The Cowboy’s Secret Babies (The Careys of Cowboy Point #3)

Chapter Two

R osie Stark’s luck ran 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.

Rosie would make 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, accepting what was instead what 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.

All was well, 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.

Rosie felt perfectly justified in ignoring her mother’s name changes as it suited her.

But thinking about her mother was not a good way to cultivate the peace she wanted in her life, so Rosie took her bowl of stew and a generous hunk of the bread that Matilda had baked to go along with it out into the living room, where she picked up the current book she was reading and sank into it.

With a big, happy sigh.

Sometimes she thought that really, this was the happiest she’d ever been. In these quiet moments, she loved her boys so much that she sometimes thought it would make her explode. In times like this she could sit here, not worry about bills or the price of keeping two rowdy little boys in clothes, or what latest foolishness Charlotte was certainly getting herself into right now.

There was none of the stress of college classes or those aspirations that had gone up in smoke when she’d stared down at two lines on a pregnancy test in a humid Target bathroom in Austin.

On these cozy naptime afternoons, when the boys might sleep for a solid few hours, she could simply sink into a romance novel, fill her belly, and for a little while, believe that everything was perfect.

So naturally, Matilda came stamping inside then, throwing off her coat here, her scarf there, and the one glove she appeared to still have with her on the side tale. Yet the fact that she was still wearing her brightly colored, striped knit hat seemed to escape her notice.

“Guess who’s back in town,” Matilda said, in that tone everyone used when they had news . “And it’s not even a holiday.”

“Some colleges have early spring breaks,” Rosie said, without looking up from her book.

Because she’d already looked up and seen all of Matilda’s discarded items of outerwear and knew that in a moment she would be picking it all up.

Matilda threw herself down on the couch, looking as happily disheveled as always. They looked remarkably alike as sisters, though no one ever commented on that, because they presented themselves so differently.

My night and my day , Charlotte had used to say, usually while imbibing in whatever substance was making her giddy that season.

Matilda was five years older than Rosie and was seemingly the most like Charlotte. Always floating around, leaving a trail of dishevelment in her wake, so that everyone thought she was on another planet.

The real truth was, Charlotte was something of an airhead. Matilda was not. People often confused her for one, however, because her singular focus was on animals. More to the point, she’d never bothered to figure out how to act around people.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t. It was that she’d never understood why she should .

The best thing about Matilda, Rosie had always thought, was that folks around Cowboy Point were under the impression that she was a little bit special . A little bit otherworldly. They thought she didn’t know any better than to act the way she did, abruptly walking away from anyone who happened to be talking to her because she was bored, or because she thought she heard a kitten crying, and so on. What can you expect from Matilda , they would say as she drove off in her antique red truck and never seemed to suffer even a moment of social shame.

The truth was that Matilda was not neurospicy so much as she was stubborn as a mule, did exactly what she pleased at all times, and was completely immune to peer pressure or the faintest urge toward people pleasing. She just did it with an airy smile.

Rosie found it impossible not to admire her sister.

But she wasn’t her.

Rosie was the baby of the family. Jack was a whole ten years older than her. After their father had died, when Rosie was only slightly older than her boys were now, he had been more of a father figure to her than a brother. He still was.

Telling him that she was coming home for the summer and staying there, and oh, by the way, he was going to be an uncle…

Jack hadn’t been angry with her. He’d been disappointed .

The memory of that conversation still made her feel a little bit sweaty.

She and Matilda, on the other hand, had always been close. Rosie thought that was likely because Matilda had simply treated her like an animal in need of constant aid and attention. After all, Rosie had been nothing but a small and helpless mammal when Charlotte had brought her home. Matilda was not built to resist such creatures.

But where Matilda was perfectly happy to wander around in mismatching socks and random hand-me-downs from Jack, because she gave absolutely no thought whatsoever to her appearance, Rosie had gone in the other direction.

