Teaser Tour and Giveaway–> Baxter’s Draw by Juliette Harper

Lockwood Legacy Series


Langston Lockwood, or at least the shadow of who he had been in life, leaned against the front gate of the Rocking L and stared at his eldest daughter drinking coffee on the front porch.


He absent-mindedly pushed his hat back and scratched his head. It never occurred to him when he blew his brains out in the barn with his favorite pistol that he’d spend the afterlife with an itchy scalp.


“Morning, Boy,” an older man said, joining him at the gate.


“Morning, Daddy,” Langston replied.


Milton Lockwood pushed his own hat back on his forehead and stared at the granddaughter he never knew in life. “That one’s a Lockwood.”


“That she is,” Langston said. “I sure as hell was hard on her.”


“You were hard on everyone,” Milton said, turning his head to spit.


“I learned from the best,” Langston answered. “They’re surprising the hell out of me, those girls.”


“How’s that?”


“I figured the way I wrote the will they’d tear each other up like wildcats. Damned if they didn’t go make a family,” he said, disgust dripping off the words. “And now they’re taking up with men. Moving’em on the ranch. And Sister is talking about planting grapes. Goddamn grapes, like we was farmers or something. They even care about their Daddy doing grave spins?”


“You got a burr under your saddle this morning, Boy,” Milton said mildly. “You’re dead. You don’t call the shots on this place now any more than I do. That gal yonder is the boss of the Rocking L.”


“When did you get so even tempered?” Langston growled.


“I’ve been dead a hell of a lot longer than you have, Boy,” Milton observed. “Tends to make a feller kinda mellow.”


“They’re going up to Baxter’s Draw, Daddy,” Langston said. “It’s all gonna come out.”


“Like I said, Boy, you’re dead. Stuff comes out once you’re dead.”


“You know what I expected to find on this side, Daddy,” Langston said. “Everything I wanted was right under my damned nose all those years and I never knew it. Now those girls are going to find out everything I did.”


“That’s why men like you and me don’t rest in our graves, Boy,” Milton said sadly. “We have to watch the consequences of everything we did play out. I was a bastard of a father to you so you were a bastard to them.”


“That wasn’t the whole reason and you know it,” Langston said. “Who would have thought we’d get along better haunting this place than we ever did alive?”


They watched as Kate, her sisters, and three men mounted their horses and rode through the pasture gate headed up to Baxter’s Draw.


“Just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t have my pride,” Langston said.


“We gonna go with’em?” Milton asked.


“I don’t think I can watch this, Daddy,” Langston said.


“Makes no difference to me,” Milton answered, spitting in the dirt again. “Not like I got any place to be.”

Juliette Harper is the pen name used by the writing team of Patricia Pauletti and Rana K. Williamson. Like the characters of their debut series, The Lockwood Legacy, Juliette is a merging of their creative energies.