by Maisey Yates
He had a feeling she was sure and certain she could protect herself and didn’t need any interference from him. And fair enough. She was a tough woman. And she had gone up like flames in his hands.
But she had also been a virgin. And he was under the impression that was a big deal.
He’d felt a little bit raw and confused after his first time, granted he’d been younger. A lot younger. But he imagined that it was the same no matter what age you were.
Hell.
He felt a little bit raw right now. It was the first time in a long time for him, and the first time with a new lover in longer. And as much as he wanted to pretend that nothing affected him, this did.
She did.
He was no kind of hero. Never had been. He needed to figure out how to be a little bit more of one. He had Emmett living under his roof, and he had stripped Pansy naked and been the first man to be inside of her.
They might need different things from him, but they both needed something.
And he couldn’t recall ever having been needed by anyone before.
His wife had liked his lifestyle and his money, but she had come from that. Took it as her due. And he hadn’t taken care of her in an emotional sense. Not at all.
He’d been the kind of husband a woman like her wanted to have. Tall and good-looking, with the means to keep her in the lifestyle she was accustomed to.
Likewise, she’d been just what he’d wanted. Pretty, polished, a gateway to a certain part of society.
They’d had a decent sex life, and he’d imagined that had meant something to her.
Except it hadn’t been enough.
Whatever he’d been, it had never been enough.
His mother didn’t particularly want to take care of him, his wife had seen him as an easy scapegoat.
Yeah. He was going to have to figure out how to be a hell of a lot more to get through all of this.
When they got to the edge of the drive that led up to her house she stopped. “Okay,” she said. “We’re here.”
He turned to face her, and wanted to find something to say. He failed at it.
“What?” she asked.
“Did anybody ever tuck you in at night?”
He didn’t know why the hell he’d asked that question.
“Is that a... Are you...you hitting on me?”
“No,” he said. Though, now that she mentioned it he wouldn’t mind tucking her in. “It was a question.”
“No,” she said. “Not after...not after they died.”
He nodded slowly. “Me neither. Sleep well.”
And then he turned and walked away, not sure what he should have done differently, but sure it should have been something.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PANSY WENT INTO her house slowly, and stripped off her clothes as quickly as she had put them back on at the barn.
A little bit faster than she had stripped them off the first time with West.
She felt numb. Numb and buzzing all at the same time.
She stumbled toward her bathroom on feet that felt like they weren’t quite connecting with the ground and turned on the hot water in the shower. She stood in front of the mirror and stared at herself.
Her ponytail was wrecked. Her eyes were red, but she hadn’t cried. Her lips were swollen. It made her mouth look funny. Like not hers.
She touched it, pressing her index finger down on her lower lip.
She wanted to hide. And she wanted to talk to someone.
But she couldn’t talk to West because they didn’t have an actual relationship.
They’d just had sex.
That made her eyes feel scratchy.
She got into the shower and let the water slide over her skin.
She wasn’t washing him off. It wasn’t like that. It was just that her body felt sore and strange, and she thought if she could be somewhere familiar it might make her feel grounded.
It didn’t.
She wondered if she would have talked to her mother about this.
Something turned over inside of her and she had the sudden realization that it was possible she had put it off for so long because she knew she would have wanted to talk to her mother about this.
Her mom had been free and easy. A contrast to her father and his uptight, brusque demeanor.
He had been constant certainty. Her mother had been the laughter.
How would having her for longer have made Pansy different? Would she have made all this seem easier?
Would Pansy have lost her virginity at seventeen instead of twenty-seven? And would her mom have held her and told her it was going to be okay? That it was part of life and she was a woman now, or something like that?
Maybe that would have happened after she got her period for the first time. Her sister had tried, but she’d been awkward and embarrassed because she was barely used to the whole thing herself.
There was a sudden rush of milestones going through her head. All the things that she’d missed. She didn’t think about her mom as often as she thought about her dad. It was a side effect of following in his footsteps.
When she put on those standard-issue shoes every day, she was quite literally walking in those footsteps. She thought about making him proud a lot, and it hit her then she had never thought about making her mother proud.
Because she already had.
Her mom had been proud of her from the beginning and she had always known it, a constant, easy love that she had taken for granted until this moment.
Even when she’d misbehaved, even when she’d had to scold her, her mom had picked her up after and held her.
And told her she loved her.
Tears filled her eyes, and one rolled down her cheek, joining with the shower water.
It was an easy place to cry.
Because she could hardly tell. Except that her chest felt like it was splitting apart.
She had just tried so hard, so very hard not to do this. Not to show weakness. Because each and every one of them had been going through insurmountable pain when their parents had died. Because Iris and Rose were in their own kind of pain, and Ryder had done his best to take care of them, while being in the exact same position of grief they all were.
