Joshua Cain shoved back his chair and rose from the round oak table in his kitchen. Next to the empty plate of overcooked eggs and slightly burned toast, the Iron Springs Gazette lay open on the table.
The headline read Lone Wolf Terror Attack in Austin. Below was the story of an Islamic extremist who had attacked a man with a butcher knife. Fortunately, the victim, a former police officer, had fought off the attacker and killed him. According to Homeland Security, the threat was over.
Josh didn’t read more. He’d left the war behind when he’d left the Middle East. He had come home to Texas to forget about fighting and terrorism and good men dying, and that was exactly what he intended to do.
Crossing the living room, he pushed open the front door and stepped out on the porch beneath the overhanging roof that ran the length of the two-story ranch house.
The sun was out this early April morning, the temperature warm, the sky a clear robin’s-egg blue. The year was beginning to heat up, but the Texas temperatures wouldn’t be unbearable for at least another two months.
Josh didn’t mind the heat. He’d spent the last four years fighting in the blistering deserts of Iraq and the barren mountains of Afghanistan. The hot, damp climate on this side of Texas, along with the wide-open spaces and deep green grasslands, suited him just fine.
Refusing to think of the war, Josh tugged his battered straw cowboy hat a little lower across his forehead and started across the open space between the forty-year-old house he was remodeling and the barn he had just finished rebuilding. A dilapidated old cow barn sat in the field beyond, one of his next projects.
He’d been back in Texas since December when he’d officially left the marines, two months after he’d run into enemy gunfire, been shot three times, taken a load of shrapnel, and nearly died.
He’d spent the following months in the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, before returning to Texas to live in a double-wide trailer on his brother Linc’s twenty-five-hundred-acre property seventy miles east of Dallas, Blackland Ranch.
Linc had insisted he take some time, finish healing, try to figure out what the hell he wanted to do with his life. Grateful for his half brother’s help, Josh had accepted the offer, then been surprised to discover that finding out what he wanted didn’t take as long as he’d thought.
As a kid, he’d loved country living, loved horses, wrangled cattle every summer and dreamed of owning his own place someday. But he’d had to work from the age of twelve to help support himself and his mother, living barely above subsistence level; it had been little more than a pipe dream back then.
Now he was the proud owner—along with the bank that held the mortgage—of the Iron River Ranch, a two-thousand-acre spread along the northern boundary of his brother’s property.
The ranch had come with fifteen head of Black Angus cattle and thirty head of horses. He had kept seven geldings—good, reliable cow ponies—sold and traded the rest for broodmares and colts he chose himself. He was looking to buy a stallion, had his eye on a registered quarter horse named Handley’s Pride.
He’d always had a way with animals, planned to raise a few cows but focus on breeding, training, and selling horses.
He glanced up at a noise in the barn, the sound of hooves pounding against the stall. Satan was at it again. He started walking. Damned horse would be the death of him—or somebody else.
The animal probably should have been put down, and he might have done it if it hadn’t been for his sixty-seven-year-old neighbor, Clara Thompson. The woman was convinced Josh could save the stallion if he was patient enough, and he was dumb enough to give it a try.
“Se?or Cain! Se?or Cain!” His latest hire came racing out of the barn, the jet-black stallion hard on his heels. Josh ran toward them, flapping his hat and shouting, driving the great black beast off in another direction.
“I quit!” Ramirez stomped toward him. “I am through with this place and that crazy horse!”
“Take it easy, Diego. I’ll take care of the stallion.”
“He nearly killed me! I am finished. I have a better job offer, one where I do not have to risk my life.”
Josh didn’t try to talk him out of it. He had a feeling the stable hand was partly to blame for the animal’s foul temper, at least this morning. He had a hunch Ramirez had been antagonizing the stallion. There were guys who liked the control, liked lording it over what they considered a dumb beast, and Josh had a feeling Ramirez was one of them.
Josh watched the man grab his rope, halter, saddle, and bridle and toss them into the back of his old brown pickup. The engine fired up and the pickup shot backward, spun, and roared off down the dirt road toward the two-lane highway that led to Iron Springs.
Josh sighed as he crossed the stable yard and went into the barn for a bucket of grain. When he came out, the big black stallion tossed its head and snorted as it trotted back and forth along the fence line.
Sonofabitch. Another half hour shot to hell trying to coax the horse into the pasture. And now he’d have to drive into town, post some notices, and put an ad in the paper for another stable hand.
He had two full-time ranch hands lined up, due to start in a couple of days, but they would be mending fences, helping him rebuild the cow barn, and doing deferred maintenance the property desperately needed, the reason he had bought it for such a reasonable sum.
The life of a rancher was never easy, and yet Josh loved every minute. He relished the solitude, the time it gave him to deal with the past and come to grips with the present, think a little about the future.
Grabbing the bucket of oats, he went after the cantankerous horse.
*
It was hard to believe four months had passed since Tory had left Phoenix. After the attack, she had moved to Houston, taken a high-paying job as an executive secretary, assistant to the president of Huntley Drilling, a small oil company. She’d liked the work, which paid well and was less stressful than her former job as an advertising executive with the Elwin Davis Group, the top marketing agency in Phoenix.
But she had gone to a headhunter to find the job so it hadn’t taken Damon long to track her down. The harassment had started right away, with him showing up at her apartment, at work, making threats, scaring Ivy. Demanding Tory return with him to Phoenix.
She’d called the police and they had done their best to help, but in Texas, the restraining order she’d gotten in Phoenix had to be updated to be valid. That meant her abuser had to be notified and given a chance to argue his side of the case in court.
She didn’t have the money for more attorney fees, and the restraining order she’d gotten after the attack hadn’t really done any good. In Houston, when the neighbor’s kitten had turned up with a wire around its neck, strangled and bloody, dead in front of her apartment door, it had been time to move on.
New Mexico sounded good. She’d taken an interim job at a dry-cleaning store in Albuquerque just to earn some money. But the first day of work, the owner had cornered her in the garment racks and suggested her job could be a lot easier if she provided a few fringe benefits. She had quit the same day.
She’d been lucky. By the end of the week, she’d found a job over the Internet, office manager of Dominion Potash, a potassium mining company in Carlsbad. She’d liked the challenge of organizing the office and keeping the company running; she’d liked the small, high desert community famous for its world-famous caverns.
After two months with no sign of Damon, she had finally begun to settle in. She’d even allowed herself to make a few friends, relax enough to leave Ivy with a sitter once in a while and go out to a show or dinner in the evenings.