The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,27
hands.
* * *
IT WAS A nice day and West was ready to blow off work and take a trail ride. Really, when you owned the land, it was still working, in some ways.
He tacked up and got on the back of his horse, remembering the night a few months ago when he had gone to ride at the Dalton place. Before he had bought his own land, he had been keeping his horses at the Dalton ranch.
He’d gone for a late night rides out there often. He’d been having trouble sleeping then.
It was a holdover from those years in prison. Years he didn’t much like to think about.
It wasn’t like the movies. No one had cut him with a shank or made him their bitch. Though, he would have put up a pretty decent fight if anyone had tried. But there were factions, and a hell of a lot of ugliness. Fights broke out all the time. And there was something...dehumanizing about it. Being kept in a cage. Cut off from the world. It had made him forget all the things that made him a man.
He hadn’t looked forward to the taste of food, because it was the same monotonous crap. He hadn’t looked forward to the day for the same reason.
Prison jumpsuit, the same four walls, the same fenced yard. Day in, day out.
He had forgotten sexual desire for four damned years because there was no excuse or reason to think about it. It was the last thing on his mind. He just wanted to get through.
The act of riding his horse out in the sun... It was something that he had taken for granted.
He had forgotten what he’d come from.
When he had escaped home and gone to the rodeo he had tasted freedom, and he hadn’t looked back.
He’d taken it from Oregon to Texas, from poverty to riches. And he’d felt free. Free from what he’d been born to, what he’d been raised in.
Then everything had fallen apart, and he had lost all that he’d built, and he would never take for granted the ability to do what he wanted ever again. He maneuvered his horse up a trail that led up a wide-open grassy hilltop, and from that vantage point, he could see another horse and rider down below.
Pansy.
He hadn’t taken note, but he also hadn’t seen her horse in the stables, which meant that she was taking advantage of the nice weather the same as he was.
He urged his horse into a trot. “Behind,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder, jumping slightly. “Oh,” she said.
“We both have the same idea.”
“Apparently.”
He couldn’t help but notice the delicate indent of her waist, the flare of her hip and her heart shaped ass. She was a damned gorgeous woman.
An inconveniently gorgeous woman.
“I haven’t been out in too long,” she said, clearly begrudging his presence.
“Me either.”
“I’ve always liked to ride.” She seemed to surrender to the fact that he was there, and decided to go ahead and make conversation.
“I learned at my first job. I got work mucking stalls at a ranch when I was thirteen. I got paid a little bit of money, and they let me ride the horses. Couldn’t ask for better.”
“I grew up on a ranch,” she said.
“So you mentioned. A cattle ranch?”
“Yeah.”
“But you never wanted to run the ranch?”
“Well, my uncle ran it mostly,” she said. “He and my dad owned the ranch. The property. Together. And my dad went into law enforcement, helped support my uncle if he needed backup during busy times and contributed financially.”
“Makes sense.”
“Since he’s the oldest, Ryder was the one who ended up taking over everything when they died.”
“I always wanted a ranch,” he said. “But by the time I had money, I was managing a big financial office. So, it didn’t make a lot of sense. We had some horses, some land. Kind of a dream, I guess.”
“What happened?”
“I guess that depends on who you ask.”
“Like?”
“If you ask my wife’s lawyer, then she would tell you that my wife is the real victim. That she tried to make a life with a man who didn’t love her. That she felt trapped. Utterly and completely. That because of my relationship with her father she felt like there was nothing she could do and no one she could go to. And if you ask her directly... Well, she’d say that I didn’t leave her any choice. I wasn’t the man that she thought she married. I didn’t do things the way