by Maisey Yates
“That...sounds like it sucks,” Emmett said, but he could see pleasure behind his eyes.
“Yeah, well tough. Because you’re a kid. I’m going to treat you like one. That means I’m going to tell you what to do. I’m going to pay your bills. I’m going to make sure you’re not hungry. So, if you think you can handle all those trade-offs...”
“Yeah,” Emmett said, his voice hoarse.
“Good,” he said. Emmett finished tacking up the horse and mounted him.
West cleared his throat as Emmett headed off in the same direction as the other boys. This whole having family thing weighed on a man in strange ways.
And he didn’t hate them.
Not at all.
West looked back and saw Pansy, who was getting in her car. Heading down to work, he knew. But also maybe avoiding him a little bit.
Things had been intense between them. They’d spent the last two nights together, and he’d stayed all night. He could tell that she was uncomfortable with that aspect of it. With him taking care of her. But she also wanted it. And he...
Well, he wanted everything. He was starting to be able to identify that feeling inside of him. But he knew that in order to make it mean anything, he was going to have to give everything to her too.
And he didn’t know if she was ready to hear that.
He didn’t know if he was ready to say it. If he was really ready to try and identify all those feelings in his chest.
But he supposed he was going to have to get to a place where he was.
First things first, though. He needed to go talk to his and Emmett’s mother.
He was going to focus on that for now.
* * *
WEST HADN’T BEEN back to his childhood home in a long damned time. When he did go, paperwork in hand, he thought that he was prepared. But he wasn’t. The whole house seemed smaller, which was silly, since it wasn’t like the last time he’d been he was a kid or anything.
It shouldn’t seem smaller. He’d been the same height the last time he walked up this cracked old sidewalk.
He knew his mother would be home, because she worked night shifts, and it was a pretty decent time of the day for her to be up and around. He charged right to the front door and knocked.
She opened it a crack at first. Then the rest of the way. He couldn’t read the look on her face. Her brows were drawn together, her eyes shining a bit bright.
Her lips were pressed together firmly, as if she was holding something back. But for the life of him he didn’t know what it might be.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Come in,” she said, backing away from the door.
To be honest, he had expected her to leave him there standing on the porch.
She invited him in, and he accepted, following her into the tiny kitchen.
One side of the table was clear, with a coffee cup still sitting in one of the seats. The other side was stacked high with magazines and scratch-off lottery tickets. It looked basically the same as it had when he left.
“I just came to talk to you real quick.”
“What?” She was guarded.
“Emmett is with me,” West said. “And I have him going to school. I need to be his legal guardian. I have some paperwork for you to sign. We may need to go to court and make it all official.”
“We don’t need to do that,” his mom said. “I can sign whatever.”
“All right,” West said, pushing the file of papers forward.
“How have you been?” she asked, flipping the folder open and staring down inside at it.
“All right.”
“You staying in Oregon?”
“Yes,” he said. “I bought a ranch.”
“That’s good,” she said, finding the places that he had highlighted and adding her first signature.
West hadn’t meant to come here to question his mother. There was spare little point. What was done was done. To both him and Emmett. But when she signed in the second spot he couldn’t stop himself. “Do you love him?”
His mother looked up at him in confusion. “Who?”
“Emmett,” he said.
She huffed a laugh and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the table. “He is my son,” she said, lighting it and taking a slow drag off of it. “I love him more than anything in the world.”
A laugh caught in West’s throat. “Is that so?”
“I did my best by you boys. I did the best that I could. But the money that Tammy Dalton gave us was only enough for this place. Sorry if it was too modest for you.”
“We could’ve lived in a trailer park, Mom,” he said, his voice rough. “We could’ve lived in a cardboard box. It didn’t matter. What mattered was knowing that you cared about us. And I can’t really speak for Emmett. But I can speak for me. You never did seem like you cared that much.”
“What more did you want? I care for you as much as I care for my own self.”
“We didn’t always eat. The men in your life... They treated us awful. The house was never clean and...” And suddenly as he said all those words he realized that what his mother had said was absolutely true.
She had cared for them the best she had known how.
She had loved them as much as she loved herself.
The problem was she didn’t love herself. Or she didn’t know how to. She didn’t feed herself. The men in her life treated her badly. She let herself live in a house that was falling down around her.
She didn’t know how to give more than that. And it started with the way she saw herself.
West was lucky enough to have some youthful idea that he deserved more. But he had thought that he had to change himself first.
And he was suddenly staring at the evidence that until a person accepted themselves. Until a person found some way to love themselves, they really couldn’t figure out how to give it to other people. Because they didn’t know what the hell it looked like.
