Page 22 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

Ryder tried to imagine Belinda mucking around with the cows. Not that she wouldn’t. He’d never seen his stepmother balk at a thing. But everyone was older now, and with four large, strapping men around to handle things—five, he amended, since he was technically here right now—why should she continue doing anything that looked like labor? He doubted he was the only one who thought she absolutely should not.

“I’m amazed that you even came up with an idea like this,” he said. “I thought the point of the ranch was to do the same thing that’s always been done, except more so, forever.”

Boone slid him a look at that, but didn’t comment. “A man likes to do something that’s his. Besides, one night I was running my mouth about exactly that and Sierra dared me to actually do something about it. So I did.”

He laughed, like he’d told himself a joke. Once again, Ryder didn’t comment, though he was fascinated by every part of that story. The idea of Boone, a man who preferred to let his actions speak, running his mouth at all took some imagining. And then, again, there was the Sierra factor. Thebest friendthing, when Boone had obviously been in love with her his entire life.

But Ryder was hardly in a position to comment on anyone else’s messy life.

Soon after, when Boone got back in his own truck and drove away, Ryder meant to follow him. Really he did.

Yet instead, he stayed where he was. Maybe it turned out that he liked the view here a lot more than he’d ever thought he would when there was so much world yet to see. There was something about this particular clearing, the specific arrangement of mountains and hills and Cowboy Point in the distance, and the trees that stretched up around him.

For the first time in as long as he could remember, the thought of settling down in a place like this didn’t fill him with that terrible itchiness. That restlessness that snuck beneath his skin, sunk into his bones, and agitated him until everything in him demanded his escape.

He hadn’t felt like that in the week or so he’d been home. That made it something like a record. Usually he was ready to walk to the nearest airport within twelve hours. Maybe he’d been changing even before he saw a whole new world in two pairs of curious dark eyes.

The only place he went tonight was back up the snowy drive. He eased his truck into the other road that forked off and led down around to Wilder’s house.

He turned his lights off before he came out of the trees, because he didn’t want to disturb Wilder and Cat. He made sure the door to his Airstream didn’t slam shut.

Once inside, he marched to the back bedroom, crawled into his bed, and lay there. He stared up at his ceiling, sure that he would fall asleep at any moment.

But he didn’t.

Instead, he found himself going over every single moment of that night in Austin, and by the time he finally slept, it seemed to be for no other purpose than to slide out of memory and into dreams of the same thing.

Rosie. Always Rosie.

When he finally got up the next day, he’d slept most of the morning away. There was an insistent sort of snow coming down, crafted specifically to build up the snowpack, not to adorn anything or make it pretty.

He messed around in his kitchen until he got the coffee going, then looked out his windows and saw that there were a number of trucks parked outside Wilder’s house. His brothers’ trucks. And he had the feeling that he was looking at an intervention, so he decided he didn’t need any part of that. He wasn’t ready to defend himself.

And he certainly wasn’t ready to let Rosie be the topic of conversation. Or her boys.

Our boys, he corrected himself.

Instead, he threw on some clothes, went out to his truck, and headed down into Cowboy Point, ignoring the gathering at Wilder’s completely.

He heard his phone buzzing, but ignored that too.

Without even meaning to, at least not consciously, he didn’t take the road all the way down into town. Instead, on the crest of that hill where the old lodge stood he turned off winding his way into the trees until the road looped him around to Rosie’s house.

When he knocked on the door, she answered, already frowning at him.

“They’re napping.” Her voice was short. He didn’t like it. “You can’t just show up here, Ryder.”

“You could maybe ratchet back on that tone of voice that suggests I show up here all the time, out of the blue, when you and I both know that’s not the case.”

“You literally showed up yesterday. Out of the blue.”

“You’ve known that you’re a parent for a lot longer than I have, Rosie,” he said then, in a low voice. Her expression changed, so he continued. “That’s not me blaming you for that. That’s me asking you for a little slack while I figure this out.”

She blew out a breath. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you left last night. Obviously. And I think that there’s no reason we can’t be civilized about it. If we both commit to putting the boys first, I don’t see why we can’t come to a mutual agreement on the best way forward.”

There was nothing inherently wrong with what she’d said. And yet he still didn’t like it.

Maybe because he wasn’t feeling anything like reasonable right now, standing on her front step with snow coming down on the both of them.

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