by Maisey Yates
He is also your landlord.
Yes. He was. But in the grand scheme of things, as much as she loved the little house that she lived in, and loved being able to have her horse there for her to ride whenever she wanted, it wasn’t like she couldn’t find another place. She could. Not only that, she could easily find another place for her horse. After all, her entire family lived on a giant ranch. No, it wouldn’t be as convenient, but she could make it work. Her having the job that she wanted, that she dreamed of, was far more important than her living in the rental that she preferred.
Anyway, her job was quite beside the point. It was the principle.
She took a sip of her mocha and charged across the street, using the crosswalk, and approached the truck. She shook her head, gathering her things so that she could write a ticket, when suddenly, he appeared.
“Is there a problem, officer?”
She had déjà vu. The lazy way he said officer was just as irritating today as it had been yesterday.
When she’d gone home to the little cabin she lived in at Redemption Ranch, the property he’d just bought, she’d half expected him to be waiting there on the porch with an eviction notice. He hadn’t been.
Somehow this felt worse.
This man looked new and broad and big. Out of place in her familiar streets with his sharp blue eyes and the black cowboy hat he wore.
“You’re parked in a loading zone, Mr. Caldwell,” she said, doubling down on her officiousness because it was safety.
“I’m loading,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes, looking up and down the street. “What?”
“Just a second.”
He walked to the side entrance of the Gold Valley Saloon and propped the door open. Then he disappeared inside. A moment later, he reappeared with a giant, heavy piece of furniture, and Laz, the owner of the saloon, holding on to the other end.
Both men were incredibly fit, with large arms, and both had straining muscles, which indicated that the piece of furniture was heavy indeed.
She had no real understanding of why she was contemplating arms.
They hefted the furniture into the back of West’s truck, and Laz ran a large hand over his close-cropped black hair. “Is there a problem, Pansy?” he asked.
“I guess not,” she said. “I thought he was parked in the loading zone. You know, and not loading.”
“I’m giving him my old whiskey cabinet,” Laz said, gesturing to the mammoth piece of furniture that was now deposited into the bed of the pickup.
“He was just going to get rid of it. It’s historic,” West said.
“And you care?” Pansy couldn’t help but ask.
“It’s not historic to Gold Valley,” Laz said. “I actually bought it off a guy in Texas who owned a saloon there. It’s a little piece of Lone Star State history.”
Pansy wrinkled her nose. “I hope you’re replacing it with something local.”
Laz smiled and pointed at his forearm tattoo, a giant fir tree that ran from his elbow down to the end of his wrist, bold and black against his dark brown skin. “As a matter of fact, I did. Showing my state pride.” He placed his hand on the back of the truck. “The historical society gave me permission to go hunt around the basement of the old museum and I found a new cabinet. Gold rush era, and maybe from the original saloon back in the late eighteen hundreds. I’ve been having it restored. So, I’m trading it out.”
“And we were loading it,” West said.
He shook hands with Laz, and clapped the other man on the back. Laz smiled and waved him and Pansy off, heading back into the saloon.
Pansy turned back to West.
“I didn’t know you were a history buff,” she said.
“You didn’t ask,” he replied.
“How do you know Laz?” she asked, feeling suspicious.
He shrugged. “I drink and I’ve been here for a few months. Anyway, who doesn’t know him?”
“And last night over beer he struck up a conversation about cabinetry?”
“As it happens, it came up that I moved here from Texas, you know, when I opened my mouth. And Laz mentioned he had some stuff that he had originally furnished the place with that came from the Lone Star State. I told him I was happy to buy it off him, and here I am. Are you going to write me that ticket?”
“No,” she said. “You were loading.”
His smart mouth twisted into a half smile and as the corner of his mouth tugged upward she felt an answering tug in her stomach. She didn’t like it. “And you were ready to assume the worst of me.”
“It’s important,” she said. “That’s where the delivery trucks park to bring the beer. What if they couldn’t bring the beer?”
“Surely the whole town would come to a complete stop. Just so you know, I’m going to be taking this back up to the house, and then I’m going to go get some fencing. Which I will also be loading. Though, I will be doing it in the actual parking lot of Big R. So perhaps you won’t see the need to write me a ticket. But hell, I don’t know. You seem to like me an awful lot, Officer Daniels.”
“I like law and order,” she said, her voice sounding ridiculous and clipped deep into her own ears. “And I like coffee, which I’m going to go back to drinking now.”
“Good for you, sunshine,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you back at the homestead.”
“I guess you will,” she said, turning away from him and walking back toward the police station, toward her car. Her face was burning. That had not gone well. No, it hadn’t gone well at all. She couldn’t remember the last time she had felt stupid. Hot faced and uncertain. But, boy had he managed to make her feel that way. She wanted to punch him in the face. But she wasn’t going to let herself be defeated. Not by him, not by anything. She was too determined to let one smart-ass cowboy get the better of her. That was just a fact.
