The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch

by Maisey Yates

Again, she was completely taken aback. “Why?”

  “Because I want to.”

  She turned and looked over her shoulder at Logan, who hadn’t even noticed that she was there. What would he think if he saw a man buying her a drink? Would he think anything about it at all? There was a time when he would have. He was as overprotective as Ryder. But, she was twenty-seven. All around her, people were flirting. She had never flirted a day in her life. Not really.

  She looked up at West and he was...well, he was gorgeous.

  Seeing him shirtless yesterday had nearly knocked the wind out of her, and when he had come upon her on the ride earlier today she’d thought she was going to fall off the horse.

  She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t think he was handsome.

  He was also the epitome of a bad decision. Everything that she had never wanted to be drawn to.

  It kind of made sense in a way. She was under an immense amount of pressure right now. Maybe that was the problem. She was having some kind of psychotic break in the shape of a broad-shouldered cowboy. For the first time, suddenly, she understood why people made bad decisions where handsome men were concerned.

  Yes. I’m sure that West Caldwell would be very interested in the idea of you testing out your sexuality on him. That he wouldn’t find that boring at all.

  The idea made her cringe.

  He was already on his way to get her a beer, and she was sure that he wasn’t pondering her or her sexuality at all.

  She burned.

  And it made her angry. She was used to being in charge. Of herself, and of the people around her. Sure, sometimes it made it weird to be the person in authority.

  To walk into a bar and have someone say audibly that they had to stop having fun now. But there was something about it that she liked too, and the fact that West made her want to connect in some way, the fact that he made her feel lonely, galled her.

  This was already far too much contemplation to be having over the offer of a beer.

  Normally, though, she found being on the outside comforting.

  It allowed her to maintain the control that she wanted. It allowed her a sense of safety. A bubble around her and everything that she was.

  He made her feel lonely. Incredibly conscious of how long she went without being touched by another person on a given week. Months. If she avoided her family...no one touched her. And her brothers were not overly demonstrative physically. Iris and Rose hugged. Though, not as often as Sammy, who seemed to touch people as easily as she breathed. But it was all dependent on whether or not she saw them, and she didn’t really have anyone else in her life that breached the bubble.

  By design.

  The reminder didn’t help.

  West returned with the beer, and she made a concerted effort not to let his hands touch hers. Because every time they had passed beer back and forth between them they had touched, and it was accumulating on her skin. Like the impression of him was there and she couldn’t do anything to make it go away.

  “Look,” he said. “There’s a table. Want to snag it?”

  “Why?”

  He looked at her, those blue eyes making her stomach feel a little bit shaky. “Same reason I bought you the beer. Because I want to.”

  “But why?” She was persistent in this, because she knew that there was always an angle. Always a catch. That was life in a nutshell. It was never straightforward. It was never simple. You might think one thing was happening, then life would turn around and clock you in the face.

  She didn’t much trust anything, least of all this far too good-looking cowboy who should be the last person in the room that wanted to talk to her, but wasn’t.

  “I don’t know,” he said, not taking his eyes off hers, and it was that admission that made her follow him over to the cleared-out table for two in the far corner.

  She could feel people watching her.

  She glanced over at the jukebox and saw Logan had noticed her finally. She didn’t want him to come over and talk to her. And when she looked up at him she decided to try and give him an expression that said exactly that. His response was to lift a shoulder and one eyebrow.

  She didn’t know what that meant.

  “Did you make any progress on the bread bandit?” West asked.

  “No,” she said. “I mean, it’s all the same person. But I don’t know who that person is, and even on the spectrum of small town police work, this feels pretty small.”

  “But you have to investigate?”

  “No question,” she said. “If I don’t then I’m negligent. And anyway, I want...you know, the police chief thing.”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking around. “Everybody knows who you are, don’t they?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They do.”

  “Must make dating tough.”

  He had no idea.

  “Doing anything in a small town you grew up in is a whole thing. It was always going to be tough for me because my father was the police chief. But then he was dead, my mother along with him, so I received a fair amount of pity in my life. Then I became a police officer too, and people are a little bit afraid of me. Or, if not afraid then...” She thought about the guy who’d said loudly that the police were here when she walked in. “It’s either that or dumb jokes. And it’s not everyone, obviously, but I’ve always been closer to my family than to any friends. It’s just that they’re the ones that know. You know, they get it.”

  “I can understand that. I think that’s one reason I came here. I don’t have anything in common with Gabe or Caleb or Jacob, not on the surface. They grew up with money. With a mom and a dad. But they’re the only people that know what it’s like to be part of this particular ragtag band of half siblings that we are. This thing that we all are.”

  “It’s not shared blood for us necessarily. It’s the shared upbringing. The shared loss.” She flicked her eyes back toward Logan. “He’s one of my brothers. You know. More or less.”

