Page 25 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

Sometimes he laughed without making a sound and she felt him do it then, because she could feel the rumble inside his chest. “I don’t know that I can answer that, seeing as how I’ve never not had one.”

“But you have other brothers. Is there a difference?”

“People like to talk a lot about twin telepathy, and magical powers that twins have, and all that stuff,” Wilder said.

“That’s not true? How disappointing.”

“Oh, no, it’s real.” He laughed. “That’s the thing. I have brothers, and I have always been close to them. I would like them even if they weren’t my brothers. Ryder…” He did that laughing thing again, and she couldn’t hide the way it made her smile. Not from the stars. “It’s not really like thinking about a different person.”

She shifted so she could look at him, or really more at that exquisite line of his jaw. “Is that a good thing? Or a bad thing?”

“That’s another question I can’t really answer. I just know him. The same way I know me.” He shifted her weight on him, pulling her closer. “Like right now, I’m kind of pissed at him, because I think he should come home. We’re a little too old for him to be riding bulls the way he does and he’s almost certainly going to break himself into a thousand little pieces. But I also know why he’s doing it. We don’t need to talk about it.” His chest moved. “I may or may not send the odd text or two to define my position.”

Cat turned into him, her face immediately warming the closer she got it to his body. “I always wished I had a sister around my age. Or at all. Tennessee and Dallas are so much older than me, something they bring up as often as possible. If you ask Tennessee—”

“I make it a habit not to ask Tennessee anything.”

She grinned at that. “But if you did, he’d probably tell you that he was more father to me than our father ever was, and that’s true. That doesn’t make for a tight sibling relationship though. How could it?” She stretched out a little because she liked to experiment with how short she was compared to him, and how far down his legs were when they were lying side by side. Also, she just liked touching him. Any possible way she could. “And you know Dallas. He was never exactly approachable, even before the Army got ahold of him. And then, you know, after Ruthie left…”

She trailed off, because Dallas certainly didn’t talk about his young, brief marriage, and didn’t exactly encourage speculation on the topic, either. No matter how much Cat had liked the sister-in-law she’d only had for a little while after Dallas had come home from his last tour. So it felt vaguely disloyal to be talking about it at all, and much less to a person that she knew her brother wouldn’t approve of.

“Having a twin isn’t like that,” Wilder said after a moment. “It’s like if the part of you that you most wanted to control walked around and did what it wanted, so you got to be mad about it but never able to fix it.” But he was grinning as he said it.

“Does he feel the same way about you?”

“Oh, definitely. Obviously, he’s wrong.”

And he was still grinning when she crawled up and kissed him, until they both stopped talking about their families for a while.

More days slipped away, and things were busy in town. The annual rodeo was going on down in Marietta, and so the Cowboy Point businesses were staying open and still celebrating their summer hours, because everybody knew that they had long, cold winter months to look forward to—and soon. There were still tourists wandering around town despite the chill in the air, and Cat could always tell the ones who’d come in from far-off cities, likely through fancy Bozeman. They always wanted to stand about in the store, taking pictures of things like the bear spray near the toiletries. And they all but applauded when she spoke, a lot like they thought she was an actress in a play.

And maybe their brand of boundless confidence rubbed off on her, because one day on her lunch break she wandered over to the old homestead that Dr. Ramona Taylor was turning into her clinic. It was over by the library and the school, set a bit back from the main road, and a nice little walk on a pretty afternoon.

Though Cat could see the snow on the top of Copper Mountain, the same as everyone else. It would be piling up on the roads soon enough.

“I thought this house was empty the entire time I was growing up,” Cat said when she went inside and found Ramona sitting there, cross-legged on her wooden floors, going through boxes. “Then I found out that someonewasliving here, but he didn’t come out much. I like the idea that someone is actually living here again. I was beginning to think it was haunted.”

“If it was, they settled down,” Ramona replied. “But then I always was my grandfather’s favorite.” She smiled at Cat. “And only, to be clear.”

“I’m glad ghosts have favorites just like everyone else,” Cat said. “Makes them more cuddly, almost.”

“I’m going to have to take your word for it,” Ramona said. “Having never spent much time trying to cuddle ghosts.”

“Your loss.”

Ramona jerked her head in the vague direction of the back. “I’m almost finished moving in myself.” Cat must have had the same look she’d had on her face that night at Mountain Mama over Labor Day weekend, when Ramona had announced her plans, because the doctor laughed. “It’s not that I disagree with what you said about how making a clinic a live and work space is almost certainly not ideal. But it’s a nice house. And I don’t know how to renovate the shed out back into anything livable, so why not make this house a home too?”

“The important thing is that it feels like a home,” Cat agreed, and it was easier to say that while in the house, because it looked less haggard than it had her whole childhood. Everything was bright and clean. “That’s what my mom always says. You can live anywhere. But there are only a few places a person can call home.”

“She sounds like a wise woman.”

“Probably too wise for her own good,” Cat said with a laugh.

Ramona stood and brushed off her jeans. She was still effortlessly beautiful, which was probably never going to stop being annoying, but her gaze was direct. And after dealing with so many people in a retail situation for the whole of her life, Cat had always prided herself on having an excellent sense of who people were.

This person, she would have sworn to it, was genuine.

“I know how to do the medicine part,” Ramona told her. “I’d even venture to say that I’m good at it, and I have to think that’s a big part of the battle. But I can already tell you that I’m going to be terrible at managing my time in my office. Can you help me?”

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