Page 31 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

The smaller it was here, the bigger it felt.

Something in him seemed to break loose when he realized that Cat made him feel the same way.

But that still didn’t get him to turn back.

He drove down the line of tall pines, pretty sure that they were all looking down on him disapprovingly. Pines were like that. He flipped a U-turn at the library square, then waited there a moment with his headlights off again. Just to make sure the coast was clear.

While he waited, he saw a familiar-looking truck pulling out of the road that led back to the new doctor’s place where Cat was working—something he fully supported, if only because she’d said that her so-called defection from Lisle Hill had given her brothers matching coronaries.

You should keep working there,he’d told her, letting her scent wash all over him while he held her, his face in her hair.Become a nurse andreallywork there.

Cat had shifted to look up at him, a strange expression on her face.It’s hard to become a nurse, you know. It’s not a sexy Halloween costume. You have to get a degree.

He’d smoothed his hand over her hair, all that lavender and rosemary wrapped in sugar, wishing she didn’t affect him like this and yet reveling in the fact that she did. She always did.Who says you can’t get a degree, kitten?

Wilder rubbed his hand over his eyes, convinced he could smell that scent here and now, when she wasn’t even here. He focused on the pickup easing its way into the main road, a lot like its driver was as concerned about spectators as Wilder was.

It sure was a curiosity, he thought.

But in order to ask his baby brother Knox what he was doing with the good doctor at such an uncivil hour, Wilder would have to reveal the fact that he was out there creeping around the streets of town himself.

So he filed it away while he waited for Knox to head off toward the ranch. Once he was gone, Wilder pulled out of the library parking lot, found his way to the head of his favorite dirt road, and bumped his way along it like he did every night now. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it blind.

His guiding light was Cat.

And he still didn’t understand how it had happened.

He texted her when he arrived at the usual spot, then got out and settled back against the front bumper of his truck, happy that the night had turned so cold already. It felt sharp, and the sharpness felt like clarity.

It had taken a couple of weeks for him to admit that this was actually happening, it wasn’t an accident, and therefore he needed to make sure that he had her phone number. Because he didn’t want her waiting around in the woods randomly—or heading out to dance in bars instead of the kind of dancing they did when they were alone.

Sometimes they texted other things. Wilder admitted, out here in the bite of a night too filled with truth, that he liked that.

A lot.

That dream he’d had still had claws, sunk in deep.

Tonight it took her longer than usual, but soon enough he heard her coming. It made him smile, because though she tried her best to be stealthy, moving through the forest swiftly, he could still hear her.

Like she was the thing the mountains sang about, deep inside him.

And he smiled when she appeared, because he couldn’t help himself. Because his Cat always looked the same to him.

So wildly, easily beautiful, with her dark hair all around her and that look on her face, like she couldn’t believe her luck.

When Wilder was pretty sure that he was the one who was lucky in this scenario.

Cat ran to him, because she always did. She ran, she jumped, and he caught her, every time.

He’d been lying to himself about how good that felt, too. That she trusted him enough to jump.

That he’d never failed to catch her.

And there was something about all of this tonight that felt unwieldy and edgy inside of him. It was all part of that same raw ache, and that grief-edged conversation he’d had with his father, and he couldn’t account for it. He didn’t understand it.

The only thing that seemed to make it better was his hands deep in her hair and his mouth on hers.

And maybe the real story here was that he was a weak man, after all. Maybe all this time that he’d been so sure he was doing his own thing, he’d just been running—the same as Ryder was. Running and running from the things that mattered, and claiming that he wasn’t doing exactly that because he wasn’t some weird loner. He was a Carey. He had more brothers than necessary, too many old friends, and this tight community of people here that he’d known his whole life.

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