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June 23, 2020

The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch

Gold Valley (West Caldwell's book)

This rebel cowboy is looking for a fresh start—will he find more than he’s ever hoped for in Gold Valley?

Police officer Pansy Daniels is the poster girl for responsible behavior. Orphaned as a child, she has dedicated her life to safeguarding her local community. The last thing she needs is a hot-headed cowboy with attitude cruising into town. He may be her new landlord, but that’s no excuse for provoking her…or sending her heart into overdrive.

West Caldwell has come to Redemption Ranch to put his past behind him. Flirting with a pint-size police officer who thinks he’s bad news is definitely not part of the plan, but it’s deliciously easy to get under Pansy’s skin. Then West discovers the vulnerability Pansy keeps so well hidden, and suddenly this renegade cowboy is in over his head. In her arms, West feels like the man he always wanted to be—but can he become the man Pansy deserves?

Also In this Series:

Cowboy Christmas Blues

October 1, 2017
(A Gold Valley Novella)
Smooth-Talking Cowboy

February 20, 2018
#1
Untamed Cowboy

June 19, 2018
#2
(Bennett's Book)
Good Time Cowboy

August 21, 2018
#3
(Wyatt's Book)
A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

September 25, 2018
#4
(Grant's Book)
Mail Order Cowboy

May 1, 2018
#Novella 2
Hard Riding Cowboy

August 1st, 2018
(Calder's book)
Snowed in with the Cowboy

September 1, 2018
Unbroken Cowboy

April 23, 2019
(Dane's Book)
Cowboy to the Core

June 18, 2019
(Jamie's book)
Lone Wolf Cowboy

July 30, 2019
(Vanessa's book)
Cowboy Christmas Redemption

September 24, 2019
The Hero of Hope Springs

July 28, 2020
(Ryder's book)
The Last Christmas Cowboy

October 13, 2020
The Heartbreaker of Echo Pass

June 29, 2021
(Iris's Book)
Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch

October 26, 2021
(Jake's Book)
The True Cowboy of Sunset Ridge

December 28, 2021
(Colt's book)
Solid Gold Cowboy

June 1, 2021
(Laz's Book)

Excerpt

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 is 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 to him. No, it was just the site of his financial and personal destruction.

He had been raised in Sweet Home, Oregon, before high-tailing 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 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 than the grassy rolling hills that he had learned to call home in Texas. There were Oregon grapes, fritillarias and ferns instead of bluebonnets. And the flat fields were backed by jagged mountains.

And hell, in Texas, the cop that pulled you over might just be Chuck Norris. So, he supposed he should be grateful that at least this one wasn’t a Texas Ranger.

He looked in his rearview mirror, and watched as the cop car stopped. He had hoped, just a little, that it would go on by. But no.

Then the door opened, and the uniformed figure inside stood. He could just barely see the top of her shoulders and head above the door.

It was a woman. Brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, dark glasses over her eyes. She was small. She slammed the door shut with the force of a much larger person, her belt and gun bulky on her tiny frame.

She hitched that belt up, like a bad cop show, and walked slowly over to the driver’s side of the vehicle. He pushed the button on his truck window and rolled it down.

She appraised him for a moment, just a moment, before she spoke.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” she asked, lifting her sunglasses and sliding them back on her head.

“Can’t say that I do, officer. But I bet you’re going to tell me.” It was clear from the way the corners of her mouth—not a bad mouth even given it was all severe—turned down that she wasn’t into his brand of humor.

“Damn straight,” she said. “Seventy-five. Max speed on an unmarked rural road is fifty-five.”

“Well, see,” he said. “I’ve been living out in Texas for the past sixteen years.” He maximized his long-ago acquired drawl for effect. “Everything is bigger there. Including the speed limits.”

“A shame you’re not in Texas anymore, Dorothy,” she returned, sharp and tight.

“You sure you want to mouth off like that? I pay—”

“You pay my salary?” She sighed heavily. “Try again. Please come up with something slightly more original if you’re going to try to insult me or take shots at me in any way. And I’m going to warn you. People are not as original as they think they are. This is a universal truth. Now, go ahead mister. While you dig for your license and registration, feel free to create a comeback that will dazzle me.”

“You sound a bit jaded for a…” he looked her up and down “…nineteen-year-old. And also, it’s a bit rich that you’re dogging me about clichés. What’s with the aviator sunglasses?”

“I like Top Gun.”

His eyes fell to her name tag. There were no discernible female curves beneath that dark blue uniform shirt and her flak jacket beneath. “Officer P. Daniels.”

“Officer Daniels will do.”

“What does the P stand for?”

“Pissy and not paid near enough to banter with you.”

She was quick. That didn’t make her less annoying. He produced his license and his registration, and she walked back toward her cruiser, where he knew they liked to run information, or maybe in her case check her lipstick.