So no.
She had never asked anyone to tuck her in. They had all been missing those people from their lives.
They’d had each other, but it had been different.
It had to be.
But all she wanted right now was her mom.
And to be tucked in.
She got out of the shower and wrapped up in a giant towel, then fell down on her bed. She lay there for a moment, swathed in terry cloth and still damp with tears, before she grabbed her phone. She looked at it for a long moment.
She could call Sammy. Sammy would tell her it was okay. Sammy would tell her it wasn’t a big deal.
In some ways, Sammy was a lot like her mother. Though, her mother would never have used the kind of language that Sammy did.
But Sammy wasn’t judgmental. She was relaxed and happy and smiling and she would be the one to make any feeling Pansy had feel normal.
She had a feeling Sammy would suggest they dance out under the moon or something to commemorate the experience.
She decided against calling Sammy. She could call Rose. And Rose would crack a dirty joke and ask for details, and then start scheming ways for Pansy to end up married to him or something.
The thought made Pansy cringe. She didn’t want to share details.
She wasn’t even ready to go back over details in her head.
Iris would let her talk. But Iris might judge her little bit.
She decided against calling anyone.
She crawled underneath the covers and West’s question echoed in her mind.
&n
bsp; Did anyone ever tuck you in?
She had just done the most intimate thing she’d ever done with another human being.
He’d been inside of her.
And somehow, it had left her feeling impossibly lonely.
More lonely than she’d ever been.
Or maybe she was just crushingly aware of it.
Of what she’d lost. Of what she wished she had.
She wondered what it would be like if West had come home with her.
If he’d gotten into bed with her.
What then? What would it be like to fall asleep in those strong arms?
That was the last thought she let herself have before she went to sleep.
But in her dreams, she was alone.
* * *
WEST WAS UP with the sun the next morning, and he made sure that Emmett was up with him. It was his first day at the school on the Dalton property. And West figured it was as good a time as any for him to go and spend some quality time with his brothers.
The ass crack of dawn, after a night spent not sleeping, which as far as he was concerned was pretty damned unfair considering the strength of the orgasm he had.
He was a man who’d been dead below the waist, for all intents and purposes, for the last few years. You’d think that he would’ve been able to hijack the benefits of his climax. But no.
He’d been worried about her. All damned night.
He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been worried about another person other than Emmett.
But hell, he was worried about her.
He had a feeling, though, that him showing up at her house unannounced in the middle of the night wouldn’t have been taken too kindly.
So, he left her alone.
He’d tossed and turned for a while, then gone downstairs and got a beer and sat up, watching TV till he fell into a half sleep on the couch that had lasted until about 5 a.m. And now, he and Emmett were just pulling into the ranch property.
“Are we early?” Emmett grumbled.
“Yep,” he said. “You sure are. But, it’s good to be early on your first day.”
“Is it?”
“When I was a kid I used to stay up late and watch these old reruns on the Disney Channel. There was stuff from... I don’t know, the nineteen fifties, probably. They used to talk a lot about work ethic. Show up fifteen minutes early at least,” West said. “I took that to heart.”
“We are more than fifteen minutes early.”
“Maybe,” West said. “But I don’t think the literal time is as important as the concept. You want to set yourself apart. You want to make sure that you work harder.”
“Why would I want to work harder?”
“Because nothing in life gets handed to you, Emmett. No one is standing around waiting to give kids like us a handout. So we can either stay in the exact same place our parents put us, or we can figure out how to do something different.”
“I’m not better than where I came from,” Emmett said. “I expect you think you are.”
“I don’t know that I’m better, but I want better. What kind of life do you see having?”
“I don’t know,” Emmett said.
He knew what that was like. To be afraid to think too far ahead. When you were a kid whose life was governed by the adults that were supposed to take care of you, you didn’t the hell know what might come next.
But until you got past that, until you could get to a place where you could dream... You were stuck.
“You’re being given an opportunity here,” West said. “Make something of it.”
“Why do you care?”
He didn’t know. He really couldn’t answer that, because in the grand scheme of things he didn’t care about much that wasn’t him.
Except...
“Because nobody was there to help me. And if I can make things easier for you I damn well will, kid. You should recognize that as a gift.”
“Thank you for the gift of yourself, West. Where would I be without my big brother that I barely saw until recently?”
“That’s not what I mean. It’s a gift of resources, dumbass. Grab hold of it. Learn something while you’re here. Figure out what you want to do with your life and then do it.”
“That simple?”
“What do you think Mom wants?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. As far as I can tell a man to share her bed and give her life a little bit of drama, a couple of packs of cigarettes a day and what else? She just wants to survive. I don’t want to be her. Do you?”
