Page 40 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

She pulled her hands out of his. “Those people probably have a lot more money, and two fewer toddlers than I do.”

“I have money.”

He didn’t mean to say that. It was true, but money was the kind of thing a man learned pretty quick not to talk about too much, because people got funny about it.

And he watched as Rosie, it turned out, was one of those people.

“I’m happy for you that you have money, Ryder,” she said after a moment. “But I don’t know what that has to do with anything.”

“Well.” And he knew he had to be careful. He tried. “Right off the bat, I’d say that since you’re the mother of my children, it should interest you. You don’t have to worry so much. You don’t have to pay for everything.”

“This is just…” She shook her head. “I know you mean well, but I can’t—”

“Rosie. I understand how hard you’ve worked, and how much you’ve sacrificed to get this far. It doesn’t have to be that hard, that’s all. They’re my kids too. If you don’t want to clean rentals, you don’t have to. If you want to open up a bookshop, you should. I’ll give you the money to do it.”

She scrambled back on the couch, then got to her feet, looking at him as if he’d hauled off and slapped her.

This suggested he hadn’t been careful enough.

“This is too much,” she said, in that shut down sort of voice he hadn’t heard from her in a while. Since he’d turned up out of the blue, in fact. “This is too much, and it’s not right. We have to draw some boundaries. Everything has been… it’s been a lot. Maybe it’s too much. We have to be very careful, Ryder, and we really have to make sure that we’re starting out as we mean to go on, and that really means that the only possible solution here is to take a break—”

But Ryder understood now. He saw the thing that had been in front of him the whole time.

The only possible solution, and it was perfect.

He was sure she’d see that too.

“Or,” he said, getting up himself and moving closer to her, so he could take her hands again, “we could do this right. We could get married.”

Chapter Nine

The thing aboutbeing a parent, Rosie found herself thinking the next day, was that it forced you to do things you wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Case in point: last night what she really would have liked to have done was surrender to all that clawing stuff inside of her that wanted so desperately to get out.

But the boys had been sleeping upstairs. And she wasn’t the sort of person who had screaming fits anyway, as far she knew. She’d been sorely tempted to experiment with that. Maybe it was time to turn over a new, screaming leaf… but, of course, she’d done no such thing.

I can’t think about this now, she had told Ryder, after staring at him so wide-eyed she’d wondered if maybe she’d actually died and what was left was her corpse, and that would make sense of the greathowlof emotion and sensation inside of her.

Because he wanted to marry her.

He thought they could just get married, like that wasn’t… Like she hadn’t given up on that as a possibility a thousand times over the years and how could he possibly imagine that he could just swan back into town andtouchher and—

Just as long as you think about it, he had replied, looking and sounding completely unbothered, which was maddening.

Trust Ryder Carey to suggest marriage and then seem not to care that much what her answer might be.

If he hadn’t currently been in total possession of her heart, however unwillingly on her part, she might have tried to kill him.

But again, she had children.Hischildren, who had only just met their father. She couldn’t be the reason they lost him again.

He had left not long after, but not before he’d kissed her goodbye. And being Ryder, he had made an entire production out of it, leaving her limp and silly on the couch.

Which, naturally, only made things worse.

Rosie had stayed there for a long time, not sure if she was about to burst into tears, give into that screaming fit that she was sure wasjust therewithin reach, or somehow find a way to breathe normally again.

She hadn’t really been making any progress on any front when Matilda came in, with a cat in a carrier and the usual spate of promises that the animal would only stay until she found it a home, or a shelter. This was a relief, because it had given Rosie something else to think about. Namely, that the arrival of any animal in any condition at all meant that Matilda would add it to her little menagerie in their outbuilding out back. The one she had spent one summer transforming from a makeshift toolshed sort of structure into a refuge for the animals she loved so much in any weather, all the while claiming that she would never use it for that purpose.

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