by Maisey Yates
“She means well,” Pansy said. “But she...she’s not the same as we are.”
“No,” Iris said. “She’s not. But I don’t think it’s...quite as easy as she pretends it is.”
“She always seems...like whatever she’s doing is easy.”
Pansy had watched Sammy flirt effortlessly with men in bars over the years. Not that she had a clear idea of who Sammy did or didn’t go home with, but she seemed at ease and able to laugh off just about anything.
“I think it’s just casual for her,” Pansy said.
Iris shook her head, stubborn. “I don’t think so. It’s not...it’s not a handshake or a dance around a bonfire or whatever it is Sammy pretends. But she’s hurt, Pansy. A lot more than she ever lets on. I don’t know what went on in her home before she came to us but I don’t think it was good. I think she likes to get physically close to men without having relationships because for her it’s the emotional closeness that’s scary.”
That idea made Pansy feel hollow. “I don’t understand why she does it if it hurts her.”
Iris shrugged. “Well, the alternative is being alone.”
Pansy had been alone all this time, so she didn’t really see why that was a problem. But then... Sammy hugged all the time. Touched all the time.
Sammy alone would be like putting a butterfly in a jar and cutting off its air supply. Making it so it couldn’t fly. Couldn’t breathe.
And if Sammy was a butterfly then Pansy was a lone polecat.
One who’d kissed her ex-convict landlord...
“I don’t think I can be casual with him,” Pansy said. “I don’t think I even know what that means.”
“You have to do what’s right for you, Pansy. No one can tell you what that is. No one else is you.”
“I know,” she said. “But...” She thought again of the way it had felt to have his mouth pressed to hers. “I never understood what it was like to be tempted.”
But a memory pushed into the front of her mind.
When she’d been young. Before her parents had died. She’d been tempted all the time. To steal the cookies out of the cookie jar that she’d been told were for after dinner.
To run when she was supposed to walk.
To try to ride the big horse even though she was supposed to wait until she was older.
To go out riding by herself even though she was supposed to wait for her father.
And she could remember his quiet disappointment every time she had given in.
“Pansy,” he said, his voice measured. “You can’t just go around doing whatever you want. You can’t just follow your heart. You have to follow what’s right.”
But she’d found it so hard, because her heart burned for things that she wasn’t supposed to want.
Her innate nature was selfish. And yes, she’d been a child when she’d behaved like she had, but her dad had worried she’d stay that way, and she really thought she probably would have.
Been the kind of kid she spent a lot of her job dealing with.
Reckless driving, drunk driving, disorderly conduct. Breaking them up having sex in cars by the river.
There were big and great divides in life. People who cared about right, about rules, and people who didn’t.
She’d been born as one type. She’d worked to become another.
After her dad had died she’d tried to change. She had forgotten temptation. What it was and what it could be, but somewhere in there she’d forgotten passion too.
She had duty, and a sense of purpose, but until her lips had touched West Caldwell’s, she had forgotten what it was to burn.
“I’ll see you around,” Iris said.
“Yeah,” Pansy said, and she wanted to hug her sister.
But then her eye caught a shaft of light coming from across the field, uneven and shaky, before disappearing behind the barn.
“I think your visitor’s back,” Pansy said.
“What?”
“You can go get Ryder. I’m going to get my gun.”
She unlocked her service weapon from her car and holstered it before making her way toward the barn. She had a feeling that everything would be all right, but she needed to be sure before she discounted the need for a weapon.
She moved silently across the grass, and made her way up to the barn, looking through the cracks in the wood as best she could.
She could see a flashlight beam moving around in there.
Movement.
The flashlight was set on the ground, a pool of light stretching across the floor. She could hear two sets of feet moving around, but only one of them sounded heavy. The other sounded animal. A dog, probably.
Then she heard a low whisper.
“Sit boy,” the voice said.
A young man’s voice. Not a man. She went around to the door of the barn and pushed it open.
There was a loud curse, an explosion of movement and the figure tried to run past her. He bumped into her shoulder, and she reached out and grabbed on to him, and they both went down to the ground.
“What the hell?” Ryder appeared, and reached down, his strong arm grabbing the back of the trespasser’s clothes and hauling him to his feet.
“It was an accident,” Pansy said. “He was trying to run away.”
“Get the fuck off me!” the boy said, and she was even more certain now that he was practically a kid. “Don’t touch me.”
“You’re trespassing,” Ryder said.
“I’ll leave,” the kid said.
Iris had gone into the barn, and had just returned with a flashlight, which she shone on the kid.
He was young, but tall. Wiry, with sandy blond hair. He had a dog next to him that looked almost as worse for wear as he did, scruffy and thin, his back end going wild as he wagged his tail.
“Some guard dog,” he said.
“Who are you?” Pansy asked.
“None of your fucking business,” he said, looking at her with defiance, each word used as a weapon. As if an f-bomb was going to scare her off.