  West followed her gaze. “I guess I’d better be careful then. He looks like he could put up a pretty good fight.”

  “He’d probably beat you up,” she said.

  “I doubt it,” West said. “I already knew how to fight, but I honed that in prison pretty well.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Were you in a lot of fights in prison?”

  “I don’t know what the benchmark is for a lot of prison fights. I mean, on the scale of prison fights.”

  “I guess I don’t either. What we have basically amounts to a couple of holding cells.”

  “Very different experience doing police work here than it is in a city, I imagine.”

  “Yes,” she said. She looked down. “I like to think that we would have done a better job for you. That we wouldn’t have made the same mistakes the police who handled your case did.”

  “It’s all complicated,” he said. “It’s not just the failure of a police officer, but the presence of good lawyers and bad lawyers, of bias in the jury. Complicated.”

  “I suppose.”

  “My ex-wife was one of them. You know, someone with money. Someone like me, someone who got ahead in life, who got ahead of their station naturally look suspicious to those with generational money. That’s the kind of thing that people shouldn’t be able to do. On the one hand, we all say we believe in the American dream, right? But when it actually happens we tend to be a bit suspicious of it, and if it appears to crumble all around somebody then I think we figure that’s about fair enough. If I’m a criminal, then it makes sense that I was able to jump up in station. Nothing else really does. We have our narratives, we don’t like them being disrupted.”

  “I’ve never thought about life in terms of money, which I suppose is how you know we’ve always had enough. There was life insurance money from my parents, plus we were well-off in terms of the land. It doesn’t
mean we haven’t struggled, we have. It’s definitely not a...not a situation where we never have to work a day in our lives, but we had enough. For a bunch of kids who went through what we did I think we’ve had it surprisingly easy.”

  “I didn’t think about anything else but money for most my life. How to get more of it. How to make sure I kept more of it. I was so damned envious of what other people had. I figured I could get myself some security. I could make my problems go away.” He chuckled. “Not so much.”

  “I think your circumstances were pretty...unusual.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  Her eyes fell to his hands, the way they wrapped around the beer bottle. They were scarred, rough looking. Workingman’s hands.

  “When do your cattle come?”

  “Next couple of weeks,” he responded. “Just about got my fence ready.”

  “Good,” she said.

  She didn’t know what else to say.

  Suddenly she wanted to say more. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to put her hand out and cover his.

  She wanted to find a connection between the two of them that was more than just words.

  He cleared his throat and knocked the rest of his beer back. “Enjoy the rest of your evening, Pansy,” he said, standing up.

  “Oh,” she said. “Are you...”

  “Just figured I’d let you get on with it. You didn’t come here to talk to me. See you around the homestead.”

  He tipped his hat to her, and walked over toward the jukebox. Someone had put a few quarters in, and Garth was singing about the friends he had in low places, which was bringing people up from the tables and out onto the little makeshift dance area.

  A couple of the girls that had been talking to Logan broke away and went toward West, one of them reaching out and brushing her hand over his chest.

  Pansy’s ears burned.

  It was easy for that girl to touch West. She just reached right out and did it, and Pansy sat there frozen, her hand welded to her beer bottle like it was a claw.

  He took hold of the girl who had touched him, and she giggled as he pulled her up against his body and spun her out onto the dance floor. Pansy looked at those big hands holding the other woman’s hips and something burned in her heart that she didn’t feel all that often, but she recognized all the same.

  The ache to be held by arms she knew would never hold her.

  It was so different this time than it had been when she was a girl. So much so that she felt guilty calling it the same thing. But it was.

  She felt lonely. Bitterly so. Sitting in this room full of people, watching West touch that other woman so effortlessly. Watching her touch him back, smiling big and bright and easy, not at all worried what people might say or do if they saw her with him.

  Isn’t that just an excuse at this point?

  She gritted her teeth against that internal comment.

  It was a valid enough excuse. Things were different for women. And things were different for her because she was local. She had to watch what she said, and watch what she did. She had to be mindful of everything all the time.

  But right about now the only thing she was mindful of was the deep ache inside of her chest. Blinking hard, she got up from the table and walked out of the bar alone. Going out drinking had not been a very good idea. She was leaving in worse shape than when she’d arrived, and she didn’t know how to untangle all the emotions inside of her. And she wished to God that she just could make them all go away. That she could find a way so to just not have them.

  But she had wished that off and on since childhood, and she had yet to find a way to make it so.

  So she would just do what she always did.

  Find a way to deal with it herself.

  Because eventually that ache would fade. That loneliness. It wouldn’t go away, but it wouldn’t be the only thing she felt, not for too long at a time.

  So she would find solace in that. Since she wouldn’t allow herself to find solace in West.

