July 28, 2020

The Hero of Hope Springs

Will Gold Valley’s most honorable cowboy finally claim the woman he’s always wanted?

For as long as brooding cowboy Ryder Daniels has known Sammy Marshall, she has been his sunshine. Her free spirit and bright smile saved him after the devastating loss of his parents and gave him the strength to care for his orphaned family. Only Ryder knows how vulnerable Sammy is, so he’s kept his attraction for his best friend under wraps for years. But what Sammy’s asking for now might be a step too far…

Something has been missing from Sammy’s life, and she thinks she knows what it is. Deciding she wants a baby is easy; realizing she wants her best friend to be the father is…complicated. Especially when a new heat between them sparks to life! When Sammy discovers she’s pregnant, Ryder makes it clear he wants it all. But having suffered the fallout of her parents’ disastrous relationship, Sammy is wary of letting Ryder too close. This cowboy will have to prove he’s proposing out of more than just honor…

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 Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch

June 23, 2020
(West Caldwell'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

For as long as Ryder Daniels had known Sammy Marshall she had been his sunshine.

She had come into his life golden and bright and warm at a time when everything had seemed dark and cold.

And like anyone who had been lost in the dark for a long while, he’d squinted against the light when he’d first seen it. Had felt like it was just too damned much.

At first he’d wrapped himself up in a blanket of his own anger and bitterness. But soon all her gentle warmth had broken through and he’d shed some layers. Some. Not all.

And only for her.

Much like the sun, he never got used to her brightness. Time didn’t dull the shine.

Even now as she spun circles out in the middle of the dance floor at the Gold Valley Saloon, he could feel it. Down in his bones. Her blond hair swung around with every movement, tangled and curling, her arms wide and free, the bangles on her wrists glittering in the light with each turn. The white dress she wore was long and loose, but when it caught hold of her skin it was somehow more suggestive and revealing than any of the short, tight dresses out on the dance floor could have ever been.

Ryder looked, because he was only a man.

But Sammy was his sun.

His source of light. His source of warmth.

And much like the sun, he knew that getting close enough to touch it was impossible.

There were two men dancing with her, spinning her back and forth between them, and she was laughing, her cheeks red and glowing. Then with a light pat—one for each of their shoulders—she abandoned them and made her way back over to the table where Ryder was sitting with his siblings, most notably his sister Pansy, and her brand-new fiancé, West Caldwell.

They had called them all out tonight to make the announcement. But Ryder already knew.

West had come and spoken to him like he was Pansy’s father.

And in many ways, he supposed that he was.

When their parents had died, it had been up to him to take care of his siblings.

When their parents had died, all the light in his world had gone out.

It had left him frozen.

Sammy had gotten him through.

And he knew that Sammy would say something entirely different. That he was her guardian, her protector. And that was true in a way. But she had saved him. Had saved him in ways that she would never fully understand.

Laughing, Sammy plopped down at the table, right beside him, her shoulder brushing up against his, the touch a sort of strange familiar torture to him.

It nearly went by unnoticed.

Nearly.

“Does anybody need another drink?” She said, pushing her mane of hair out of her face and treating him to a smile.

“Your friends might want one,” he pointed out.

She cast a glance back at the dance floor. Then she made a dismissive noise. “They’re not in the running to becoming my friends,” she said.

He was relieved to hear it, even though he wouldn’t ever say.

Sammy was everything wild and free. Everything that he never would be.

He had no desire—ever—to try and bottle up that freedom and use it for himself. To limit it. Whatever he thought about it sometimes.

“I’ll get the drinks,” Colt said, getting up from his seat.

One of the cousins that had grown up with them, Colt was only a couple years younger than Ryder. He’d been fifteen when their parents had been killed. His brother Jake had been seventeen.

Reining in the older kids had been one of the harder parts of the whole thing. Because how did you tell someone who was basically your age that they needed to quit staying out all night and maybe try a little bit harder at school?

Well, you just said it, but it didn’t always go down well.

