by Maisey Yates
That man who had left rodeo dirt and arenas behind and had gone into an office five days a week, worked on a computer at home more days than that.
For a long time he’d thought that prison was a weird time-out in his life. A moment when he had stopped being him.
But, truth was, he’d stopped being him a long time before that.
“I made money that way,” he said. “I thought that’s what I had to do to be happy.”
“And did it make you happy?”
He chuckled and stabbed the end of the shovel into the dirt. “You know how it ends, so...no.”
“What if it hadn’t ended that way? Would you have kept on doing it?”
He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I would have. I had pretty much made the choice to make that my life. I mean, I married a woman who would have... She never would have accepted anything else. Still, on the weekends I was a cowboy. Not really the life I dreamed of in every way. But I had a big house. I fit in.”
“What’s that like?” she asked. And he saw that she was looking at him with no small amount of sincerity in her eyes.
“Terrible,” he said. “If it’s not the space you were meant to fit in to.”
She nodded slowly. She pushed the head of her shovel down into the dirt and lifted out a weed, the roots all splayed out and crooked. Detached. Another damned metaphor.
“I’ve never fit,” she said. “I’ve never fit here in my hometown. I didn’t have a ton of friends in school after my parents died because I was too serious. Because no one wanted their kids to come to our house—who wants their kid going to a place where kids are raising kids? Even now, I’m trying to fill a uniform that came before me. I’m not him.”
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe you don’t have to be?”
She said nothing, the two of them just kept on digging.
They worked until the sun was high in the sky and they were all sweating, and to West’s surprise, Barbara bought Emmett lunch.
“If you want to we can be finished. Or, you can go on to Carl’s place and work a shift.”
Emmett squared his shoulders. “I’m not tired.”
West wasn’t quite sure where the bakery was, so Pansy walked with him and Emmett down the street toward the place.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
She flashed him a suspicious look. “I don’t know.”
“You’re off duty,” he said.
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“Have a drink,” he said.
They walked back toward Main Street, and he could feel the tension radiating off of her in waves. He wasn’t sure what the deciding factor had been that made her stay with him, since she was clearly uncomfortable.
He wondered if it had more to do with the challenge of the whole thing than anything else.
That she couldn’t show him she was nervous to be around him. Because that would violate her down to her core.
When they arrived at the Gold Valley Saloon, it was fairly empty, given that it was pretty early on a Saturday. There were a few people in there having lunch, but it was not the best food place in town. People generally congregated there at night to get drunk.
Laz was there behind the counter, and he grinned when West walked in. “How’s that Texas whiskey cabinet working out for you?”
“Good. Does your whiskey taste like pine yet?”
Laz laughed. “Of course not. It tastes like kale.”
“A Pacific Northwest influence I could live without. I’ll have a beer. And whatever the lady wants.”
Pansy gave him a look that was comically prissy, considering he’d seen the woman come apart, naked and sweaty in a barn. “It’s the middle of the day, so the lady will have a Coke.”
“Suit yourself,” West said.
“So you two are speaking to each other now,” Laz said when he brought their drinks back.
“Sometimes,” West said, looking at Pansy’s defiant profile. “When the good officer is in the mood.”
Color mounted in her cheeks, and West was just childish enough to take joy in that.
“Don’t push your luck,” she said, popping the top of her Coke can and taking a drink.
“Hey,” Laz said. “I have another piece of furniture you might want. Down in the storage area of the museum.”
The old museum. It was West’s understanding that nothing had been in there for a few years.
He set a key on the counter. “If you want to go down and check it out, it’s an old bed frame that’s up against the wall in the back, behind a couple barstools, I think.”
West actually needed the bed frame. Considering Emmett was sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and he hadn’t fixed that yet.
“Thanks,” West said. “I’ll check it out.”
Laz left the counter, heading to the back of the saloon.
“You’re just in a furniture exchange program with him?” Pansy asked.
“He’s my friend,” West said.
As soon as he said it he realized that it was a little weird.
All those years in Texas, and he had never made a real friend. All of that had become evident when his life had fallen apart and people had taken a kind of ghoulish interest in the proceedings, while very few people had rallied around him. And then when he was convicted, no one had rallied anywhere.
But here... He had his family. His family. Weird as hell.
And there was Laz, who he’d gotten really friendly with. A few other people he saw at the bar frequently enough. Jackson and Calder Reid, who he’d had drinks with a couple of times. Though they were family men, so they didn’t come out that often.
He thought back to what Pansy had asked him earlier. If he never fit in.
He wondered if this was fitting in.
Except it had required very few acrobatics, so it didn’t seem right to him.
