Page 7 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

“I’m a Lisle,” Cat replied, her eyes gleaming. “In the tradition of my people, I don’t pay that much attention to the opinions of Careys.”

“Oh, this isn’t an opinion,” Ryder said, and made himself laugh the way Wilder did. Like maybe this time it might take. “It’s a fact. You’re doomed.”

“Oh no,” Cat said, grinning up at her husband. “Whatever will I do?”

“Good news,” Wilder said, turning back to Ryder as he pulled Cat into his side. “You’re doomed with us now. Like it or not.”

“I don’t like it at all,” Ryder declared, but more to the mountains than his brother, because Wilder wasn’t paying attention.

But the Gallatins kept their own counsel, and he was back in Montana for the foreseeable future, so Ryder sucked it up and followed them both inside.

Chapter Two

Rosie Stark’s luckran out on a frigid cold February afternoon in the middle of another snowstorm.

Before that, it was a perfectly nice day in the frozen north in the middle of another winter that would never end, and that she would forget all about once it was June and light all the time.

The twins, finally recovered from the sniffles that had plagued them for most of January, slept well the night before. They hadn’t gotten her up all night long, a miracle, and had managed to go without any meltdowns all morning. Levi, the bossier of the two, was ordering the younger Eli around in that toddler babble that only the two of them understood. Though more and more these days, there were English words sprinkled in there as well, Rosie always wondered if they’d also keep their secret language.

She hoped so.

She had just put them down for their afternoon nap, the most glorious part of her day. Today there had been only minimal whining and false claims of alertness.

Levi needed to be told he could not get out of bed until he counted to a hundred, which he couldn’t.

Eli needed a song.

Once they were asleep, Rosie stayed there for a moment, amazed that her heart could ache so much at the sight of those little round cheeks of theirs while simultaneously despairing at how grown-up they already looked to her now that they weren’t tiny babies.

Not that she could remember much about them as tiny babies, because that part of her life had been such a blur. She still didn’t know how she made it through, only that she had.

And always will, she reminded herself stoutly, because she had to. And there was something marvelously freeing about not having any choice in the matter.

Rosiewouldmake it through, no matter what.

She was a mother now.

After a little more admiring their ridiculous dark eyelashes and their perfect little mouths—particularly cute when they were quiet, it had to be said—she left them sleeping in her bed. They thought it was fancy and special somehow, and this got them more excited to nap, so she was all about it.

Rosie spent the next ten minutes or so moving through the house quickly, neatening up the inevitable toy explosions, throwing in some laundry, and putting the living room back to rights. It wasn’t only that she liked to clean house, though she did. It was that she didn’t live by herself with the boys.

And she knew perfectly well that if she let things get out of hand, her sister Matilda would take that as an opportunity to never pick up a thing again. And likely to start moving in some of the many animals she liked to rescue, so it would truly be a zoo.

Rosie had been forced to let go of a lot of things over the past few years. She’d had to get comfortable with releasing expectation, acceptingwhat wasinsteadwhat ought to have been. It had sucked. She’d done any number of the irritating exercises she found online, all in an effort to convince herself that she was exactly where she was meant to be and all was well.

Allwaswell, but she knew now that things could change. Fast.

Overnight, even.

But she did have some standards, despite the things a few gross men and even more judgmental women had said to her about her ‘circumstances.’ She drew the line at an actual petting zoo in the house where she lived.

When she was done restoring order, she made herself lunch. She’d whipped up a huge batch of beef stew earlier in the week when everyone knew the storm was rolling in, and she and Matilda had been eating well ever since. They could both cook, something both they and their older brother had learned pretty fast when they were kids, because it was that or not eat.

Their mother was a bighearted, deeply authentic, robustly empathetic human who actively sought and followed her own path through life.

What Charlotte was not, and never had been, was any kind of a good mother.

Rosie refused to indulge her mother’s naming fetish. Charlotte called herself whatever she wanted, but that didn’t mean Rosie had to go along with it. Matilda thought Rosie was being harsh, but then, Matilda and their older brother Jack had not been victimized by Charlotte when it came to their own names. Jack and Matilda were perfectly reasonable names. Teal Rose, the name that was on Rosie’s birth certificate, was not.

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