by Maisey Yates
West had talked about growing roots into this land, but as he laid her down and settled between her legs, she thought it wasn’t the land that had become a part of her. It was West.
He didn’t feel like a rebellion. He felt like reality. He felt like part of her.
Maybe even the largest part.
Like his heart was making hers beat in return.
Like his touch was fueling her breath. Her vision. Her pleasure.
He drove her to the edge, over and over again. He made her feel unbreakable. He made her feel unashamed.
And when it was over, she drifted to sleep in that tall grass, until he bundled her back up on the horse and rode them both back home.
Until they slipped beneath the covers together and found heaven one last time there in the secluded darkness of her bedroom. She didn’t know how many times she woke up in the night and turned to him. She lost track of the heights he took her to. She was reduced. To nothing more than a shattered, glittering thing. And yet, she felt like more as well.
Like she had never been so in touch with all of the places of her body. With every beat of her heart.
When they finally did sleep for real, the sky was turning gray. And she fell asleep dreaming of what it had meant to be with West during each evolution of the sky. From gold to a midnight of stars, and back to that pale morning.
It felt like them.
Like the way they were together. Fiery and passionate. A sweet blanket of comfort. The beginning of something new.
Those thoughts spun around in her head until her eyes drifted shut for real.
* * *
SHE SAT UPRIGHT before she realized she was awake. The sky was far too blue. It was not early. It was much too late.
West was lying next to her, and he was never here this late.
She looked at her phone.
“Dammit,” she said. She stumbled out of bed in a panic. Her interview was in twenty-five minutes. There was no way she was going to be able to get ready and get there in time. It took her ten minutes just to drive into town.
She started moving around in a tear, trying to find her uniform. Which of course should be exactly where it always was. It wasn’t, though. Because she had left it in the car, because she had gotten distracted when she had come home and seen the basket. She ran out of the house wrapped in a towel, and dug through her car, taking the uniform bag and running back in. Then she started dressing as quickly as possible.
“What’s going on?” West asked, his voice gravelly.
“We overslept. I have an interview.”
“Shit,” he said, getting out of bed. “Emmett is probably late to school. Awesome first day of guardianship.”
“I’m never late,” she said. She couldn’t even care about him or Emmett. It was all too... She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to keep from panicking. Then she grabbed her phone and dialed the number for the city manager.
“I’m going to be late,” she said. “Can you delay the panel by ten or fifteen minutes?”
“I’m afraid I can’t” was the response. “We’ll discuss among ourselves until you arrive.”
She gritted her teeth, angry that she had taken time away from getting ready to make the call.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll see you there.”
She let out a frustrated growl and continued getting ready. Her hair was in a ponytail. She didn’t often bother with makeup anyway.
“Is there anything I can do?” West asked.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said, her heart hammering. She couldn’t think through all the implications of this. She just couldn’t. She was too frantic. And she had to get there. And she needed him to not talk to her.
“All right,” he said. “If that’s what would help you.”
“It would,” she said.
She tore out of the house and got into her car, driving as quickly as she could down into town without breaking any speed laws, because God only knew how horrific it would be if she got pulled over for speeding on her way to the job interview.
When she walked in, there was clearly a discussion happening. She took a breath and sat down at the table. “I’m sorry I’m late.”
“I think we’re close to being finished here,” Barbara said.
“Don’t you have questions for me?”
“Well,” Barbara said. “We might have. But we are on a schedule. And we have another interview directly after. This is your chance to make a final statement.”
Everyone was looking at her, and she felt herself falling apart. Felt herself losing her grip. On everything.
“I’m qualified for the job,” she said, her voice breaking. “I’m the most qualified person. It’s not...it’s not actually a debate. Just because Barbara doesn’t like me. I’m sorry I was late today. It’s the first time in eight years with the department I’ve been late to anything. My superior officer can attest to that,” she said, carefully not looking at Chief Doering. “I care about this town. Nobody else cares about it more. I hope you’ll do the right thing.”
“Thank you, Pansy,” the city manager said. “We will keep all this in mind as we make the decision.”
She stood and walked out of the room on numb legs. Then she stopped just outside the station, clutching her chest. She couldn’t breathe. She really thought that if she were going to have a heart attack it would be now.
A couple minutes later the panel began to file out the front door and Pansy wished that she could melt into the sidewalk.
No one said anything to her, but when she chanced a look, it was Barbara who met her eyes. The older woman practically smirked.
And Pansy had only herself to blame.
She had brought all of this on herself. She had gotten involved with West. She had gotten involved with Emmett. She had thought...
She had thought for a moment that she could have more than the thing she had been focused on for so many years, and she had done it at the worst possible time. She had compromised everything for herself. Everything. Over what? Over that man. The man who was supposed to be nothing more than a diversion.
She had lied to herself. She had tricked herself into believing that she was being more than just a naughty kid with him.
That she somehow wasn’t the same girl that she’d been.
She wanted to hide. She wanted to hide like she had that day her father had left for Alaska.