In his experience finding a place had always required that.
“Want to come with me and check out the furniture?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know.”
“I might get in trouble if you don’t. I’m an ex-con,” he said. “God knows what I’ll get up to in the basement of an old building.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine. I just need to go to the bathroom first.”
“Hey, do you know the deal with the names on the bathroom wall?”
She frowned. “No.”
“People who have hooked up in there carve their names on it.”
She blinked. “No.”
She was scandalized, and he’d be damned if he wasn’t charmed.
“Yes,” he responded.
“Olivia Hollister’s name is in that bathroom.”
“Yeah. But look who she’s married to.”
He hadn’t had a whole lot of interaction with Luke Hollister, but enough to know exactly what manner of man he was.
Pansy beat a hasty retreat to the bathroom but when she returned, she didn’t look flustered at all.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go get your furniture. If you end up getting it you can even park in a loading zone.”
“Officer,” he said. “There’s nothing more I’d like to do than park in a loading zone with you.”
* * *
WHY WAS SHE still with him? It was a question she asked herself several times as she walked down the street with West toward the old museum building.
She could say that it was because she was curious to go poke around in the old, abandoned museum that had lost its funding several years ago and now sat as a sad storage unit for many of the town’s great histories.
She could say that it was because she had nothing else to do and it was more convenient to stay with him than to walk away.
And she could say it was because she was curious to see how everything went for Em
mett. But then, she could always go back in and check with Carl if she wanted to know how things went for Emmett.
No, if she was deeply honest with herself the issue was that she wanted to be with West.
She had felt a strange, gnawing sense of incompletion ever since she had...since they had...slept together. Except, the euphemism didn’t really work in this case. Because they hadn’t slept at all, they had just done something rough and hard in a barn that had taken less than an hour and had transformed the very fabric of who she was.
No big deal.
And she had rationalized staying away from him in that regard, but here she was.
She just wanted to be near him.
That she was vulnerable and predictable in that way annoyed her.
She wanted to be stronger than that.
Because life had forced her to be stronger than that.
She knew better than to idealize anything.
She wasn’t the kind of person who had ever lived in a fantasy world. She had learned about the realities of life too early.
Her dream—her biggest dream—was to be police chief of her small town. And that was realistic. It was a job she was qualified for, a job she even had a dynastic pedigree for. In her world that was a dream.
There was no room for fantasies about strong, hard, scarred cowboys who were all kinds of wrong and all kinds of bad, and where they might fit into her life.
There was no room for him.
And even if there were, he wasn’t the kind of man who would want there to be room for him.
He had stated that openly enough.
And now she was walking with him and brooding. Which was even worse than being with him in the first place.
The old Museum was a two-story brick building with white trim, a broad porch and an American flag waving cheerily from the top.
The building itself was still lovingly cared for, the front lawn cut and manicured. But the inside was dark, and had been for a long while.
“I think this thing is for the door down here,” West said, gesturing toward the side of the building.
She walked with him toward the back, where there was a door that was much less grand than the one at the front. He took the key and stuck it into the lock, and it turned.
And for some reason Pansy felt that catch in her chest. But she ignored that. And she followed him into the dark building. They went down a set of stairs that went straight into a basement area that was surprisingly neat and tidy. Items were organized carefully into groups, and everything was spotlessly clean.
“I wonder if Barbara takes care of this,” Pansy said, touching an utterly dust free rolltop desk that was pushed against one of the walls.
West huffed a laugh. “She seems like a whole thing.”
That was definitely one way to put it. “She is. And it’s easy for me to forget that she does care about this town, even if she is rigid and uncompromising. I tend to think of her as someone who’s always trying to protect her own position. Her own power. And that’s somewhat true. She wants to feel important. And because of that she doesn’t really mind making other people feel...you know. But I think she’s just sad and lonely. And she does do an awful lot for this town. Granted, I care a little bit more about the future of Emmett than I do about whether or not this desk stays free of dust.”
West chuckled. “Yeah, I’m with you there.”
West pulled his phone out of his pocket and turned the flashlight on. Pansy laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“It’s just funny. Because you look like the kind of guy who would actually have a big, stalwart flashlight on them. Not a cell phone.”
In his battered blue jeans, tight black T-shirt and cowboy hat, he looked like a man who had just come in from the fields, who perhaps didn’t give any consideration to technology or the modern world at all.
“I like convenience,” he said. He lifted the cell phone a little bit higher. “My phone before I went to prison didn’t have an official flashlight on it. That was a cool modern convenience waiting for me when I got out.”
