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...

  Praise for the novels of Maisey Yates

  “[A] surefire winner not to be missed.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Slow Burn Cowboy (starred review)

  “This fast-paced, sensual novel will leave readers believing in the healing power of love.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Down Home Cowboy

  “Yates’ new Gold Valley series begins with a sassy, romantic and sexy story about two characters whose chemistry is off the charts.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Smooth-Talking Cowboy (Top Pick)

  “Multidimensional and genuine characters are the highlight of this alluring novel, and sensual love scenes complete it. Yates’s fans...will savor this delectable story.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Unbroken Cowboy (starred review)

  “Fast-paced and intensely emotional.... This is one of the most heartfelt installments in this series, and Yates’s fans will love it.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Cowboy to the Core (starred review)

  “Yates’s outstanding eighth Gold Valley contemporary...will delight newcomers and fans alike.... This charming and very sensual contemporary is a must for fans of passion.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Cowboy Christmas Redemption (starred review)

  Also by Maisey Yates

  Secrets from a Happy Marriage

  Welcome to Gold Valley, Oregon, where the cowboys are tough to tame, until they meet the women who can lasso their hearts.

  Smooth-Talking Cowboy

  Untamed Cowboy

  Good Time Cowboy

  A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

  Unbroken Cowboy

  Cowboy to the Core

  Lone Wolf Cowboy

  Cowboy Christmas Redemption

  The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch

  In Copper Ridge, Oregon, lasting love with a cowboy is only a happily-ever-after away.

  Part Time Cowboy

  Brokedown Cowboy

  Bad News Cowboy

  The Cowboy Way

  One Night Charmer

  Tough Luck Hero

  Last Chance Rebel

  Slow Burn Cowboy

  Down Home Cowboy

  Wild Ride Cowboy

  Christmastime Cowboy

  Look for Maisey Yates’s next novel

  THE LAST CHRISTMAS COWBOY

  available soon from HQN.

  For more books by Maisey Yates, visit www.maiseyyates.com.

  Maisey Yates

  The Hero of Hope Springs

  For the caregivers. You might not be thanked for what you do every day, and sometimes you might be taken for granted, but what you do matters. You matter.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  EXCERPT FROM THE LAST CHRISTMAS COWBOY BY MAISEY YATES

  CHAPTER ONE

  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 d
ance 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. But the 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 st
arted 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.