a sigh of relief when one of his buddies, Logan Voss, spotted him and motioned him over to join a poker game. A friendly game of five-card stud was exactly what Jake needed to take his mind off Chrissie and the way she’d turned him inside out yet again.
“So, how’s it shakin’, Jake?” Logan asked as Jake hung his black Stetson on a brass hat rack in the corner of the bar.
“Can’t complain. How about you boys?”
He got what he’d expected—mumbled “fines” and head nods. While members of the club often tackled matters of grave importance and danger within these walls, it was also a haven. As a rule, a man didn’t come to the Cattleman’s Club to talk about his troubles. He came here to get away from them, to simply hang out with men of like minds.
Of all of his friends at the club, he felt a particular kinship to Logan Voss. Voss ran a large cattle ranch just outside of town. Like Jake, the rugged rancher, who was a hands-on owner, was divorced. Unlike Jake who took pains to see that no one saw his pain, Logan’s scars occasionally showed in the bleak look in his eyes and the weary set of his shoulders. Or maybe Jake was just sensitive to Logan’s situation since he’d gone through an ugly divorce himself.
“You in, Thorne?” Mark Hartman asked. “Or you gonna sit there and admire your cards the rest of the night?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m in,” Jake said and called Hartman’s good-natured haranguing.
Jake didn’t know Mark Hartman as well as he knew Logan, but he liked what the guy stood for. Jake didn’t know the entire story, but the retired soldier had lost his wife in a violent mugging. Mark played his cards—and his feelings—pretty close to the vest, too. The African-American appeared to be independently wealthy but still spent hours at his gym where he gave self-defense classes to women. No one had to wonder what motivated him.
“Read ’em and weep, boys.” This came from the fourth man at the table, Gavin O’Neal, as he laid down a diamond flush.
Jake groaned and tossed in his cards. He hated this run of luck. But how loudly could one complain about losing to the sheriff? A decent one at that. O’Neal had been a wild man in his day, but he took the shiny badge that he wore on his chest seriously. The badge also didn’t hurt his standing with women. As a rule, Jake loved to give O’Neal grief about his reputation.
Tonight, though, Jake just wasn’t in much of a joking mood—mainly because of one particular woman giving him so much grief.
O’Neal dealt Jake another stellar hand. Not. He arranged his cards, rolled his eyes and folded. When Voss won the hand, Jake was down fifty bucks—and he hadn’t been in the game a full hour. He was starting to think his luck had deserted him altogether when Voss dealt him a pair of queens. Finally. A bidding hand. He was about to raise Gavin’s bet when a commotion by the front door had the entire table on their feet.
“What the hell?”
It was Nita Windcroft. Her violet eyes were shooting sparks and the slim young woman, who had recently taken on one helluva responsibility when she’d assumed management of her father’s horse farm, appeared to be in one high and mighty snit.
“Sheriff,” she said, marching toward the table. “You’ve got to do something.”
O’Neal met her halfway across the bar and laid a settling hand on her arm. “Good Lord, Nita, settle down before you bust a vein. Not another word until you calm down. Take a deep breath now. That’s it. Give me another one. Okay. Now tell me what’s wrong.” He steered her toward the table where the men had been playing.
Even off duty and out of uniform, Gavin had an air of command that Nita responded to.
“The Devlins are at it again,” she said, rage coloring her voice. “And if you don’t put a stop to it, so help me, I will. I can’t let them destroy my ranch.”
“Okay, Nita. Settle down,” Gavin repeated with a soothing calm that seemed to make Nita at least stop and take stock of her surroundings.
Besides their table, only a half a dozen other TCC members sat in the bar. After Nita’s initial outburst, they all returned to their respective conversations.
“You want to talk to me in private?” Gavin asked.
“I don’t care if the whole county hears what those snakes have been up to! You’ve got to do something.”
The Windcrofts and the Devlins had nursed a Hat-field-and-McCoy-style feud for close to a century. Old Jonathan Devlin had liked to keep the situation stirred up, but Jake had thought things would settle down now that Jonathan was gone.
Judging from the look on Nita’s face, he’d thought wrong.
If he had his facts straight, the Windcroft-Devlin feud had started when Richard Windcroft lost over half of his land to Nicholas Devlin in a poker game. The Windcrofts always had maintained the game was rigged. A Devlin ended up getting shot and killed over it, and of course, the Windcrofts got the blame. The accusations and squabbles had been going on ever since.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on out at the ranch that’s got you so upset, Nita,” Gavin suggested.
“In the past few weeks I’ve been dealing with downed rails, cut fence lines and spooked horses. At first I tried to write it off as wear and tear, but then I found wire cutters by a downed section and some of my new board fences have been broken, as well. I spent three days rounding up stock from the last time those bastards did their dirty work. But the last straw, the very last straw—they poisoned my horse feed.”
Nita’s cheeks were fiery red. “If my foreman hadn’t noticed something off, there’s no telling how much stock I would have lost. It’s bad enough I’m treating over a dozen head of very sick horses—some of them my customers’—but it will cost me a small fortune to replace that tainted feed. And do you have any idea what this is going to do to my business once word gets out? It could ruin me. Not to mention, I’m worried sick about the horses. Only a Devlin would stoop so low as to try to kill innocent animals.”
No wonder Nita was upset, Jake thought. The Wind-croft ranch boarded and trained horses. She’d start to lose customers if they felt the safety of their stock was compromised. She was leveling some pretty serious charges, and the Devlins were prominent citizens in Royal. Tom Devlin was even a member of the Cattleman’s Club and Jake considered him a friend.
“Those are pretty strong allegations, Nita,” Gavin warned, echoing Jake’s thoughts. “You have some proof that the Devlins are behind this?”
“Who else would it be? They’ve finally come up with a way to ruin us. It’s what they’ve always wanted. And they’ll shut us down if they aren’t stopped!”
“Have you had any direct threats on your life?” Gavin asked.
“My life is my ranch, so you can play it anyway you like.
“Okay, no,” she admitted when Gavin gave her a stern look. “I haven’t been personally threatened, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come to that. I’m worried about my stock. I’m worried about my help. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
“Come on,” Gavin said. “Let’s go down to the station. You can write out a statement and I’ll dispatch an officer to your ranch to take stock of all that’s
