Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,135

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