Page 30 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

Something about the idea of Zeke—of all people—spouting philosophy sat wrong with him, but Wilder supposed this wasn’t really the time to argue with the old man. “Are you feeling all right?”

Zeke stood up from the chair, maybe a little too easily and quickly, which had to mean he was overcompensating for his illness. He frowned at Wilder. “What if I told you that I didn’t? Are you working on my last request? So far, it seems only Harlan’s taking me seriously.”

“Harlan always takes it seriously. Everything and anything that can be taken seriously, or better yettooseriously, Harlan is the man for the job.”

But while he usually said things like that in what he considered his charming manner, he was notably free of all that today. He was too busy being a wreck of himself.

He definitely needed sleep.

Zeke stuck his big hands in his pockets. He nodded at the photo of Alice, frozen in joy and light forever—and maybe someday that would make Wilder happier than it did sad, the way everyone always told him it would. Eventually. “I asked your mother to marry me two weeks after our first date.”

Wilder was startled. Then he laughed. “You’ve never told us that before.”

“Whether I told you or not doesn’t take away the truth of it.” Zeke reached down and put one fingertip on the glass of the picture, as if to brush Alice’s cheek. “She sure was pretty. Too pretty. I was sweet on her since we were both fourteen, but her daddy told her she couldn’t date until her eighteenth birthday. And my Alice was a good girl. So the day of her eighteenth birthday, I took her out. And I declared my intentions two weeks later. And we were married six months later, which just so happened to be a week after high school graduation.”

“So she wasn’t allowed to date, but you were raring to go anyway.” Wilder eyed his father. “Interesting story to tell your child.”

“Oh, she was ready to date,” Zeke said, with a flash in his dark gaze that reminded Wilder, maybe a little uncomfortably, that his father and late mother really had been teenagers together.

With all those longings and desires that he really wished he’d outgrown when he’d graduated. That he’d thought he’d at least made manageable, anyway, before Cat.

There were a lot of things he’d thought before Cat, he realized, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to unpick all these snarls when he got to theafterCat part. And only partly because he couldn’t imagineafter.

“She was notallowedto date,” Zeke told him. “But there was never any question that once she did, it was going to be me. And I’m getting that this skipped a generation, but I’ve always been a man who knows what he wants, Wilder.”

“Just a casual reminder that you’re talking about my late, sainted mother, since you seem to have forgotten that part.”

Zeke laughed. “I’ll tell you this for free. It isn’t the knowing that matters the most. That helps, because it gets the ball rolling, but what really matters is being prepared toact. That’s what separates the men and the boys.”

He touched Alice’s face once more and then walked out of the room, leaving Wilder there alone. All the bright light of the room danced around, and his mother’s smile seemed a part of it, but Wilder couldn’t escape the feeling that his father had just delivered a stinging sort of chastisement.

Like he knew.

When of course he couldn’tknow.

Fun fact, he texted Ryder.Dad claims he had eyes on Mom since they were fourteen and chicken hawked her eighteenth birthday. If I have to know that, so do you.

Fun fact, Ryder replied.I never liked you.

But even that exchange didn’t manage to get what Zeke had said out of his head. It hung on, then seemed to take up lodging directly beneath his ribs, like what he really needed was another ache to add to his collection.

That night he told himself that he was going to stay home, get a good night’s sleep, and maybe rethink some things while he was at it.

Instead he found himself in his truck the same as every other night. He eased out from the ranch, headlights doused, so that none of his brothers—or worse, his stepmother, Belinda, who was like a bloodhound when it came to her boys’ shenanigans—would see the lights and wonder what he was up to. A lot like he was not, in fact, a grown man, since last he’d checkedgrown mendid not sneak around like teenagers.

But he didn’t turn around. He didn’t take his grown ass home.

He turned the headlights back on when he reached the first of the many unmarked dirt roads that crisscrossed up here, leading all the way to Mount Chisolm, deeper into the Gallatin range, even over to the Absarokas and up to the Bridgers. Eventually.

But he was headed for a patch of woods near a hill, not a proper mountain.

No matter how much he was trying to convince himself he wasn’t.

When he coasted over the hill to Cowboy Point, he noticed that there were lights on in the lodge—but only in the back, where no one but folks coming in late on these empty mountain roads would see. Wilder took some comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one out here, trying to keep himself under the radar.

He always drove through town first, to get a sense of whether people were out and about and therefore likely to notice his truck and where it was headed. But it wasn’t summer any longer, no matter how folks tried to keep hold of it in the early weeks of September. The rodeo was over. The Farm & Craft market was over for the season. Mountain Mama’s patio tried to stay open on the weekends, with heaters when there was no snow, but it was a weeknight tonight. The pizza place was closed, indicating that summer hours were over.

The only place in town that was open was the Copper Mine, and he recognized pretty much every truck he passed. All locals. That was how to really tell that the summer was over. Cowboy Point shrunk back down to size. And much as Wilder had always enjoyed a tourist experience, when he thought about his hometown it was always like this. Empty enough so a man could hear the beat of his own heart echoed back from the mountains that were always there, sentries and sentinels alike. Quiet enough that it sometimes seemed he had the mountains’ thoughts in his head, not his own.

---