Ryder had been a teenager, not a parent. It wasn’t like he’d been a model for anything good or decent. The only reason he had kept his grades up when he was in high school was because he wanted to stay on the football team. That had been his life.

And he had been untouchable. Golden.

Until he wasn’t.

Until he had discovered that his family was more than touchable. They were breakable.

Until he had to give up college scholarships and other aspirations so that he could take care of everyone.

Not that he would have made it into the NFL after college. He just would have been able to use football to get through school.

It didn’t matter. He had never wanted to be a rancher. He wanted to get out. He wanted to leave home and see the world and have something different. Different than his uncle, who had lived on one plot of land for his whole life.

Different than his father, who had been the police chief of the town he was born in. The town he’d never left.

And here he was. The same. Just the same. And only about ten years younger than his dad had been when he’d died, too.

That was a real parade of cheer.

It didn’t take Colt long to return with drinks, and he passed around bottles of beer. Pansy took one and stood.

His younger sister was pocket-size. A petite anomaly in a family that was otherwise of above average height. Pansy had followed their father’s footsteps. She was currently the youngest police chief Gold Valley had ever had. And the first female. He was damned proud of her. But he didn’t believe for a moment that it was down to something he’d done right.

Pansy was just good all the way through. Determined and strong. She’d had to be.

She’d only been ten when their parents had died.

Poor Rose had been seven.

Yeah. It had been a certain kind of hard to deal with the teenagers. But comforting children who were crying helplessly over mothers who would never hold them again…

That was a hell he didn’t like to remember even now.

So instead he just looked at Pansy, a grown woman with a man by her side.

That had been the first time he had to deal with something like that, too.

West Caldwell had come and asked him for permission. And Ryder had a feeling that he should have rejected that. Told him he didn’t need it.

But he felt like he did.

He felt like he needed it for each and every one of them. Because they were his.

Even Sammy.

Because while she might be the sun in his life, he was her protector.

It was his job to make sure nothing bad ever happened to them.

“West and I have an announcement,” Pansy said, smiling. “We’re getting married.”

Sammy Marshall was in a whole mood. And Pansy’s marriage announcement somehow made her feel even more tender.

She’d come out to have a good time. To forget life and all its irritants. And for a moment, on the dance floor with those guys, it had almost worked.

They were into her. That always made her feel good. A little attention she could control. A little attention that didn’t cost anything.

But then she’d looked over at the table and caught Ryder’s eye and something about him had brought her back down to reality.

Back to who she was.

Though it wasn’t his fault the confrontation she’d had earlier with her estranged mother had lodged itself in her chest and wouldn’t let go and it…enraged her.

She didn’t want to care what her mother thought of her. Or their relationship. Or anything at all.

But when she’d shown up at Sammy’s workshop—an out-of-use barn at Hope Springs Ranch that Ryder let her put all her metal working equipment in—with a tale of woe that was nothing more than a Trojan horse, all sad and wilted with a request for money hiding in the middle, Sammy had made the grave error of letting herself give a damn.

Of course when she’d told her mother she couldn’t give her everything she was asking for, the resulting explosion had been…predictable.

You don’t have any loyalty, Samantha. You never have. You left us.

I couldn’t stay with you.

Because you don’t understand love. How can you? You don’t have kids. And you’d be a terrible mother if you did.

Sammy gritted her teeth and looked over at Ryder, choosing to push her own issues to the back and focus on his. She could tell by the strong, certain lines of Ryder’s profile that he wasn’t shocked. Whatever he thought about his sister getting married, she couldn’t say. Butthe announcement wasn’t a surprise to him.

Not that he would have reacted a whole lot more visibly even if it was.

The whole rest of the table had been fractured by noise the minute that she had made her announcement. But the Daniels family, and extended members, had never been accused of being quiet. No, in fact, they were loud and they were boisterous, and that was one of the things that had drawn Sammy to them in the first place.

Her world had been silence, walking on eggshells punctuated by explosions of violence.

