Page 21 of Her Jolly Cowboy
Rhett and Frankie’s little boy, Wyatt Luke Carson, born last Christmas, is currently smashing his chubby fists into a cake shaped like a red pickup truck while the entire family cheers.
I’m thirty-four, barefoot in wool socks, Luke’s flannel and jeans, hair in the same messy knot I’ve worn since the day I met him, and I have never been happier to be off-schedule.
Luke comes up behind me, arms sliding around my waist, chin resting on my shoulder. His wedding band is warm against my stomach.
“Boss Lady,” he murmurs against my ear, “you outdid yourself. That bounce house shaped like a barn is gonna be talked about for generations.”
I laugh. “It has a working hayloft slide. I may have peaked.”
He turns me in his arms and backs me gently against the counter. “Doubt it.”
His kiss is slow and lazy and still makes my knees weak after five years of practice. When we break apart, Wyatt is waddling toward us, face covered in buttercream, arms raised.
“Up, Unca Wuke!”
Luke scoops him without hesitation, settling the sticky toddler on his hip like he was born for this. Wyatt immediately grabs Luke’s beard and squeals.
Frankie appears in the doorway, cheeks flushed, another baby bump just starting to show under her sweater. “I swear he only wants his Uncle Luke and Aunt Holly today.”
“He has good taste,” Luke says solemnly, but with a cheeky grin.
I watch the three of them and feel my heart do that thing it does every time I realize this is my life now.
I sold my Denver company three years ago. Kept a tiny satellite office for the clients who refuse to let me go, but mostly I plan kids’ birthdays, anniversary parties for ranch families, and the occasional vow renewal. I trade spreadsheets for glitter cannons and toddler meltdown contingencies, not bridezilla ones.
And I have never once regretted it.
Luke catches me staring and lifts a brow. “What?”
“Just thinking how far we’ve come from one blizzard and a single bed.”
He grins, wicked and soft all at once. “We still only need one bed.”
Wyatt chooses that moment to smear frosting across Luke’s cheek. Luke doesn’t even flinch, kisses the top of Wyatt’s blond head, and hands him off to Rhett, who’s appeared to wrangle his sticky heir.
Rhett claps Luke on the shoulder. “You two coming to the bonfire later?”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” Luke says.
Rhett’s eyes flick to me, warm and knowing. “You know, when Frankie hired you to plan our wedding, I thought Luke was gonna scare you off in the first ten minutes.”
I laugh. “He tried.”
Luke leans down, lips brushing my ear. “She liked it.”
Heat floods my cheeks even after years together.
Later, when the kids are sugared out and the adults are gathered around the fire pit with cocoa and whiskey, Luke pulls me onto his lap in one of the oversized Adirondack chairs. Snow is falling again, soft and silent, as it did the night everything changed.
I twist the ring on my finger, a cluster of diamonds in the shape of a snowflake. Luke notices and asks, “Still happy, Mrs. Carson?”
I turn to look at him with the firelight dancing in his eyes, snowflakes melting in his hair, and the same smile that stole my breath the first day I met him. “Ridiculously,” I whisper.
He kisses me, slow and deep and shameless, in front of the whole family, and nobody even pretends to look away anymore.
When we break apart, Grandma Martha raises her mug from across the fire. “To blizzards,” she declares. “And to stubborn cowboys who know when to keep a good woman around.”
Everyone laughs. Luke’s arms tighten around me.
I rest my head on his shoulder and watch the snow fall over the ranch that’s become my home, the family that’s become my heart, the life I never planned but somehow turned out perfect anyway.
