Page 6 of Look at Her and Die

“True,” Preacher agreed.

Preacher wasn’t actually a preacher.

Preacher was an AC repair man, and an online-ordained minister that married people for fun.

He’d gotten his name ‘Preacher’ because he’d officiated at the marriage of our club president, Webber.

He has married quite a few people since then, too.

The military kid came back to us with our drinks and said, “We’re only doing grilled cheese.”

I grinned. “I heard.”

“We can put anything that you want on it, hell, we can make it a patty melt, but when it’s just us in here, it’s easier to just make the sandwiches. We ran out of potato salad and macaroni when some rich bitch came in here and bought it all for a work function. And my mother agreed to it because she was thinkin’ ‘oh, this is great, let’s get rid of all the food so we can make more money.’ But she wasn’t thinkin’ about how we don’t have time to replenish the stock, or the fact that we’ll have people coming in here wanting something other than grilled cheese and fries.”

I nodded, but it was Cutter who said, “We order grilled cheese anyway. They’re the best.”

We didn’t get over here often.

The diner, Hodges, was well out of the way of anything and anywhere that we went or did. It was on the very outskirts of Dallas, right off the interstate, which was why it was as busy as it was—which admittedly wasn’t all that busy most of the time. But for us, it was well over forty-five minutes away from the clubhouse, and even farther from most of the club members’ jobs.

The only reason we were out here today was because I’d invited the boys to come out to the ranch—the place that I owned and ran—to get free food and beer if they’d help me fix a couple of barn doors.

The only takers I’d gotten were Cutter and Preacher.

Though, the rest had said that they would take me up on my offer this weekend if I still needed help.

They’d spent the morning with me building the barn doors and fixing up places that needed patched, and I’d kept them full up on beer and then had offered to take them to the diner for lunch for a break.

Which led us to here and now.

Hodges really was fuckin’ great.

I loved it, and was ordering food almost every other day. Though, most of the time I sent my ranch hand, an eighteen-year-old wanna-be bull rider that had better luck grooming the bull than riding it.

Hodges was about eight minutes from the ranch, and usually I didn’t have the time to just go out and get the food because there was too much to do at home.

Eight years ago, I’d been in the military, working as a Navy SEAL, thinking that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

Then I’d gotten a call from my superior officer letting me know that my stepmom and dad had died in a car wreck, leaving me custody of my little sister, Scottie.

I hadn’t thought too much of the next step.

I’d gotten out of the Navy and headed right home.

I hadn’t realized how rundown the ranch had gotten until I arrived home to see it in such disrepair.

See, once upon a time, my mom and dad had been happy. They’d bought the ranch and had turned it into a large cattle operation.

Over the years, Mom had gotten pretty used to nice things, and had turned into a more critical, expectant form of her old self.

Then tragedy struck, and nearly three-quarters of our herd went down in a freak tornado accident that literally gave the scene from Twister with the cow in the air a run for its money.

We had over a thousand head of cattle die, and we were picking them up for months.

That year our ranch went from a thriving, well-tuned machine to a shell of its former self.

Mom realized that she would rather live large than live happy, so she divorced Dad and found a new man that could give her that life.

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