The Hero of Hope Springs

by Maisey Yates

“Let’s see what we’ve got,” Logan said, hunkering down by the animal. Ryder joined him, and Sammy stood back, pressing her thumb against one of the particularly deep gouges on her palm. Now it hurt. When before she had been able to ignore it a bit.

  “Fool,” Rose said.

  “I just wanted to help.”

  It didn’t sound any better the more she repeated it. And standing there she couldn’t quite articulate why she had to.

  It was just... It was all part and parcel to this weird feeling of uselessness inside her. That sense that she was adrift in some way.

  There was something incomplete about her. Something that needed filling and fulfilling. Which was how she’d arrived at the baby.

  At Ryder. At everything.

  Using tools, Logan and Ryder got the little calf free much more quickly than the progress that she had been making. They got the calf loaded up into the back of the truck, and Logan got into the driver’s seat, Ryder getting into the bed. Rose got into the cab with Logan, and that left Sammy with the decision to make. Squeeze into the cab, or climb in with her friend.

  She got into the back with him, because if she didn’t, it would be weird. And the fact she was thinking about it all was weird, but there was really nothing to be done for it.

  She crouched beside him, beside the animal.

  “Your heart is too big, Sammy,” he said softly.

  “Really?” She looked at the wound on her hand. “Here I was just thinking it’s not big enough. That’s part of my problem. Feeling like what I’m doing is so... That everything in my life is about me and it’s not really enough anymore.”

  “You take care of us,” he said.

  “Do I? Because it seems to me like you’re always taking care of me.”

  He shook his head slowly. “I was drowning,” he said, his voice rough. “When my parents died... You know I don’t really remember that night very well. Except I remember Pansy’s old boss, my dad’s friend, Chief Doering, coming to the door. Except he wasn’t the chief then, he was just another officer. And I answered it and he looked so grim. I knew enough about my dad’s job to know what those kind of visits meant. But all of them... Sammy, all of them. My mom and dad, my aunt and uncle. Logan’s mom. Everyone. I just remember... It was like being shot. This burst of pain and impact like you don’t think you could possibly survive. And then silence. Nothing. Just numbness while you wait to bleed out. And then the strangest thing happened. Sugar cubes started showing up in my barn.” He lowered his head. “You know, it’s embarrassing, and I never told anybody this but at first I thought maybe it was...my mom’s ghost or something. Not a ghost. I never had the sense she was a ghost. Her soul. An angel. Because I couldn’t figure out where else sugar would come from. It was just so strange and funny. And that night I found you.”

  She blinked hard, trying to keep from dissolving into tears right there in the back of the truck with an injured calf between them.

  “Were you disappointed? I mean, I’m not exactly a brush with the supernatural.”

  He shook his head. “I always thought you might be. It took me a while to be sure that you were real. And not...”

  “Don’t tell me you thought I was an angel.”

  He huffed a laugh. “A fairy. Not an angel. You are too damned pretty and not in the heavenly way.”

  That compliment, delivered with a slightly wicked smile, made her stomach turn over.

  What did he mean by that? Did he mean that he had wanted her even then? He’d said as much. That when she had come to his bed he’d wanted her. But this was still slightly different.

  Because for one, it was easy to imagine that he just wanted her because she was a woman and she had gotten into bed with him. And he was a man, and it was a very basic response for that to become sexual.

  “Why wasn’t I an angel?” she pressed.

  “Because the things I wanted to do to you would’ve got me thrown into hell.”

  She felt both satisfied and unnerved by the response.

  “Oh.”

  “But you know, that wasn’t the important thing. The thing was... It felt like everything was dark until you. You were something else. Sunshine coming through the darkness. And all that was more important than wanting you. So I forgot about that quick. Especially... Especially when I found out that you didn’t just come out from behind a flower in the garden one day and decide to join the family. When I found out about your dad.”

  “You have taken care of me,” Sammy said.

  They never talked about that night. Ever. It was as unspoken between them, as well... All of this was. Except, this was spoken now.

  They had touched each other.

  Things had changed.

  The truck continued to rumble, the calf between them occasionally making a plaintive bleat. It was a ludicrous time to have this conversation, which made it about as good a time as any.

  “I wanted to kill him,” Ryder said.

  “You almost did.”

  “No less than he did to you, Sammy. I’ll never get over seeing those bruises on your face. Knowing he put them there. Dammit. I still wish I had killed him.”

  “He’s dead now anyway, and we’ve had all this time. And if you’d killed him then you’d be in prison. And we wouldn’t be here.”

  He shook his head. “No, we wouldn’t be.”

  That felt loaded right about now. Because where exactly were they? She didn’t know.

  They rode in silence after that, until they reached the barn. Bennett Dodge was already there, his mobile unit fully equipped to handle any sort of emergency.

  “Hi,” Ryder said, getting out of the back of the truck and shaking the other man’s hand. “How are things?”

  “All right. Kaylee’s got some wicked morning sickness but other than that...”