“I’m a police officer,” she said, calm and firm. “It is my business.”
“Where’s your badge?”
“I’m off duty,” she said. “We can wait for me to get my badge and you can tell me who you are then, if you like. I can haul you down to the police station. I suspect that you’ve been involved in some of the theft we’ve had around here. Am I right?”
“I don’t have to tell you anything.”
“We can do this the hard way if we have to. But if you’ve got parents that I can call...”
“I don’t have parents.” He spat out that last word like it was dirty.
“I don’t have parents either,” Pansy said.
The kid struggled, but Ryder was still holding on to him.
“I would rather we have a conversation,” she continued. “I don’t really want to chase you and tackle you. And I don’t want to have to take you down to the station tonight. So if you could just tell me who you are so I can figure out who I’m supposed to get in touch with...”
“There’s nobody that cares about me,” he said. “You’d be wasting your time.”
“Your name,” she said.
“Emmett,” the kid said, finally. “Emmett Caldwell.”
CHAPTER NINE
WEST WAS SETTLED in for the night with takeout he’d gotten earlier from Mustard Seed and a beer on his TV tray, when there was a knock at his front door.
Pansy.
He hoped it was Pansy. Come to finish what they’d started outside the saloon the other night. He’d done nothing but think about her ever since then. His body had been persistently hard, which was irritating because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so het up over a woman. The one woman who didn’t seem to be all that into him.
He went over to the door and jerked it open. The first person he saw was Pansy. And the second...
“Emmett?”
“Yes,” Pansy confirmed.
Emmett didn’t say anything. Pansy all but marched the kid into the house.
“Go sit down on the couch,” she ordered.
And in spite of the surly expression on his face, his half brother complied.
“What the hell are you doing here?” West asked.
“What are you doing here?” Emmett asked. “Came here to live with your fancy rich family?”
“I came to get to know them,” West said, his voice measured. At least, as measured as he could manage.
“Well, you might have remembered about your other family,” he said. “Instead of just...coming straight to them after you got out of jail.”
“I asked your mother where you were,” West said. “Over and over.”
“Our mother? You abandoned her too. You don’t give a shit about us.”
“I give several shits about you, you little asshole,” West said, knowing that was probably not the way you were supposed to talk to kids. But he wasn’t a damned kindergarten teacher. “I was looking for you. And you’ve been here the whole time?”
“And responsible for a few break-ins,” Pansy said.
West stared hard at his kid brother. “You stole that woman’s wallet. And you broke into the bakery.” Pansy slipped something out of her pocket, and it took a moment for him to realize it was the missing wallet. She opened it, and he saw a license inside that said Barbara Niedermayer. He shook his head. “Kid, I thought you knew better than this.”
“You’re going to lecture me?” Emmett scoffed. “You’re the one that spent four years in jail.”
“For something I didn’t do,” West said.
“Maybe I didn’t do it either,” Emmett said, lifting his chin. “Same as you.”
“I really didn’t do it,” West said.
“I have to... He’s under eighteen,” Pansy said. “I don’t know if Carl Jacobson from the bakery or Barbara are going to want to press charges. I’m going to recommend that they don’t, and that he engage in community service instead.”
“He’s young,” West said. “He shouldn’t be...he shouldn’t be punished for the crappy life we’ve had.”
“But he did those things,” Pansy said, her voice shot through with steel. “And I feel bad about it, but...”
“Pansy,” West said. “Please. Work with me.”
“I will. The question is if Carl and Barbara will. I have to uphold the law, West.”
“Oh, because of your fucking police chief position?”
“Yes,” Pansy shot back. “Because of that, and because of what’s right. I don’t get to just choose when to care about what’s legal and what isn’t. It’s my job to care about it all the time. It just is.”
Throughout their argument, Emmett was quiet.
“I’m not going to be able to make this go away, kid,” West said. “It’s not up to me.”
Emmett looked at him. “Am I going to go to jail?”
“For this?” Pansy asked. “Probably not. If so, not for long. But there will be some consequences.”
“Are you going to send me back home?” Emmett asked, this question directed straight at West.
West sighed, and looked around the place. His other half brothers happened to run a school for troubled kids. An alternative school. And, on the one hand, the idea of his half brother being around kids who were no less trouble than he was, was a little bit concerning. But then... Emmett was trouble, so it was fair enough.
“I’m not going to send you home,” West said. “Unless you want to go home.”
Emmett looked skeptical. “Really?”
“Emmett,” West said. “I was looking for you to find out if you wanted to live with me. From the minute I got out of jail. But Mom didn’t know where you were.”
“She didn’t care where I was,” Emmett said. “She never called me or anything.”
“You have your phone?”
“Yeah, but it’s not hooked up to anything anymore. I was on her plan. She quit paying for it a couple of months ago.”
