Page 9 of The Cowboy's Secret Babies

As always, even the thought of him set every nerve ending in her body alight. Pure hatred, she assured herself. As he richly deserved.

Her throat felt dry, so she cleared it, and wished that she could get rid of the ringing in her ears at the same time.

“What?” she managed to ask.

Matilda was frowning down at her socks, unmatched as always. She reached out and poked at one of the holes in the bright pink fabric on her left foot. “Ryder Carey came home. I was just in the general store and Tennessee Lisle said he saw Ryder pulling into town yesterday, with his trailer and all. Like he’s planning to stay a while.”

“Unlikely.” Rosie managed to keep her voice calm, if maybe not as disinterested as she might have liked. Luckily, Matilda didn’t pay attention to things like that. “He’s not a hometown kind of a guy.”

“He never was,” Matilda agreed. “But bull riding is a mean sport. There’s only so long a body can take it.”

The last thing Rosie wanted to think about was Ryder Carey’sbody.

Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she liked to sit around imagining that a bull threw him, for once, and hard. That Ryder was trampled into pieces. Not enough to permanently disable him, but enough to mess up that ridiculously pretty face of his. And maybe make it impossible for him to maintain that whipcord leanness, all tight muscles, rock-hard thighs, and that ridged wonder of an abdomen that she had—

This was the wrong road to go down.

She stopped herself cold.

Rosie needed to divert this conversation away from Ryder, who could not possibly be moving back here. She couldn’t accept that. It couldn’t possibly be true.

She eyed her sister. “I would have thought that you’d hate bull riding. Isn’t it cruel to the bulls?”

Matilda looked at Rosie like she was nuts. “Do you know how much care and maintenance goes into those bulls? First of all, they’re big moneymakers. No one treats a moneymaker badly in this economy. The bulls are in perfect health. They’re athletes. They’re treated better than most humans, and certainly much better than any of the bull riders. If people treated stray cats the way they treated bulls at bull riding events, there wouldn’t be any stray cats.”

“I had no idea you were such an expert on bull riding,” Rosie said, a little faintly.

“It’s like we’ve never met. I love the rodeo.” Her expression went a little dreamy, which, in Rosie’s experience, led to rabbit families in the laundry room and kittens running kamikaze missions in the living room. “Maybe if Ryder really is back in town, he can bring some of that star power to the Copper Mountain Rodeo next September. I know Marietta gets superstars on the regular, but a hometown boy who hit the heights Ryder has? Think of the fundraising opportunities.”

Her whole face lit up. “Maybe we could even open that shelter up here in Cowboy Point.”

Rosie felt a panic attack coming on, shaped like a six-foot and something cowboy, and had to breathe deep to push it away. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. You don’t even know if he’s friendly. Wilder is supposed to be the friendly twin. For all you know, Ryder might not even like animals.”

Matilda sniffed dismissively. “Even people who don’t like animals don’t dare admit they don’t like that in front of me. They’re afraid I might getearnest.”

This was a true thing Rosie had seen play out more than once, though she didn’t find it funny just now.

Matilda chattered on about her dreams of opening up a legitimate shelter, maybe a whole veterinary office, right here in their little community. Much better than depending on the facilities that already existed down the hill in Marietta.

Ten miles down a hill that wasn’t always safe to drive on.

Long after she had gone off into the kitchen to find her own bowl of stew, Rosie found herself… frozen. Her pulse was going wild in her neck, but she was unable to do much of anything except stare straight ahead like a zombie.

Ryder couldn’t be home. That was impossible.

Yet even as she thought that, she knew that the real truth was that she’d been waiting on this same stretch of thin ice ever since she’d run into old Zeke Carey in the feed store that day.

The very thing she had been wanting most to avoid had happened. And so quickly that there was nothing she could have possibly done to prevent it. It was like being trapped in one of her nightmares.

Levi had gone straight to Zeke like he knew his own grandfather at a glance.

Zeke had certainly known his grandson.

Rosie had felt terrible. She still felt terrible.

She had wanted to tell him then and there, but she couldn’t. How could she tell Zeke when she’d never told Ryder?

That seemed like adding insult to injury.

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