by Maisey Yates
“Pansy,” he said. “I think you do.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I’m trying to get a job as the police chief. And I’m not going to mess around with... I’m not going to...”
“But you want to.”
“I want this job.”
But he had seen her. Seen the way that her lips parted softly when she looked at him, the way that she looked at his mouth when he took a drink of beer. He had seen how she looked at him, and he knew the way that it made him feel. It was too damned late for her to pretend that he hadn’t.
He reached out and wrapped his arm around her waist, pulled her up against him. He wrapped his other arm around her back and placed his palm directly at the center of her shoulder blades. He expected her to get stiff. Expected her to pull away. But she didn’t. Instead, she shivered. Her whole body went pliant against his. All his blood rushed south. He wanted...he wanted her.
He wanted this.
And he was going to take his time, because he hadn’t held a woman in his arms since his wife, and every memory of making love to Monica was ruined now. Torn beyond repair.
In the dim light he could just make out her eyes, wide and looking up at his, glittering beneath the moon. He ran his thumb along her lower lip, and found it soft and full.
Inviting.
“Damn you’re pretty,” he said.
His voice was rough and husky, a stranger’s voice. He didn’t know if he could recall a time when the potential for a kiss had made him feel this way. So damn hard he couldn’t see straight. So damn hard it hurt.
And then she did something he hadn’t expected at all. She went up on her toes, bracketing his face with her hands, and kissed him.
Her mouth was so soft.
Damn.
And she tasted like that beer that she just been drinking. And it all went to his head. He tightened his hold on her, angled his head and took the kiss deep, parting her luscious lips with his tongue and tasting her.
It was his turn to shiver.
Desire shot down his spine like a lightning bolt. Need gathered low in his gut as he kissed her and kissed her, luxuriating in the little sounds that she made as he licked into her mouth. Nipped her lower lip.
He felt rooted to something just then. To her. Grounded in ways he hadn’t been in years. Maybe ever. She was so petite it would be easy to pick her up and carry her over to the side of the building where he could put her up against it and grind his desire against hers. Have her quick and hard on a darkened, empty street, with no one any the wiser.
The two of them could burn through the need that was eating them up. Except...
She wouldn’t like that. It would be against several laws, first of all.
And second of all he knew that she didn’t want to be a spectacle. Knew it. Felt it in his bones.
He cared enough that he wouldn’t do that to her.
But hell, they were in the perfect situation for someone who didn’t want rumors to fly about an affair. They both lived on Redemption Ranch. They couldn’t even be faulted for their cars being left anywhere overnight. It was their living arrangement. He moved his mouth away from hers, and her breath fanned against his cheek in intense, ragged puffs. He kissed her jaw. Her neck. She clung to him, making tiny almost injured little sounds that he knew she wouldn’t like remembering having made when she was back in full officer mode.
But she wasn’t a police officer now, any more than he was an ex-convict.
He was a man and she was a woman. And they wanted each other. This was a simple, beautiful thing in the world.
Desire.
It was honest.
Of all the things on an earth littered with deceit and betrayal, desire like this was real.
“Come back to my place,” he said, nuzzling her ear, nipping her earlobe gently.
“I can’t,” she said.
Suddenly, she was pushing against him. And even when he released his hold on her, she was still pushing at him as if she hadn’t realized that he had let go of her immediately.
“Pansy,” he said, his voice measured. “I want you. That’s the real answer to why I bought you a beer, and why I asked you to sit down. To why I followed you out of the bar. I don’t want her. I want you. It’s not about getting lucky, it’s about getting you. And I’m not a man that does relationships or anything like that. My last one soured me a little bit. But there’s no reason the two of us can’t...”
“Yes, there is,” she said. “I’m the reason. I don’t... I can’t... It’s not me, West. I don’t do this. I can’t do this. Not in this town.”
“No one would have to know.”
“They would,” she said. “Somehow they would, and I just can’t. Not right now. You’re...you. You’re new, you’ve been in prison, and I want to be the police chief, and there is no way that I can do that while I’m... I can’t.”
“You left the bar because you didn’t want to see me with her. Because you want me.”
“I want a lot of things,” she said. “I wanted my parents back for a really long time, but nobody dropped them on my doorstep. I wanted to feel normal, and I wanted to have friends, but I felt like an alien swimming outside of my body, and outside of people and society for most of my life. Because nobody but my siblings could ever understand what it was like to be me. I can’t have everything I want. I already know that. So I’m choosing to have this one dream. I can have this job. I can... I can make him proud. I was such a...such a terror when I was a kid and he never got to see how I grew up. And I’m not going to screw this up. Over...over a man. I’m not going to do that.”
She turned and almost ran away from him, headed toward her car. He hadn’t moved. He wasn’t chasing her. And he knew that the real truth was that the woman was running away from herself. Not from him.
Damn it all.
