The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,4
fairs in the summer, but never for long.
Sammy wasn’t involved in ranch work, but the rest of the family who lived here was. It didn’t make sense for Pansy to live there, and anyway, she prized the independence. She followed Sammy and Ryder into the house, and the dogs trailed in behind them. She could hear her sister Iris shouting from the kitchen.
“They live here,” Ryder said. “Nothing you can do.”
Iris came out of the kitchen shaking her spatula. “It’s our home. They don’t need to have the run of it.”
Both Ryder and Logan looked at each other and shrugged.
Iris sighed heavily, looking to Sammy as if she would take a hard-line stance on animals running roughshod through the house.
“Don’t look at me,” Sammy said. “Remember, I tried to make a case last year for us having a house cow.”
As the oldest sister, Iris had taken on a stern matriarchal role, where Sammy had always been a feminine free spirit.
It didn’t matter that Iris was stern. Pansy loved her anyway. Or maybe, even loved her for it. She knew that her older siblings had really taken the hit for the kids.
The house itself was worn. Wood floors with the finish worn off in high traffic areas, and claw marks from the dogs. Rugs that were shoved to one side, couches that bore the impressions of the people who sat on them in their very particular spots. There was a huge TV in the living room, a giant table in the dining room, with eclectic chairs all around. There were high ceilings and exposed wooden beams, large windows that looked out on the fields and mountains that surrounded the house.
And from the entry there was a prime view of a big sign that hung up over the end of the driveway that matched the one out on the highway: Hope Springs Ranch.
A cattle ranch they’d worked to run as a family, and keep family run, for generations. With her siblings having to take over much earlier than anyone had imagined they would.
For a long time, Pansy had hated the name Hope Springs. Because it had felt so ironically named when all of them had been left without much evidence that hope did a damn bit of good in the world.
But sometimes now she felt like she could see it. In the way the sun spilled over the ridge of the mountains, gilding the edges of the pine trees. In the way the cows looked dotting the fields, healthy and contained by strong fences. Evidence that the ranch itself had sustained them.
They’d experienced the kind of loss that could have destroyed them. But from it they’d made a life richer than most people could ever hope for.
“Did anything interesting happen while you were at work?” Sammy asked as she went into the kitchen, grabbed a stack of chipped plates and started to place them on the table.
“Well,” Pansy began. “I gave my landlord a speeding ticket.”
That earned her a moment of silence in the chaotic house. “You didn’t,” Logan said.
“I did,” Pansy confirmed.
“Before you found out he was your landlord?” Logan asked. “I mean, he’s the new guy, right. I remember that you were a little worried because old Dave Hodgkins was selling Redemption Ranch.”
“Yeah. I mean... I didn’t know that when I pulled him over. But I found out pretty quick. And then I wrote him a ticket.”
“Why?” Sammy asked.
“You probably could’ve negotiated for some money off your rent,” Logan pointed out.
The very idea of fudging the system that way made Pansy’s pulse quicken. “No,” she said. “I’d never do that.”
Pansy was absolutely adamant about following the rules. Doing the right thing. Honoring her father’s legacy.
Pansy Daniels knew exactly who she was, and what she was about.
It would take more than a handsome lawbreaking landlord to shake that.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’M RETIRING, PANSY.”
“Retiring?” Pansy looked at her boss, the police chief of Gold Valley, in absolute shock. He was in his early fifties, and his dark hair was still more brown than gray. She couldn’t imagine him stepping down from the job. Sure. That kind of thing happened all the time in high stress municipalities. But not Gold Valley.
Roger Doering had been police chief ever since Pansy’s father had died seventeen years ago, and in many ways he had become something of a father figure to Pansy himself. No, he would never replace her father’s gruff certainty, but he was someone who had always been there for her.