by Maisey Yates
“So what should I do? Go to her door and beat it down?”
“No. But you seem to think that she’s the strongest, smartest, best woman around. And if that’s true...she’s going to come to these conclusions on her own. Even though they’re hard.
“What can I do for her?” West asked.
“Well. I suppose you could always submit a personal statement to the city manager. To the mayor. About all she’s done to help Emmett.”
“Yes,” West said. “I can do that.”
“And then I suppose Gabe and I could do the same. Talk about what she did for the kids here.”
“All right,” he said.
“And you still might not get her back, you know. Even if she does get the job.”
“I know that,” West said, his chest feeling tight. “But she deserves the job whether she chooses me in the end or not.
“You really do love her.”
“I know,” West said. “What a way to find out that I can love like this. It’s kind of a bitch.”
“Yeah, this part of it kind of is. But when you get it back, it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.”
“But I might not get it back.”
“That’s the risk. It’s always the risk. That’s why you don’t do it till you find the person worth all that risk.”
And West knew that no matter what happened, that person for him was Pansy.
Whether in the end she broke his heart or not, he wanted her to have her dreams.
For the first time ever, the dreams of another person felt more important than his own.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
PANSY PRACTICALLY SNUCK into Iris’s room, creeping up the stairs and dashing into her older sister’s room.
Eventually, she supposed she would have to talk to everybody. About the job.
She would have to admit that she had messed up. And somehow not talk about West.
Sammy and Rose would want to know.
But Iris... Iris was the one that Pansy felt most closely understood her.
“What’s going on?” Iris asked when they were safely ensconced in the private space.
“I ruined everything.”
The whole story came pouring out of her. Down to West saying that he loved her.
He loved her.
The very idea made her heart pinch.
“You sent him away?” Iris asked.
“I can’t accept it. I can’t. Look at how I messed up the interview because of all this distraction.”
“If you’re not going to get the job why not at least take the man?” Iris was looking at her genuinely incredulously.
“Because I can’t. Because I don’t... I don’t deserve him,” she said, the words slipping out, surprising her.
“You don’t deserve him? How can you think that?”
“You remember what I was like when I was a kid,” Pansy said. “How I misbehaved all the time. How I... You probably don’t remember this, but Dad got so angry at me before they left. And I hid from him. And it’s the last memory that I have. It was the last he ever knew of me. And I just wanted it to be different. I wanted to be different.”
“Pansy,” Iris said. “You were a little girl.”
“I built my whole life around this. Around needing to be good.”
“Why?” Iris asked. “Do you really think that he would’ve been mad at you for the rest of your life for doing something naughty when you were a child? Do you really think he died thinking what a bad girl you were?”
“I don’t know,” Pansy said.
“I think you do,” Iris said. “I think you do. Is that all you remember about Dad? Him being disappointed in you? Because I remember him being really proud of you, Pansy. I remember him laughing at your jokes. And thinking you were so silly and so clever. I remember one time you drew a picture of him in his uniform and he had it on the fridge for months. Ryder didn’t take it down until...way after they died. I remember one time we went on a walk around the property, and him and Mom held your hand and swung you between them.”
Pansy’s throat started to get tight, a lump building there.
“Don’t you remember how they would read to us?” Iris asked. “How they would tuck us in?”
Tears started to fall down her face, and she hadn’t even been aware of them building.
“No,” she said, her voice a broken whisper. “I don’t remember.”
“Why not?”
“It hurts too bad,” Pansy said. “And there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s just sadness. It’s just loss. At least when...when I was going to be police chief for him there was a reason. It meant that he...that he mattered. That him dying mattered. That it changed me. How can you lose your parents and not have it change you?”
“Of course it changed us,” Iris said. “But Dad would have wanted you to be happy. More than anything else. You know that.”
Something broke inside of her. And pain washed right on through.
He would want her to be happy. Because suddenly she didn’t just remember his stern face, but his smiling one. Him lifting her up in the air, putting her on his shoulders.
You wouldn’t want to make him proud if he weren’t a really great dad.
And West’s words echoed in her head.
He had been a great dad.
He had tickled her and teased her and he had tucked her in at night.
And he had disciplined her when she needed it, because that made him good too.
He’d worried for her. He’d tried to teach her his values. But he’d loved her. Above all, he’d loved her.
She hadn’t been able to let herself remember just how much.
“It hurts to remember,” she whispered.
Iris put her hand over hers. “I know. I know.”
