Indigo Lake

“Nope, but if you don’t want the job my next recruit is Dice.”

They both looked back at Dice slowly walking around Reid Collins like the ranch owner was a half-dead snake.

Blade knew he was cornered. “I’ll take the job.”

CHAPTER TEN (#u4587fbbb-578e-5caf-9983-b50a9319798e)

LAUREN SAT IN her tiny office in what everyone called the strip mall. Three ten-by-twelve offices with small loft apartments above and a parking lot out front for eight cars. She’d opened a site for online news called ChatAroundCrossroads after she moved back from Dallas. She planned to sell ads on her webpage for income in the morning and work on her writing in the afternoon.

Only, everyone read the news, but no one bought ads, so she was forced to take editing jobs to pay the bills. Still, broke in her hometown among friends and family was better than being broke in Dallas alone.

Lauren had always thought her real money would come from writing. Short stories, poems, articles. After all, every English teacher she had in college told her she could write.

But they hadn’t told her what to write.

So far everything she tried only dribbled in small change. But last month she’d had a new idea. Dakota Davis, in the office next door, had told her scary tales about her neighbor’s place and she’d pitched the idea to Texas Monthly. They said they’d consider it.

Lauren didn’t believe any of the stories, but that might be something people would read. A feud over cattle. A gunfight over love. And a ghost who walked the land by Indigo Lake.

From there she could write other stories. Ransom Canyon was full of legends and stories.

She stared out the glass door, thinking she’d managed to get nowhere with her writing career in her five years since college, so she might as well try this road. There was good money in magazine writing if she could just make herself write. At the rate she was going she’d die of old age with her obituary only half-written.

But if she wrote about legends and curses people passed down, she might build a name for herself. She could do a series of shorts and eventually put them together in a book. The people around here knew her, trusted her. They’d open up to her.

Tapping her pencil against her forehead, she decided if she stepped into nonfiction, she’d check her facts, make it almost like a historical account. Somewhere back in the history of this area must be a real event that started the stories.

“Write, write, write,” she mumbled to herself as her fingers danced across the keyboard too lightly to produce words. She had to work, or go back to wondering why Lucas had kissed her last night like he was leaving for the front lines.

Lucas reminded her of a recurring dream that never ended. Part love story, part nightmare. She sometimes told herself he was the reason she never made up her mind about anything.

Maybe this was just puppy love that hung around ten years too long. But the truth was, she hadn’t met anyone she wanted to move on with.

Sometimes hanging on to a maybe was enough to last awhile. She’d let go of the dream of her and Lucas so slowly it had drifted out of sight before she realized it was gone. Even when he’d kissed her last night, she hadn’t allowed hope to crawl into her heart again.

She glared through the glass door at the antiques store across the street, which usually looked abandoned except on Saturdays. Maybe the town had evacuated and had forgotten to tell her. Zombies were probably roaming the streets looking for fresh brains, and here she was worrying about an almost-love she couldn’t get over.