by Maisey Yates
Why feel something unwanted when you could eat cheese instead?
A reasonable question as far as Pansy was concerned.
“No that’s all right,” West said at the same time Emmett said, “Sure.”
“I’ll do grilled cheese,” Pansy said.
She went inside the house, and began to cook, and it occurred to her as she was midway through flipping the second grilled cheese that she had never really taken care of anyone before.
She and her siblings had depended on each other. They had created a home, a life, had taken all their broken pieces and glued themselves back together so they could go on. It had been survival. Cheerful and raucous at times, but survival nonetheless.
There were things they’d done for each other—punch a bully in the nose if he dared pick on someone in the family.
There were things they’d done for themselves—pack lunches, do their own laundry. And no one had ever cleaned their rooms.
When it came to dinner, Iris and Sammy had taken on the task. Transportation, discipline, signing teacher’s notes...well that had all been Ryder.
She was one of the younger kids. And the position of the younger kids in the family was quite clear. West had taken care of himself primarily, as far as she could tell.
She wondered if he had ever taken care of anyone else before, or if Emmett would be the first.
Maybe his wife.
But, she hadn’t heard anything about his marriage that made it sound like...that made it sound like they really did things for each other in that way.
One of her early memories of her parents was her dad coming home after a long day of work and telling her mother to go sit down because she had been on her feet all day. As if he hadn’t been.
But they had been like that with each other. They had checked in with each other. They had cared for each other. They hadn’t kept score when it had come to who had been carrying what share of the load.
At least, they hadn’t done it in front of the kids.
So Pansy knew that marriage could be that way. Good and balanced. Real.
And even though she hadn’t really made a space for marriage in her own life, she knew that it could be good. West’s marriage didn’t sound good.
Framing him for fraud aside.
She went back outside with the grilled cheese sandwiches, and a beer, plus a bottled water.
She set all of the things down on the picnic bench and table right out front of her house. Because she was not handing West anything. Not again.
They needed to not touch.
She was too confused about all of that to add another spark to the fire that was making it feel like her body wasn’t her own.
“Barbara has requested that you do some service at the Community Center. She’d like you to come help weed and plant flowers.”
Okay, maybe like was overstating it. But she had agreed to allow him to do that, and Pansy hoped that the opportunity to use the young man for free manual labor would make her a little bit easier to deal with in general.
And maybe, eventually, she would even understand the point of all of this.
Though, Pansy doubted it.
She’d had a lot of years to become thoroughly set in her own ways and Pansy didn’t imagine she was going to magically become forgiving and generous now.
But if they could come to some sort of...truce.
Pansy didn’t need Barbara on her side for any of this to go her way, but she didn’t like the resistance.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m going to school, though.”
“Good,” she said. “You can do that too.”
Emmett looked at West. “Don’t look at me,” West said. “I want to keep you busy. Because I don’t want to have to deal with you and your idle hands becoming a devil’s workshop.”
“Are you ninety?” Emmett asked, clearly bristling under the authority West was doling out. Authority Emmett wasn’t used to, but Pansy could tell he desperately wanted.
She related heavily. To being lonely. To missing something from your life like that. And while she’d had no problem letting Ryder be there for her, she’d watched it play out differently with the others.
Sometimes you resisted what you needed because of how much it hurt.
“No. But I do remember what it’s like to be your age. And, having caused my fair amount of trouble, I can tell you right now I don’t want to have to clean up after you.”
“My mom doesn’t care.”
“No, our mom doesn’t care,” West said. “But I do. That means I’m not going to let you run around like a hellion. I’m not going to let you make a mess of your life.”
“Who said I was making a mess of anything? It just is what it is.”
“Nothing is what it is, unless you let it be. You can have different. I know you can.”
“Says the guy who ended up in jail.”
West shook his head. “Finish your food, go work on the fence.”
Emmett stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and got up, walking away from the table and back toward the work site, where he got back to the task at hand with an almost dramatic flare.
“So it’s going well,” Pansy said.
West crossed his arms, the corners of his lips turned down. “I miss the simpler days. When I would park in a bad spot you would write me a ticket. When I wasn’t taking care of a surly teenager.”
“I’m glad you found him,” she said.
The alternative was too sad. Just thinking about Emmett out there all alone... No one should ever be alone.
West shrugged. “You found him. Not me. I’m thankful for that. Don’t get me wrong. Doesn’t mean that it’s easy.”
Pansy nodded. “Well. As far as I can tell there’s very little about life that’s easy. He needs you, though, whether he can show it or not is another matter. And there are certain things that good people do. And one of those things is...be there. When your family needs you. You’re doing that.”
“I think you just came perilously close to calling me good.”
