by Maisey Yates
From the Author
Sometimes it takes a special place to bring an idea together. I knew the characters in Secrets from a Happy Marriage from the beginning, but didn’t know quite where I wanted to put them. Then I remembered visiting a beach on the Oregon coast and seeing a lighthouse up on the hill. A quick internet search revealed not only what the lighthouse was, but that it was also a bed-and-breakfast. I immediately made a reservation to stay there.
It was late January, the weather was a misery and I had serious concerns about getting to the lighthouse—it’s Oregon, we’re not equipped to drive in snow!—but I made the trip, and I’m so glad I did. The rich history of the location provided the backbone for this story.
Built in 1894, the house has lived many lives. From the original lightkeepers’ residences, to barracks, to dorms and finally to a bed-and-breakfast. Lives have started, and ended there. Children have taken their first steps in the parlor, and old men have breathed their last in the upstairs bedrooms. The stories of ghosts, mail-order brides and soldiers give a sense of the generations of people whose history is wrapped up in this place.
I wasn’t sure how I wanted Wendy to have come by running the fictional Lighthouse Inn, until I heard the very real story about how the innkeepers of the Heceta Head Lighthouse came into that job. It was, in fact, a contest run on the radio by the United States Forest Service in the ’90s. And they really did write a letter and win their position there.
I love that story. A chance letter that changes the course of your whole life, and I knew it belonged in the book.
Sometimes the real history of a place is more interesting than any fiction that could be created, and the history of this house is definitely one of those cases. It is, to me, as important a character as any others in this story. Because it’s the anchor that holds Wendy, Rachel, Anna and Emma to each other, and to the town.
Which was a lesson to me, I think, as much as to the characters in the book. That we’re one thread in a much bigger story, and it’s the full perspective of time and history that creates the beautiful picture we enjoy around us. Which is inspiration to make our own thread a brilliant one.
The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch
by Maisey Yates
1
THERE WASN’T A man alive who was happy to see blue and red police lights come up behind him on a long stretch of deserted highway where there were no other visible cars.
But West Caldwell imagined that as men went, he was probably distinctly unhappier than many. Having spent a couple of years behind bars, witnessing the grave failure of the justice system. Though he supposed in the end the system had prevailed and he had been exonerated of the fraud he hadn’t committed in the first place—but that initial failure meant that he didn’t really have a keen view of law enforcement.
Not of any stripe.
Not that he didn’t know full well that most police officers were just doing their jobs. But the thing was, something happened to you when you were in prison. There was a little bit of an us vs. them mentality. The inmates, and the ones who’d put them in jail. Of course, then there was the fact that he couldn’t trust half the bastards in prison.
So really, there were gradations of teams.
But either way you cut it, the cops were not on his team.
Of course, he wasn’t in prison anymore. Neither was he a criminal in the eyes of the law.
Still.
He didn’t want to get a ticket either way.
This was what he got for moving to Small Town, USA. Gold Valley, Oregon. He’d rolled into town to get acquainted with his old man—Hank Dalton—a legendary retired bull rider and man whore. One who had left half siblings littered around the country.
West had ended up staying. Because Dallas no longer held any allure for him. No, it was just the site of his financial and personal destruction.
He had been raised in Sweet Home, Oregon, before hightailing it out of there at eighteen and joining the rodeo, coming back and forth to check in with his half brother—his mother’s son, Emmett.
He had other half siblings here, though. His father’s children, not his mother’s, so he’d figured Gold Valley was as good a place as any to settle in and start over.
He hoped he could get in touch with Emmett again. His mother said her much younger son had run off, doing whatever the hell he wanted, and she wasn’t all that concerned.
West didn’t feel the same.
But here in town he’d discovered a hell of a lot more family than he’d bargained for. And not only that, the family had taken him in, more or less.
Though part of that was that they seemed to be inured to having siblings popping up out of the woodwork.
He wasn’t the first.
And if what his half brother Caleb thought was true did in fact prove to be, he wouldn’t be the last.
Not that any of that had a hill of beans to do with what was happening now, and the ticket he was about to receive.
He pulled off on the side of the road, next to a copse of dense, dark pine trees. The place was lousy with pines. Totally different from the grassy rolling hills that he had learned to call home in Texas. There were Oregon grapes, fritillarias and ferns instead of bluebonnets. And the flat fields were backed by jagged mountains.
And hell, in Texas, the cop who pulled you over might just be Chuck Norris. So, he supposed he should be grateful that at least this one wasn’t a Texas Ranger.
He looked in his rearview mirror and watched as the cop car stopped. He had hoped, just a little, that it would go on by. But no.
Then the door opened, and the uniformed figure inside stood. He could just barely see the top of her shoulders and head above the door.
