Chapter Four
L ater that night, Ryder found Zeke in the small tack room he used in the barn. Once it had been for farm use, then it was an office, but now it was Zeke’s workshop. It was where he made his spurs and his bits these days so he could sell them in the summer market and online.
Ryder was happy that he was there, and alone.
He wasn’t quite ready to go wide to the whole family about the day he’d had and how everything had changed. In an instant.
Though he did pause in the doorway to take a look at the old man.
For the second time today, he looked at someone else and saw himself, but this time in the other direction. It made him feel about as close to dizzy as he’d ever been without a head injury. Those tiny, new faces that were the way his had been. This old, weathered face that was the way his was heading.
The driving force that had led him here tonight, the snow be damned, kicked in again.
Harder than before.
“You knew that Rosie Stark had my babies and didn’t tell me,” he said, shoving his way in through the door.
He hadn’t forgotten that she’d told him that, though there had been other things to focus on in the moment. It had been one more drum beating inside of him the whole of the night, and it got almost too loud to bear as he navigated a slippery path through the snowstorm that had blown in when he finally headed home.
After he’d had dinner with his children for the first time. After he’d watched Rosie be a mother, making them dinner and arguing them in and out of the bathtub. Reading them stories, then tucking them into bed.
Do you live here? Levi had asked while they were snuggling into the bed they still wanted to share, in a small bedroom with horses and trucks all over the walls.
I don’t , Ryder had told him.
Ryder is your daddy , Rosie had said, very matter-of-factly, with only a sideways look at Ryder to indicate that she knew this was a huge thing, this acknowledgment.
He’d actually held his breath as he’d waited for the boys to respond.
Jacinta has a daddy , Eli had said, like that settled the matter.
Rosie had bitten back a smile as she’d informed Ryder that Jacinta was Eli’s best friend at nursery school.
Is he my daddy too? Levi had asked in a stage whisper.
I’m both your daddy , Ryder had said then. And it’s past your bedtime.
If he’d found himself sweating from a performance far more precarious than any he’d given before, he certainly didn’t want anyone to see it. Just like he didn’t want to tell anyone—because he didn’t know how to feel about it—that the act of tucking the boys in and leaving them in their bed, sleepy and safe, made his heart actually, physically hurt in his chest.
Rosie had walked him out. They had said very little. Everything was too big, maybe. The ramifications were still coming at them, fast, and she probably knew as well as he did that the reckoning was only just beginning.
That Ryder Carey had knocked up Rosie Stark and left her on her own for a couple of years was going to take some digesting, and not just on his part.
Whatever it was, all he’d done was nod at her, stiffly, and then take himself home. He’d been glad it was dark and cold. He’d been glad that he’d had to focus on the road to make sure he didn’t slide off and over the side of the mountain.
He’d driven in total silence, save that drumbeat inside of him. It had gotten deafening by the time he made it to the ranch. He’d driven past the turnoff to his and Wilder’s plots and straight on to the house, where he could see the lights on inside.
If they hadn’t also been on in the barn, he would have turned around, gone back to his Airstream, and looked for answers in a bottle of whiskey. They were never there, those elusive answers, but a complicated life meant a man kept looking.
Zeke glanced up from what he was doing with a mild expression on his face.
“You’re not going to lie to me, are you?” Ryder asked incredulously.
“I’ve been many things in this life,” his father said in that slow drawl of his that always made Ryder stand a little bit straighter, like he was still a kid. “But a liar has never been one of them.”
“How could you keep something like that to yourself?”
“I thought about telling you.” Zeke turned his attention back to the metal in his hands. “But we’re talking about two boys’ lives, Ryder. You made it very clear that bull riding comes first. Above and before every other thing in your life. Why add to that list?”
“That’s fucked up and you know it.”
Again, Zeke seemed profoundly unbothered. Maybe too unbothered, though Ryder couldn’t think why that was.
“Children aren’t a game,” his father told him. “You can’t pick them up and put them down when you’re bored.”
That seemed profoundly unfair, given Ryder had known he was a parent for only a handful of hours.
“I didn’t ask you for parenting lessons,” he gritted out. “I want to know why you knew something of critical importance to my life and chose to keep it to yourself.”
Zeke looked up at him then, and while he didn’t look unbothered anymore, he didn’t look apologetic, either. “What would you have done?”
Ryder stared back at him, aware that every muscle in his body was tense. Particularly his jaw, which felt soldered shut.
“What would you have done?” Zeke asked again, as if he was being gentle and reasonable when Ryder would have preferred a punch in the mouth. “If I called you, back in the fall, would you have packed up everything you own and hurried home? And if you had, would you have come here to make Rosie’s life easier or harder?”
Again, and not for the first time today, Ryder felt winded.
“I’m your son,” he managed to get out.
“You are. And Rosie Stark is a good girl. She’s been through a lot in this town.”
