by Maisey Yates
They had a very petty serial burglar on their hands.
* * *
IT WAS A nice day and West was ready to blow off work and take a trail ride. Really, when you owned the land, it was still working, in some ways.
He tacked up and got on the back of his horse, remembering the night a few months ago when he had gone to ride at the Dalton place. Before he had bought his own land, he had been keeping his horses at the Dalton ranch.
He’d gone for a late night rides out there often. He’d been having trouble sleeping then.
It was a holdover from those years in prison. Years he didn’t much like to think about.
It wasn’t like the movies. No one had cut him with a shank or made him their bitch. Though, he would have put up a pretty decent fight if anyone had tried. But there were factions, and a hell of a lot of ugliness. Fights broke out all the time. And there was something...dehumanizing about it. Being kept in a cage. Cut off from the world. It had made him forget all the things that made him a man.
He hadn’t looked forward to the taste of food, because it was the same monotonous crap. He hadn’t looked forward to the day for the same reason.
Prison jumpsuit, the same four walls, the same fenced yard. Day in, day out.
He had forgotten sexual desire for four damned years because there was no excuse or reason to think about it. It was the last thing on his mind. He just wanted to get through.
The act of riding his horse out in the sun... It was something that he had taken for granted.
He had forgotten what he’d come from.
When he had escaped home and gone to the rodeo he had tasted freedom, and he hadn’t looked back.
He’d taken it from Oregon to Texas, from poverty to riches. And he’d felt free. Free from what he’d been born to, what he’d been raised in.
Then everything had fallen apart, and he had lost all that he’d built, and he would never take for granted the ability to do what he wanted ever again. He maneuvered his horse up a trail that led up a wide-open grassy hilltop, and from that vantage point, he could see another horse and rider down below.
Pansy.
He hadn’t taken note, but he also hadn’t seen her horse in the stables, which meant that she was taking advantage of the nice weather the same as he was.
He urged his horse into a trot. “Behind,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder, jumping slightly. “Oh,” she said.
“We both have the same idea.”
“Apparently.”
He couldn’t help but notice the delicate indent of her waist, the flare of her hip and her heart shaped ass. She was a damned gorgeous woman.
An inconveniently gorgeous woman.
“I haven’t been out in too long,” she said, clearly begrudging his presence.
“Me either.”
“I’ve always liked to ride.” She seemed to surrender to the fact that he was there, and decided to go ahead and make conversation.
“I learned at my first job. I got work mucking stalls at a ranch when I was thirteen. I got paid a little bit of money, and they let me ride the horses. Couldn’t ask for better.”
“I grew up on a ranch,” she said.
“So you mentioned. A cattle ranch?”
“Yeah.”
“But you never wanted to run the ranch?”
“Well, my uncle ran it mostly,” she said. “He and my dad owned the ranch. The property. Together. And my dad went into law enforcement, helped support my uncle if he needed backup during busy times and contributed financially.”
“Makes sense.”
“Since he’s the oldest, Ryder was the one who ended up taking over everything when they died.”
“I always wanted a ranch,” he said. “But by the time I had money, I was managing a big financial office. So, it didn’t make a lot of sense. We had some horses, some land. Kind of a dream, I guess.”
“What happened?”
“I guess that depends on who you ask.”
“Like?”
“If you ask my wife’s lawyer, then she would tell you that my wife is the real victim. That she tried to make a life with a man who didn’t love her. That she felt trapped. Utterly and completely. That because of my relationship with her father she felt like there was nothing she could do and no one she could go to. And if you ask her directly... Well, she’d say that I didn’t leave her any choice. I wasn’t the man that she thought she married. I didn’t do things the way she wanted, and I didn’t care about giving her the life that she expected. So while I was still thinking we were happy, she was plotting to frame me for fraud. And succeeded.” He took a breath. “You know, you come to a certain acceptance of the fact that life isn’t fair. I mean, when you have a beginning like I did, you don’t have a choice. But there’s also an idea in the back of your mind that the American dream is available to you. If you work hard and stay the course, you can become whatever you want. We see it in movies all the time. Rags to riches. And I did that. So at some point I figured maybe I was safe. But I was wrong. Life is always there waiting to punch you in the teeth.”
Pansy made a musing sound. “As a kid who lost her parents I get that. I knew life wasn’t fair in the beginning. A deep dark fear I didn’t even know I should have was realized when I was ten years old. I became an orphan. But you’re right, even with being an orphan you’re trained to think it’ll all be okay. You watch enough movies... Scrappy orphans can overcome anything, right?”
