Page 20 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

“I didn’t ask you for parenting lessons,” he gritted out. “I want to know why you knew something of critical importance to my life and chose to keep it to yourself.”

Zeke looked up at him then, and while he didn’t look unbothered anymore, he didn’t look apologetic, either. “What would you have done?”

Ryder stared back at him, aware that every muscle in his body was tense. Particularly his jaw, which felt soldered shut.

“What would you have done?” Zeke asked again, as if he was being gentle and reasonable when Ryder would have preferred a punch in the mouth. “If I called you, back in the fall, would you have packed up everything you own and hurried home? And if you had, would you have come here to make Rosie’s life easier or harder?”

Again, and not for the first time today, Ryder felt winded.

“I’m your son,” he managed to get out.

“You are. And Rosie Stark is a good girl. She’s been through a lot in this town.”

He didn’t addalone, but it lingered there, like an accusation made into another piece of metal for his father to use as he pleased.

“Dad, I don’t know how to break this to you, but you’re supposed to support your own family first.”

“And in public, that is what I will always do,” Zeke told him staunchly. “Even in private. You know that I’ll always support you. You’re my son and I love you. But between you and me, Ryder. Man to man? Well. That’s a different story. I can support you and also not do what you think I should.”

Ryder had always wondered if a man knew he was having a heart attack before it happened. Now he wondered if it happened like this, his own heart beating so hard and so intently in his chest that it felt like he was clobbering himself from the inside out.

“So you think she was right to hide the existence of my children from me for years. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“I didn’t say that.” Zeke kept his gaze level on Ryder’s. “But I can understand why she did it. Can’t you?”

And the thing was, Ryder really could understand it. He’d told Rosie that much himself.

But he sure didn’t like hearing it from his own father, dying or not.

Though Zeke had sure seemed healthy as a horse while doling out the kill shots tonight. No frailty or blanket around the shoulders in sight.

Ryder threw himself back outside to find the snow had stopped. His breath made clouds against the night sky. His heart was a percussion section. He felt as if something was holding him in a tight grip, and squeezing him more by the second.

He glared back at the barn and the obstinate father who certainly seemed healthy enough to be throwing zingers, getting in some metalworking, and casting aspersions on his own flesh and blood.

This homecoming thing was getting more complicated by the moment.

He got in his truck and drove back down the hill, but instead of turning up Wilder’s drive, he took the other drive toward his own little plot.

It took some doing. No one had driven down that way since the snow had started coming down in the fall. Ryder had a bit of a time making sure he stayed on what ought to be the road, instead of skidding off into the trees.

When he got there, the plot was still cleared, because that’s what he and Wilder had done with both of their bits of land as soon as they’d got them. They’d cleared them off together, talking big games about what they’d do with them, and then… hadn’t.

Or anyway, Ryder hadn’t. Wilder had built his first cabin the summer after high school. Then he’d added to it and updated it throughout the years.

Ryder had taken all the savings he’d ever had and had made the down payments on his truck and his Airstream. Then he’d left, heading straight for whatever rodeo would have him.

Tonight he parked his truck in the general area of where a cabin would sit, if he ever got around to building one. He hadn’t thought about settling down like that, not in a long time. Maybe not ever, not really.

But all he could think about tonight were the faces of those little boys.Hislittle boys. Levi and Eli, names that almost rhymed but didn’t, just like him and Wilder. He’d spent most of the night staring at the two of them, trying to figure out if he thought they favored Rosie more, or him. Every time he thought he had the answer, he changed his mind again the next moment.

They were as different as they were alike, two silly, funny, happy little boys.

Tempting as it was to sit here and get dark and grim about all the things that had been kept from him, and he could certainly go that route—he could see the entrance yawning at him from afar—he had to factor in the inarguable fact that Rosie was doing a good job with them.

That was no small thing. Ryder hadn’t had to leave Montana—or even Cowboy Point—to understand that parents didn’t always do the best job with their kids. Especially not when they were on their own. He’d certainly gotten a broader view of that kind of thing as he’d traveled around the country again and again.

His sons—and something in him seemed to sputter to a halt, then pound back to life at the thought of it.His sons.He swallowed, hard.

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