The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,54
way. But I’m not going to let you ruin that kid’s life. I just won’t. So yeah, maybe that doesn’t make you happy. Maybe I failed as far as you’re concerned. But I hope that I helped him. And I hope that you can find it in yourself to treat him like he’s a human when he’s here. He has been failed by every adult in his life. Don’t join that list. You’re right. I’m not my dad. But I do know what it’s like to grow up without a dad. Just like Emmett. He’s nothing but a fatherless child. Give him a chance. Show him that he can come back from a mistake. Punish me if you need to. But don’t punish him.”
She turned and walked back out of the Community Center feeling deflated. More upset than she should.
She had come to town to run away, to find solace in the familiar. And she hadn’t been able to do it. She hadn’t been able to make herself feel fixed.
West.
West was to blame for all of this. Anger burned in her chest, doing something to cover up the pain. The uncertainty.
She drove. Just to drive, and when it got dark she finally headed back toward her house.
She still didn’t want to go inside. Didn’t want to go to bed. So she headed out toward the barn.
Maybe she would find some clarity there.
But the light was already on. And it wasn’t clarity she found inside.
It was West.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WHEN PANSY CAME storming into the barn, West knew that one of two things was about to happen. Either she was on the verge of hauling off and punching him in the face, or she was on the verge of flinging herself in his arms.
West knew which one he would prefer.
Instead, she stopped herself short, standing in the center of the room, anger and uncertainty radiating off of her tiny frame in waves.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
“I didn’t mean to,” she said.
“No. But you have something to say to me. That much is clear. So you might as well.”
“You’re ruining everything,” she said. “Absolutely everything. Before you came here everything was fine. But you brought you... And you brought Emmett, and now I have a one-woman wrecking crew trying to destroy my campaign for police chief.”
“Technically you don’t get elected, do you?”
“Not in a technical sense, but I’m being chosen with the help of this very specific panel. And she’s an influential part of this selection process. And she...she told me that I was never going to be like my dad. You know what? She’s right. But before you came, I wouldn’t have believed that. But you...you make me realize that it’s true. I’m not my dad. I’m not ever going to be. I don’t have his dedication to law and order. I’m too soft, and I’m too... I’m weak. And the harder things get with this job the more I notice it. But that’s because of you too. Do you know what I was thinking about last night before I went to sleep? It wasn’t my job.”
“I hope it was me,” he said, heat igniting in his gut.
She hated him either way. So if she wanted to blame him for a little bout of self-destruction that was fine by him. But he wanted her. He wanted her, and he was damned tired of fighting it because he wasn’t a man who had ever engaged in much altruism in his life, but here he was trying to do his best to take care of his half brother, and he couldn’t resist her on top of it.
Yes. She was an entanglement. Yes, she was a hell of a lot more trouble than he wanted to get involved in, but she woke up places in him that had been sleeping for a long damned time.
Places that he thought irreparably damaged by the betrayal of his ex-wife. The years of prison he thought had damaged him beyond repair.
Because the West who had gone into prison wouldn’t have come straight out and looked for his father. He would’ve come straight out and looked for a hot, willing woman to take to bed.
But everything had gotten twisted up somehow. His life, himself and somehow as little sense as she made, Pansy felt like a solution in the middle of it all.
Like a return to what he’d been, and he was hungry for that.
Hungry for her. So if making her angry brought her closer, made those eyes glitter, made her face