CHAPTER THREE
BY THE TIME West was unloading fencing, he was in a bad mood. It had been a long ass day, and something about Pansy Daniels was starting to get under his skin. Perhaps it was the fact that she seemed to have a hard-on for him. And not the kind he would’ve preferred a woman to have.
Not that he wanted that particular woman to.
She was a tiny menace.
He couldn’t believe that she was putting a ticket on his truck when he’d come out of the Saloon.
He snorted, hefting fencing out of the back of the truck and laying it in front of the spot where he was going to do the deed.
He would get a little bit of a start this afternoon, but there wasn’t a whole lot to be done with the daylight that was left. Thankfully, it was getting into summer, and that meant that the sun was sinking behind the mountains later and later.
He pushed his sleeves up and went for the posthole digger.
It was then that he heard the sound of a motor, and saw a truck driving up behind him. It was his half brother Caleb’s truck coming up the drive. He sighed heavily.
When his brother parked and got out, he folded his arms over his chest. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to help you with the fence.”
West snorted. “I didn’t say I needed help with the fence.”
“Yeah, only Jamie mentioned that she saw you down at Big R buying fencing, and she told Ellie, who mentioned it to me. I thought maybe you needed some help, but you were too hardheaded to ask for it.”
There he was, back on the gossip chain. And he’d like to be mad about it, but he couldn’t be. Not now. Not when the telephone game was proving for the first time in years that he was connected to a line.
His half brother Caleb liked him for some reason that West couldn’t quite discern. He knew it had something to do with the fact that he had given the other man advice when he had been in a difficult place with the woman who was now his fiancée.
If West had known it would forge this kind of a bond between them he might not have given the advice.
People popping over unannounced wasn’t quite the level of family he was after.
But then, given that Ellie and Caleb were decent people who’d found happiness with each other, West supposed he couldn’t be too put out about the whole thing.
West thought love was like a forest. You came to the edge of it and went right in, but until you were a ways down the path it was impossible to tell if you were going on a pleasant walk through beautiful scenery, or signing up for an uphill battle with brambles, rocks, mudslides and in his case a bear that wanted to eat his head.
Metaphorically.
“Well. I was just going to do the fence myself,” West said. “And I have no problems with that. Not in any particular hurry to get it finished. So, me not asking for help was hardly being hardheaded.”
“Disagree. If I needed help with something I would ask.”
“You would have a whole crew ready to show up. And I said I didn’t need help.”
Caleb ignored what he’d said about needing help. “You could have a whole crew too. If you asked.”
His situation with the Dalton family was...complicated. He still wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted from them. Or what he expected.
All he knew was that he had reached the point where in Texas there was nothing for him.
His relationship with his mother was nonexistent, she didn’t even know where his younger half brother was at, and thanks to his stint behind bars, he knew just about every law enforcement official in the area was bound to treat him the way Pansy had when she’d first pulled him over. With a hell of a lot of suspicion. That he’d been cleared just never seemed to matter all that much.
Back in Dallas, he’d had a difficult time being accepted back into the circle that he had once been in. The fact that after he’d been imprisoned for three years, new evidence had been unearthed by his lawyer and then his ex-wife had been tried and convicted for fraud might have exonerated him legally, but it hadn’t done it personally.
No. Instead, everyone who sided with her old money family had turned their backs on him completely. They had thought that whatever she had done, it was obviously to escape from a situation with him that had been untenable.
No one would believe that he—a roughneck from the wrong side of the tracks—had in fact been victimized by her—a pampered petite blonde who drank blood in her spare time.
At least, she drank his.
Again, metaphorically.
But, he felt drained all the same.
“Yeah, well. I don’t know y’all well enough yet.”
“You could. If you wanted to.”
“Maybe.”
“Just shut up. I’m going to help you with the fence.”
“I don’t have an extra post hole digger,” he said.
“You’re in luck,” Caleb said, grinning. “I brought my own.”
“Of course you have your own,” West muttered.
Caleb chuckled. “Yeah. Well, I have a whole Christmas tree farm. I need to dig holes sometimes.”
“You are the most random bastard I have ever met.”
“It’s funny, don’t you think?” Caleb asked when the two of them were in position.
“What? The look on your face?”
“No. The fact that we were both in the rodeo for a time. I mean, I was directly following in my old man’s footsteps. You were... I guess you just had it in your blood.”
Discovering that he was the illegitimate son of rodeo royalty had been something of a trip. West didn’t really know how he felt about it. He’d discovered that Hank Dalton was his father some time before he had gone to prison. It was information that would have changed his life when he was younger. But, at that point he had already changed his own life. Made his fortune and all of that.
He didn’t care.
