Page 21 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

They were well cared for. They were happy. They had family, a roof over their heads, a mother who adored them, and he couldn’t find fault in any of it.

That didn’t mean he was happy about it.

Maybe there was no getting himself happy about it.

Because what Zeke had said to him was settling in, like its own kind of ache. He still thought his father was wrong to not have told him—but whatwouldhe have done? What would he have done if Rosie had come and found him as soon as she’d learned she was pregnant?

Here, now, it was easy to puff up and claim thatobviouslyhe would have done the right thing, whatever that looked like for Rosie—but would he have?

Ryder knew himself pretty well and he doubted it.

And that sad, selfish truth sat in him like indigestion, making it hurt to breathe.

He sat there a long time. And he might have sat there longer still, but he was interrupted from his contemplation of the darkness before him, the suggestion of mountains in the distance, and the outlines against the night sky by a set of headlights coming down the track he’d made in the snow.

He braced himself for Wilder, but it was Boone’s truck that pulled into view, and then bumped its way right up next to his. Boone looked over at him, then climbed out of his own truck and came around to swing himself into Ryder’s passenger seat.

“I saw lights where there shouldn’t have been any lights,” Boone said with a grunt as he settled, the blast of cold air from outside swirling around them both. “Had to come see what was happening over here.”

“What did you think was happening?” Ryder asked, genuinely curious. It was after midnight on a very cold night after another snowstorm. It was a typical February night in Montana and smart people were tucked up indoors, as close to a heat source as possible.

“Could be poachers,” Boone said, in that deadpan way of his, as if there was a rash of poaching exploits in the dead of winter. Or ever, because this was Montana, where everyone was armed.

Besides, there was nothing to poach in this snowy clearing.

The brothers sat there a while, contemplating the night.

“What are you doing wandering around so late?” Ryder asked. Eventually.

Boone shrugged, a rustle of his heavy jacket. “I was down at Sierra’s. Something going on with her generator and there’s a whole lot of winter to get through yet.”

Ryder considered that. “And her husband’s not around to handle that sort of thing?”

He figured that he’d kept his tone sufficiently neutral when it came to the contentious topic of Boone’s lifelong female best friend, because Boone actually answered. “Business trip.”

If Ryder was any other one of his brothers, he would have jumped on that. He would have pointed out that no husband worth his salt would ever have tolerated the relationship that Boone had with Sierra. And no, he didn’t reckon that Sierra’s husband was simply more highly evolved or trusted his wife or any of the other things Boone had said over the years to make it seem like anyone asking was deeply immature.

It was pretty clear to Ryder that he didn’t care.

He could have said all of that, but he didn’t. He had his own problems.

Problems that the entire community of Cowboy Point was going to know all about, likely by morning. Assuming they didn’t already know, thanks to the Stark brothers.

He saw no reason to give Boone a preview.

Besides, he still had no idea what he was going to say once the parentage of Rosie’s twins was public knowledge. The twins themselves had accepted that he was their daddy and that was all thatreallymattered, he decided.

“I need to get over and see what you’re doing with that dairy,” he said instead. “Though I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to feel about the fact that folks around here are signing up for anartisan milkman.”

“If it wasn’t me I would hate me,” Boone agreed with his big, booming laugh. “That was Sierra’s idea. She lives down in Marietta and has a first-row seat to the kind of crafty, artistic takes on regular things that people are drawn to these days. Everyone wants small, local, and accessible. They want to meet the cow that made their milk and their cheese, and if it could come in a pretty package? Even better.”

“Please tell me you do not have meet and greets with your herd.”

Boone looked over at Ryder. “Oh, it’s on now. This summer? I’m making the herd a tourist attraction. I might give them their own social media account. Just wait.”

Ryder couldn’t engage with the idea of social media cow accounts, which he had a sneaking suspicion probably already existed. “A tourist attraction. Here.”

“The dairy is all the way over on the other side of the creek,” Boone said with a laugh. “Mom made it pretty clear that she didn’t want to wake up of a morning with a dairy smell coming in her windows. But I guarantee you, she’ll be all over it when the weather’s nice and the city people come down from Bozeman to cosplay the farming life for a week or so.”

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