Before the boys, she’d been all about perfect makeup, no matter what. She’d gone to school down in Texas and had found her people there. Hair always done just so . No such thing as casual, not really. She considered mascara and a little bit of eyeliner as necessary to waking up as brushing her teeth or putting on clothes.

Even now, on a day where she expected to see no one and do nothing, she dressed. Rosie didn’t do sweats. She liked clothes that fit her, and fit her well. She didn’t do bedraggled . Jack took after their darker haired father while she and Matilda had the same blonde hair they’d gotten directly from Charlotte.

Ripe strawberry blonde , Charlotte liked to call it, when it was really more golden. All Rosie knew was that Matilda always had hers in two wild braids, half of it falling out all the time. Charlotte had decided on white lady dreadlocks the last time she’d come by, in a cloud of patchouli. Rosie, obviously, preferred her hair swept back into a high ponytail that looked perky, was held in perfect place with the appropriate products, and would not have looked out of place in her sorority.

“Ryder Carey,” Matilda said. Seemingly out of nowhere, while Rosie had wandered off into a tangent in her head.

That name, of all names, slammed into Rosie like a bullet. But she didn’t react. Not outwardly. She’d taught herself better than that, these past few years.

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’s body .

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 get earnest .”

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.

Rosie had spent a lot of time since then thinking a whole lot about the choices she’d made since that pivotal moment in that Target bathroom stall.

She found herself defending those choices in her head. Or in the bathroom mirror.

And every time she did, it sounded weaker.

She’d expected that Ryder would seek her out the next time he came home, if only to be polite. After all, what happened in Austin had been so…

But she didn’t want to think about that night. It had caused her enough trouble already, not that she would change it now that she had Levi and Eli.

Back then, she’d thought that at the very least , this being such a small community, a famous man like Ryder would want to make sure that they were good. Good enough to ignore each other when they saw each other in public, that was. Good enough to make sure there would be no scenes.

But he didn’t come home. And when he did, he only saw his family briefly, then left again.

Rosie intended to tell him, she really did, but he never gave her the opportunity.

And yes, sure, she knew his family. She knew exactly where they lived. She could have tracked him down. But it all seemed so sordid and unfair when he never bothered to follow up after that night.

What was she supposed to do? Drop in on the Carey family while they were having Sunday dinner, announce that Ryder had knocked her up after one long night after finals week her senior year? And ask if they could maybe give her his phone number?

The very idea of it had made her want to die of shame.

And then she really did feel as if she was dying of shame, and maybe was, because she kept getting more and more pregnant.

The thing about twins was that carrying them wasn’t subtle .

The pregnancy had been rough. They’d come early, the way twins did, and she’d spent the last month of it on bed rest. That had been a great opportunity to mourn the life she’d lost that night as well as to worry over the new life she was about to start, with two tiny babies to keep alive.

Though at least it had been a lovely change of pace from wandering around town, the subject of all the gossip.

Then, if she was brutally honest, brand-new motherhood had about killed her. And she’d had a whole lot of help. She had no idea how single mothers with no one did it, except, of course, she understood now that mothers… just figured it out.

Because they had to.

Rosie was lucky. The Starks were a big, sprawling family. Her grandparents had produced three sons. Wes, the oldest, had died only a few years ago. Jimmy, Rosie’s father, had died long ago. The other uncle, Steven, was still alive, but hadn’t gotten along with either of his brothers, maybe ever. He and Wes had liked to come by separately and bring up their grievances, then lay them all at Jack’s feet as if he was the reincarnation of his own father.

At least all the cousins got along. Uncle Steven’s three sons were feral, since their mother had run off when they were little and Steven was… not exactly nurturing. Sarah Jane, everyone’s favorite cousin, was the only child of Uncle Wes. She was also Cowboy Point’s librarian, a fierce advocate for every lost lamb she encountered, and she’d been a stalwart support for Rosie from the start.

