Page 44 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

And the thing about Charlotte was that she wasn’t good at the day to day. She wasn’t good at routines, or self-sacrifice, or putting other people’s needs above her own. She, in fact, would tell anyone who listened that these things were herstrengths.

Rosie had always found that debatable, to put it mildly.

What Charlotte was great at, however, was this.

A moment of crisis. An opportunity for connection.

Rosie’s relationship with her mother was a necklace of sorts, one jewel-like moment strung together with the next, with nothing in between. No real parenting, but she’d come to terms with that a long time ago. And there had always been Jack.

But there was also this.

There was the way Charlotte rose to her feet in that graceful way of hers and moved across the floor, a vision in flowing white clothes—all of them appropriate for yoga, or perhaps joining a cult.

Not that Rosie cared when her mother wrapped her in a hug that smelled of weed and roses, murmured lovely things in her ear, and then led her off into one of those multipurpose rooms after all.

It turned out it was a kind of study, with beanbag-type cushions strewn about the floor on a cozy warm rug. That was where they sat. Charlotte rocked Rosie like she was a baby and didn’t ask her a single thing until she sat up, wiped her face again, and let out a long, hard sort of breath.

“There you go,” Charlotte said, with a nod, as if she understood what was happening on a deep, cosmic level that transcended actual communication. For all Rosie knew, she did. “Emotion is a gift, Rosie. If you allow it to do what it will, there’s no need for it to storm like this, taking you out with it.”

“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “This feels like a storm.”

And then she poured it all out. She told her mother about Ryder and what had happened in Austin. Because this was Charlotte, who had very few boundaries in general and none when it came to intimate relationships, she really did tell her everything. She told her about how it had been since he’d come here and found out the secrets that she been keeping. She told her about how their relationship had shifted and what he’d offered, money and marriage, and how she’d reacted. To the money thing, and then, in a much bigger way, to the marriage thing.

She told Charlotte how much she hated all this.

Or wished she hated it, more like.

“Now he’s offering the thing I’ve secretly wanted the most,” she said, and something in her shattered, hard, because that was true. And she’d had no idea it was true until she said it out loud, raw and inarguable. “I want it, but I can’t do it this way, can I?”

She wiped at her face. Charlotte only made a sound to show she was listening, though she didn’t speak.

“Shouldn’t I hold out for love?” Rosie could barely get that out. She shook her head. “But he’s so hard to resist and he’s my babies’ father. And Mom…” Charlotte looked surprised, likely because Rosie hadn’t called herMomin years. Rosie should probably have been surprised too. “They adore him already. And how can I break their hearts? Not now, but eventually. Eventually they’ll understand that they could have been a family.”

That word made her cry all over again.

“Rosie.” Charlotte rubbed her hand over Rosie’s hair, and then rubbed circles on her back, a throwback to Rosie’s childhood that made her realize this was why she rubbed Levi and Eli the same way. “Tell me about this man in ways that don’t have to do with motherhood. Or fatherhood. Where does he stand in his divine masculinity?”

Rosie sighed at that. “I love him,” she told her mother, because if she started talking about hisdivine masculinityshe was going to get entirely too graphic. Charlotte might not care, but she would. “I’ve always loved him. I fell in love with him hard and fast in one night, and then I spent these years hating him because he’d changed my life forever.”

Charlotte nodded, as if this was only to be expected, which was oddly comforting.

Rosie kept going. “And then he walked back into my life and changed it again, and I tried so hard to keep hating him, but I never did. I never really did, did I? I’ve loved him all along.” She sucked in a breath, and it felt the way it had when she’d been out there in the snow. Daggers down deep. “He wants to marry me. This is my dream come true.” She heard the sound she made as she sucked in a breath then, because it hurt. “But he doesn’t love me.”

Charlotte only gazed back at Rosie, holding the space. Another thing that Charlotte was good at.

“He doesn’t love me,” Rosie said again, and it didn’t hurt less, but it made her feel less raw and torn apart to say it. To stop hiding from it. “And you can’t love someone into loving you. You just can’t.”

She waited for her mother to say something that would be maddening and yet true. About rivers that always made it to the place they were heading, no matter how many rocks or rapids they found. Something about the sun that always rose, and wouldn’t it be a shame if there wasn’t a whole night first to make it possible to love a sunrise so much.

Charlotte nodded, as if she was thinking, and her hair flowed over her soft white garments. She kept rubbing circles on Rosie’s back. But there was a look in her eyes Rosie wasn’t sure she’d seen before.

“You don’t love a person into loving you, Rosie. You just love them.”

The way she said that made something deep inside of Rosie ache in a whole new way. Because it almost felt as if her mother was talking about all kinds of love. Even this kind of love—their kind of love.

She could swear that somewhere in Charlotte’s always-opaque blue gaze, there was something encouraging Rosie to think about the fact that Charlotte really did love her. And how Rosie experienced that love was Rosie’s problem.

And that maybe that wasn’t as messed up as she’d always thought it was.

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