Page 15 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

It had always seemed like shell games within shell games to him.

By the time Rosie pushed her way to the front door that she apparently didn’t keep locked—as he remembered it, no one locked anything this high up in the mountains, because why bother when there were so few people—he thought his blood pressure was back within manageable limits.

Inside, the tension rose again as the door swung shut and closed them in. But it was tempered somewhat by the fact that they had to stand there in the small foyer, shrugging out of their heavy coats, kicking off their boots, and adjusting to the heat indoors.

It was hard to keep the tension at its height when a man was padding across the living room floor in his socks.

Rosie didn’t sit, so he didn’t either. She stood there, closer to the door, like she wanted the option of bolting if necessary. Then she crossed her arms and looked at him as if she was waiting for him to roll out the nearest guillotine.

All those things he wanted to shout at her out there in the front yard, all of that disbelief and fury and something like betrayal, were… not exactly gone. But that roaring boil of too many feelings had calmed itself down into a simmer.

“What I need you to tell me,” he said, as carefully as he could, “is—”

“They’re yours,” she snapped at him. “I realize you don’t know this about me but I don’t, in fact, get naked with every cowboy I meet.”

“I know they’re mine.”

That came out a lot less careful. Their gazes slammed together, and that wasn’t the greatest idea. Because her gaze was wide and that remarkable shade of blue. And he didn’t need the wordnakedhanging there between them, either. He remembered her beneath him, gazing up at him, those too-blue eyes wide and glazed with heat and—

Rosie cleared her throat again. “Oh. Okay. I guess I thought the first thing you would ask me was to go get a blood test or something.”

“Those little boys look exactly like Wilder and me when we were their age,” Ryder said, forcing himself to keep his voice even, if not anything likeeasy. “I remember, but there are also pictures all over the house I grew up in. There are only two men in the entire world that could be their father, Rosie. And if a woman he’d slept with was suddenly walking around pregnant, then produced twins, Wilder would probably have some questions. So that leaves me, doesn’t it?”

He watched as she stood a little straighter. Squared her shoulders. How she took her time doing it, like she, too, was trying to keep it smooth. Like she wanted to actually talk, not give into the heightened emotion that was pressing in on them in the small, tidy living room with windows that looked down the hill and into the valley.

And Ryder counted himself lucky to have known a whole lot of beautiful women in his time. So many that they sometimes seemed to blend together, and that was a shame. But this was the one that had haunted him.

This was the one that had really gotten to him, apparently, because after Rosie, it was always and only her face that he saw before him. Though he knew better than to say something like that, no matter how many unkind thoughts he might have been tempted to have about Rosie in that moment.

She was still gathering herself, so he did the same. Though what gathering himself looked like in this scenario was studying her.

Like she was a mystery that needed solving, and quick.

The most obvious thing about Rosie was that she looked exactly the same as his memory of her. That pretty gold and copper hair of hers that gleamed like summer even now, in the depths of February, was tucked back into something smooth and elegant. That perfect face, with a stubborn chin and the sort of mouth that made a man’s imagination take over, was actually even more beautiful than his memories.

She had been dressed in jeans and cowboy boots down in Austin, with one of those strappy little tank tops for maximum distraction, and it had worked. Today, she was dressed for Montana cold, and that was never too fancy—though she was making a run at it. She was wearing jeans that did fantastic things to her bottom, but they also looked pristine. Not the least bit ratty or ripped or even stained. And the sweater she wore looked like one of those thin wool jobs, all about heat with none of the bulk, and he appreciated that, because he could see she was exactly as attractive as he remembered. Long legs. Wide hips. That indentation between them that he’d spent a lot of time appreciating that night, with a decent handful up top besides.

Rosie Stark was pretty. There was no getting away from that.

There was something else about her that he hadn’t been able to define. Not that night and certainly not that morning after, when he’d been tempted to break his cardinal rule of one night only to see if maybe two nights might be even more fun—

But she’d woken up and looked at him with her heart in her eyes, and he’d reacted badly.

Now, under completely different circumstances, he could still see her heart in her eyes. Difference was, he now had a better idea of what it was about her that got to him.

It was that Stark stubbornness, very obvious to him now, as she made no attempt to explain herself. She simply stood there as if awaiting his judgment.

“I’ve been going over the reasons that I didn’t tell you, and I still think they’re all as valid as they were then,” she said, after a good long while. Before he could react to that, she inclined her head a little. “I also don’t think they’re a good excuse.”

That took a pretty decent swipe out of his outrage, and so Ryder listened as she laid it all out. Her thinking. Her notion of what he might do, should do, and hadn’t. The fact that—valid or not—her life had felt like rolling heavy stones down a steep hill and at some points, it was all she could do to not get crushed.

He tried not to react, though he could feel the urge to respond, to fight, to argue, well up in him—

But this wasn’t about him. He kept reminding himself of that. Whatever he felt—and he felt plenty—he would deal with. In the meantime, he had to think about those little boys. The sweet heartbreak when they’d gripped his hand, because they werehereand they werehisand he didn’t know them at all.

And they didn’t know he was their father.

Yet.

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