It was a woman. Brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, dark glasses over her eyes. She was small. She slammed the door shut with the force of a much larger person, her belt and gun bulky on her tiny frame.
She hitched that belt up, like a bad cop show, and walked slowly over to the driver’s side of the vehicle. He pushed the button on his truck window and rolled it down.
She appraised him for a moment, just a moment, before she spoke.
“Do you know how fast you were going?” she asked, lifting her sunglasses and sliding them back on her head.
“Can’t say that I do, Officer. But I bet you’re going to tell me.” It was clear from the way the corners of her mouth—not a bad mouth even given it was all severe—turned down that she wasn’t into his brand of humor.
“Damn straight,” she said. “Seventy-five. Max speed on an unmarked rural road is fifty-five.”
“Well, see,” he said, “I’ve been living out in Texas for the past sixteen years.” He maximized his long-ago acquired drawl for effect. “Everything is bigger there. Including the speed limits.”
“A shame you’re not in Texas anymore, Dorothy,” she returned, sharp and tight.
“You sure you want to mouth off like that? I pay—”
“You pay my salary?” She sighed heavily. “Try again. Please come up with something slightly more original if you’re going to try to insult me or take shots at me in any way. And I’m going to warn you. People are not as original as they think they are. This is a universal truth. Now, go ahead, mister. While you dig for your license and registration, feel free to create a comeback that will dazzle me.”
“You sound a bit jaded for a—” he looked her up and down “—nineteen-year-old. And also, it’s a bit rich that you’re dogging me about clichés. What’s with the aviator sunglasses?”
“I like Top Gun.”
His eyes fell to her name tag. There were no discernible female curves beneath that dark blue uniform shirt and her flak jacket beneath. “Officer P. Daniels.”
“Officer Daniels will do.”
“What does the P stand for?”
“Pissy and not paid ne
ar enough to banter with you.”
She was quick. That didn’t make her less annoying. He produced his license and his registration, and she walked back toward her cruiser, where he knew they liked to run information, or maybe in her case check her lipstick.
Maybe he would say that to her when she came back.
“You have a lot of speeding tickets,” she said. “Mr. Caldwell.”
“A fair few.”
“A fraud conviction.”
“An exoneration,” he responded.
“That doesn’t show up.”
“A quick internet search will show it. I was in the news.”
She huffed a laugh. “Well, let’s hope this doesn’t end with either of us being in the news.”
“That would be ideal,” he said.
He looked at her name tag again, and for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why her name was pulling him up. It sounded familiar, and he didn’t know why.
“Well, I can’t really let you off for good behavior, since according to your record, you don’t have much of it.”
“And here I heard small towns were supposed to be friendly. This is how you welcome new residents?”
“Only when they insist on leading their own Parade of One down one of my highways in a big-ass Ford truck, paying no mind to the speed limit.”
“Well, damn. That kinda runs roughshod over my grand marshal fantasies.”
“A shame. It’s an expensive ticket, too.”
Expensive ticket. Didn’t the hell matter to him. He had money to burn, and he was investing a lot of it in his brother’s school that he ran on the Dalton family ranch. But he was also working at getting his own place up and running. He had just bought his own property, and his own house that had...
“But what does the P stand for?” he asked.
“It’s not really relevant.”
“Penelope. No. That’s not right.” He squinted, trying to remember the paperwork that he’d gone over earlier in the week. A tenant agreement had been in there with all the mortgage stuff. And just then, he remembered the name. It was a stupid name, and that was why it had stuck out.
“Pansy.” He snapped his fingers. “Officer Pansy Daniels.”
Denim-blue eyes widened. “What?”
“I believe I’m your new landlord. You going to write that ticket or not?”
* * *
BY THE TIME Pansy got to her brother’s house that night, she was still reeling over her interaction with West Caldwell.
When she had pulled the truck over earlier today, she had imagined it would be a routine stop. But then she had approached the vehicle, and he had been the kind of good-looking that had punched straight through her bulletproof vest and left her without air. Which was disturbing, because Pansy wasn’t really prone to fits of breathlessness over men or anything else.
Life had beaten the ability to be surprised right out of her from an early age. She was tough, because she had to be. Because every last one of the Daniels siblings had to be. Raising themselves on Hope Springs Ranch hadn’t been easy.
They’d had each other, but they’d had a whole lot of hard, too.
She didn’t often consider her name one of those hardships. Not anymore. She had gotten over her peers making fun of her at a pretty early age. And anyway, now she carried a gun, so people were much less inclined to mock her. But today...today she had hated it.
That man was not only good-looking, he also had a smart mouth, and he was in fact her new landlord. And the whole power structure of their entire interaction had suddenly been flipped on its head when he’d said that.
She’d written him the ticket anyway.