“I’m afraid to love West,” Pansy said. “I’m afraid it will make me weak.” She swallowed hard. “When he left I cried. And I thought I might die. It felt like when we lost Mom and Dad. And I never wanted to feel that way again ever in my whole life. And he makes me feel that way. I’m so scared of losing him.”
“Honey,” Iris said. “You lost him already.”
“No,” she said, stubbornly. “I sent him away. It’s different.”
“Is it?”
“It feels like it,” she said.
“It’s all the same in the end.”
Seconds ticked by, marked by the clock that hung on the wall. Old-fashioned and steady like Iris herself.
“I’m afraid of being happy,” Pansy said quietly.
“I know,” Iris said. “I know. But you have a real chance at something here. And I think you need to take it.”
“Is that what you would do?”
Iris shook her head slowly. “No. I have a feeling I would run away scared. I’d hate myself for it later. But I’m not brave like you, Pansy. I bake pies and knit sweaters. You arrest bad guys.”
“You are brave, Iris,” Pansy said. “You took care of us. If it weren’t for Ryder and you and Logan...”
“I know,” Iris said. “But I like to be here. I like to be safe and it’s why...it doesn’t matter. Be brave enough to remember the good parts about love, Pansy. Be brave enough to let him love you. And to love him back. Because our childhood wasn’t all grief. And your life shouldn’t be all about it either. We’ll always carry the loss with us. It’s part of who we are. But there’s plenty enough that we get to choose.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“It’s up to you,” Iris said. “You know I’ve always admired you,” she continued. “I admired the way that you left the ranch, and went out and did all this stuff. I never knew you were afraid of anything.”
“I’m pretty much afraid of everything,” Pansy said. “And up until recently I could pretend it wasn’t true
.”
“It’s hard when you know that the world isn’t safe,” she said.
Pansy nodded.
“But rejecting him won’t make it safer,” her sister said, gently. “It’ll just make you sad.”
Pansy sniffed loudly. “I came to you because I figured you would be practical about it.”
“If a gorgeous man who is also good in bed tells you that he’s in love with you, rejecting him is not the practical choice.”
And then her sister got up and left her sitting in her bedroom. And Pansy was left to wonder if she was right.
* * *
WHEN SHE WAS called into Chief Doering’s office the next morning she was sure that it was going to be to have him delicately tell her that she did not get the job. So when he told her that she in fact had gotten it, it took her thirty whole seconds to actually process the words.
“What?”
“The job is yours, Pansy.”
“How?” she asked.
“Oh there was vigorous debate,” he said. “Especially after you showed up late to the last interview. But believe me when I tell you that Johnson put in a pretty piss-poor performance over his interviews, and the prospect of hiring an outsider didn’t thrill anyone. Not even Barbara. Combined with your track record, and the results of your evaluations...it was a unanimous decision in the end.”
“I have the job,” she echoed flatly.
“Yes, you do,” he said.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” he said.
“I...”
He stood up from behind his desk and walked around it, pulling her in for a brusque hug. “I had to give your brother the worst news anyone could have given. It means a lot to me to give you some good news, Pansy. Your dad would do that if he were here. And he would be damned proud of you. The youngest police chief in the history of the town. The first woman with the job. You’ve done him proud, Pansy. You’ve done us all proud.”
She had done it. She had done exactly what she wanted to do. Exactly what she had felt like she needed to do all her life.
Her photo would go on that wall, the same as her father’s. The Police Chief of Gold Valley, Oregon. She was finally good enough.
She had finally done it.
Those words kept playing in her head over and over again as she went about her day, went about her job.
And she waited to feel done. Waited to feel changed. Waited to feel as if she had walked through some magical, mystical veil and crossed over to the other side.
But she hadn’t.
She hadn’t even come close.
She didn’t feel changed at all. She felt hollow. And worst of all, the person that she wanted to tell most in the whole world was West.
And she... She didn’t have West.
And it all felt pointless.
Because her dad—as much as she loved him—wasn’t here to celebrate this. And West would have been. But she’d rejected him.
She had been so sure that this moment would change her. That it would make her feel like she could sit down and rest after running a long race. But she just felt numb.
And her dad was still gone.
Nothing had changed. Nothing at all.
She thought back to what Iris had said about their parents. About the way they had loved them. Hugged them.
And it all blurred together like a montage in her mind. These beautiful moments with her parents that didn’t come with a directive, or a sense of shame. These memories that she could do nothing with except feel.
