Page 20 of Knotting the Cowboys

“Ma’am.” His voice rumbles deep, careful. A polite but unmistakable warning in every syllable. “Can we help you?”

I should speak…explain…but his scent keeps wrapping around me, and there's something familiar about the way he stands—protective without crowding, alert without aggression.

My mouth opens, closes, no words coming.

Where the first man makes me want to stand straighter, the second one makes me want to soften.

"Easy there, Cole," the second man says, and his voice carries the kind of calm that probably soothes spooked horses. "Can't you see she's overwhelmed? Not nice to do that to an Omega, especially when she clearly means no harm."

Cole. The name slots into place, though I don't know why it feels significant.

"I'm River," the calmer one continues, keeping his distance like he knows exactly how much space I need. "That's Cole, our foreman. And that's?—"

"Mavi, checking the perimeter." A third voice comes from my left, and I turn to find sharp green eyes studying me from about twenty feet away. Dirty blond hair, compact build, every line of his body ready for trouble. His scent carries on the breeze—smoke and cinnamon with an edge of danger that makes my pulse skip. Where Cole offers protection and River offers peace, this one promises vigilance.

"Paranoid is what he is," a fourth voice chimes in, warm and amused. "Don't mind him. He thinks everyone's casing the joint."

This one—the youngest-looking of the group—approaches with an easy smile and a baby on his hip.

The man is young—midtwenties, maybe, though the easy confidence in his stride says oldest sibling energy to me. He wears his warmth the way some men wear a badge: shiny and obvious, impossible to ignore. His jaw is soft, not squared off like the first two, and his face is all open lines and sun-touched freckles, lending him the approachable air of a small-town nurse who actually remembers your birthday.

He wears cologne, but it’s subtle, layered over a scent so clean it almost hurts—like cotton sheets after a dry snap, or thedeep inhale you take after a long rain when every dust mote in the world has been washed away.

It’s a scent engineered for comfort, which should be impossible in a place that already smells this much like home. The effect is so thorough it almost overrides my anxiety response, and for one dizzying moment I want nothing more than to bury my face in his shirt and let him tell me everything’s going to be all right.

But it’s not the man himself who unmoors me.

It’s the baby in his arms—a not-quite-infant, maybe eight months old, with a riot of wispy hair and a marshmallow face still etched with that newborn look of perpetual surprise. She’s got a sunbeam smile, softened at the edges by teething, and her eyes—one bright blue, one greenish-gray, unmistakably heterochromatic—lock onto mine the instant we’re in the same orbit.

And then she shrieks, not in terror or protest but in the pure, nuclear delight that only babies muster when they’ve just had an emotion explained to them by the universe.

She flails both arms wildly, then jams a fist into her mouth as if to contain her joy. Her legs paddle against the deputy’s hip, almost knocking him off-balance, and she makes this high, ululating sound that I can’t help but mirror with a startled laugh.

It’s a ridiculous sound—like a dinosaur crossed with a car alarm—but it brings every grown man in the vicinity to attention, as if she were the ranch’s actual foreman.

The youngest man handles this with practiced ease, bouncing her gently, murmuring, “See, kid? Told you she’d show up,” in a voice so calm and sure I feel my throat close up with unexpected emotion.

He glances down at the baby, then back at me, as if to confirm some in-joke he’s been waiting weeks to deploy.

“Sorry about that,” he says, narrowing his eyes just a little, like he’s taking my measure and not sure if I’ll bolt or if I’ll actually pet the baby’s head as instinct demands. “She’s a bit of a greeter. Gets it from her dads.”

Dads. Plural. I file it away for later, but the word clangs in my chest with a resonance I don’t have time to process right now, because the baby’s outstretched hands are now full-on groping toward me, and the man—still smiling, but warily now—makes a small show of tightening his grip.

And even though every nerve in my body is screaming for me to maintain a safe, city-bred distance from this small army of wholesome rural men, I feel myself inching forward, powerless to resist the gravitational pull of an unfiltered infant.

“That’s Austin,” River offers helpfully, nodding in the deputy’s direction. “And the little one is Luna. She’s new.”

“She’s not new,” the man—Austin—corrects, “she’s just…very enthusiastic.” The way he says it tells me everything I need to know: that this baby is adored, that she is the axis around which this odd collection of men now rotates. Even Mavi, the barn-circle guy, stops mid-pace to shoot a glance at the commotion, his restless skepticism replaced by something softer and more curious.

I have no idea what you’re supposed to do in a moment like this, when an entire porch full of strangers is half-expecting you to meet a baby like it’s some sort of handshake ritual.

My arms twitch with the impulse to wave, or coo, or perform some appropriate gesture of biological solidarity, but all I manage is a sheepish half-smile and a quiet, “Hey, little one. You always make an entrance like this?”

Luna makes another delighted squawk, this one so loud and urgent she very nearly squirms out of Austin’s arms. For a split second, her baby-blue eye fixes on me with the laser precision of a guided missile, and I feel a weird, headlong shiver—like she’slooking straight through the battered shell of me and into the part that might have once known what home felt like.

"Luna, no—" the man starts, but she's already reaching with chubby hands, babbling excitedly like I'm her favorite person in the world.

"I think she likes you," River observes with a gentle smile.

---