Page 32 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

His twin laughed, but there was something darker in his gaze. “Because coming back home would be a fate worse than death, got it.”

Ryder thought about that a lot later that night. He had dinner with his father, alone, because Belinda had gone out to one of her club meetings. Garden club, book club, wine club, it was hard to say. Belinda was a woman of many passions.

Zeke and he talked about sports, the weather, the ranch.

They did not discuss health. They didn’t even stray close to the topic. Maybe a better son would have pushed, Ryder thought—but he only knew how to be the son he was.

After they ate, they cleared away their dishes and neatened up the kitchen because it was that or face Belinda’s wrath—and no one wanted to deal with Belinda’s wrath, or even the faintest hint of her annoyance. She was not the sort of woman who kept her feelings inside. Standing there in the sparkling, clean kitchen, Ryder thought to ask his father a question that never would have occurred to him to ask before.

“I can’t remember why I was so determined to leave this town when I did,” he said, looking at one of the pictures of him and Wilder on the wall. He had no idea which one of them was which, since they had dressed as twin cowboys for Halloween that year. “Can you?”

Zeke smiled, though there was something sad about it. “Your mother died here. Don’t you remember?”

“That she died?” Ryder shook his head. “Yeah, Dad. I remember that.”

“When she died, you and your brother got it in your head—”

He shook that off, but Ryder knew what he meant—or he thought he did, anyway. He didn’t think he or Wilder had ever talked about it with anyone else, but the fact was, they’d been six years old and hard to handle at the best of times, and they had likely caused their mother more stress in her final days than she needed.

There was no point talking about it, that was just the way it had been.

The way Zeke looked at him now made something in him think good and hard about shivering, though he fought it off. “You told me once, around that time, that this was a bad place. When I asked you why, you said it was because it took her.”

Ryder felt that land. So hard and so intense it was as if Zeke had picked up a crowbar and plunged it straight through his ribs.

The worst part was that his father’s gaze on his was kind. And knowing in the way Wilder’s had been, too, like the only mystery here was the stuff Ryder insisted on not letting himself see. About himself.

“I always thought,” Zeke told him quietly, “that you figured if you ran around hard enough, fast enough, and long enough, you’d find a way to outrun death.”

Ryder thought he would prefer it if his father had picked up one of the cast-iron pans and whacked him in the face with it.

He made it out of the ranch house and into his truck, but truth be told, he wasn’t sure he really paid any attention to what he was doing until he was off Carey land and making his way up that hill toward the lodge.

On the other side, he didn’t think. There was no one else on the road so he pulled out his cell phone and texted Rosie.

When he got to her house, she came outside to meet him with a heavy coat wrapped around her but not zipped up. She peered in his window, frowning.

“What’s going on?” she asked. “Why did you want me to come out here?”

“Are the kids okay? Is your sister home?”

Rosie’s frown deepened. “Yes and yes, but—”

“Get in.”

He belted out the order and he watched her blink, take it in, consider telling him what he could do with his order—and then decide to obey him anyway.

And it was a fine thing, it turned out, to know a woman well enough to see the things shedidn’tdo right there on his face.

It felt like another intimacy he hadn’t known enough to understand he was missing, because it had never occurred to him that friendship and family could go along with heat and sex and longing. He had seen those smug expressions on other men’s faces and he’d thought they were nuts.Poor fools, he’d thought, to get themselves locked down like that when there was a whole world out there.

He hadn’t gotten it.

He never would have gotten it, but now there was Rosie.

And there were so many worlds in this one woman.

Too many worlds.

---