Page 13 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

His phone buzzed beside him and he picked it up to find his brothers already texting about the work that needed to be done in various parts of the ranch today before their usual Sunday dinner. He volunteered to ride the fences in the north pasture, the better to stay away from everyone until he could make certain he was back to his usual, charming self. And, if he was lucky and the cattle did what cattle always did, he’d get to throw in a little manual labor to boot.

There was nothing like the vastness of Montana to get a man’s head on straight.

And if he’d wasted his opportunity to exhaust his body in a pleasurable way, well, there was always a fence post that needed hammering.

He showered, dressed, then swung into his truck—

But he sat there a moment before he got the engine going, because it smelled like her. Rosemary and lavender, damn her, and spun sugar besides.

That put him in an ornery enough mood that instead of heading out to the pasture he took the dirt road that branched off from his and drove it around to the plot of land where Ryder had yet to build anything.

Ryder, too, had a view of Copper Mountain, but his land was a little bit higher. He could sit here and see the lodge and a slice of the valley beyond, all of it sparkling in the morning light, a lot like Cowboy Point was something off a postcard.

Orsomeonecould sit here and see all that, because Ryder was off trying to match wits with bulls that outweighed him by some fifteen hundred pounds.

Might put up some condos here, he texted his twin.Seems like a shame to let a view like this go to waste when I could upsell it to Californians who will decorate with antlers, wrap themselves in Pendleton blankets, and write bad poems about mountain magic.

I see you woke up and chose violence today, Ryder texted back.What’s the matter? Didn’t get laid last night?

That his twin could tell that little detail from a text—and Wilder didn’t kid himself, he knew it wasn’t a lucky guess on Ryder’s part—did not improve his mood any.

But the day was bright and beautiful. And the sky was without a cloud, breezy and blue… and, he couldn’t help noticing, the precise shade of Cat Lisle’s eyes.

Good thing there were a whole lot of fence posts that needed his attention.

And maybe a little bit of his aggression, too.

By the time he rolled into Sunday dinner at the main ranch house, he was tired and showered and so heartily sick of himself that he welcomed the opportunity to gather round and poke at his brothers a while instead.

He started with Ryder, always his favorite target—a sentiment he knew his twin also held, and closely.

Heading into Sunday dinner now, he texted.Wonder how many of those we’ll have left? But make sure you say hi to today’s bull for me.

Ryder texted back immediately with an anatomically impossible suggestion that made Wilder grin.

He was infinitely more cheerful when he found his way inside, walking into the house that in some ways, he knew better than his own.

This was the house that he’d grown up in. He’d wrestled in every single room with Ryder, taking part in their lifetime game of cheerful one-upmanship that continued to this day. They’d driven his father and his sainted mother, Alice, to distraction. Pretty much daily.

But he didn’t like to think about what pains in the ass he and his twin had been.

After his mother had died and gruff Zeke Carey had somehow convinced the vibrant Belinda to marry him, there’d been even more noise and chaos when the two youngest Careys, Boone and Knox, were born. And now they were all grown and all much too big for their own good as they shouldered each other around in Belinda’s kitchen, pretending they didn’t hear her when she ordered them to stop.

“I will take this meal and give it to the wolves,” she threatened them, as she’d been doing since they were kids. There had never been a single donation to the wolf population, as far as he knew, but the threat worked the way it always did.

In that it brought the din down… a little.

Wilder scanned his dad the way he always did now, looking for signs that it was really happening, this unimaginable thing that no one talked about directly. But Zeke looked the way he always did. Big, brawny, and grumpy as he stood at the counter and carved the roast that Belinda had made. If he was sick, he didn’t look it.

There was a comfort in that, though Wilder didn’t trust it.

Still, the old man looked good today. And that was something.

He looked over to find Harlan beside him, and they exchanged a look that said pretty much all of that in a single straight shot.

And Wilder wasn’t sure he liked the fact that they were all running these same diagnostics, all the time, but that was what he kept trying to come to grips with every morning. Life went on. The sun rose, the dark receded, and then the world put on the same show again tomorrow.

This was comfort or curse, depending.

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