A sad smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “I had read a series of books about brothers and sisters who lived in a boxcar after their parents died. They lived by themselves, and they survived that way. It seemed like an adventure. But when it really happened to us... It didn’t seem like much of an adventure. It was just sad. And we didn’t have a rich grandfather who came to rescue us. We had a ranch instead of a boxcar. But... I guess to an extent sometimes I think everything is supposed to be all right now because I already paid into all that. My... Good Luck Bank or whatever.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. I figured I had spent all the bad luck I could possibly have in a lifetime. But no. I ended up in jail for something I didn’t do. And honestly, as bad as that is it was worse that it was because of my wife.”
“You must’ve loved her a lot,” Pansy said, sounding much sadder for him than she should.
He shook his head, looking out over the rolling hills that led to the base of a tall, craggy mountain blanketed by jagged pines.
“No,” he said. “I loved the idea of making a life that looked a certain way. I loved the idea of being the kind of man who had a wife like her. A house like mine. A job like I had. With a desk and an office. A view. I felt like I beat the system somehow with it. But you don’t. I guess that’s the lesson there. You don’t really beat the system.” He regarded her closely. “I suppose you became the system.”
“I know that doesn’t protect you,” she said. “I mean it didn’t protect my dad.”
“I don’t suppose.”
They rode on in silence for a while, neither of them saying anything as they continued on down the grass covered hills. Purple flowers bloomed all around them, with sprays of pink and yellow interspersed throughout. The mountains looked like pieces of green velvet layered over each other. A natural collage, the pines all torn edges.
It was the kind of beautiful that made a man’s soul ache.
Gold Valley might be getting in his bones now.
He had let himself forget how beautiful it was in Oregon. Let himself forget who he was for a while because it had been better to think that maybe he had started in Texas. That he was somewhere else and someone else, and all the things that had come before didn’t matter.
Coming back to Oregon, coming to find the Dalton family, had been the opposite of that.
Leaning into finding out wher
e he came from and what he was built from.
If he was stitched together with rodeo glory, the scent of the forest and personal failure.
Because he had a sense that he might be.
Just like Hank Dalton.
He’d tried to be something else, after all, and that hadn’t worked out at all. No. Not at all.
“I haven’t ridden this far before,” she said, when they came to the edge of the trees. There was a trail that blazed on through.
“It continues along the base of the mountain,” he said. “Goes to a small pond.”
“Should we go?”
“Sure,” he said.
He wasn’t quite sure when it had transitioned to the two of them intentionally riding together, but it had. And he didn’t mind.
She was a funny thing, this woman.
This woman who represented so many things he didn’t like. An adversary in many ways who had been gouged by life. Who’d had things stolen from her the same as he had.
He’d lost four years of his life. Had never had parents who’d cared about him. She had lost the sense that life was safe and certain when she was just a girl.
They were completely different people. At cross-purposes half the time. But they both knew what life could take from you.
They were both there, living proof that no matter where you started, you weren’t necessarily safe.
Not the most comforting of realizations, at least not for some people.
West found it oddly comforting. Life was going to do what it did. His response was to just keep saddling up.
As they wound their way up the trail, he saw a tree that had been scratched bald. He stopped and stared at it for a moment. “Is that just a rub?” he asked, meaning a spot where male deer went to scrape the velvet off their antlers during a particular time of year.
“It doesn’t look like one,” she said.
“Weird,” he commented. His eyes went past the tree, to a space just off the trail. There, he saw a bag full of trash, and what looked like a fire ring. “Looks like I’ve had a camper.”
“Looks like,” she said. Her horse pranced in place, and Pansy tugged on the reins, keeping her locked in place. “My sister was telling me that my brother thought someone was in our barn the other night. Considering all the things that have been going on lately, this is a little bit strange.”
“Guess so,” he commented.
“There was a break-in at Buttercloud.”
“Buttercloud?”
“It’s a bakery.”
“Okay,” he said.
She got off her horse and went toward the fire ring. It was the bag of trash she took hold of, opening the top of it and looking inside. “There is in fact a bread bag from Buttercloud here.”
“So your bread thief has been here.”
“It would seem so.” She sighed heavily. “Probably a drifter. And with any luck, he’ll move on soon.”
“You think so?”
“I mean, if I were not tied to any one place, and I was in the position where I had to steal to get food, yes, I would move quickly. I wouldn’t want to linger and keep stealing from the same place, because then you’re at risk of the police actually finding out who you are.
“I’m going to take this,” she said.
“The bag of trash?”
“It’s evidence.”
“I guess it is.”
“Just more of me trying to do the right thing,” she said dryly. “Building up my defenses against life.”
“Life doesn’t care,” he said, flashing her a grin. “I keep hoping it might start to.”
She got back on her horse, and they turned around, heading back toward their houses.
He looked at the stubborn line of her jaw, the straight set of her shoulders. She was tough, this woman. Even out on a trail ride, she had stumbled on something she had to inventory.
