The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,101

her badly. She let herself live in a house that was falling down around her.

She didn’t know how to give more than that. And it started with the way she saw herself.

West was lucky enough to have some youthful idea that he deserved more. But he had thought that he had to change himself first.

And he was suddenly staring at the evidence that until a person accepted themselves. Until a person found some way to love themselves, they really couldn’t figure out how to give it to other people. Because they didn’t know what the hell it looked like.

“I’m sorry,” West said. It didn’t make what his mother had done to them right. And it didn’t mean that if she started loving herself tomorrow everything would magically change.

Love meant wanting better. Love meant trying.

Love wasn’t a passive acceptance of the way things were, or the way a person was.

Love was active. The evidence of it would show up everywhere. If she loved herself, her life would look different. She would look different.

So would his. So would Emmett’s.

And he’d done a whole lot of thinking since last night about what it would look like if he could accept himself. If he could find a way to stop holding bits of himself back. But maybe that was it.

Maybe it was just finding out a way to be all right with all that he was. From those white trash roots to the mistakes he’d made escaping them. His failings and his relationship with his mother. With his wife.

Even with Emmett. Accepting it and finding a way to be open in spite of it.

He was the man from here. The man who had married his wife. The man who had gone to prison.

That was all him. All decisions he’d made that had led him to those places. He was ready now to embrace this new life. This new path. To be the man that Emmett needed. The man that Pansy needed.

And in order to do that, he knew what he had to do.

“You did the best you could,” West said. “I’m just fine. And Emmett...he’s going to be just fine too.”

He could see relief winding down his mother’s spine. Relaxing her posture. “I always was proud of you,” she said.

He put his hand over hers for a moment. Then took it away.

She finished signing the paperwork, and he took it and headed back out the door, headed back to Gold Valley.

Back to create the life that he’d never known he wanted.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

WHEN PANSY ARRIVED home from work there was a picnic basket at her door.

There was a note attached to the top of it, but even without the note she would have known who it was from.

She smiled and bent down, looking at West’s bold handwriting.

Dinner for two.

She looked around, wondering where he was. And suddenly, she saw him. Riding up to her on an actual white horse.

“What are you doing?”

“I think it’s called a romantic gesture,” he said, maneuvering the horse right up to her front door.

She straightened, taking hold of the basket.

He looked...well, he looked like some damned fantasy come to life. He was wearing a white Stetson, a white T-shirt and battered jeans, along with some well-worn and expensive looking cowboy boots. He had one of those big rodeo belt buckles that she had never thought she would find compelling, but did now. And she was just wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans.

Which...was what he was wearing, but somehow with all the cowboy trappings it seemed a bit more spectacular.

Her bad boy was on a white horse, at Redemption Ranch. And it all seemed so surreal, so perfect, she could hardly wrap her mind around it.

“Let me give you a hand up,” he said, reaching out his hand.

“You’re kidding,” she responded.

“Nope.”

She hesitated, then took his hand with the free one that wasn’t hanging on to the basket, and he hefted her up off the ground right in front of him on the horse.

“Shouldn’t I ride on the back?”

“This is fine,” he said, his breath hot on her ear.

He put one hand on her stomach, and used the other to guide the horse out of her yard and onto one of the trails that lead away from the house.

“What if I had plans?” she asked.

“I’d ask you to cancel them. For me.”

There was something about that request. That he would ask her to make him a priority that...unsettled her. Because they had been doing this thing as if it were convenient. And