That day that he died.
She gritted her teeth, and made her way to her car.
She drove home slowly. And when she walked inside her house, West was there.
“What are you doing here?”
“I just came back to clean up.”
“Get out of my house,” she said.
“Is everything okay?”
“No,” she said. “How can you ask me that? Everything is not okay. Not at all. The interview went horribly. I got there and it was just about finished. I’m not going to get the job now. I’m not going to get the job. Because of this. Because of you. I worked my whole life for this, and you took it from me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes.” Except she knew that she had taken it from herself. “You did.”
“Pansy,” he said, keeping his voice low. “If they don’t give you the job over this, that’s some bullshit. You’ve gone in what? Two other times? And you did an excellent job. You have history working for the city. You’ve never made any mistakes. Your boss thinks that you should have this job. He thinks that you should be his successor. If they don’t give it to you, then they were looking for an excuse.”
“And I gave it to them,” she said. “I gave it to them, and I swore I would never do anything like that. I would never do anything that opened myself up to censure. I’m young, and I’m a woman, and I knew that all that was working against me. And still, I let myself get distracted. I... Wh
en I was a kid this was what I did. I messed things up all the time. I misbehaved. My dad was so... He was so disappointed in me all the time. And right before he died I made him so mad...” She squeezed her eyes shut, tears falling down her face. “I never got to fix it. He never got to see.”
“Sweetheart,” West said, closing the distance between them, his voice filled with tenderness that made her hurt.
“Sweetheart, you weren’t bad. You were just a kid.”
“No. He was right. I swore that I’d make him proud, West. I swore it. But we can’t change. It’s all still there. And I... I can’t do this.”
“Pansy,” he said, keeping his voice measured. “Not getting a job isn’t a failure.”
“It’s not that. It’s everything.”
“Honey,” he said, his tone stern. “I love you.”
She hadn’t expected that. Of all the things that she had expected to come out of his mouth, it hadn’t been that.
“You don’t,” she said, her voice choked. “You don’t love me. This is a fling. And I was a virgin, and you’re...you’re older than me, and you’re more experienced than me, and you don’t ever want to fall in love because of your ex-wife.”
“All true,” he said. “But I did just the same. You showed me something,” he said, his voice husky. “About being brave. And I can be at least half that brave.”
“I’m not brave,” she said. “I’m just a mess. I’m a mess who doesn’t need you up in the middle of it. I have to... I can’t do this. I can’t be this person.”
“I didn’t think I could be either. I had a whole plan for myself, Pansy. I was supposed to be mega rich by now. With a big corner office. Because I thought that’s what I had to be to be important. But I’ve never felt more important than when you’re holding me, darlin’. That’s just true. It doesn’t matter to me what anyone else in the world thinks. What matters is what you think. I’ve never given myself to someone wholeheartedly before. I’ve always kept parts of myself back. My wife couldn’t love me, because she didn’t know me. And I couldn’t love her because I didn’t give her all the pieces of myself. Because I didn’t really trust her. Not ever. Good thing, as it turns out. But still.”
“I need... I need to...”
“You don’t need to do anything,” he said. “You don’t need to change a damn thing. The woman you are reached in and saved me somehow. And I want to spend my life drinking Coke with you in the middle of the day in a bar. Having sex in a basement at a museum. I want to watch you put your uniform on in the morning, and then I want to take it off you at night. I want to meet this big family of yours that raised you and made you who you are. Because that woman, I love her.”
“It’s not enough,” she said, everything in her pushing against these declarations.
“Why not?”
“I’m not... I’m not enough. I’m just not. I need to get this job.”
“Why? To build a monument to a dead man? I’ll tell you what, it’s a lot easier to do that than it is to look around you and fully embrace the living people that care about you as you are. You’re having conversations with someone who can’t talk back. You don’t know what your dad would say with all these years and all this hindsight. You don’t know if he’d be proud or not.”
“He would be proud if I...if I did what he did.”
“Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he didn’t like the man he was, Pansy. You don’t know. You were a child. Let me tell you what I think. I think he would’ve been proud of you if you would have become police chief, an artist, a dancer. Whatever. I think at the end of the day he would’ve wanted you to be happy. You know why I think that? Because you love him so damned much. Which means that in spite of whatever issues you had with him sometimes, you loved him a whole lot. Because his opinion mattered to you. And you wouldn’t want to make him proud if he weren’t a really great dad. And if he was a great dad, that means he would’ve loved you always.”
She pushed back. She rejected it. She couldn’t believe him. She couldn’t. And she didn’t quite understand why she couldn’t with such desperation. She only knew that it was so.
“No. Get out of my house, West. I have to deal with the fact that I’m going to have to call a man that I want to punch in the face my boss in the next couple of weeks, because lord knows Johnson is closer to getting the job than I am. I just lost the one thing I cared about.”
“Pansy...”