She got in her car and drove away, leaving him standing there with unsatisfied desire that he was just going to leave unsatisfied. He wasn’t even going to try to make it better. Not with the woman inside the bar, and not with his right hand. Because the only thing that would satisfy him was Pansy, and she’d said no.
He would have preferred it if she’d left him with another ticket, rather than this. Because that at least he could have paid.
This...this, he didn’t know what to do about.
And he didn’t like feeling helpless.
He had known that touching her would be a bad idea. He just hadn’t foreseen it ending like this.
CHAPTER EIGHT
PANSY HAD CONSIDERED just not going to the family dinner on Sunday. But she had already skipped last week and it was going to be far more conspicuous than she wanted to be if she skipped again.
So she had managed dinner with everybody, and had even managed to talk about her pursuit of police chief somewhat normally, and all she could do was hope that she didn’t have I got my first kiss and it was with the absolute least suitable man alive written all over her face.
Even more terrifying was that somehow Sammy would find a way to wiggle it out of her without even knowing what she was wiggling.
Sammy was uncomfortably perceptive. She always had been.
When she’d come into their family she’d been a breath of shocking air. They had been so isolated since the deaths of their parents.
And then Sammy had appeared one day, like a fairy from the woods.
She’d been sixteen and all constant chatter. She had brought things like new sheets for the beds, chipped dishes with flowers on them.
It was strange that they’d lived next door to each other for years and never met Sammy. And then she’d pulled her little camper onto the property and taken up residence like she’d always been there.
Whatever her relationship to her parents, Pansy knew it was flawed.
She could sense Sammy had come from some darkness
. There was a reason she was part of them. Part of Hope Springs. A reason she’d used this place for a refuge.
But for all the world to see, she was sunshine and light.
Also, nosy.
“Who was the guy you were with last night?”
Logan.
She’d been so focused on Sammy she hadn’t looked to the obvious problem.
She should have known that he was going to make this difficult. That he wouldn’t be able to let go of the fact that she had been sitting at the table with the man he didn’t know.
“My landlord,” she said, opting for directness, because the shadier she was, the more Sammy would ferret.
“Your landlord?”
“Yes. He just bought Redemption Ranch. He’s been doing some work on my house. We were just talking about that. Sorry to disappoint you.”
“It’s just the way that you warned me off of coming over there I figured you were trying to hook up.”
Ryder looked at Logan and scowled. Logan looked back. “What?”
“Do you need to say things like that?” Ryder asked.
Sammy tapped Ryder on the shoulder. “Calm down. She’s an adult woman.”
“Sure,” Ryder grimaced. “But that doesn’t mean that I need to know about anything.”
“There’s nothing to know about,” Pansy said.
“You had a beer with West Caldwell?” Iris asked. She had half a mind to dive under the table and bite her sister on the leg.
“And his broad shoulders?” Rose asked, an impish smirk on her face.
“Rose...”
“Why are we talking about some guy’s shoulders?” Ryder asked, looking appalled.
“Sorry you don’t have your boys’ club right now,” Sammy said, looking cheerful. “You guys are outnumbered very handily with Colt and Jake being out of town.”
“I don’t like it,” Ryder said.
“You don’t like anything,” Sammy said.
“Not true,” he said. “I like having dinner uninterrupted by conversations about my sister’s dating life.”
“There’s no dating,” Pansy said.
The subject died after that, but once dinner was over and Ryder and Logan had vanished Sammy rounded on her in a flurry of blond hair and flowing skirts. “So what happened with Mr. Broad Shoulders?”
Iris and Rose looked at her keenly. Because they knew as well as Pansy did that if there was anything to say Sammy would be able to badger her into saying it.
She had a decision to make. Whether or not she was going to resist Sammy’s relentlessness or if she was going to accept the inevitable.
“I kissed him,” Pansy said, deciding on surrender.
Iris and Rose made very loud sounds, and Pansy looked worriedly toward the living room. She did not want to draw Logan and Ryder’s attention.
“You made that almost too easy,” Sammy said, looking disappointed.
And the only joy that Pansy could get out of any of this was that she felt she had perhaps mildly defeated Sammy.
“Well, I knew you were going to figure it out,” Pansy said. “I’m a terrible liar and I always have been. And you are absolutely shameless.”
Sammy grinned. “It’s true.”
Sammy was the biggest source of sex ed for Pansy. Sammy was the one who’d given Pansy a vibrator on her eighteenth birthday, which Pansy had immediately hidden in a drawer.
She’d never used it. The thing terrified her.
But that didn’t mean she’d never...that she didn’t know her way around her own body. But unlike Sammy she could never be so open about it. So free and easy.
The emergence of her sexuality had been scary for her. Caught between the desire to follow rules, to pursue her goal, and the very real burgeoning of her hormones, along with the fear of caring for someone outside her family, had kept her pretty paralyzed on that front.
And now West, and whatever West made her feel, seemed to sort of...circumvent a lifetime of caution and...well, keeping sexual feelings to her damn self.
“I knew it,” Rose said. “I knew you liked him.”