  * * *

  WHEN HE LOOKED up again she was gone. He had walked away from her for good reason. Because sitting at that table in that quiet little corner, it had been easy for him to forget all the reasons he wasn’t going to go there. Most especially with her brother—or whatever he was—in the room. But then he had gone over, and the touch of the woman he was currently dancing with had failed to spark even a quarter of the interest that a mere glance from Pansy managed to conjure up. And he didn’t know what he had expected her to do, but he hadn’t expected her to leave.

  “Thanks for the dance,” he said to his partner. “I gotta go.”

  “Why?” she asked, looking petulant.

  Well, he felt pretty petulant, come to that. Because if he could have contrived to get some physical interest in the little beauty currently holding on to him that’s what he would have done.

  He hadn’t touched a woman in four years. To say that he was hard up was an understatement. And damn but he would like to break his dry spell. But apparently his body was only interested in one woman.

  Since when had he become a connoisseur of any kind? Typically, he was a buffet man. Before prison he’d liked sex readily available, plentiful and right there for the taking. Offered up. He didn’t want to work for it, he didn’t want any of that.

  And yeah, he had been married for a few years. He had no trouble being faithful when he took vows. He wasn’t picky. That was the thing. He liked women, which meant that attraction should be that simple. But he was having some kind of weird ass chemistry situation with his uptight policewoman, and he didn’t care for it.

  He could spin whole fantasies out of a brief touch of their fingertips, out of the searing tension that came from sitting in a corner with her.

  It made him feel like a boy.

  Because only boys got excited over things like that. Stolen glances, accidental touches and the indrawn breath of what-if.

  Grown men didn’t deal in what-if. It wasn’t about possibilities. It was about honesty, simplicity.

  Except, here he was, bidding farewell to a sure thing to look for absolutely not a thing.

  He couldn’t credit it, except that he couldn’t credit much of anything to do with his own behavior since he had gotten out of jail.

  He wasn’t the same man.

  A hard realization. Because he’d wanted to be. He’d wanted to go back to who he had been before Monica. He didn’t want to be changed by her or what she’d done to him.

  But he was.

  He was rootless, and he was adrift, and he had been looking for something to anchor him since he’d left Texas.

  Pansy Daniels felt like an anchor, and he didn’t know why. But when he talked to her, he felt like she might understand half of what came out of his mouth, and he didn’t even understand half of it.

  Or maybe that was all justification. Justification because he was horny, and for some reason only for her.

  He wasn’t sure he much cared.

  He pushed open the saloon door and went outside into the balmy evening. The sky was a deep blue, dotted with stars, streetlights not remotely powerful enough to begin to wash them out. For a moment he thought he’d missed her completely, but then he saw a flicker of movement head off Main and down the cross street.

  Toward the police station.

  He kept his pace, moving quickly down the sidewalk, and when he turned the corner, he called her name. “Pansy.”

  The slim little shadow stopped.

  “Don’t shoot me,” he said.

  “I’m not carrying my gun,” she responded. She turned around. “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, the second time he had given her that answer in the space of a half hour. Because he didn’t know. He didn’t know why Texas was dead to him and he was drawn to Gold Valley. He didn’t k
now why he couldn’t get excited over the things that used to excite him. He didn’t know why he wanted to talk to this wound up little police officer and not to a woman who had made it plain as day that she was happy to play the part of buckle bunny to any cowboy she could find.

  He didn’t know why he was standing out on a darkened street instead of getting drunk inside that bar. He could make a whole list of all that he didn’t know right about now.

  “You were dancing,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I was.”

  The darkness felt like a layer of protection. Against prying eyes, against his own better judgment. And he was all for it.

  “You should probably go back and dance with her,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” Pansy said, clearly mimicking his tone.

  “I think you do know,” he said.

  “Well, if you’re looking to get lucky, you should definitely be dancing with her. And not out here talking to me.”

  Get lucky.

  That was the furthest thing from his mind. Not sex, sex was very much on his mind, but wrapping it up in the term get lucky just didn’t work for him right now.

  Because there was nothing lucky about the fact that he only wanted this woman. And there was nothing lucky about the fact that she was a walking entanglement.

  Maybe this was the problem. Maybe the problem was that difficult was what he was into. That wrong was what he was after. Because after everything that he’d been through maybe he was just tired of butting up against brick walls and having them stand.

  Maybe you want to knock some down.

  “Officer Daniels, I don’t think there’s much of anything lucky to do with the fact that I would rather be out here with you than in there with her.”

  He couldn’t see her face, but he could feel her posture go rigid even from ten feet away. He walked toward her, strung out like a wire. “And I had the feeling that you walked out of there because you didn’t want to see me with her. Am I right?”

  “I... I don’t care who you’re with, West.”

  It was the first time she’d ever directly addressed him. The first time she’d ever used his name.