“I’m sorry,” West said. It didn’t make what his mother had done to them right. And it didn’t mean that if she started loving herself tomorrow everything would magically change.
Love meant wanting better. Love meant trying.
Love wasn’t a passive acceptance of the way things were, or the way a person was.
Love was active. The evidence of it would show up everywhere. If she loved herself, her life would look different. She would look different.
So would his. So would Emmett’s.
And he’d done a whole lot of thinking since last night about what it would look like if he could accept himself. If he could find a way to stop holding bits of himself back. But maybe that was it.
Maybe it was just finding out a way to be all right with all that he was. From those white trash roots to the mistakes he’d made escaping them. His failings and his relationship with his mother. With his wife.
Even with Emmett. Accepting it and finding a way to be open in spite of it.
He was the man from here. The man who had married his wife. The man who had gone to prison.
That was all him. All decisions he’d made that had led him to those places. He was ready now to embrace this new life. This new path. To be the man that Emmett needed. The man that Pansy needed.
And in order to do that, he knew what he had to do.
“You did the best you could,” West said. “I’m just fine. And Emmett...he’s going to be just fine too.”
He could see relief winding down his mother’s spine. Relaxing her posture. “I always was proud of you,” she said.
He put his hand over hers for a moment. Then took it away.
She finished signing the paperwork, and he took it and headed back out the door, headed back to Gold Valley.
Back to create the life that he’d never known he wanted.
CHAPTER TWENT
Y-ONE
WHEN PANSY ARRIVED home from work there was a picnic basket at her door.
There was a note attached to the top of it, but even without the note she would have known who it was from.
She smiled and bent down, looking at West’s bold handwriting.
Dinner for two.
She looked around, wondering where he was. And suddenly, she saw him. Riding up to her on an actual white horse.
“What are you doing?”
“I think it’s called a romantic gesture,” he said, maneuvering the horse right up to her front door.
She straightened, taking hold of the basket.
He looked...well, he looked like some damned fantasy come to life. He was wearing a white Stetson, a white T-shirt and battered jeans, along with some well-worn and expensive looking cowboy boots. He had one of those big rodeo belt buckles that she had never thought she would find compelling, but did now. And she was just wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans.
Which...was what he was wearing, but somehow with all the cowboy trappings it seemed a bit more spectacular.
Her bad boy was on a white horse, at Redemption Ranch. And it all seemed so surreal, so perfect, she could hardly wrap her mind around it.
“Let me give you a hand up,” he said, reaching out his hand.
“You’re kidding,” she responded.
“Nope.”
She hesitated, then took his hand with the free one that wasn’t hanging on to the basket, and he hefted her up off the ground right in front of him on the horse.
“Shouldn’t I ride on the back?”
“This is fine,” he said, his breath hot on her ear.
He put one hand on her stomach, and used the other to guide the horse out of her yard and onto one of the trails that lead away from the house.
“What if I had plans?” she asked.
“I’d ask you to cancel them. For me.”
There was something about that request. That he would ask her to make him a priority that...unsettled her. Because they had been doing this thing as if it were convenient. And getting to a place where they worked to spend time together was something else entirely. Something she wasn’t sure she was ready for.
But then she forgot to be concerned, as they rode up a steep trail that eventually let out at a clearing. It was beautiful. All yellow and lavender flowers and sunshine.
In late May the evening air was warm and wonderful, and the sun was beginning to cast a rose gold glow all around.
“This is beautiful,” she said.
“It is.” He helped her dismount, and then tether the horse to a tree nearby. Then he took her hand, and the picnic basket, and they picked through the tall grass, just up and over a rise that offered them a stunning view of the valley below.
“That’s why they call it Gold Valley,” he whispered.
The sun was spilling over the town below, like liquid gold illuminating the vineyards, the barns, the houses. She could just make out Main Street, the red brick set ablaze in the light.
The whole thing had been turned to miniature up here. This place that held her heart so deeply. That mattered so much. She could see it all at once.
It was incredible.
“I don’t think that’s really why they call it Gold Valley,” she said softly. “I think that has to do with the gold rush.”
“Well, now there’s no gold in the hills. But there’s definitely gold on them.”
“I guess so.”
He reached into the picnic basket and took out a blanket, spread it out on the grass, and then settled onto it.
“You know,” he said as he got food out of the basket—sandwiches, potato salad and some kind of pasta salad, “when I moved here I had the thought that I didn’t know the place yet. I found something in Texas. Something that made me a better man. I found out that I could work and I could make change in my life. And that was an important lesson. Trust me. It was when I needed to learn. More than that, because I figured out what kind of man I was going to be there, I felt like the land was in me in some way. In a way that I didn’t feel here. Texas felt like home. Until I got out of prison, and I realized I didn’t know it anymore.