And then next door had been this…wonderful, ridiculous collection of people—children—who had been living without parents. It reminded her of Neverland. Like they were the lost boys. And she had wanted so desperately to fly out of her bedroom window and join them.

The chaos had appealed to her. The anarchy of children running their own lives. But above all else, the tall, strong figure of Ryder had been something of a fantasy in her life.

He was the leader. And she had recognized that immediately. From the mantle of authority that settled over his broad shoulders.

Even at eighteen, she had found him mesmerizing.

Ryder commanded respect with nothing more than a firm nod of his head. Her father, for all his red-faced yelling and bruising fists,hadn’t been able to squeeze respect out of a rock, much less beat it into a rebellious teenage girl.

But Sammy had learned at an early age that there was no amount of perfect that would ever please David Marshall. And so she might as well settle for being as imperfect as she possibly could be.

She had moved out of the house and into an old camper on the property when she had been fourteen. It had helped her keep her distance. Her mother had liked it because she felt that without Sammy’s fractious presence in the house, her father might be calmer.

Sammy suspected that might have been true. But regardless of the truth of it, the arrangement had been better for her.

And it had allowed her to sneak over to the Daniels’s ranch with much greater ease.

It was when she had put her plan into place. Operation: Befriend Ryder Daniels.

The memory made her smile even now. Then she looked at Pansy, and something turned over in her chest.

Pansy had been a little girl when Sammy had first started spending time with the family. And now she was getting married. Starting a family of her own. Pansy was one of the few who had moved out right at eighteen.

The rodeo boys came and went with the season. There was no reason for them to not bunk up on the property when they traveled so much. Keeping a permanent residence didn’t make any sense.

Logan lived in the original ranch house on the property. Rose, Iris and Ryder lived in the main house. Sammy herself had moved her camper onto the ranch when she’d been about seventeen.

Sitting there looking at Pansy, Sammy still felt about seventeen, but somehow Pansy was a grown woman, getting married and…

The way that West looked at her. West loved her.

Sammy had never been particularly drawn to romantic love. For obvious reasons. Her experience with it—with her parents’ marriage—had put her off.

She liked to have a good time; that much was true. She gravitated toward men who had a light, easy approach to life.

But it was all starting to feel a little bit…

She felt achy. She felt like she wanted more. The fight with her mother today had made it feel even more stark, and the vague longing had started to feel crystallized earlier.

You’re not a mother. You don’t understand.

You’d be a terrible mother anyway.

It was insane.

Except it kept coming up in her mind, again and again, and she kept dismissing it because it was crazy. Absolutely and completely crazy.

She came out of her deep thoughts just in time to key in to Ryder giving a toast to the newly engaged couple.

“To West and Pansy,” he said.

“Thank you,” West said, grinning.

“If you hurt my sister, I’ll rearrange that pretty face of yours into something no one would ever recognize as human. Count on it.” He said it with a smile.

“I believe you,” West said.

“Good,” Ryder responded. “You ought to.”

Ryder was teasing. Well, kind of.

Ryder was protective. He always had been.

It was one of the things that had drawn her to him in the first place.

And seeing it now, seeing it play out with Pansy made her feel… He was so sure and solid. Everything here was sure and solid. For the longest time her only goal had been to have a family.

She had made something of a family with the Daniels. More than something. They were better than the one she had been born into,that was for sure. But…Pansy had broken off and now she was making a life for herself, and it reminded Sammy that she was no closer to doing that.

And you want something to change.

She did.

She was doing really well with her handmade jewelry business. Online marketplaces and an interest in craft fairs had done very well for Sammy. She had something of her own.

She wasn’t dependent. Not anymore. But… Well, but.

It was her mother. The sameness of her mother combined with the accusations her mother had spit out.

Sammy’s mother was the same as she always had been. Brittle and angry, her skin pulled too tightly over her bones. Committed to misery and bad decisions, when before the death of her father Sammy had been convinced she’d been committed to him.