The cousins had long been united in their desire to finally rehabilitate the old Cowboy Point Lodge. It was their fathers who hadn’t gotten along and could never agree on a thing, so the place had fallen apart once Grandma and Grandpa Stark got too old to run it.

Jack was personally determined to give the place a new life and what Jack said usually happened.

But the second, major Stark cousin bonding experience was the twins.

Once all of her male relatives understood that Rosie wouldn’t be sharing the name of the baby’s father no matter how they shouted about it, they all jumped on board. The same way they did everything else.

Jack acted like the babies’s father, just as he had when Rosie was a baby. Sarah Jane had moved in for the first month or two. Matilda was always good with small mammals.

Wyatt, Logan, and Noah made a game out of coming by. Rosie didn’t trust her cousins not to hurt themselves, as wild as they were, but she did trust them not to hurt her boys. First they’d competed as to who was the better mother’s helper in those terrifying early days. Then, as time went on, they’d taken the twins to do man things . Possibly at each other.

They would always come back with the best pictures of the twins having adventures, from fishing or hiking up some of the trails around town to pretending to help out with the lodge renovations. It was cute.

But ever since she’d run into Zeke and she’d watched him figured it out in a glance, she’d known, deep down, that she was on borrowed time.

The truth was, she always had been. She’d been kidding herself.

She could already tell that the twins looked like their daddy. Zeke wouldn’t be the only one to make that connection, especially not now that Ryder was back in town. Rosie had never been anywhere near Wilder Carey and besides, even if he hadn’t gone ahead and married Cat Lisle, Wilder had never been one to mess around close to home. Everyone knew his reputation, but it was made down in the Wolf Den, the seedy Marietta bar where reputations were made and drenched in whiskey, usually in the company of strangers.

Now that Ryder was back, if Ryder was back, people might look a little closer at Rosie’s little boys.

And all of the excuses she’d used all this time were true. But it didn’t matter, did it? He could have checked in with her, that was true. He’d been there that night. He knew what had happened between them.

Still, she was the one who knew that she was pregnant and she should have told him. She should have found a way. She’d let herself get wrapped up in the pregnancy. In trying to keep two perfect, active babies alive. In trying to raise them and love on them, and all the rest of it.

But a reckoning had always been coming.

Sooner or later.

Rosie couldn’t breathe for the next few days. It was like she expected him to come leaping out from any shadow, and she braced herself, thinking that it would be imminent. Surely his father would have told him, if not back when he’d seen Rosie, then certainly now that he’d moved home.

By the second week after Matilda’s announcement, Rosie knew that he really had moved home. Everyone knew. It was all that folks could talk about as the winter kept dragging on.

Rosie had to hear about it every time she took the twins to their cute little nursery school in the basement of the church out past the creek. She had to hear about it when she went into the general store, and every single person who came in felt called to muse on the topic with whatever member of the Lisle family was manning the till.

If she was the forthright, stand-up woman she’d always believed she was, she would handle the situation herself. She would get in her car, drive up onto the Carey’s ranch, and inform Ryder of the fact that he was a father.

But try though she might, she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

Mostly, she thought as she lay awake in her bed at night, the boys making their usual sleep noises on the baby monitor from their room across the hall, it was because she didn’t want to face him.

Because the last time she’d seen him had been that morning after.

Even if she hadn’t gotten pregnant that night, that particular morning would still be haunting her. That was how awful it had been. That was how intent he’d been on making sure that she knew she meant absolutely nothing to him, no matter what had happened between them that night.

Ryder had scraped her off like she was nothing but dirt on his cowboy boots, and she wished it was only her pride had been hurt by that. But it wasn’t.

It wasn’t just her pride, and that was the part she couldn’t forget.

That was the thing that made it impossible for her to go and face him the way she should. Because she’d been foolish enough to spend that night thinking that it all meant something , and that was horrifying. She thought that if she had to see that pitying smile of his ever again—

But February kept moving along, and she couldn’t keep herself on high alert the whole time. She had a whole life that she was living, the one she’d built when she’d come back here pregnant.