“Then I came here, and I didn’t feel any more connected. But I’ve been coming up here a lot. I feel like I found my roots. This land, this dirt... It gets in your blood. I’m happy that I’m staying here. I’m happy that I’m going to ranch here. That this is the ground I’m going to work. I had to go somewhere else to find it, I think. Redemption. It’s what I’ve been searching for all this time. I found it here. I found home.”
“For me too,” she said softly.
“I love the big skies in Texas. But here they’re tall. Taller than the trees. And the mountains stretch on forever. Makes you feel small. Like you could walk into one of those thickets and never come back out. You feel your insignificance here. I needed to find my insignificance. Because I spent a whole lot of time being concerned with what I looked like to other people. Inflating their thoughts about me into something that mattered the most. And I built a scaffolding of a person around what I was.” He cleared his throat. “I went and saw my mother today.”
“Oh,” she said, her heart twisting.
“I’ve been angry at her for a long time. But I realized something today. She just hates herself, Pansy. She doesn’t think she deserves for things to work out. She doesn’t really think she deserves anything nice or good or lovely. And that’s why she couldn’t give anything to us. I can’t hate her. But I can damn well make sure that I take that lesson and learn it. For myself. Because I don’t want to be sitting by myself in the same old house in twenty years bent by bitterness and the weight of the world. And I could be. I could let my time in prison define me. I could let what happened with my ex-wife define me. But I have to be willing to let it go. I have to be willing to care about the future more than I care about the past. To want something good in the present more than I want to hang on to my anger.”
He stared out at the scene below, the light reflecting in his blue eyes, setting sparks of fire off the color there. “I have to stop hiding myself away. Because the truth is I was in prison a long time before I went there physically.”
His words scraped uncomfortably close to her bones. And she didn’t quite know what to say in return. So they just sat. She ate her sandwich in silence, and looked out at the view.
“How are you feeling about your interview?” he asked, shifting his body, shifting the conversation.
“Oh,” she said. “Good.”
Except she didn’t know what she felt about anything. She didn’t feel particularly confident. In herself, yes, but in what was going to happen? No.
“You’re the best person for the job,” he said.
“You don’t know that. You don’t know everybody else they’re considering.”
“Do you think that you’re the best person for the job?”
“Well, yes. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be going out for it.”
“I think plenty of people would, whether they thought they were best or not.”
“Well. I wouldn’t.”
“Which is exactly why you are best for the job. I’ve never known anyone quite like you,” he said. “So sure in yourself. I mean, I’ve met a lot of people who had confidence in themselves. Who had an inflated idea of who they were. But you... You’re strong. You’re steady. I know that you want the best for the community. I admire how much you care. In spite of everything that life has taken from you.”
Pansy didn’t know quite how to respond to that. She felt like she had always been fighting to be good. And he just seemed to think that it was something she was already. That she was worthy of praise for some reason.
“I...”
She started to argue with him. But then, she didn’t want to. Because the man had literally ridden
to her door on a white horse.
Because he was the epitome of a hero.
And she would have never thought that she would look at an ex-convict, a man like him, and see that. She had spent her entire life with a very rigid idea of what it meant to be a hero.
Of what it meant to be good.
But West made her see layers. Depth and richness that she hadn’t before.
She looked at him and saw a hero. And for just a while she wanted him to be hers.
Because she had lost the only other hero she ever had far too soon.
And now she had this man only a foot away from her. Strong and solid and real.
Arms that could hold her.
She leaned in, and she pressed her palm against his chest. Felt his heart beating.
Strong and certain.
This man was so incredible. So solid and alive.
He kissed her. He kissed her, and she surrendered to it. Surrendered to him. And she shivered when his hand skimmed over her curves. When he pulled her shirt up over her head, and the cooling air drew breath against her skin. She should be embarrassed. She supposed.
But in the arms of her hero, she couldn’t be anything but his.
Cherished.
Cared for.
So many things that she had decided she didn’t need to be.
He stripped her bare underneath a blue sky that was fading to purple. And then he stripped himself down, and it felt like the most honest thing she had ever experienced in all of her life.
West. Pansy.
Naked and in the open.
She had spent so much time fighting against her nature. Fighting against her name.
As if she had to prove she wasn’t her namesake. Wasn’t weak or wilting.
But out here on this blanket of flowers she didn’t think of those blooms as weak.
Bright and striking and resilient.
Because they came back every spring, didn’t they? No matter how cold the winter got.