She had wanted so much to avoid feeling.
Because action was so much easier than pain.
Like West said, it was so much easier to build a monument to the dead than it was to try and live. Really live. With her whole heart. With everything.
West.
He loved her.
He loved her just like she was. He loved her when she was cranky and mean and handing out tickets, and pushing him away.
He loved her in spite of everything he’d been through. And he called her brave.
But she wasn’t the one who was brave. It was him.
He was all the things that she’d been afraid to touch. Beautiful and wild, and he made her feel like she could be too. And suddenly she knew what she had to do. She knew where she needed to be.
She went into Chief Doering’s office. “Can I just take a couple of hours?” she asked.
“Why don’t you take the day off?” he asked. “We’ll start going over everything you need to know tomorrow morning.”
“Thank you,” she said.
She changed quickly out of her uniform, got in her car and drove back toward home.
Toward Redemption Ranch.
Not her little house, but the place where West was.
When she got there, she tumbled out of her car, and ran up to the front door of his house. She knocked, but he didn’t answer.
So she started walking out toward the barn, and there she saw him, off in a distant field. She stood there and looked at him, at his broad back as he stood facing away from her, looking at the scenery. At this place where he had grown roots.
This place of redemption.
And her heart filled to overflowing. With love and pain and all the things that she had been afraid of for so long. But most of all, that sense of bursting, boundless excitement that had filled her when she had been a girl. For life. For everything. Until the death of her father had killed it.
Not her father. Not his words. Not a fear of disappointing him.
But that sudden, awful blow delivered by death. Something that she had learned could happen far too soon.
Fear.
All of this was because of fear.
It was nothing to her to be a police officer, to put on a badge and promise to protect other people.
But it was everything to her to risk loving someone that she might lose again. Trusting that things could be okay, when she never knew for sure if that was the case.
But the love that West made her feel was stronger than that.
And it returned something to her that she thought she’d lost forever.
And they were two people who lived on land named Redemption and Hope.
Fear had no place in either.
She grabbed hold of the rubber band that held her hair up in its ponytail, and she released it, shaking her hair out. She put the rubber band in her pocket, then reached down and untied her shoes, toeing them off along with her socks. Until she was barefoot. Until her hair was free.
And then Pansy Daniels ran, like she hadn’t done since she was a child.
Not jogging in formation around the town, but like a wild spirit that couldn’t be contained.
Right toward the man who held her heart.
“West! West,” she repeated.
When he looked at her, he smiled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
WEST THOUGHT HE had never seen a more beautiful thing. Pansy, her hair tangled, her cheeks red, her breath coming in short, hard bursts.
Her feet were bare in the squishy grass, and her eyes were bright.
He loved her. More than anything.
And she had come back to him.
“I’m ready,” she said.
He let out a whoop and grabbed hold of her, lifting her up off the ground and spinning in a circle.
She threw her head back, and she laughed.
And it was the best thing he’d ever heard.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you too,” she answered, brushing her fingertips along his jaw. “I’m sorry that I was afraid.”
“There’s a whole lot of things to be afraid of in this world. And they’re not foolish. Because God knows life can hurt. There is no shame in being scared of someth
ing like this.”
“But it could’ve ruined everything,” she said. “I had an excuse in my head for why...for why being police chief was the most important thing. Why honoring my father’s memory was the most important thing. I held on to the idea that I needed to make him proud because I didn’t just want to feel... Losing him hurt so much. It hurt so damn much.”
“I know, sweetheart,” he said, his voice rough. “I know.”
She was so beautiful now. Wild and vulnerable. It killed him to let her keep talking because he could see that it cost her.
But he needed to let her.
She needed to say it. And he needed to hear.
“Losing my mother hurt.” Her shoulder shook. “And I realize I didn’t even ever let myself think of her because that just hurt. She always accepted me the way that I was. And you know, my dad did too. But I wanted something to do with the feelings inside of me and just missing them didn’t feel like anything. Anything but pain. And I held on to all that like a kid hiding from the truth for the last seventeen years.”
She wiped her tears on her arm, and kept on going. “West, you make me feel like that person that I used to be. Who never lost anyone. Who could still be filled with joy and excitement about the world. And who sees mischief and fun in it all. You make me want more. You make me want everything. And there’s just no room inside of me to be afraid anymore. I haven’t felt this free in so long.”
Her voice broke, something inside him breaking along with it. But it felt fixed too, and he didn’t know how that was possible.