  That was the first that Sammy had heard about the veterinarian’s wife being pregnant. His wife, who was the other veterinarian.

  Bennett Dodge was one of the least scandalous people in the entire town of Gold Valley. But he had one of the more scandalous things from his past pop up to haunt him. Well, not haunt him, she supposed. But one day three years ago a fifteen-year-old son he hadn’t known he had had ended up on his doorstep. That was when things had changed between him and his coworker and friend Kaylee. Sammy wasn’t privy to all the details; all she knew was that they had been the best of friends, and then the next thing she knew she heard they were getting married. And now apparently having a baby.

  “Congratulations,” she said.

  “We were empty nesters for all of two minutes.”

  He said it with a lot of humor. Bennett was only in his midthirties. She doubted he was ready to be an empty nester anyway.

  Plus, he’d missed the first fifteen years of his first child’s life.

  “I’ll never be an empty nester,” Ryder said, looking around. “I can’t get these people to leave.”

  “It’s overrated anyway,” Bennett said. “Having been one for most my life.”

  “I never have been.”

  He’d never lived alone. And neither had she. Not really. But it struck her then how funny that was.

  Was that what she needed to do? Did she need to get back to her original thought of being independent? She wasn’t really sure.

  “Let’s check this little guy out.”

  For the next half hour or so Bennett gave the calf a thorough once-over and dressed his wounds. Primarily, his issue was dehydration. But Bennett was hopeful that with the minor injection of fluids and a speedy reunion with his mother, he would pull through quickly.

  He left them with instructions on what to look out for, and then left on another emergency call.

  “I better get back to... I was making jewelry, actually.”

  “No, you don’t,” he said. “We need to go in the house
and get your hands patched up.”

  “I’m fine.”

  Rose appeared from around the front of the truck. “You’re not fine. You’re bleeding like a son of a gun. A stuck pig. It’s awful, Sammy.”

  “I’m fine,” she protested.

  But she found herself being grabbed by said hands and propelled toward the house.

  It took her a moment to realize it was only she and Ryder who had gone inside.

  “Where’s Iris?” Sammy asked.

  “Don’t know,” he said.

  He opened up the cabinet in the kitchen that housed all the medicine and the first-aid kit and dragged it down. It was an old, metal thing that could probably be used for a weapon. She was sure that they’d had it since they were kids. Probably something that their parents had bought and they had just continued to restock.

  Ryder got out an antiseptic ointment and some Band-Aids, and she leaned against the counter, watching his movements.

  His dark head was bent low as he opened the Band-Aids and put medicine on them, one lock of hair falling into his face.

  She fought the urge to reach out and push it back off his forehead.

  A casual gesture that she might have engaged in thoughtlessly before last night. But now she just couldn’t. She couldn’t do anything like that casually.

  Because touching between them was no longer casual.

  It hurt her to realize that.

  That last night they might have found something, but they lost some things, too. And she wasn’t sure that they would ever be able to get back to a place where they had them. She wasn’t sure if you could have everything after all.

  She never had been.

  It was one of those big promises that you saw trumpeted everywhere and she had always been naturally suspicious of it. As she was naturally suspicious of all things that sounded slightly too good to be true.

  “Give me your hand.”

  She did, and remembered this morning when he had kissed her wrist after he demanded her hand. But he didn’t kiss her wrist this time. Instead, he started putting a bandage on it, followed by another. “You should have waited.”

  “It just felt really important,” she said. “I couldn’t stand to see him suffer like that.”

  “I know. It’s one of the things I like about you.”

  He began to position a Band-Aid over a particularly deep one and she winced, air hissing through her teeth. He paused, leaning in and blowing cool air over the wound. She shivered. His breath against her skin was a whole revelation.

  No. They couldn’t touch casually anymore. But his touch had transformed into magic, and right now she wasn’t sure she would trade the two things.

  Sunlight filtered through the window and illuminated his face. Spiked the tips of his lashes with gold, those brown eyes looking more whiskey in the light. It even highlighted his stubble. Then she noticed. For some reason now every little detail of his face—it all seemed to matter so much.

  She swallowed hard. He licked his lips and looked up at her, met her gaze. Her heart started thundering. Hard.

  And she was feeling pretty glad that they hadn’t made any kind of decisions or thrown down any gauntlets or anything earlier in the day. Sure, that had been his suggestion, but it was seeming like a very good suggestion right about now. She was about to ask him to do something naughty. About to open her mouth and flirt with him. Ask him if he wanted to kiss it and make it better. When Iris breezed into the room.

  “Sammy. Are you okay?”

  She and Ryder jumped, like a pair of startled raccoons that had been caught getting into some feed.

  “I’m fine,” she said, jerking her hand away from his and lowering it to her side. “I was trying to rescue a calf.”

  “She was,” he grunted.

  “Okay,” Iris said.

  She was carrying a bag of groceries, which she set on the counter and began methodically taking out. And of course, she had no idea what she had interrupted, because it would never occur to her that she might have interrupted something like that between Ryder and Sammy.