There was so much buried in such a simple sentence. Time wasted, missed. Stolen.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
The image of this man, this rugged man, locked away for years nearly destroyed her.
She knew the justice system was flawed. Every system had flaws, because it was run by people. But staring at someone who had suffered directly from that failure really drove the point home.
“It happened,” he said. “I’ve come to terms with it. More or less. Well, maybe come to terms with is a bad way to put it. I’m not sure if I’ve come to terms with it. But I have figured out where to go after. That’s all you can do sometimes.”
“Yeah. I know that.”
They moved deeper into the space and West’s body felt warm and solid by her side, and she did her best to ignore it.
“I bet this is it,” West said, finding a small grouping of furniture on a blank wall that matched the description that Laz had given.
Pansy maneuvered so that she was on the other side of it. “Yeah,” she said. “You going to need some help carrying it?”
He looked at her, a smile playing at his lips. She could see it, even in the dim light. “You’re going to help me carry these?”
“I’m strong,” she said.
“I know you are,” he said. “But you’re small.”
She frowned. “So? I can help with that.”
“I might wait till Emmett is finished. No pressure.”
“You’re ridiculous,” she said. “A fifteen-year-old boy is not stronger than me.”
Suddenly, she realized that he was not looking at her face. Not at her eyes. He was looking at her mouth.
“You’re small,” he said. “But strong. And damn pretty.”
The words felt strange. They twisted in her stomach. West was the first person she could remember calling her pretty. And before that she couldn’t remember the last time she had really thought about being pretty.
She worried about her body being serviceable. Able to do its job. She didn’t really worry about how she looked. And when she had taken her clothes off in front of him in the barn she hadn’t given it much thought either. It had all been a frantic, crazy moment, and she hadn’t been insecure about what he saw when he looked at her, but more about what might happen next.
Suddenly she cared—deeply cared—that West Caldwell thought she was pretty.
It made her own mind a stranger. Her own body out of her control.
And that was foreign. Utterly and completely.
Somehow, down here in this basement, the basement of an old museum in the town that she loved so much, she didn’t even really mind.
Why was she here? She was afraid that she was here for this. For this moment. This long, steady moment that seemed to stretch endlessly in the dark. Where West was looking at her mouth and she was hoping it was a promise.
He shoved his phone into his pocket, and as soon as he was finished with that, he reached out and touched her face. She closed her eyes, and she let the particular weakness that took over her when West touched her win.
She let him melt her bones. Let him turn her muscles into jelly.
Let him take that body that had always been about strength, and had always been about serviceability, and turn it into something that belonged to him.
She sighed. As if it was the invitation he’d been waiting for, he caught that sigh with his mouth and kissed her.
It was deep and hard and consuming. Not gentle like the previous moment had been. And she was glad. She didn’t want gentle.
No.
She felt like something foreign. An entity that she didn’t understand. And right now, didn’t want to have to.
Because she could allow herself to get ca
ught up in this.
No one was here. No one would know.
Except for him.
Didn’t he already know her secrets? That a man had never touched her until him. Didn’t he already know what her body looked like, and what sounds she made?
Didn’t he already know that he could make her mindless?
That she felt like she didn’t fit anywhere. That sometimes she felt alone.
West already knew all those things, so she didn’t have to be afraid.
He had already seen her weakness.
And he was the only one.
What harm was there and letting him see it again?
It was why she had been here. From the beginning.
She could admit that now. Now that his lips were consuming hers. Now that his tongue was sliding against hers, delving deep, and his rough hands were moving over her body, large and calloused, spanning her waist with ease.
He made being small feel good.
When before, if it had been anything to her it had only been a detraction. Because she wanted to be a police officer, and you didn’t exactly inspire fear in people when you weren’t halfway over five foot.
But West, broad and muscular and over six feet tall, made her frame feel lovely. Like it had been created to fit against his. Like she was made to fit right into his arms.
He made her feel like her softness existed to complement his hardness. And there was so much hard about this man.
She let herself touch all of it.
His chest, his body lived in her dreams every night. The way that he looked. The way that it had felt to touch that hot skin, those hard packed muscles. That perfect amount of body hair over the top of them.
He was a man.
And he made her feel glad to be a woman in ways that she had never been aware of before.
He made her understand why that difference was a mystery meant to be untangled without clothes on. Made her understand why being around a pack of large cowboys all of her life didn’t really mean anything in terms of being accustomed to men like that.
Because this was a whole different thing. A whole different intimacy. A whole different reason for noticing the differences between men and women.
Before it was that they were tall. That they smelled after a hard day’s work. That they weren’t afraid to take up space or leave their muddy boots all over.
