Page 2 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

“It’s all good,” Zeke said out loud as he navigated the path through the snow. “It’s only going to get better now.”

And when the wind picked up, it sounded like a song, and he knew that was his Alice. Checking in and letting him know that she was with him, still and always. That she approved of what he’d done so far.

Not to mention what was to come.

“You’ll see,” he told the wind. His lost, first love. “They’re going to be happy, my love. Just like we were.”

It had been a dark, late morning. A gloomy day. And now it was fixing to be another long, stormy night. There was already snow coming down as he made his way back from the barn toward the house, but it never failed to make his heart sing a little bit in his chest. The beauty of this place, even covered in winter, that he knew enough to make sure he got out in as often as he could.

Because men who worked the land weren’t meant to be house pets. That he knew. And in winter, folks who lived in places where winter clamped down hard and held on tight, it was necessary to get out there and enjoy the weather no matter how grim it got.

Hibernation only worked if you were a bear.

The lights in the windows of the house beamed out at him as he drew close, beckoning a man in.

He stomped his way into the mudroom, peeled off the heavy outer layers that kept the cold at a reasonable level, and padded into the kitchen in his heavy winter socks. The heat of the house made his cold cheeks feel even colder at first, though they warmed as he made his way inside.

Belinda was sitting at the kitchen table, looking through some papers. There was a big spread of the bespoke spurs and bits that were Zeke’s hobby, gleaming in the light. More than just a hobby now, Zeke thought. That was thanks to Kendall and the booth she’d set up for him at the summer market, and the website she’d built for him too. Things he’d never thought he’d ever do.

Everything around here was changing. For the better.

“Ryder’s coming home,” he told his wife.

Belinda looked up from her stack of papers, a grin breaking across her face. “You really sold it at Christmas. Clutching that blanket around your shoulders like the next draft might take you out was a nice touch.”

“It was some of my best work,” Zeke agreed.

Belinda’s grin widened as she gazed at him, another surefire way to get that song going in his heart.

Zeke was an extraordinarily lucky man. Alice had been a gem. An angel. She had made everything around her better until the day she’d died. Now he spent a lot of time talking to her, and saw the signs she sent him in return, as they both watched over their grown sons.

He had never stopped loving her. He never would.

Belinda was more of a storm. She still swept him away with that smile of hers. She had taken on his first three boys as if they were her own, helped him raise them, and had always treated them like they were no different from the two younger boys she went on to make with him. She had never begrudged his love of Alice, or demanded he get over it.

On the contrary, Belinda grew flowers in the warmer months for Zeke to put on Alice’s grave. In the colder months, she drove down into Marietta to get arrangements from the florist.

Zeke’s life had almost too much love to bear.

So why not add more? Why not pack it as full as it could get?

“Do you know how hard it is for me to see those little boys in town?” Belinda was asking, her grin fading a bit as she shook her head. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it myself.”

“I imagine because Rosie didn’t want any of us to see it,” Zeke said, mildly enough.

Though this was not a topic he feltmildlyabout, he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to get Belinda too riled up.

Belinda trulyriledwas far more worrisome than anystorm, as he could attest, having done his share of riling her up over time.

It had been late in the fall when he’d figured out the truth. Rosie Stark, a member of an old Cowboy Point family, had shocked the whole community a few years back by coming home after her college graduation pregnant.

With twins, no less, and Zeke had spent a good amount of time kicking himself for not cluing into that. She had a pair of identical boys, had never mentioned the father, as far as anyone could tell, and flatly refused to engage in any of the rumors surrounding her.

Zeke hadn’t thought much of it—aside from the usual pleasure he took in psychoanalyzing his friends and neighbors, a particular joy in a small town where a man could be sure he was providing everyone around him with a similar narrative. Not, that was, until the day that Zeke ran into her and her boys in the store and recognized the dark eyes staring back at him from a little boy’s face.

Alice’s eyes.

More to the point, his three oldest sons’ eyes.

---