So she could have let the police track her son’s phone, and she hadn’t done it. Probably even could have done it through the cell phone company, and hadn’t done it.
She had just cut him off. Quit paying for his phone, because it was convenient for her.
West knew that it shouldn’t be a surprise to him since he had been raised by the same woman. Since he knew what kind of parent she was.
Still. It damn well shocked him. Because when he looked at Emmett he saw a kid. He might be fifteen, but in West’s eyes he was a child.
And the thing that crashed in against him, crushed down on him like a ton of rocks rolling off the side of a mountain, was the fact that his mom didn’t seem to look at him and think the same.
That she hadn’t looked at West and seen the same.
Or if she had, that she hadn’t cared.
She had been young when she’d had West. A kid herself, at eighteen, and he’d always cut her a certain amount of slack because of that. But she wasn’t young anymore. There was no excuse. He’d been a kid left behind. One that had fallen between the cracks. He couldn’t go back and fix that. Couldn’t make their mom a better mother. But...he remembered what Pansy had said.
That he was trying to be the family for Emmett that no one else had stepped up to be for either of them.
He had to be that.
“You can stay here,” West said.
“I can?” The question sounded cautious, and not exactly optimistic.
West nodded. “Yes. There’s plenty of room here.”
“Well,” Pansy said. “Then I suppose there’s the small matter of...”
She turned and walked out of the room, and left him standing there with Emmett.
“Was there more to that sentence?” West asked.
Emmett shrugged. The two of them just looked at each other until Pansy returned, with a dog following behind her. “He was waiting in the car,” she said. “He’s a good boy.”
“You have a dog?” West asked.
Emmett lifted a shoulder. “I found him. He was a stray. And I guess...” Emmett squared his shoulders. “Well, so am I, I guess.”
“Not anymore,” West said. “You can stay here. So can he.”
His brother blinked twice. Hard.
And if West were a different man, he might have attributed the shifting sensation in his chest to emotion.
“Do you have any clothes or anything?”
Emmett shrugged. “Some. I took a few things with me. Not a lot.”
“Have you been camping this whole time?”
“No. When the weather was really crappy I stayed with some friends. But when I came to Gold Valley...yeah.”
“So you’ve been in the barn at Hope Springs, and you’ve been out here.”
“Yeah,” Emmett said. “I camped a few other places too. It was nice if I could find a barn, because I felt a little less worried that I was going to get eaten by a cougar. But the dog helped with that too.”
West regarded the dog. It was looking at Emmett, like Emmett was his master. His expression didn’t hold any concern or worry at all. Just a kind of steady watchfulness. It reminded West of the dog he’d fed all those years ago.
And West had the oddest feeling that he should thank the dog.
For keeping an eye on his kid brother. For being there for Emmett so he wasn’t so lonely and scared.
But that was ridiculous.
“Do you have any of the money from the wallet?”
“Some,” the kid said. “I used it to buy food, but I was saving the rest.”
“Well, hopefully if we
return everything we’ll get Barbara on our side.” Pansy sighed. “I assume your brother will pitch in what’s not there. You chose an incredibly unsympathetic target, kid. Not the best choice.”
“I’m not exactly out here making historically awesome choices,” Emmett said. “I mean. I would have thought that much was obvious.”
Pansy shook her head.
“Are you hungry?” West asked.
“Starving,” Emmett said.
West looked down at his reheated burger. “I haven’t started that yet.”
“Can I have a beer too?” he asked, far too hopefully.
“No,” West said, emphatically, even though he was sure his younger brother’d had multiple beers in his lifetime. That wasn’t the point. He wasn’t going to allow it. “Eat,” West said, picking the beer up. “Can I talk to you?” He directed the last part at Pansy.
Pansy nodded and the two of them walked out of the room, then out the front door onto the porch.
It was strange, because even though they were outside, they were alone again, and the night air seemed to wrap itself around the two of them like a blanket. Suddenly, it all felt a lot more intimate than it had a few moments before.
Your street urchin of a half brother is in the house eating your soggy french fries. And you’re thinking about getting Pansy naked?
Yeah, he was.
“I don’t want him in any trouble,” West said.
“I don’t want him in any trouble either,” Pansy returned. “But I’m going to have to handle this like I would handle this for anyone. Whether I’m sympathetic or not.”
“Right. Just like you had to write me a ticket for being in a loading zone.”
“I’m under scrutiny,” she said.
“Yeah,” West said. “For a job. This is his life.”
“My job is where I spend forty hours a week. It’s what I poured my whole life into. Why do you think it’s a separate thing? I learned before I was his age that I had to behave myself. That I was going to have to behave differently than the people around me if I was going to have the life I wanted someday. The one I needed. He’s going to have to do the same. And if he has to learn the hard way that’s nobody’s fault but his. He broke into that store. He got into Barbara’s car and took her wallet. I don’t have control over what they decide to do with that.”
