Well, he thought.Join the club.
The twins went running toward their uncles and Ryder watched them go, with the strangest aching sensation in his chest as he watched howcomfortablethey all were. The ease with which those big, tough Stark brothers threw the little toddlers up in the air, passed them back and forth, and had them squealing with delight.
All things he’d imagined he would do, one day, when he was a father. Before reminding himself that he was never going to be a father.
No wonder it hit different today, now that he was one.
He glanced back at Rosie to find her eyes wide and filled with something like misery. Or maybe it was just plain old misery.
“Heard you were in town,” Noah Stark said, drifting closer. “Keep thinking we’ll see you in the Copper Mine now that your brother’s abandoned us for the ball and chain lifestyle.”
Noah was the youngest of the Stark brothers, and was roughly Ryder’s youngest brother’s age. The three Stark brothers lined up in age, more or less, with Ryder and Wilder, Boone, and Knox. They’d caused a ruckus or two in their time, that was for sure.
But today was something else entirely. Ryder couldn’t think of a thing to say, and the longer the silence dragged out, the more Noah narrowed his eyes suspiciously as he looked between Ryder and Rosie.
Ryder didn’t have it in him to play this off. He just stood there, fully aware of the way his jaw was flexing, and stared the other man down.
Levi and Eli came running back again and careened into Ryder’s legs this time. And Ryder got to watch as the three Stark brothers went through the same gamut of emotions that he had.
They looked at the boys.
They looked at Ryder.
They glared at Rosie.
“Rosie,” Logan said in a low voice. “You don’t really—”
“Why don’t you take the boys up to the lodge,” Rosie said, cutting him off. And though she forced a smile, it was clearly for the benefit of the boys because her gaze was anything but happy. “I’ll text you in a little while.”
“If you put a hand—” Wyatt began, with the bluster that had served him well in many an almost-barfight.
But Ryder was the one who’d taught him how to fight in middle school.
He cut his gaze toward the man he’d known all their lives, and let whatever expression was on his face do the talking.
Wyatt lifted his hands, palms up. He jerked his head at his brothers, and the younger two rounded up the twins. For a moment it was all the high-pitched, exciting chattering of the toddlers, then the truck engine starting up.
And then there was nothing but the kick of the wind on the mountains, that same wild drumming of his heart, and Rosie.
The woman who’d made him a father.
The woman who hadn’t, as far as he could tell, ever intended to fill him in on the fact that they’d made themselves a couple of whole humans.
Rosie cleared her throat. Then again. “You’d better come in, Ryder.”
She didn’t make any eye contact as she turned back toward her car, but Ryder beat her to it. He told himself it was because he needed a task to focus on. It was better than focusing on this terrible sense of betrayal he felt. Besides, he’d had two mothers in his lifetime and they’d both taught him to mind his manners, no matter the circumstances.
He took the grocery sacks out of her arms, jerking his chin toward the front door of the house when she started to protest.
“Fine,” she muttered, her cheeks looking red—redder than they would have anyway, having been outside in all this cold for this long. “Um. Thank you.”
To calm himself, he forced himself to think about the little house that she hurried toward. There was the lodge up on the top of this particular hill, standing there as a glamorous memory of a bygone age. And then, scattered all the way down to the valley floor were little cabins mixed in with slightly more expansive homes, like this one. They had all been built as outbuildings for the lodge in its heyday, as well as housing for the lodge’s workers. He knew the Stark brothers lived in these houses, somewhere—and probably not all piled into the one he was pretty sure they’d commandeered at sixteen and had used to get up to all kinds of no good when they were all in high school. He was pretty sure someone had told him that Jack Stark now lived in the house on the lodge’s grounds. Many of the cabins were short-term rentals these days, something he knew because he’d listened to his brother Knox, the youngest, lay out an entire retirement plan over Sunday dinner that involved short-term rentals andbuilding a portfoliowhile the rest of them sat there experimenting to see which one of them could roll their eyes the hardest.
Big talk from a man who was MIA all morning today, Boone had said. Boone was built like a linebacker, or possibly a bear. He always looked like what he was, to Ryder’s mind. Solid. Dependable. And perfectly capable of kicking some butt along the way.
You have to have a job to retire from it, Harlan had pointed out. In that drawl of his that was as much a smack as a backhand would have been.
He thought about HGTV shows he’d watched while working through his endless physical therapy exercises, for maintenance these days rather than repair. He’d watched the home renovations. Real estate. Properties flipped and fancied up and sold.