“I don’t love you,” she said. “I just wanted to lose my virginity. That’s it. I was so focused on this that I forgot to do that. And then big surprise it turns out I don’t do balance very well. Well, my lesson is learned. And I’m done. Please get out of my house.” He looked at her for a long moment, his blue eyes filled with pain.
Pain she had put there.
Only a week or so ago she had thought that if anyone ever hurt West, if she could find the people who had been responsible for putting him in prison, she would have to fight against her desire to put them in the hospital.
And now she was the one hurting him. But she had to.
She had to. To save herself.
He said nothing. He only nodded once, and tipped his hat.
And then West Caldwell turned and walked out the door.
Pansy couldn’t catch her breath. She had been struggling with it since she’d left the interview, and now it was even worse. She collapsed onto the ground, breathing hard and heavy.
And suddenly she remembered the day that her parents had died.
Remembered the pieces of it that she had forgotten. This. On the floor. Breathing hard. Thinking she was going to die too.
Grief.
Whole body grief. Stole her breath. Stole her ability to think. But she didn’t know in this moment if she was grieving for the loss of her job, or for the loss of West.
West.
She had lost West.
She didn’t think she’d ever be okay again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
WEST DIDN’T FIND himself on the Dalton ranch at night all that often anymore.
And of course, he wouldn’t be able to just run into his half brother Caleb by happenstance, seeing as his brother was now happily engaged, and didn’t have any reason to be out doing late-night wandering.
So he called him.
And few things had pained him more.
But his brother had come. Even in the darkness.
The two of them mounted up on their horses, with headlamps as guides.
“So what’s going on?” Caleb asked.
“I thought... I thought we might re-create our late-night ride. Because I’m in desperate need of a similar miracle. Crappy thing is, it’s not anywhere near Christmas, and it’s entirely possible that a little bit of holiday magic played into your success story.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” Caleb said.
“No,” West said. “But then, I don’t know much of anything.”
“You might need to start from the beginning.”
So West did. Starting with the ticket Pansy had written him when he had rolled into town, ending with her rejecting an offer of love he hadn’t even been planning on making.
But he realized that he couldn’t hold a damn thing back from her if he wanted to keep her. Because she deserved more and better. Because she deserved a man who was certain of his feelings.
When his wife’s betrayal had sent him to prison, it was the consequences of that which had hurt him.
Being in prison sucked.
But this actually felt worse. And it was simply because a life without Pansy wasn’t one he wanted to live in.
“I’m a goner,” he said. “I would have told you that I couldn’t have ever loved a woman like this. Not ever loved anyone like this. It’s all your fault,” he said.
“How is it my fault?” Caleb asked.
“Al
l y’all,” he said. “Gabe, Jacob, you. McKenna. Emmett. This whole family thing. You said that all of your significant others helped you deal with the situation with your family. Well my damn family made me think that maybe I could fall in love. Because look at all of you. None of you are less of a mess than I am. And look at you. Married. Engaged. Happy.”
“Not for lack of fighting it,” Caleb said.
Silence settled over them as they continued to ride the horses under the cover of the darkness. West knew that to be true. He knew that Caleb fought for what he had.
He knew that he had encouraged him to do it.
“She said no,” Caleb said. “She said no to me too.”
“Yeah. And I had no idea how fucking miserable that was.”
“You gave some pretty good advice all the same. The thing is, I had accepted that I loved Ellie a long time ago. I had also accepted that I couldn’t have her. I spent a lot longer sitting with my feelings than she did with hers. So when I was ready to make it all or nothing...she wasn’t.”
“She thinks she messed up getting the job she wanted because she was late. Because of me.”
“Why exactly was she late because of you?”
“I’m giving you a look right now,” West said. “I know you can’t see it. But if you could, you’d get it.”
“The usual reason then,” Caleb said.
“Yep. That part we’ve got no problem with. It works a little too good. Kept us from talking when we probably should have. But then, I think we were using it as an excuse to be together.” He snorted. “Yeah, burn out the sexual attraction. Keep it physical. I mean, it’s a damn fine excuse. But mostly, I think we like to be together. I think neither of us wanted to admit it.”
“I relate to that too,” Caleb said. “Here’s what I know. Love is complicated. And it’s a damn scary business. Pansy’s lost people. And...that’s tough. It’s tough to move on from.”
“She’s got this idea that she has to be something particular to honor her father’s memory.”
“Deals you make with the dead are pretty damned hard to get out of later,” Caleb said. “As a man engaged to my best friend’s widow, I can speak to that pretty solidly. I promised him I’d take care of her. But the trouble was, I was also in love with her. And what I had to realize was that when you lose a person...they’re gone from here. What they don’t need are promises from the living. Because their concerns aren’t here. I’m not saying I know what Clint would’ve wanted or not wanted from me or Ellie. I just know that we’re the ones that are here having to live. That she’s the love of my life. And I’m the love of hers, as hard as it was for her to admit that. I get it. She and I railed against more than one ghost. But we found love with each other. And that’s a beautiful thing. And it’s worth the fight. It’s about the only thing I can think of that is.”