“No,” Emmett said. “Mostly because I don’t want a man to share my bed.”
West shot the kid a look. “You know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” Emmett said reluctantly. “She said if she could have married your dad she would’ve been rich.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Sadly for her my dad was already married.”
“She’s hoping someone else will save her,” Emmett said.
West was surprised by his younger brother’s insight. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess she is.”
“I never figured anyone would save me. Not her, not anyone.”
“So you figured what? You figured you’d just scrape by on your own?” West asked.
“Yeah. I don’t need much.”
“All right. Maybe you don’t need much. But how about letting yourself want more?”
A sly look came over Emmett’s face. “Does that mean getting up this early?”
“I expect that’ll come into it.”
“Shit,” he said.
West chuckled and parked the truck.
Caleb, Gabe and Jacob were all there, standing out in front of the house drinking coffee. Caleb didn’t work on the ranch, so he was surprised to see him there.
“What are you doing here?”
“I dropped Ellie off,” he said. Caleb’s fiancée was one of the teachers at the school. “And Amelia. She’s spending the day with Tammy.”
Amelia was Caleb’s future stepdaughter. Though, she called him dad. Amelia’s own father, who had been Caleb’s best friend, had died before she was born. Caleb had been a constant in Amelia and Ellie’s life, but it had taken some time for Ellie to come to terms with her feelings for Caleb.
West had been part and parcel to fixing that.
And try as he might to deny it, it did make him feel slightly closer to Caleb.
“For those of you who haven’t met him,” he said, clapping his hand on Emmett’s shoulder. “This is my half brother Emmett.”
“Welcome to the half siblings club,” Caleb said.
“I’m not your half brother,” Emmett said.
“Still,” Gabe commented. “This place is pretty lousy with them.”
“That’s what I hear,” Emmett said.
“We practically have a baseball team of half siblings,” Caleb said.
“Not that many,” Gabe said, deadpan. “That we know of.”
“I can help you get started on some chores,” Jacob said. “And we can discuss the art class you’ll be taking today.”
West had a feeling that Jacob was really just going to tell the kid that he better be nice to the art teacher, who was Jacob’s wife, Vanessa.
Emmett looked at West.
“Go,” West said. “Learn stuff. Make the most of opportunities. Seize the day.”
“Fuck you,” Emmett said, but followed Jacob off toward the barn.
“So you acquired another sibling?” Caleb asked.
“I did. I mean, I knew about him. I’ve been looking for him, actually. I wanted him to come live with me here. But then it turned out he was causing some mischief locally. Hanging around. He’s angry at me for some things. Some justified, I guess. Some not. But when you’re his age and the worl
d is full of asshole adults you just pick your targets where you can.”
“Yeah,” Gabe said. “We know a little bit about asshole adults.”
“Sure,” West responded. “But it’s not the same. I mean, I know you had stuff. But Emmett and I had to actually worry about whether or not we were going to get taken care of. We didn’t have a fancy house to cushion the blow.”
He looked at his brothers, standing in front of him, so...so similar to him in looks. It was weird. For a guy who had never put much stock in family, or blood connections, having so many people out there in the world who shared his DNA was a little bit strange.
Especially because that link was what brought him here.
That link that never mattered much to his mother, and sure as hell didn’t change the way she treated him... It was why he was here.
It was why he cared about Emmett. Because otherwise he sure wouldn’t care about some snot nosed fifteen-year-old.
Obligation. Blood.
That’s what it was. These made-up reasons you were supposed to care about each other, when you had come from such different circumstances.
Though it felt like more than made-up stuff now. It felt like...it felt like something deeper.
He and Emmett, for all that they were of different generations, had more in common.
His half brothers here... Yes, their father was a problem. A philanderer. Someone who had sown his seed indiscriminately and left a whole lot of pain behind.
But he also seemed to open his arms and his home easily enough. He had treated them like he cared about them—each and every foundling that had come into the place. He had given them a space in this family.
Emmett and West couldn’t much get the mother who’d raised them to do that.
“I suppose that’s true,” Caleb said slowly. “But you look at our parents now and you see them with things kind of held together. For a while there...it was held together with duct tape. It might’ve been gold duct tape, but duct tape nonetheless. We kind of had to be the adults. Because they couldn’t seem to manage it. They were always fighting and screaming and lighting things on fire.”
“You mean that as a figure of speech, right?” West asked.
“Hell no,” Gabe said. “Tammy Dalton lit her share of things on fire. And she smashed in Hank’s truck with a baseball bat. Pretty sure Carrie Underwood writes her songs about Tammy.”