It might not have been the one she’d planned, but it was a good one. She cleaned out some of the rental properties around town, because more seemed to pop up in their little community all the time, even in the winter. She’d talked to a few of the owners—because she knew them all—and got herself the gig.

Now, while the twins were in nursery school, she went and hit whatever units need a cleaning. Rosie wouldn’t be jetting off to any fancy locations anytime soon, but cleaning allowed her to keep herself and her kids fed and clothed and not a burden on her family.

And, bonus, she liked cleaning. She did not have OCD, as Matilda claimed. Rosie liked the simple pleasure of setting things to rights.

She never really ran into members of the Carey family that much anyway. She didn’t spend time in bars, where the single brothers often were. She wasn’t a rancher. It had been a complete fluke that she’d been in the feed store when Zeke was that day.

As more time passed and she didn’t see him, she relaxed.

Rosie began to think that maybe they would all just carry on as they were, and it was a relief. She told herself that it was the way things were supposed to be.

And Ryder wouldn’t stay here. That wasn’t who he was.

He was a problem that he would solve on his own, no need for her to get involved.

Then one day, right as February was getting ready to give itself over to the roaring March lion waiting in the wings, she picked the boys up in the afternoon the way she always did. She took them home, let them out to romp in the snow, and was unloading the groceries when a truck pulled up in front of the house.

And then everything happened much too fast.

Like a nightmare, Ryder Carey was standing right in front of her. Right there, in the front yard of the little house that she and Matilda lived in, tucked away on the hillside below the lodge.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she blurted out, making both Levi and Eli shriek with scandalized laughter, because they knew that she wasn’t supposed to say hell . It was a bad word that only their naughty cousins said, as they always reported back with glee.

“I’ve been meaning to come over here and see you,” Ryder said, very formally, and Rosie felt like she was having an out of body experience.

Because he was as beautiful as she remembered, maybe more so. And she’d never heard him sound formal before. That night had been all about that slow, hot smile…

And this couldn’t be happening. And the boys were right here .

“I owe you an apology,” Ryder said. “I’m sure you’ve long since moved on, but my behavior that night was—”

Levi and Eli pushed in, each grabbing onto one of her legs, staring up at the strange man in the snowy front yard with great interest.

Then, the way he had last fall, Levi pointed straight at Ryder.

“Eyes,” he said.

The exact same thing he’d said to Zeke.

Ryder looked down at both boys as if he’d forgotten they were there. Or was only just seeing them, and was modifying whatever words he’d been about to choose.

But he stopped dead.

His face went pale. He looked from Levi to Eli, then back again.

And when he looked back at Rosie, he had a completely different expression on his face.

Pale, yes. But lit through with pure fury.

“Rosie.” His voice was colder than the afternoon around them, inching toward an icy dark. He said her name like it was the filthiest curse he could come up with, and she flinched, but she didn’t look away. It was the least she could do. “Are they…?”

Her throat was so dry it hurt. “Ryder.”

He looked… something far more deep and deadly hurt than outraged , but he was that, too. She could see it.

She could feel it.

Ryder took a step back. Then he surprised her by squatting down in front of the boys.

And ripped her heart out when he smiled at them, with a smile that matched the ones they offered him. First tentatively, then fully.

“Hey,” Ryder said, in a tender voice she didn’t know was possible, coming from a man who usually sounded like a hard shot of whiskey tasted. “How old are you guys?”

Eli smiled wider and stared. Levi puffed up his chest in his little parka. “We three in March,” he said proudly. “That’s older than two.”

Rosie stood there, torn between begging Ryder not to do this in front of her children and knowing she had no say in how he took this in. She watched him do the math. She saw the way it hit him, like a hammer.

He smiled at the boys.

Then he stood again, his dark gaze like fire, and she felt it tear through her.

“You better start talking, Rosie,” he said in a voice that was even worse than the way he looked at her. “And fast.”