scurried from their hiding place and padded into the house behind her. That first cup of coffee was long gone, and the lingering scent of the seasoned scrambled eggs she’d turned off fifteen minutes ago had her stomach rumbling. The enemy’s arrival had interrupted her peaceful morning.
With her shotgun propped in the corner near the kitchen table, she adjusted the flame beneath the skillet to warm up the eggs. Another more pungent odor sifted through her preoccupation with the sharp gnawing pains in her belly. Smelled like something scorched …
“My biscuits!” Sadie grabbed a mitt and yanked the oven door open. “Well, hell.” Not exactly burned but definitely well done and probably as hard as rocks. She plopped the hot tray on the stove top and tossed the mitt aside. How could a grown woman screw up a can of ready-to-bake biscuits? “One who’s spent her whole life in the barn,” she muttered.
Her mother had passed away before Sadie was old enough to sit still long enough to learn any culinary skills. The rodeo was all her father had bothered to teach her, and most of the lessons she’d gleaned were ones she wanted to forget. Gus Gilmore was heartless. But then, she’d understood that by the time she was fifteen. He’d tried to keep her away from her grandparents when she was a kid, but she always found a way to sneak in a visit. He had worked overtime to keep her away from everything she loved until she was twenty-one. That date had been more than a significant birthday; it had been her personal independence day. Prevented from taking anything from her childhood home other than the clothes on her back, she’d walked into the lawyer’s office and claimed the inheritance her grandparents had left for her—despite Gus’s every attempt to overturn their will—and hadn’t looked back.
Nineteen months later she had created the life she wanted, just outside her father’s reach yet right under his nose. They had been at all-out war since. Fact was, they had been immersed in battle most of her life. The stakes had merely been upped with her inheritance. Gus, being an only child, had assumed he would inherit the small five-hundred-acre ranch that adjoined his massive property. But life had a way of taking a man down a notch or two when he got too big for his breeches.
Sadie poured a second cup of morning-survival liquid and savored the one thing in the kitchen she was pretty good at—rich, strong coffee. She divided up the eggs and biscuits with her worthless guard dogs and collapsed at the table. Mercy, she was running behind this morning. If that low-down Sizemore hadn’t shown up, she would be feeding the horses already instead of stuffing her face.
First things first. She had to calm down. The animals sensed when she was anxious. And fueling her body was necessary. Gus’s pals had intimidated the last of her ranch hands until they’d all quit, leaving Sadie on her own to take care of the place. She didn’t mind doing the work, but there was only so much one woman could do between daylight and dark. She’d narrowed her focus to the animals and the necessary property areas, such as the barn and smaller pasture. Everything else that required attention would just have to wait. Things would turn around eventually. As long as she was careful, her finances would hold out. Between the small trust her grandparents had left and donations for taking care of her rescues from generous folks, she would be okay in spite of her daddy’s determined efforts to ensure otherwise.
Gator and Frisco stared up at her from their empty bowls. Abigail stared, too, but she hadn’t touched her biscuit. Not that Sadie could blame her. Maybe her ranch hands had fled for parts unknown to escape her cooking. Sadie didn’t like to waste anything, unlike Gus, so the dogs were stuck with her cooking until she figured out how to prepare smaller portions.
Before she could shovel in the final bite of breakfast, all three dogs suddenly stilled, ears perked, then the whole pack made a dash for the front door. Sadie pushed back her chair, her head shaking in disgust. If Gus had decided to show up in person and add his two cents’ worth, he might just leave with more than he bargained for. Or maybe less, depending upon how well her trigger-finger