Pansy was never spontaneous, but as she looked at West she said just the first thing that popped into her head. “I suspect you’re about as good as you are bad.”
Their eyes caught, and his mouth curved into a smile that made the word wicked echo inside of her.
She didn’t know anything about men. But she knew that she liked kissing this one. Knew that the parts of him that were bad called her maybe even more loudly than the parts of him that were good, and that scared her.
Because it reminded her of when she was young and she had a restless, wild spirit that she’d made a concerted effort to change.
West called to that spirit inside of her, the one that she had shut down deep. And it was tempting. So tempting to just not control it anymore.
To throw caution and everything else to the wind and explore what was bad in him.
That, she had a feeling could be very good.
She didn’t know why she had that feeling. Maybe it was a host of tangled up bad boy stereotypes and TV and the fevered fantasies of her own body, which currently seemed to be reminding her that she had left the whole virginity thing far too long.
It was the silliest, most trivial thing to be thinking about. While she had the concerns of the new job hanging over her head, and West had the concerns of his half brother to deal with.
But she was thinking about it anyway.
It was amazing how the curve of that man’s lips could twist her thoughts.
Could tie her stomach in a knot and make her feel like a foreign entity unto herself.
“That’s probably the highest praise anyone has ever given me,” he said.
“Well, it’s not very high praise,” she pointed out.
“I don’t suppose.”
She pushed an anxious breath out of her lungs, hoping it would ease some of the tension in her. “If it weren’t for my siblings... I would have ended up in foster care. And that can be good. I mean...it’s not ideal. But... I wouldn’t have been able to grow up on my family ranch. I would’ve lost my parents and my home. It’s not a small thing that you’re doing. Stepping in for him like this. It could change his life. Utterly and completely change his life. Knowing that someone cares about you enough to sacrifice for you changes everything.”
“I hope so,” he said. “I hope it’s enough to change him. I made it through without anyone. More or less. I don’t want him to have to. I don’t want him to have to make the mistakes I did. You can come back from pretty much anything. I’m a walking testament to that. But you know, I don’t recommend getting married to a person who would get you sent to prison.”
“Well...yeah, solid advice,” she said.
“There’s a certain amount of resilience that you get in life because you go through things that are out of your control. But I’d like to soften some blows for him.”
There was something about the glint in his eye that made her breath catch in her throat. She wanted...she wanted to reach out to him. She wanted to touch him. It occurred to her that only a couple of short weeks ago this man had been a stranger she’d pulled over on the roadside and given a ticket to. Now his face was so familiar she could close her eyes and trace it in her mind.
She had kissed him.
She swallowed hard.
“If you keep looking at me like that, Officer Daniels, I’m going to think that you’re issuing invitations.”
His voice went all low and husky, and she could feel it echoing inside of her body.
“Neither of us have time for any parties,” she whispered.
He chuckled, the sound warm and husky, rolling through her bones. “But I give such good parties.” He shook his head. “How much time do you think it would take?”
He was offering an express trip to sin, and lord she was tempted.
“Too much,” she said. “Too complicated.”
“Doesn’t have to be.”
She could think of nothing more ridiculous than instigating a physical relationship for the first time in her life when she was in the middle of such a critical moment.
“We both have a lot on our plates,” she pointed out.
“It’d be nice to have something there that wasn’t terrible, wouldn’t it?”
She looked away. “I don’t know.”
“Pansy...”
She jumped up off the bench. “I just remembered that I forgot to get something from town.”
“Liar.”
“I’m a police officer. I don’t lie.”
He looked at her, too long. Too hard. “I think you do. To me. But mostly to yourself.”
“I need milk.”
“Go get your milk.” She nearly fled, stumbling away from him and back to her car, and it was only when she was almost the whole way back to town that she could admit that he was right. That she was lying because she was afraid. Because she didn’t know what would happen if she took that step.
It was silly. And she couldn’t banish the panic that fluttered in her breast. Instead of figuring that out, she went into the community center, hoping that she would find Barbara there. She wasn’t disappointed.
“Emmett agreed to your plan,” she said. “He’s going to come and do community service for the next few weekends.”
“Good. It doesn’t change the fact that I’m unhappy with how this was handled. I’m not going to give you my support.”
Pansy only just managed to stop herself from rolling her eyes and opened her mouth to say something, but Barbara interrupted her.
“Your father was a good man, Pansy. And he honored the position that he had. But you’ve lost your way. You are not the person that this town needs. It doesn’t matter how hard you try, you won’t be. You’re the wrong fit.”
Pansy had managed to stand strong in the face of everything this woman had thrown at her up until now. She had been able to stand up to anything, everything, except for this. Except for her saying that her father was fundamentally different than she was.
That she could never be all that he was.
