The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch - Maisey Yates Page 0,28
she wanted, and I didn’t care about giving her the life that she expected. So while I was still thinking we were happy, she was plotting to frame me for fraud. And succeeded.” He took a breath. “You know, you come to a certain acceptance of the fact that life isn’t fair. I mean, when you have a beginning like I did, you don’t have a choice. But there’s also an idea in the back of your mind that the American dream is available to you. If you work hard and stay the course, you can become whatever you want. We see it in movies all the time. Rags to riches. And I did that. So at some point I figured maybe I was safe. But I was wrong. Life is always there waiting to punch you in the teeth.”
Pansy made a musing sound. “As a kid who lost her parents I get that. I knew life wasn’t fair in the beginning. A deep dark fear I didn’t even know I should have was realized when I was ten years old. I became an orphan. But you’re right, even with being an orphan you’re trained to think it’ll all be okay. You watch enough movies... Scrappy orphans can overcome anything, right?”
A sad smile tugged at the corner of her lips. “I had read a series of books about brothers and sisters who lived in a boxcar after their parents died. They lived by themselves, and they survived that way. It seemed like an adventure. But when it really happened to us... It didn’t seem like much of an adventure. It was just sad. And we didn’t have a rich grandfather who came to rescue us. We had a ranch instead of a boxcar. But... I guess to an extent sometimes I think everything is supposed to be all right now because I already paid into all that. My... Good Luck Bank or whatever.”
He chuckled. “Yeah. I figured I had spent all the bad luck I could possibly have in a lifetime. But no. I ended up in jail for something I didn’t do. And honestly, as bad as that is it was worse that it was because of my wife.”
“You must’ve loved her a lot,” Pansy said, sounding much sadder for him than she should.
He shook his head, looking out over the rolling hills that led to the base of a tall, craggy mountain blanketed by jagged pines.
“No,” he said. “I loved the idea of making a life that looked a certain way. I loved the idea of being the kind of man who had a wife like her. A house like mine. A job like I had. With a desk and an office. A view. I felt like I beat the system somehow with it. But you don’t. I guess that’s the lesson there. You don’t really beat the system.” He regarded her closely. “I suppose you became the system.”
“I know that doesn’t protect you,” she said. “I mean it didn’t protect my dad.”
“I don’t suppose.”
They rode on in silence for a while, neither of them saying anything as they continued on down the grass covered hills. Purple flowers bloomed all around them, with sprays of pink and yellow interspersed throughout. The mountains looked like pieces of green velvet layered over each other. A natural collage, the pines all torn edges.
It was the kind of beautiful that made a man’s soul ache.
Gold Valley might be getting in his bones now.
He had let himself forget how beautiful it was in Oregon. Let himself forget who he was for a while because it had been better to think that maybe he had started in Texas. That he was somewhere else and someone else, and all the things that had come before didn’t matter.
Coming back to Oregon, coming to find the Dalton family, had been the opposite of that.
Leaning into finding out where he came from and what he was built from.
If he was stitched together with rodeo glory, the scent of the forest and personal failure.
Because he had a sense that he might be.
Just like Hank Dalton.
He’d tried to be something else, after all, and that hadn’t worked out at all. No. Not at all.
“I haven’t ridden this far before,” she said, when they came to the edge of the trees. There was a trail that blazed on through.
“It continues along the base of the mountain,” he said. “Goes to a small pond.”