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.