Maybe he would say that to her when she came back.

“You have a lot of speeding tickets,” she said. “Mr. Caldwell.”

“A fair few.”

“A fraud conviction.”

“An exoneration,” he responded.

“That doesn’t show up.”

“A quick internet search will show it. I was in the news.”

She huffed a laugh. “Well, let’s hope this doesn’t end with either of us being in the news.”

“That would be ideal,” he said.

He looked at her name tag again, and for the life of him, couldn’t figure out why her name was pulling him up. It sounded familiar, and he didn’t know why.

“Well, I can’t really let you off for good behavior, since according to your record, you don’t have much of it.”

“And here I heard small towns were supposed to be friendly. This is how you welcome new residents?”

“Only when they insist on leading their own Parade of One down one of my highways in a big ass Ford truck, paying no mind to the speed limit.”

“Well, damn. That kinda runs roughshod over my grand marshal fantasies.”

“A shame. It’s an expensive ticket, too.”

Expensive ticket. Didn’t the hell matter to him. He had money to burn, and he was investing a lot of it in his brother’s school that he ran on the Dalton family ranch. But he was also working at getting his own place up and running. He had just bought his own property, and his own house that had…

“But what does the P stand for?” he asked.

“It’s not really relevant.”

“Penelope. No. That’s not right.” He squinted, trying to remember the paperwork that he’d gone over earlier in the week. A tenant agreement had been in there with all the mortgage stuff. And just then, he remembered the name. It was a stupid name, and that was why it had stuck out.

“Pansy.” He snapped his fingers. “Officer Pansy Daniels.”

Denim blue eyes widened. “What?”

“I believe I’m your new landlord. You going to write that ticket or not?”

By the time Pansy got to her brother’s house that night, she was still reeling over her interaction with West Caldwell.

When she had pulled the truck over earlier today she had imagined it would be a routine stop. But then she had approached the vehicle, and he had been the kind of good-looking that had punched straight through her bulletproof vest and left her without air. Which was disturbing, because Pansy wasn’t really prone to fits of breathlessness over men or anything else.

Life had beaten the ability to be surprised right out of her from an early age. She was tough, because she had to be. Because every last one of the Daniels siblings had to be. Raising themselves on Hope Springs Ranch hadn’t been easy.

They’d had each other, but they’d had a whole lot of hard too.

She didn’t often consider her name one of those hardships. Not anymore. She had gotten over her peers making fun of her at a pretty early age. And anyway, now she carried a gun, so people were much less inclined to mock her. But today, today she had hated it.

That man was not only good-looking, he had a smart mouth, and he was in fact her new landlord. And the whole power structure of their entire interaction had suddenly been flipped on its head when he’d said that.

She’d written him the ticket anyway.

If he was going to evict her…well, so be it.

Yes, she was in the middle of a year lease, so legally it would be difficult for him, and yeah, it would maybe see her right back at her brother’s house, which she didn’t really want to do, but she had to stick to her guns. There was no way that she could not write him the ticket just because he was her landlord.

No. Gregory Daniels, police chief, would never have not written someone a ticket just because they might use that to hurt him.

Her father had been a man of integrity. A man worthy of his uniform and his badge. He was Pansy’s idol, and always had been.

She wasn’t going to balk over something like that.

She sighed heavily and got out of her car, her service weapon locked up in a special box inside. She’d changed out of her uniform and into a T-shirt and jeans. She always felt oddly light after a whole day at work in all of her gear.

When she’d first joined the Gold Valley Police Department, it had felt heavy.

Now, when she was out of all her gear, she felt strange. Plus, when she went home to Hope Springs, she wasn’t Officer Daniels.

She was just a little sister. At least as far as Ryder and Iris were concerned. Rose was the youngest, but that didn’t stop her older siblings from treating Pansy like a baby.

Even Sammy was a pretty terrible offender, and she hadn’t even grown up with them. Though, close enough.

Her cousins would have been on hand to continue treating her like a child, too, if they hadn’t all gone off to make their way in the rodeo. Now they were on the road so much Pansy barely saw them.

They were an eclectic group of siblings, cousins and friends, bonded together by tragedy.

They’d lost their parents on the same day. A catastrophic small plane crash during what had been intended to be a relaxing vacation in Alaska for their parents.

Ryder had been the oldest at eighteen, and had suddenly had not only unimaginable grief on his shoulders, but a heavy amount of responsibility. And the local Child Services had agreed to let them all stay together. Live together on Hope Springs Ranch. Agreeing that introducing instability after such a great tragedy would only be worse. Pansy had been ten. Rose had been six. They were the two youngest and had spent the longest stretch of their childhood without their parents.

At some point, Sammy had joined their ragtag crew, running from her own family issues—though her parents were very much alive.

It didn’t matter who was related to who biologically. Hope Springs was a refuge for those who were out of hope.

