The Hero of Hope Springs Read online

  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 the 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 aft
er 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.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A LOT OF strange things had come out of Sammy’s mouth in the past seventeen years, and Ryder had been audience to many of them. But he had to admit that this one was up there as far as crazy went.

  “You...want to have a baby.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I want... I want a family. You know that. You know what my home life was like. You’re the only one who does. And you know that I...”

  “It’s not a labradoodle, Sammy,” he said. “You don’t just decide to go get one.”

  “Why not?” She was worked up, that Sammy energy crackling around her like a glitter fire that he could feel somehow rather than see. “My mom told me I don’t understand her because I don’t have a kid. Can you believe that? Of all the insulting... I don’t need to have a child to know that she didn’t protect me. To know that I’d do better. And I want to. It’s my chance, Ryder. To know what it really means to have a mother-child relationship, because God knows I’m not going to get it with mine.”

  “But there are other things you might want to get first.”

  “You think I need white picket fences and a soul mate? Why should I sit around waiting to go through some magic chain of steps to have the life that I want? It doesn’t make any sense. That’s how you end up brittle and alone.”

  He couldn’t make sense of that. Because as far as he was concerned life could only function by the chain of command that it ran in. And when things went out of order on that chain, life got particularly unpleasant.

  Yes, children expected to bury their parents. But not when they were eighteen. Not both parents at the same time. An aunt and uncle, a woman who might as well have been an aunt to him. There was no order to that. To all those little kids that were left behind without parents.

  Parents were supposed to sacrifice for their children. And when they didn’t you ended up with a situation like Sammy had.

  The order of things was a damned goddess as far as Ryder was concerned.

  “You live in a camper,” he pointed out, because if he knew one thing about Sammy it was that what seemed logical to him didn’t always track with her line of thinking.

  “So?” she asked. “Have you seen how much space babies take up?”

  “Sammy,” he said. “You don’t...”

  “I’m not going to go and buy one tomorrow,” she said. “I’m thinking about having one.”

  “Are you with someone?” With Sammy standing there in white, her blond hair lit up by the streetlamps, he was forced to imagine her in a wedding gown. With a man standing beside her. And suddenly, he could easily see a baby in her arms. Cradled close to her breasts. For some reason, the image made his stomach turn sour.

  “No,” she said.

  The image still refused to vanish, in spite of her assurance that there was no man.

  Sammy was a free spirit. The idea of her being tied down to some kind of domestic... Well, he knew what it was like. There was a reason he had no interest at all in getting married. And having a family of his own. He’d raised children. He loved them, with everything he was, and he had stood at the front lines of life protecting them for years. He didn’t want to do it again. He knew what a grim parade of responsibility it could be, and Sammy had no real idea. The relentlessness of it.

  How sometimes you just wanted to go to sleep but you had two little girls having nightmares. Teenage boys sneaking out.

  One time Colt had up and disappeared for two days. The fight they’d had after that had been extreme. Ryder was only three years his senior, but he was in charge. And all he could think of was...

  The responsibility had been left to him. Whether or not their parents had intended that, it didn’t matter. His aunt and uncle were gone, and it had been up to him to keep Colt safe. And at fifteen Colt had most definitely felt like they were essentially the same age. But Ryder felt a burden of responsibility that his cousin would never have understood.

  Because Ryder was in charge.

  Because he was the one who was supposed to protect everybody. And it didn’t stop. Twenty-four hours a day, it didn’t stop.

  Hell, it didn’t stop now that they were adults. And it was ridiculous because he wasn’t a father.

  He had just been a kid who’d had to become a man very, very quickly.

  And Sammy had no idea what she was signing herself up for.

  “As someone who had the benefit of parenthood without all that baby fever stuff, let me tell you, it’s not fun.”

  “I don’t need it to be fun,” she said. “It’s not like I’m wanting a baby as an accessory. I just want... I want to make a home and a family. I don’t think that’s weird. I want
a baby. That’s... Biologically we’re kind of geared toward wanting that. At least I am. I understand that you had your fill of it. And I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you for not wanting to do it again. But I’ve never done it. You’ve taken care of me most of my life, and before that I was by myself. No one took care of me. I want to take care of someone else. I want to... I know it doesn’t make sense necessarily, but there’s something I need to heal. Something that was broken by my parents. I can’t have a mother-child relationship with my mother. You know that. But I can have one with my own child.”

  “Sammy, you need a plan. You need a house. A real job...”

  “I make money with my jewelry.”

  “Health insurance.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said.

  “Sammy, life is expensive. And when you think you got everything under control, one of the dumbass kids that you take care of goes hiking, slips off the trail and has to get airlifted out. And where do you suppose that bill goes? How much do you suppose health insurance covers of air transportation? A lot, but twenty percent of thousands of dollars is still thousands of dollars. You’re one accident away from being absolutely buried.”

  “That’s thinking a little bit further ahead than I need to.”

  “You have to think further ahead,” Ryder said. “You have to. That’s having children.”

  “Ryder, whether or not I go out and get pregnant tomorrow, I need to make some changes in my life. And you demanding that I submit to a life plan is not going to change what I want.”

  He had half a mind to accuse her of wanting to do this out of sheer stubbornness. Or try and call her bluff, because with Sammy, it was very difficult to tell the difference sometimes between a harebrained scheme and a provocative statement.

  She lived to be unknowable, and usually, from his perspective, that made her easy enough to decode. But with this he honestly couldn’t say.

  “All this and you want to leave, too?”

  That got him. The idea that she might not be there. That for the first time in seventeen years Sammy might not be steps away from his front door.

  “Yes,” she said. “You have... You have Hope Springs. It’s yours. You work the land, and you make something wonderful out of it. I admire that. I have my...my thing. But I need to be...”