Because deep down, she believed it.
Because it was true.
West had tested that thing inside of her that was so wild, and he had woken it up.
She wasn’t going to do what her father had done, because she couldn’t be the steady, perfect person that he was.
She didn’t know what to do about that. It was a crisis point in her chest that burned.
Failure.
Was this what failure was? It wasn’t about the job. It was about...her. She wondered if there was something broken in her that other people could just see.
Or maybe Barbara is just a horrible person?
She gritted her teeth. “Fine,” she said. “I’m not like him. I won’t ever be. There’s no way. But I’m not going to let you ruin that kid’s life. I just won’t. So yeah, maybe that doesn’t make you happy. Maybe I failed as far as you’re concerned. But I hope that I helped him. And I hope that you can find it in yourself to treat him like he’s a human when he’s here. He has been failed by every adult in his life. Don’t join that list. You’re right. I’m not my dad. But I do know what it’s like to grow up without a dad. Just like Emmett. He’s nothing but a fatherless child. Give him a chance. Show him that he can come back from a mistake. Punish me if you need to. But don’t punish him.”
She turned and walked back out of the Community Center feeling deflated. More upset than she should.
She had come to town to run away, to find solace in the familiar. And she hadn’t been able to do it. She hadn’t been able to make herself feel fixed.
West.
West was to blame for all of this. Anger burned in her chest, doing something to cover up the pain. The uncertainty.
She drove. Just to drive, and when it got dark she finally headed back toward her house.
She still didn’t want to go inside. Didn’t want to go to bed. So she headed out toward the barn.
Maybe she would find some clarity there.
But the light was already on. And it wasn’t clarity she found inside.
It was West.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN PANSY CAME storming into the barn, West knew that one of two things was about to happen. Either she was on the verge of hauling off and punching him in the face, or she was on the verge of flinging herself in his arms.
West knew which one he would prefer.
Instead, she stopped herself short, standing in the center of the room, anger and uncertainty radiating off of her tiny frame in waves.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said.
“No. But you have something to say to me. That much is clear. So you might as well.”
“You’re ruining everything,” she said. “Absolutely everything. Before you came here everything was fine. But you brought you... And you brought Emmett, and now I have a one-woman wrecking crew trying to destroy my campaign for police chief.”
“Technically you don’t get elected, do you?”
“Not in a technical sense, but I’m being chosen with the help of this very specific panel. And she’s an influential part of this selection process. And she...she told me that I was never going to be like my dad. You know what? She’s right. But before you came, I wouldn’t have believed that. But you...you make me realize that it’s true. I’m not my dad. I’m not ever going to be. I don’t have his dedication to law and order. I’m too soft, and I’m too... I’m weak. And the harder things get with this job the more I notice it. But that’s because of you too. Do you know what I was thinking about last night before I went to
sleep? It wasn’t my job.”
“I hope it was me,” he said, heat igniting in his gut.
She hated him either way. So if she wanted to blame him for a little bout of self-destruction that was fine by him. But he wanted her. He wanted her, and he was damned tired of fighting it because he wasn’t a man who had ever engaged in much altruism in his life, but here he was trying to do his best to take care of his half brother, and he couldn’t resist her on top of it.
Yes. She was an entanglement. Yes, she was a hell of a lot more trouble than he wanted to get involved in, but she woke up places in him that had been sleeping for a long damned time.
Places that he thought irreparably damaged by the betrayal of his ex-wife. The years of prison he thought had damaged him beyond repair.
Because the West who had gone into prison wouldn’t have come straight out and looked for his father. He would’ve come straight out and looked for a hot, willing woman to take to bed.
But everything had gotten twisted up somehow. His life, himself and somehow as little sense as she made, Pansy felt like a solution in the middle of it all.
Like a return to what he’d been, and he was hungry for that.
Hungry for her. So if making her angry brought her closer, made those eyes glitter, made her face flush, then he would go ahead and poke away, because he had a feeling it was the way to get that mouth back on his. And he wanted it.
“You did something to me,” she accused, her brown eyes furious.
He’d have laughed if he could breathe.
“It’s called attraction, Pansy. And I wasn’t looking for it any more than you were, but there it is. Why do you think I was parking my truck in all those spaces? So that you could get mad at me again. Because you make sparks inside me, darlin’, and I’ve been cold in there for a long time. You put men in prison, do you know what it’s like? It’s not fun. Your day gets ground down to a tired routine. You forget that you’re a man. Hell, you’re lucky if you remember that you are human and not an animal. I never got wood the whole time I was in there. Dead below the waist. Why? Because there’s nothing to get excited about. Because there’s no point dreaming about a woman or a cheeseburger or soft bed, because you’re not going to get it.”