“What’s it like to be a police officer where you grew up?”
He didn’t even like to go back to Sweet Home as a regular citizen. Too many people knew him, remembered him being a troubled kid. There was too much baggage for his liking.
And then, when Dallas had gotten to be the same he had left there too.
She had been here all of her life, as far as he could tell.
“Complicated,” she said.
“But you do it anyway.”
“I want to be police chief,” she said. “I want to... I owe it to my dad’s memory.”
He wasn’t going to argue with her. Both of his parents were alive, but when they weren’t he didn’t think he would feel inclined to do anything in their memory. Since they hadn’t done much for him in his life. He couldn’t argue with that kind of loyalty. If anything, he envied it.
“Do you think you would have wanted to do anything else?”
“No,” she said, in that same stubborn tone. “I think this is who I was meant to be. You can’t ask what-if about things like this. You’ll go crazy. Because then you start asking questions like what if the plane had left five minutes later? Or the day before? Or not at all? You start... You start seeing everything as a little bit too much of a coin toss. And it makes you too scared to do anything. To decide anything. I can’t live like that, not in my line of work. I have to make choices. I have to do things. So... I just figure, this is who I am. Fate or destiny, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Probably a good way to look at it.”
“Do you believe in fate?”
He shook his head. “No. I chose to make a different life for myself. Monica chose to blow that life up. Because I had money I was able to fight it, and keep on fighting it. Make sure I had good legal counsel. Make sure that we were able to continue questioning evidence and examining everything, making sure that my lawyer got into things that the police missed. But all that was because of choices. No hand of fate or anything like it. Nobody made Hank Dalton cheat on his wife. Nobody made my mom raise me the way she did. Life moves around you. And it’ll do good and bad with you, that I believe. But where I’m standing is because of me.”
She nodded slowly. “I guess it’s all whatever helps you sleep at night.”
“Sex and alcohol mostly,” he said, his tone dry.
Her cheeks went pink. It surprised him that she was blushing over something that basic. But then, with the way she had been looking at his mouth the other day maybe she couldn’t hear the word sex without thinking about it with him.
Truth be told... He wasn’t neutral on the subject when it came to her.
But he didn’t believe in fate. There was no greater power that had tossed the two of them together. It just was. And what he did or didn’t do about it was up to him.
She was an impractical distraction, and not worth the hassle. And that was the beginning and end of it.
“I have to go,” she said when she dismounted the horse.
“I can put her away for you if you want.”
“Oh, that would be...helpful. I need to go down to the station. I want to handle all this myself.”
“Works for me.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking somewhat surprised that he was being a decent human being.
“Not a problem.”
She paused.
“Officer,” he said. “What helps you sleep at night?”
He shouldn’t have stopped her. Shouldn’t have poked at her.
She gave him her sternest expression. “Knowing that I had another successful day following all the rules.”
“Sometimes it’s fun to break the rules,” he said, those words bending themselves around and turning on him. Because hadn’t he just been thinking that he was in command of himself? And wasn’t she a new rule that he had just put out there?
Like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
“I’m no
t a rule breaker,” she said.
And then she turned and left him standing there, holding two horses, and feeling like everything he knew about the world had just been twisted and turned around by a giant hand he didn’t even believe in.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PANSY WAS NOT big on going out and drinking after work, in fact she never did it. But, she had spent the day going over plastic bread bags, of all things, making a return visit to the campsite and feeling fairly certain there was a connection between the occupant of the barn, the person staying on West’s property and the break-ins that had occurred.
So consequently she found herself doing the very uncharacteristic thing of walking into the Gold Valley Saloon in her plain clothes that afternoon.
It was already packed full of people, most of the tables full, and the barstools too. There was a collection of women around the jukebox giggling and talking to a tall, broad man with a cowboy hat. When he lifted his head, Pansy saw that it was Logan. She felt instantly irritated. Because it was almost the same as coming to the bar and running into her brother.
Really, she couldn’t escape.
She took a step into the room, and heard someone from the bar call out, “The cops are here, everyone behave!”
She turned her head sharply and couldn’t see who had actually said it. This was why she didn’t go out. It just wasn’t worth it. She thought about turning around and leaving when the door opened again, and in walked West.
Now she was officially beset.
“How did your investigation go?”
She was so taken off guard by the sincere question that she froze.
“That good, huh?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she returned.
“Hey,” he said. “There’s somebody parked in the loading zone outside.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Is it you?”
“No. I wouldn’t be that careless.”
“I’m off duty,” she said.
“Somehow, I don’t think that would preclude you from giving me a ticket.”
“It wouldn’t,” she said.
“Can I buy you a beer?”