“I don’t like him,” she said. “I don’t... I don’t know what I am.”
“Normal?” Sammy asked, lifting his shoulder.
That word diffused it. Made it feel like it must not be that big of a deal. And Pansy wasn’t sure how she felt about that, because it had felt earthmoving and singular, and like a gigantic mistake that she shouldn’t have committed. And Sammy was acting like it wasn’t any of those things.
“Well,” Sammy said. “If the world came to a halt every time I kissed a guy we wouldn’t get anything done.”
She thought back to how she’d felt watching that other woman touch West. How easy it was for her. How casual.
It just wasn’t like that for Pansy. She couldn’t be casual about a touch. Because all of this had been built up to be so big in her mind.
She couldn’t be casual about a kiss.
“Pansy...haven’t you...” Sammy suddenly looked very concerned. “Oh no. You’ve...dated, right?”
She had a feeling this was Sammy trying to be delicate about whether or not Pansy had slept with a man.
“Not really,” Pansy said.
“Oh, Pansy,” Sammy said. “Date him.”
“He doesn’t want a date.”
“I didn’t mean date,” Sammy said. “Bang him.”
“Sammy!” The admonishment came from Iris.
Rose was looking on with deep interest.
Pansy realized that she had covered her mouth like a maiden spinster.
“What?” Sammy asked. “There’s no law that says you have to take every physical thing that happens with a man deadly seriously. If you’re into him you should do something about it.”
“I can’t,” Pansy said. “I need this job, and I need to make sure that I don’t rock the boat until I can have it. It’s a bad time to try anything new.”
“Why would he compromise your job? Maybe a little bit of fun is what you need to be able to focus on getting this job. You work harder at being good than anyone I know, Pansy. Don’t you know it’s not bad to be with someone?”
Pansy looked from Sammy to her sisters. It was clear that the opinion was divided on this particular topic. She could see that to her sisters the suggestion of a casual relationship was shocking.
“I think Ryder might kill you if he knew what you were advocating,” Pansy said.
“Well, he can feel free. I would take him to task for being a judgmental asshole. He...does what he does.” She waved a hand. “It’s not like he’s chaste for all that he wanders around looking grim and forbidding all the time.”
Pansy grimaced. “I don’t really want to know about his love life any more than he wants to know about mine.”
“You have good instincts,” Iris said. “If you don’t think you should be with him, then don’t be.”
Pansy hadn’t meant to turn this into a kiss by committee. But she should have known that there would be no going back home, no seeing her sisters and Sammy without it turning into this.
For the first time she wondered if they didn’t talk about men only because nothing like this had ever happened to any of them.
Sammy excluded.
She did feel like Iris was a bit more secretive, but for all of Rose’s big talk, Pansy was sure that she’d never even kissed a man.
If she had, they all would have known.
Rose didn’t have the capacity to keep secrets.
“He’s out of my league,” Pansy said.
“He kissed you,” Sammy said.
“I kissed him,” Pansy said, belaboring the point. “And I just mean...he’s been married and divorced. And...you know, he’s not exactly the poster child for good behavior.”
“You’re w
orried that he’s more sexually experienced than you?”
“This loaf of bread is more sexually experienced than I am,” Pansy said, picking up a chunk of sourdough from the counter.
Rose hooted out a laugh. Iris and Sammy just exchanged glances.
“I would embarrass myself,” Pansy said.
“So what?” Sammy pressed. “If it’s like you say it is, and for him it’s super casual, and he has lots of experience, then what does it matter? He’s a guy anyway. A bottle of lotion and a lingerie catalog would do it for him. Not much is required of you. And you can benefit from his experience.”
Pansy felt horrified to even be discussing this, let alone considering it. “I’m out,” Pansy said, tapping the table. “Literally tapping out.”
“Why?” Sammy asked. “We’re sharing.”
“I’m done sharing. I can’t do this. I mean... I can’t...have this discussion. I don’t know what I feel about him. Except...he’s good looking. But...”
“But what?”
“But,” Pansy said, resolutely.
That put an end to the conversation, at least for a while. And they spent the next couple of hours in the living room together chatting until Pansy started to yawn.
“I’d better go,” she said, pushing herself up so that she was standing.
“I’ll walk you to your car,” Iris offered.
It was warm out, the night sky clear and sprayed with silver stars, crickets chirping a steady rhythm that ran beneath the music of the wind rustling through the trees. “You kissed him,” Iris said.
Pansy hunched her shoulders up by her years. “Yeah.”
“I think that’s pretty brave of you. Even if Sammy can’t understand why.”
But Iris did. Because she knew what it was like to be a forced member of their fierce, isolated little clan.
Sammy was like a butterfly that flitted through their garden, and had decided to land on a flower. She fluttered off sometimes in her caravan, traveling for a bit selling jewelry before coming back. She came from a different place. From a different background.
It wasn’t the same for her because she’d chosen Hope Springs.
Hope Springs had chosen the rest of them.
