Page 31 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

The more time he spent with his new little family, the more he questioned himself about the ways that he’d operated in his own family all his life. Because this instant family deal of his was great. He loved these kids. They fascinated him and entertained him. They were their own little people, and it was something like awe-inspiring to see the way they learned their way in such a big world all around them. He and Rosie would put the boys to sleep, then he would follow her downstairs. And then, if Matilda wasn’t around, the two of them would end up stretched out on that couch in her living room, driving each other crazy.

Rosie insisted they stay dressed. Ryder, happily, had always been a creative thinker.

Every night it seemed to get hotter, better, in a way that really should have alarmed him.

But it didn’t.

It was like he’d been waiting for this his whole life.

One typically frigid morning, he and Wilder sat in Wilder’s truck, bumping around through snowy pastures. until Ryder found himself something like emotional as he gazed out at the splendor of this place. Snowcapped mountains in every direction. The sweep of this land that had been in his family’s hands for generations.

It all felt like it landed in him differently, now. He could imagine taking his own boys on a tour like this, making sure that they knew that they were connected to the sky so big, the mountains so tall and watchful, and the sheer courage and grit it took to carve out a life in between the two.

“You must be clawing at the walls,” Wilder said. When Ryder only lifted a brow, his twin laughed. “Last time you stayed in Cowboy Point this long, you had a calendar on the bedroom wall where you marked off each day like you were in prison.”

At first Ryder had no idea what he was talking about. Then he laughed, too. “I was a teenager.”

“It’s not like you stuck around when you weren’t a teenager any longer, though, is it?”

There was no heat in that question, no guilt trip or underlying attempt to shame Ryder one way or the other. Maybe that was why it resonated the way it did.

“Things are different now,” Ryder said after a moment or two. “There’s Dad, first and foremost. That’s why I came back.”

Wilder only shook his head at that, his mouth flattening out. “I still find it hard to believe.”

Ryder couldn’t go there. “I don’t want to believe it. Maybe I think the longer I stay here, the longer he’ll live, because he’s always complaining I only come home for the big things. Weddings. Funerals.”

They both laughed, sort of. Funerals weren’t very funny anymore.

The truck slid over an icy patch, and Wilder let it, then had them bumping along again when the patch of ice let them go.

“Do you know you’re going to do?” he asked.

Ryder was fully aware that this was the same sort of question that his brothers had all been waiting to ask him that day that he’d done an end run around their little intervention. He’d had to deal with each and every one of them individually after that, but he thought he’d gotten the better end of the deal by not having them come at him in a pack.

Individually, they’d all pretty much said the same thing. Harlan had expressed surprise, but also concern, for both Ryder and Rosie. Wilder had been outraged that Ryder had never told him that he’d seen Rosie down in Austin. He wanted to know what else Ryder had kept from him,desecrating the twin bond, as he put it. And he hadn’t liked it much when Ryder had rolled his eyes.

So Ryder had rolled them even more.

Boone had been gruffly concerned about the rumors he’d heard in town, all of which, he was quick to tell Ryder, he’d been certain to correct.Because I know you’re no deadbeat dad, Boone had said with that quiet intensity of his.And now they know it too.

It was Knox who had looked at him curiously, and then asked,Do youwantto be a father?

Like it was a choice.

But the unspoken part of all of his conversations was the inevitable truth that Ryder would leave again. That this was a break he was taking to look after Zeke. Or at least to be around while Zeke was declining, because it wasn’t like the old man let anyone take care of him in any real sense.

The Ryder they all knew had never resisted the call of the road. None of his brothers even thought to question the possibility that he might be done with it.

In point of fact, he hadn’t actually thought that himself, until this moment.

Until his twin asked him what he was going to do, out here where the sky was too big and the mountains too tall and every breath felt like eternity.

“I could do another tour,” Ryder said, feeling it out as he said it. “But I’m already the old man in the mix. Every ride I take increases my chance of serious injury and the older I get, the less likely I am to recover well.”

“You’re telling me things I already know,” Wilder replied, lazily. “What I don’t know is how you lasted this long.”

“Spite,” Ryder drawled, but he smiled as he said it. “Sheer stubbornness.”

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