And as for Pansy, her siblings, her cousins and Logan, they were linked. Tied together by a deep and terrible tragedy that few people would ever be able to understand.

They could just look at each other and know. That it was a particularly hard birthday or that the anniversary of the accident was weighing heavily on one of them.

That was why, no matter where she went, no matter what she did, this place was home.

And the people in it were the most important ones to her. Even if they did still treat her like a kid.

It was Sammy who rushed out to greet her, all wild blond hair and flowing skirts. Ryder’s best friend was so feminine that sometimes she made Pansy downright uncomfortable.

Samantha had been one of most dominant female influences in Pansy’s life. She had started coming around about six months after the Daniels siblings had lost their parents, and Pansy still had no idea how Sammy had managed to wiggle her way in. The friendship between the free-spirited woman and her taciturn older brother always mystified her.

She was half convinced that Sammy had targeted him, decided that they would be friends and simply hadn’t gone away when Ryder had said no.

Nothing that she had witnessed had yet to disabuse her of that notion.

“I made lasagna,” Sammy said. She grabbed hold of a mass of blond hair, wound it around her wrist and then effortlessly looped a scrunchie over it into a big messy bun.

Pansy was suddenly incredibly conscious of her own tight ponytail that had not a single strand out of place.

She didn’t know why the contrast between herself and Sammy suddenly hit her so hard. Only that it did.

“Great,” she said, ignoring that weird feeling. “I’m starving.”

“Me too. But I’ve been sampling garlic bread liberally.”

“You slapped my hand when I took some,” Ryder said, coming out of the sprawling ranch house behind her.

“I’m the chef,” Sammy said, pointedly. “I can do what I want.”

Ryder shook his head, but didn’t make further comment.

Like her, her older brother was a rule follower. Though she wasn’t sure if he was one by nature or if he was one by circumstance. It was hard to say.

Not even she really knew when it came to her own self. Because she had a hard time remembering life before her parents’ death in clear detail. It had made her terrified at first. Paranoid. She had been afraid every time Ryder had gotten in his car to drive to town to go to the store, much less go farther afield. And then sometimes she’d remember herself, her behavior, and sadness would overtake her entirely. All the ways she’d disappointed her dad, and how she’d never been able to make up for it.

What she found solace in was her dad’s legacy. She had found purpose in it. She had focused in on it. And she had come to the conclusion that if she was in authority, she might feel a little more control over her life.

Ironic, since her dad had clearly still been vulnerable enough to die in a plane crash. But somehow it all made sense. In a strange way.

And even if it didn’t make sense when it was all spooled out in front of her like that, she didn’t much care.

In the end it might not make her safe. But it would make her good. Would do his memory proud. And that… Well her real fear was that she might not manage that.

She would rather be carrying a gun either way.

“Just as long as you left some for me,” Pansy said. “I’m starving.”

She walked across the gravel drive, and the four ranch dogs seemed to sense her presence, running in from the direction of the barn barking with glee. The little pack was much like her family. Ragtag and thick as thieves. Comprised of a malamute, an Australian shepherd, a border collie mix and an unidentifiable rescue mutt Rose had found on the side of a highway.

“Yes, yes,” she said, bending down and petting the dogs. “I’m here.”

It wasn’t long before Logan followed up behind the dogs, his cowboy hat pushed up off of his forehead, dirt on his chiseled face, his blue eyes shining all the brighter for it. “Afternoon, Pansy,” he said.

“Hi yourself,” she said.

Logan wasn’t blood related to them, but he was like a brother to her all the same. His mother had been killed in the plane crash with her parents. He’d been staying with them for the duration of the trip, and he’d never left.

“Arrest any bad guys today?” he asked.

“It’s Gold Valley,” she said.

“And?”

“No.”

It wasn’t like they didn’t have crime, but actual arrests weren’t a daily occurrence. There was a handful of regular troublemakers who got into scrapes now and then but didn’t pose much of a threat to anybody in the community.

Of course drugs were a problem, no place was immune to that. Then there was domestic violence, which crossed all economic lines.

There were crimes that as far as Pansy could see came from a certain kind of desperation. Then there were crimes that were just hideous. Insidious. Urban, rural, rich, poor. No place or person was totally safe.

She was lucky, living where she did, that she didn’t see a host of terrible things—the population was sparse, and there was a lack of anonymity in small towns that made it difficult to hide. But they had their issues.

“Thank you for your service,” Logan said dryly.

“I’m not in the military.”

He gave her a mock salute and headed toward the house. Pansy rolled her eyes. “Is Rose here?”

“Yes,” Sammy said. “She shouldn’t be far behind. I think she was out doing chores with Logan today.”

Logan, Ryder, Iris and Rose still all lived at Hope Springs. Sammy’s camper van had been parked on the property for the most part since she was sixteen years old. She would leave for a while to sell jewelry at different markets and 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.