Not especially. Because he had grown into a man who didn’t really need anyone. His half brother was eighteen years younger than him, and they were separated by a whole lot of distance but he’d done his best to try and make what relationship he could with the kid. Have him out to Texas sometimes. Before he’d gone to jail, anyway. Otherwise, he didn’t have much use for family. And he couldn’t say that he had much use for Emmett, it was just that he felt sorry for the kid. Because he knew what it was like to grow up in the fluttering shadow of Jessa Caldwell.
But by the time he’d gotten out of prison, his mom hadn’t even known where the kid was.
It ate at him.
That was something he could talk to Officer Pansy Daniels about. But then, she’d probably write him another ticket.
“What do you know about that little lady police officer?”
He hadn’t meant to ask about Pansy, it had just sort of come up.
“Pansy? That’s her name, I think,” Caleb said. “Not much. I vaguely remember she’s part of a family... All the parents died. I mean, her parents and her aunt and uncle. So they all grew up on a ranch on the outskirts of town. That’s one of those things you don’t forget.”
West was surprised to hear that. He hadn’t imagined that she... Well, fundamentally he had imagined that somebody like her probably hadn’t been through many hard times. A cop in a small town where there was probably barely any crime. He would have guessed that she didn’t know much of anything about difficulty.
“She lives here,” West volunteered. “On the property. She also gave me a speeding ticket the other day. And tried to give me another ticket today.”
“Were you breaking the law?”
“No. I was getting ready to load in a loading zone. Why does everybody think that I’m a second away from breaking the law? I was exonerated.”
“And you never broke the law otherwise?”
“I never got caught. I’m not that sloppy.”
Sure, he’d been involved in some petty break-ins and things when he was a kid. But for a while he’d really hung out with the wrong crowd. Then he’d gotten his first job on a ranch in town and had found that he enjoyed building things a hell of a lot more than destroying them. That fixing a fence and earning a wage meant more than stolen cigarettes ever could. He had made a success of himself, and then his ex-wife had ruined everything. Sure, he was getting back on his feet now, but he had already gotten on his feet.
And Monica had been born on her damn feet. Complete with a silver spoon in her mouth and a high horse to sit on so she had a view of the peasants down below. She had no idea what it was like to struggle, not a day in her life.
Of course, she was probably struggling a bit now in prison. So there was that. She had taken so much from him, and fundamentally had no idea the amount of work it had taken him to get it, and what it had entailed for him to lose it.
He was still angry about it. He always would be. He wasn’t the kind of guy who let things go. He didn’t get to where he was by letting things go.
“Like I said,” Caleb continued. “I don’t know that much about her. But then, I’ve never had a speeding ticket.”
“You’re an ex-firefighter turned cowboy. How the hell can you be this boring?”
“Ellie doesn’t think I’m boring,” Caleb said.
“Well, that’s why the two of you are suited to each other, I guess.”
“Do you want to come out to the house for dinner tonight?”
West found that he...almost did. But it was still weird. Going over to the Daltons’ for things. He preferred to be there when school activities were happening. Big outdoor barbecues, where it wasn’t people sitting around a table. He had participated in the family Christmas a few months earlier, and he had felt...patently uncomfortable. He didn’t have any experience of Christmases outside of the years he had been married to Monica. Then, he had done the whole holiday thing. They had decorated their
ridiculously showy home on the outskirts of Dallas in a way that would make the Joneses get stressed out about keeping up with them.
But growing up... His mom hadn’t done anything like that. No, she had usually hauled herself off to the casino and left him to fend for himself.
“Not tonight,” he said.
“Suit yourself. But you know you’re always welcome.”
“Yeah,” he said.
They continued working in silence for a while after that.
“I know the whole situation is weird,” Caleb said. “But nobody has any issue with you or McKenna.”
“I know,” West said.
Actually, the way that the Dalton family had accepted him was endlessly weird to him. He had a standing invitation to weekend barbecues from Tammy, and even though he didn’t really want to pursue a ton of quality time with Hank, the old man had been...well, friendly and charming in every situation West had seen him in. If it had all been reversed, and his mother had been the one that had to accept random illegitimate children it never would have happened. She barely accepted the children she had.
“When are you going to finish this fence?” Caleb asked.
“I’m going to be working on it off and on over the next few weeks.”
“And when are your cattle getting here?”
“I’ll tell you what,” West said. “I promise that once I have a timetable I’ll give it to you.”
He wasn’t sure if he was telling the truth or not. He hadn’t really decided yet.
“Okay,” Caleb said, nodding once. “I better head home. Gotta wash up before I eat.”
West, for his part, was going to wash up and reheat a burger he bought at Mustard Seed earlier in the day, in preparation for dinner.
But after Caleb bid him farewell and he made his way up to the house, West saw a lone figure standing on his front porch that he recognized from the stance alone. Hip cocked out to the side, arms crossed over her chest. She didn’t need a uniform for him to know with absolute certainty that Officer Pansy Daniels had come to harass him again.