But her father had died five years ago. A heart attack. Which felt right. A heart ill-used, turned hard and scarred. A heart that allowed the abuse of a child. That didn’t burn at all when he’d turned his rage and fists on the little girl she’d been.

It seemed right a heart like that would give out early. Poisoned by the spite that surrounded it.

Though she knew death found many good people that same way, so it was probably just a random occurrence.

It comforted her to think otherwise.

When he’d died she’d believed that maybe she and her mom could…that maybe with the enemy gone they could find a way to having a relationship. But no.

Paula Marshall had proven that while she hadn’t made the particular kind of misery she’d found with her husband, she hadn’t wanted to find anything else in life, either.

And she was angry at Sammy for leaving. For walking out on the abuse.

I wouldn’t do that to my child.

She hadn’t said it to her mother earlier, but she thought it now in defiance.

She would be a better mother. She knew she would be.

And she could change at any time. She wasn’t frozen the way her mom was.

Her mom was still in that house. Like she was tied to it.

Sammy wasn’t like her. She could…she could do whatever she wanted.

And that feeling in her chest, that insistence, expanded.

Without thinking, she turned to Ryder. “Can I talk to you?”

Ryder looked at her, one brow arched. “Sure.” He stayed rooted to his seat, as if he didn’t understand that she was clearly asking to speak to him alone.

“Outside,” she said.

He was going to tell her she was crazy. She totally knew that. But she really wanted to talk to him about this. About her idea. About what she wanted to do to move her life to where she wanted it to be.

She was thirty-three years old. At some point there had to be more than just sponging off her best friend’s family, using his kitchen and parking on his land. At some point she had to make something for herself. Something of herself.

She didn’t want to be her mother.

Never changing.

Tied to something that had no real power to hold her anywhere anymore.

What if she wasn’t destined to be like her mother at all?

That had been itching at her brain now for a while, a restlessness in her soul she hadn’t been able to define.

Until today.

And even though she knew that Ryder would tell her she was crazy, she wanted him to know what she was thinking.

Because his opinion mattered, even if she didn’t ultimately do what he suggested. It just mattered. He mattered. He always had.

“If you’re asking me my opinion on any of the guys out on the dance floor it’s grim.”

She laughed, reaching out and placing her hand on his shoulder, the connection instantly soothing her. “No. I already told you none of them were in a running for my particular brand of friendship.”

“Good thing.” She laughed at his stern mouth. Honestly, he could be such a…brick wall.

“I’m not asking you to help me pick out my date for the evening. I am not asking for your opinion on my choice of bra.”

He shook his head. “Thank God.”

She’d only done that once. She’d been seventeen. And she wasn’t sure what had possessed her to do it. A need for attention, most likely. She had narrowed down quite a lot of her behavior to that one root cause. When she had been young, she had been almost entirely driven by that need. She had settled into something a lot more comfortable over the past years. More comfortable with herself, which had translated into her being more comfortable with everyone around her, and a whole lot less…random and volatile.

“I’ve been thinking about something for a while,” she said as they walked out the front door of the saloon and onto the main street.

The streets were crowded, and it was dark. The air was warm, the sky clear, the golden glow from the streetlamps doing nothing to dim the light from the stars, which were like crushed silver against black velvet.

She loved a country sky.

As long as she could see those stars wherever she was, it could feel like home. And she had done a bit of roaming over the past few years in her camper van, selling her jewelry. But she always came back here.

Always came back to her touchstone.

And she was starting to wonder if that was keeping her stagnant, rather than simply holding her steady.

“Yeah, I’ve been thinking,” she said.

“Okay.”

“I’m so proud of Pansy. Of how she’s grown up. And that makes me sound about a thousand years old but…”

“Hell, you practically raised them,” he said.

“No, you raised them. Iris did. But I was there. And watching her and Rose particularly become the women that they are is really inspiring. But Pansy… She’s in love. She’s making her own family. An offshoot of what you have. And that’s an amazing thing. It’s so brave.”

“Sounds exhausting to me,” Ryder said.