  Each piece that she pulled out of the bag was like torture.

  Sammy felt like she was made of sexual frustration. And as the seconds ticked on she found a sort of gratitude for it. Because maybe Iris had to save them from doing something stupid.

  She was in a weird space. Feeling obsessed with Ryder and what he could make her feel when she should be dealing with the fact that she had nearly had an emotional meltdown and gone off and had a baby with a stranger.

  Yes. At some point she was going to have to deal with that.

  “Can I help?” Sammy asked.

  Iris looked at her like she was insane. “No. Your hands are all messed up.”

  She looked down at her Band-Aid-covered paws. “Sure. I suppose they are.”

  “There’s no suppose about it. I don’t want you touching any of the food.”

  “She is disinfected,” Ryder pointed out.

  “Gross. It doesn’t matter.” Iris looked at him. “You could help, though.”

  So he did, rallying and getting all of the food put away. Iris cast them both a long look before she walked back out the door.

  “It was always like that,” Sammy said. “Wasn’t it?”

  “I was never even tempted to bring anyone home,” he said.

  “But we were always just...in your stuff, weren’t we?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was for the best that I never did bring anyone. I wasn’t looking for anything permanent anyway. And bringing somebody into this family... You all would’ve jumped on her. Asked if I was going to marry her five seconds after she walked through the door. No, thank you.”

  It hit her then just how much of his life actually was kept a secret from her. And she probably knew more about him than anyone else in the family. But she had tended to let him keep separate what was separate, too. Maybe on some level because it might bother her.

  The truth of the matter was it had always suited her that he didn’t have girlfriends in a traditional sense. Because they would’ve been jealous of her. And it would have been an issue. Sammy had never wanted to compete with another woman for his attention. He was hers in a way that none of them ever could have been anyway. It would’ve been foolish for them to try to compete with her. At least, that was her humble opinion on the matter.

  “Still. I just guess I didn’t really appreciate... I mean I understand that you were basically being the parent while everybody else still got to be a kid but sometimes I think I still don’t fully get everything that you did. For me. For us. For them.”

  “I wanted to do it,” he said. “Don’t go acting like I did some kind of great sacrificial thing. I didn’t. When I lost my parents...the idea of being away from anyone else in my family was pretty much unbearable. Taking care of them, making sure that they were okay, that gave me a purpose. And if there were some sacrifices in there... I don’t mind. It was part of it.”

  “Well. It would be nice if you could get some privacy now.”

  He looked at her far too meaningfully. She felt herself blushing, and she couldn’t remember the last time she blushed before this. Ridiculous.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Thank you. For helping with my hands.”

  She wanted to thank him for some other things, too, but she didn’t know if it was appropriate. He picked his hat up off the counter and put it back on his head, and damned if the man didn’t tip it at her like some old-fashioned movie cowboy.

  “I’ll see you later, Sammy.”

  “See you,” she said, and when he left the room, she was almost certain that he had taken the air right along with him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN THEY ALL went out for drinks on Friday night, Rose acted scandalized when Sammy ordered a beer.

  “What a
bout the baby?” she said.

  “I’m on hiatus from that,” Sammy said.

  Logan looked at Ryder, and then back to Sammy.

  “I decided it wasn’t a good idea,” she said.

  He could feel his friend’s eyes boring a hole through the side of his face.

  “Why not?” Iris asked.

  “You didn’t think it was a good idea,” she said. “Why are you suddenly asking why I don’t want to do it?”

  “Because you don’t normally change your mind. At least, not unless there’s a particularly shiny whim off somewhere, and I haven’t seen any.”

  “Maybe because I was trying to fix a problem with something that isn’t supposed to be a Band-Aid.” She looked down at her hands.

  Putting Band-Aids on her earlier had been some sort of weird torture. It shouldn’t have been sexy. But it was. Maybe because she was, no matter what. Still, he hadn’t realized quite how sick he was until he had wanted to make out with her while putting ointment on her hand.

  “And what gave you clarity?”

  The look Logan was giving him sharpened, and Ryder nearly choked on his beer. It was like Sammy had taken her thoughts and planted them into his brain. Ryder’s penis. Ryder’s penis gave me clarity.

  It had to come from her. Little witch. Because he would never think of such a thing. It was her. Prolonged exposure to her and her ridiculousness.

  “Well, Iris, I went out into a field sky-clad and asked the earth to tell me the answers. Then I went to a pond and knelt by the water. I reached in, and when I pulled my hand out there was a stone in it. And on that stone was written the word idiot. So yeah, then I figured maybe I shouldn’t go have a baby with a guy I don’t know.”

  “I was asking you with sincerity,” Iris said.

  “I don’t think you were. Anyway. Not doing it. So we never need to discuss me or pregnancy again. Sorry I exposed all of you to it in the first place.”

  A muscle in his face twitched. Because of course that was a great reminder that what the two of them had done had the potential for consequence.

  He should talk to her more about that. Of course, that would mean talking more about it when what happened next was still up in the air.