Page 2 of Love Me Back
Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t hurting. Actually, we were quite comfortable. The horses I trained didn’t sell cheap. But the responsibility of caring for everyone wore me down.
Then there were the bodies.
We’d found two women dead on our ranch. One could explain both instances as accidents. Wrong place, wrong time, and a lack of situational awareness.
Our cows trampled the first woman found last December. She never should have been in that field, and we had no answers as to how she got there.
The second woman fell from a cropping of rocks. She could have easily missed a step, but again, she shouldn’t have been out there. There was one other thing that connected these two women.
There were both naked.
There hadn’t been any other women found as of yet. But my brother Tyson did shoot and kill a detective from Oklahoma a few months back. He had been following the sister of one of his club brothers. Threatening her when Tyson shot him from just about half a mile away.
That was how he got his road name.
Winchester.
We all knew how to shoot. You didn’t live out here in the middle of nowhere without knowing how to use a gun and use it well. But Tyson excelled far beyond what could be considered proficient.
In 1964, the army drafted Pops into the war. Nana was pregnant with our mom, and not only did Pops miss the birth of his daughter, but he spent the first six years of her life in Vietnam.
He’d taught us everything he knew about shooting and protecting ourselves against an enemy.
Foreign and domestic.
Those women were part of the reason I’d hesitated in pursuing Jessie the way I wanted to. That, and she was so goddamn skittish.
I knew nothing about her. Sure, I could ask Ellie, but being her best friend, I wasn’t sure how much she would tell me. Then again, Danny and Dante were living in one of our cabins, and they knew her as well.
Danny Franks was a member of the Golden Skulls MC, while Dante had joined the Soulless Sinners MC.
The four of them met in college and had been close ever since. As a hacker, whatever Danny didn’t know about her, he could find. But would he help?
Something told me no. If there was one thing Tyson had taught us about being in the MC, loyalty meant everything. I wasn’t in the club, so that loyalty extended to Jessie first.
Thunder’s muscles rippled beneath me. The tension in his body told me he was alert to something. He was a magnificent horse. An American quarter horse I’d raised from birth. He was the only horse on the ranch I would never breed. While his bloodline was superb and he’d been bred to be a racehorse, possibly one of the fastest racehorses in the world, his temperament wasn’t ideal.
I was the only one who rode him, brushed him, and fed him.No one else could get near him. Hundreds had asked me why I would keep a horse no one could get near but me. The answer was simple.
My mom.
Thunder was the last horse she bred before she was taken from us. She’d had high hopes for him. Only she died not long after he was born, and it was because of him I didn’t lose myself when she was gone.
Somehow, he’d grieved right along with me. He was the first horse I had delivered on my own, and he was born on the night of my parents’ accident.
Thunder had brought me back from the pain and grief of losing my parents. Sometimes I wondered if he’d taken on all the anger I thought I’d worked through. Taking care of him had given me purpose when I was floundering after the death of our parents.
Mom and I were close. She taught me everything I knew about horses. She grew up on this ranch, just like we did. Folks in town called it the Powell Ranch, but the legal name was The Triple J.
Mary Johnson was the third generation of Johnsons to live and work this ranch. When she married my dad and changed her name, Pops offered to change the name of the ranch, but Dad wouldn’t let her. He said this was her family’s ranch and it should stay that way.
Our last names might be different, but a Johnson would always live and work on this ranch if I had anything to say about it.
Thunder’s ears flickered, and my eyes searched the area, straining to see anything in the distance. One of the things I loved about Nebraska was the flat landscape. You could see an enemy coming from a mile away.
Except at night.
It was so damn dark at night you could see every star in the sky, but that didn’t give off as much light as people thought. Unless it was a full moon, you might as well be locked in awindowless room with the lights turned off.
