Page 11 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

And all of the excuses she’d used all this time were true. But it didn’t matter, did it? He could have checked in with her, that was true. He’d been there that night. He knew what had happened between them.

Still, she was the one who knew that she was pregnant and she should have told him. She should have found a way. She’d let herself get wrapped up in the pregnancy. In trying to keep two perfect, active babies alive. In trying to raise them and love on them, and all the rest of it.

But a reckoning had always been coming.

Sooner or later.

Rosie couldn’t breathe for the next few days. It was like she expected him to come leaping out from any shadow, and she braced herself, thinking that it would be imminent. Surely his father would have told him, if not back when he’d seen Rosie, then certainly now that he’d moved home.

By the second week after Matilda’s announcement, Rosie knew that he really had moved home. Everyone knew. It was all that folks could talk about as the winter kept dragging on.

Rosie had to hear about it every time she took the twins to their cute little nursery school in the basement of the church out past the creek. She had to hear about it when she went into the general store, and every single person who came in felt called to muse on the topic with whatever member of the Lisle family was manning the till.

If she was the forthright, stand-up woman she’d always believed she was, she would handle the situation herself. She would get in her car, drive up onto the Carey’s ranch, and inform Ryder of the fact that he was a father.

But try though she might, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

Mostly, she thought as she lay awake in her bed at night, the boys making their usual sleep noises on the baby monitor from their room across the hall, it was because she didn’t want to face him.

Because the last time she’d seen him had been that morning after.

Even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant that night, that particular morning would still be haunting her. That was how awful it had been. That was how intent he’d been onmaking surethat she knew she meant absolutely nothing to him, no matter what had happened between them that night.

Ryder had scraped her off like she was nothing but dirt on his cowboy boots, and she wished it was only her pride had been hurt by that. But it wasn’t.

It wasn’tjusther pride, and that was the part she couldn’t forget.

That was the thing that made it impossible for her to go and face him the way she should. Because she’d been foolish enough to spend that night thinking that it allmeant something, and that was horrifying. She thought that if she had to see that pitying smile of his ever again—

But February kept moving along, and she couldn’t keep herself on high alert the whole time. She had a whole life that she was living, the one she’d built when she’d come back here pregnant.

It might not have been the one she’d planned, but it was a good one. She cleaned out some of the rental properties around town, because more seemed to pop up in their little community all the time, even in the winter. She’d talked to a few of the owners—because she knew them all—and got herself the gig.

Now, while the twins were in nursery school, she went and hit whatever units need a cleaning. Rosie wouldn’t be jetting off to any fancy locations anytime soon, but cleaning allowed her to keep herself and her kids fed and clothed and not a burden on her family.

And, bonus, she liked cleaning. She did not have OCD, as Matilda claimed. Rosie liked the simple pleasure of setting things to rights.

She never really ran into members of the Carey family that much anyway. She didn’t spend time in bars, where the single brothers often were. She wasn’t a rancher. It had been a complete fluke that she’d been in the feed store when Zeke was that day.

As more time passed and she didn’t see him, she relaxed.

Rosie began to think that maybe they would all just carry on as they were, and it was a relief. She told herself that it was the way things were supposed to be.

And Ryder wouldn’t stay here. That wasn’t who he was.

He was a problem that he would solve on his own, no need for her to get involved.

Then one day, right as February was getting ready to give itself over to the roaring March lion waiting in the wings, she picked the boys up in the afternoon the way she always did. She took them home, let them out to romp in the snow, and was unloading the groceries when a truck pulled up in front of the house.

And then everything happened much too fast.

Like a nightmare, Ryder Carey was standing right in front of her. Right there, in the front yard of the little house that she and Matilda lived in, tucked away on the hillside below the lodge.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she blurted out, making both Levi and Eli shriek with scandalized laughter, because they knew that she wasn’t supposed to sayhell. It was a bad word that only their naughty cousins said, as they always reported back with glee.

“I’ve been meaning to come over here and see you,” Ryder said, very formally, and Rosie felt like she was having an out of body experience.

Because he was as beautiful as she remembered, maybe more so. And she’d never heard him soundformalbefore. That night had been all about that slow, hot smile…

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