If he was going to evict her...well, so be it.
Yes, she was in the middle of a year lease, so legally it would be difficult for him, and yeah, it would maybe see her right back at her brother’s house, which she didn’t really want to do, but she had to stick to her guns. There was no way that she could not write him the ticket just because he was her landlord.
No. Gregory Daniels, police chief, would never have not written someone a ticket just because they might use that to hurt him.
Her father had been a man of integrity. A man worthy of his uniform and his badge. He was Pansy’s idol, and always had been.
She wasn’t going to balk over something like that.
She sighed heavily and got out of her car, her service weapon locked up in a special box inside. She’d changed out of her uniform and into a T-shirt and jeans. She always felt oddly light after a whole day at work in all of her gear.
When she’d first joined the Gold Valley Police Department, it had felt heavy.
Now, when she was out of all her gear, she felt strange. Plus, when she went home to Hope Springs, she wasn’t Officer Daniels.
She was just a little sister. At least as far as Ryder and Iris were concerned. Rose was the youngest, but that didn’t stop her older siblings from treating Pansy like a baby.
Even Sammy was a pretty terrible offender, and she hadn’t even grown up with them. Though close enough.
Her cousins would have been on hand to continue treating her like a child, too, if they hadn’t all gone off to make their way in the rodeo. Now they were on the road so much Pansy barely saw them.
They were an eclectic group of siblings, cousins and friends, bonded together by tragedy.
They’d lost their parents on the same day. A catastrophic small-plane crash during what had been intended to be a relaxing vacation in Alaska for their parents.
Ryder had been the oldest at eighteen, and had suddenly had not only unimaginable grief on his shoulders, but a heavy amount of responsibility. And the local Child Services had agreed to let them all stay together. Live together on Hope Springs Ranch. Agreeing that introducing instability after such a great tragedy would only be worse. Pansy had been ten. Rose had been six. They were the two youngest and had spent the longest stretch of their childhood without their parents.
At some point, Sammy had joined their ragtag crew, running from her own family issues—though her parents were very much alive.
It didn’t matter who was related to who biologically. Hope Springs was a refuge for those who were out of hope.
And as for Pansy, her siblings, her cousins and Logan, they were linked. Tied together by a deep and terrible tragedy that few people would ever be able to understand.
They could just look at each other and know. That it was a particularly hard birthday or that the anniversary of the accident was weighing heavily on one of them.
That was why, no matter where she went, no matter what she did, this place was home.
And the people in it were the most important ones to her. Even if they did still treat her like a kid.
It was Sammy who rushed out to greet her, all wild blond hair and flowing skirts. Ryder’s best friend was so feminine that sometimes she made Pansy downright uncomfortable.
Samantha had been one of the most dominant female influences in Pansy’s life. She had started coming around about six months after the Daniels siblings had lost their parents, and Pansy still had no idea how Sammy had managed to wiggle her way in. The friendship between the free-spirited woman and her taciturn older brother always mystified her.
She was half convinced that Sammy had targeted him, decided that they would be friends and simply hadn’t gone away when Ryder had said no.
Nothing that she had witnessed had yet to disabuse her of that notion.
“I made lasagna,” Sammy said. She grabbed hold of a mass of blond hair, wound it around her wrist and then effortlessly looped a scrunchie over it into a big messy bun.
Pansy was suddenly incredibly conscious of her own tight ponytail that had not a single strand out of place.
She didn’t know why the contrast between herself and Sammy suddenly hit her s
o hard. Only that it did.
“Great,” she said, ignoring that weird feeling. “I’m starving.”
“Me too. But I’ve been sampling garlic bread liberally.”
“You slapped my hand when I took some,” Ryder said, coming out of the sprawling ranch house behind her.
“I’m the chef,” Sammy said, pointedly. “I can do what I want.”
Ryder shook his head, but didn’t make further comment.
Like her, her older brother was a rule follower. Though she wasn’t sure if he was one by nature or if he was one by circumstance. It was hard to say.
Not even she really knew when it came to her own self. Because she had a hard time remembering life before her parents’ deaths in clear detail. It had made her terrified at first. Paranoid. She had been afraid every time Ryder had gotten in his car to drive to town to go to the store, much less go farther afield. And then sometimes she’d remember herself, her behavior, and sadness would overtake her entirely. All the ways she’d disappointed her dad, and how she’d never been able to make up for it.
What she found solace in was her dad’s legacy. She had found purpose in it. She had focused in on it. And she had come to the conclusion that if she was in authority, she might feel a little more control over her life.
Ironic, since her dad had clearly still been vulnerable enough to die in a plane crash. But somehow it all made sense. In a strange way.
And even if it didn’t make sense when it was all spooled out in front of her like that, she didn’t much care.