“Yes, I know your opinions on marriage and the institution thereof. Also your stance on children. And I don’t blame you. I really don’t. You know why I first started giving you sugar cubes?”

“Yes. And I told you a thousand times. The sugar was not required.”

She smiled. It had started with sugar cubes. There had been a spot where she’d gone, in the mountains, and she’d looked down on the ranch imagining she was part of them. Until she had ached with it. Been full with her longing for it. She had begun sneaking into the barn, and she had given the horses at the ranch sugar cubes. And then she had started leaving them behind. Leaving them for Ryder. It was how he had first known someone was sneaking into the barn at all. She had begun doing it to get away from her father’s rages. Had gone hiding out at Hope Springs, because the name had appealed.

She’d needed some hope.

Ryder had suspected someone was in the barn, but he never found her. Until one day she left an intentional trail of sugar cubes that led right to her.

She could remember it like it was yesterday. Looking up into those stern, brown eyes.

Who are you?

Would you believe I‘m the sugar fairy?

And she held up a sugar cube. Reflexively, he held out his hand, and she had dropped it into his palm. You took my treat, she said. Now you can’t be mad at me.

And somehow after that, she had found a way to make sure she was never away from there — away from him — for very long.

At first he had been grumpy about it. And very unfriendly. But he had let her follow him around while he was doing ranch chores. And after a while, she just couldn’t remember what it was like to go a day without walking around Hope Springs Ranch in Ryder Daniels’s boot steps.

The idea of changing that, of ending it… It made her whole chest ache.

But Sammy wanted more for herself.

And she only had two real thoughts on how to do that.

“I think I’m going to leave,” she said, determinedly looking down the street.

There was a truck stopped at the four-way that headed out of town, two girls hanging out the windows, catcalling the cowboys walking down the street. One of them stopped to do spontaneous push-ups and the girls started howling.

“Okay,” Ryder said, his tone neutral.

“No, not like I do sometimes. Like…really leave.”

“What?” The question was sharp. She could feel him looking at her, but she didn’t look back “Not like…forever. But…for longer than I do sometimes. I think I need to strike out on my own a little bit more.”

“What brought this on?” She could hear the frown in his voice. Laced through with stern disapproval.

She shrugged, as if it wasn’t a big deal and not something that had been nagging at her for ages now. “Pansy. Pansy making her own way. Her own place. Her own family.”

Ryder looked like he wanted to say about ten different things at once, which was strange, considering he never looked like he had more than one thing to say at a time, if that. He said nothing.

“I think it’s the right thing to do,” she said. “Because…I’m happy. But I’m not whole. I have been doing a lot of thinking about what I need to do to have the kind of life I want. I’m not a kid anymore. And it’s all hitting me really suddenly. I’ve always thought of Hope Springs as Neverland, Ryder, but I have to grow up.”

“Is anyone stopping you from growing up?”

“I’m stagnant.”

“You’re not,” he said, his eyes far too sharp and focused. Far too insightful.

“It’s my mom,” she said finally. “She came to the workshop today and…she’s just…stuck, Ryder. She’s committed to her bad choices. I thought my dad held her back but it was her. So what if I’m the only thing holding me back, too?”

“Holding you back from what? Sammy, you’re building a successful jewelry business. You’re a one woman manufacturing machine.”

“But I’m… I don’t know how to explain it. I’m the same. I’m…alone.”

“You have us.”

Yes. She did. The family she’d crashed.

“I know. I don’t mean that but I…I look at my mom and I see someone so bitter about everything. So stuck in these choices she made, and I don’t want to become that. I don’t want to realize someday that I missed out on something I really wanted.”

You’d be a terrible mother.

Rage kicked in her chest. Rage and a desire to prove her mother wrong.

“I want to be more than I am. More than she thinks I can be. Just… Ryder…” She turned to face him finally, and the look in his brown eyes nearly took her breath away. But she continued on anyway because her mind was made up, and it was too late to turn back now. “I think I want to have a baby.”