Page 42 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

Rosie got Eli and he got Levi, and for a moment, she felt disoriented. It was like she’d fast-forwarded into that life he’d been suggesting last night. The two of them stood there for a moment, here on his land with their children and no reason at all that this shouldn’t be their life every day—

Her hearthurt.

And the boys started squirming, so they both put them down. They immediately started running around like maniacs that had never seen snow before, still shrieking out their joy into the trees.

Rosie forced herself to look Ryder directly in the eye. Then she made herself smile, the way she’d practiced for four years in Austin.

“You don’t have to fake a smile, baby,” Ryder drawled, with a look she didn’t try to define in that dark gaze of his.

Meaning it wasn’t a fluke that he’d said it last night. Meaning she was going to have to come to terms with what her body did when he said it. How she melted, everywhere, and wanted nothing more than to stop whatever it was she thought she was doing so she could crawl into his arms.

But she didn’t.

Though she did stop smiling. “Call me if you need anything,” she said, and only had to clear her throat once. “They can be overwhelming.”

“I can be overwhelmed,” he replied. “I’ll figure it out.”

There was a pause, then. She thought he was very close to saying something about last night, and what he’d said, and possibly her reaction to that. Unless, of course, he’d reconsidered, which wasn’t something she really wanted to think about either. But he didn’t.

Though he might as well have, because she was thinking about it, wasn’t she?

It was kind of a relief to kiss her wild little monkeys, then try not to stumble as she left them with Ryder. It was a relief to get in her car, and get out of there. She drove off of Carey land, then pulled her car to the side of the road and sobbed.

Rosie sobbed for a good long while, and she couldn’t have said why. Or maybe it was simply that there were too many things, all at once. Leaving her babies. Leaving them with Ryder, of all people. Ryder, who she had, at different points, vowed to hate forever.

It was all those things. It was last night. It was the fact that she was used to him now. She was used to his body and having access to it. She wascomfortablewith him in ways she never would have believed could be possible. It was already more than she’d ever dreamed could happen after that night in Austin.

Yet accepting all of that only made her sob more.

Rosie kept going until she couldn’t. Then she sat up and laughed at herself. She pushed her way out of the car, letting the cold air outside crash into her. One deep breath was like daggers thrust deep into her lungs. Another one, deeper, felt sharper—but better.

She bent down, right there by the side of the road, and got two fistfuls of snow. Then she rubbed it all over her swollen, too-hot, sob-wrecked face.

It feltgreat.

Or maybe it was a shock to her system, because her next idea was on the loony side.

She stood there, cold everywhere, thinking it through.

“Are you really going to do this?” she asked herself. Out loud, out there on the top of a bunch of mountains, without a soul in sight. “It’s the nuclear option and you know it.”

Her face was stinging from the cold rubdown. She needed to get back in the car before she gottoocold, and that was a fine line out this far from civilization. But Rosie desperately wanted some kind of sign—

Then she laughed again, because she was her own damn sign. She could decide on any kind of option that felt right, nuclear or not. She was a fully grown woman who didn’t have her children to take care of today, and if she wanted to drive all the way out to a place that was so far from the middle of nowhere that it was more like the middle of never where, she would.

Sometimes, Rosie assured herself, a girl had to go and see her mother.

Even if that mother was Charlotte.

She climbed back in her car, and jacked up the heat to high, shivering as the blast of it hit her frozen skin. It seemed smart to wait until she was sure she would stop shivering, so she did that. Then, when she turned the heat back down to a normal level because she was starting to feel hot, she unzipped her parka, blew out a breath, and asked herself if this was really what she was doing.

“It is,” she said into the quiet of her car’s interior, because if she’d learned one thing from her mother, it was that some intentions required words spoken aloud to take root.

This felt like one of them.

Intention rooted, Rosie drove back toward the lodge. But before she climbed up the hill that led to it, she took one of the smaller roads that branched out and headed west. Away from Paradise Valley and much deeper into the Gallatin range.

If she was still looking for signs, she decided that one of them was the fact that someone had already driven this way this morning, which was a nice gift from the universe. It was nice to have the tracks in front of her to lead the way.

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