He didn’t add alone , but it lingered there, like an accusation made into another piece of metal for his father to use as he pleased.
“Dad, I don’t know how to break this to you, but you’re supposed to support your own family first.”
“And in public, that is what I will always do,” Zeke told him staunchly. “Even in private. You know that I’ll always support you. You’re my son and I love you. But between you and me, Ryder. Man to man? Well. That’s a different story. I can support you and also not do what you think I should.”
Ryder had always wondered if a man knew he was having a heart attack before it happened. Now he wondered if it happened like this, his own heart beating so hard and so intently in his chest that it felt like he was clobbering himself from the inside out.
“So you think she was right to hide the existence of my children from me for years. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I didn’t say that.” Zeke kept his gaze level on Ryder’s. “But I can understand why she did it. Can’t you?”
And the thing was, Ryder really could understand it. He’d told Rosie that much himself.
But he sure didn’t like hearing it from his own father, dying or not.
Though Zeke had sure seemed healthy as a horse while doling out the kill shots tonight. No frailty or blanket around the shoulders in sight.
Ryder threw himself back outside to find the snow had stopped. His breath made clouds against the night sky. His heart was a percussion section. He felt as if something was holding him in a tight grip, and squeezing him more by the second.
He glared back at the barn and the obstinate father who certainly seemed healthy enough to be throwing zingers, getting in some metalworking, and casting aspersions on his own flesh and blood.
This homecoming thing was getting more complicated by the moment.
He got in his truck and drove back down the hill, but instead of turning up Wilder’s drive, he took the other drive toward his own little plot.
It took some doing. No one had driven down that way since the snow had started coming down in the fall. Ryder had a bit of a time making sure he stayed on what ought to be the road, instead of skidding off into the trees.
When he got there, the plot was still cleared, because that’s what he and Wilder had done with both of their bits of land as soon as they’d got them. They’d cleared them off together, talking big games about what they’d do with them, and then… hadn’t.
Or anyway, Ryder hadn’t. Wilder had built his first cabin the summer after high school. Then he’d added to it and updated it throughout the years.
Ryder had taken all the savings he’d ever had and had made the down payments on his truck and his Airstream. Then he’d left, heading straight for whatever rodeo would have him.
Tonight he parked his truck in the general area of where a cabin would sit, if he ever got around to building one. He hadn’t thought about settling down like that, not in a long time. Maybe not ever, not really.
But all he could think about tonight were the faces of those little boys. His little boys. Levi and Eli, names that almost rhymed but didn’t, just like him and Wilder. He’d spent most of the night staring at the two of them, trying to figure out if he thought they favored Rosie more, or him. Every time he thought he had the answer, he changed his mind again the next moment.
They were as different as they were alike, two silly, funny, happy little boys.
Tempting as it was to sit here and get dark and grim about all the things that had been kept from him, and he could certainly go that route—he could see the entrance yawning at him from afar—he had to factor in the inarguable fact that Rosie was doing a good job with them.
That was no small thing. Ryder hadn’t had to leave Montana—or even Cowboy Point—to understand that parents didn’t always do the best job with their kids. Especially not when they were on their own. He’d certainly gotten a broader view of that kind of thing as he’d traveled around the country again and again.
His sons—and something in him seemed to sputter to a halt, then pound back to life at the thought of it. His sons. He swallowed, hard.
They were well cared for. They were happy. They had family, a roof over their heads, a mother who adored them, and he couldn’t find fault in any of it.
That didn’t mean he was happy about it.
Maybe there was no getting himself happy about it.
Because what Zeke had said to him was settling in, like its own kind of ache. He still thought his father was wrong to not have told him—but what would he have done? What would he have done if Rosie had come and found him as soon as she’d learned she was pregnant?
Here, now, it was easy to puff up and claim that obviously he would have done the right thing, whatever that looked like for Rosie—but would he have?
Ryder knew himself pretty well and he doubted it.
And that sad, selfish truth sat in him like indigestion, making it hurt to breathe.
He sat there a long time. And he might have sat there longer still, but he was interrupted from his contemplation of the darkness before him, the suggestion of mountains in the distance, and the outlines against the night sky by a set of headlights coming down the track he’d made in the snow.
He braced himself for Wilder, but it was Boone’s truck that pulled into view, and then bumped its way right up next to his. Boone looked over at him, then climbed out of his own truck and came around to swing himself into Ryder’s passenger seat.
“I saw lights where there shouldn’t have been any lights,” Boone said with a grunt as he settled, the blast of cold air from outside swirling around them both. “Had to come see what was happening over here.”
“What did you think was happening?” Ryder asked, genuinely curious. It was after midnight on a very cold night after another snowstorm. It was a typical February night in Montana and smart people were tucked up indoors, as close to a heat source as possible.
“Could be poachers,” Boone said, in that deadpan way of his, as if there was a rash of poaching exploits in the dead of winter. Or ever, because this was Montana, where everyone was armed.
Besides, there was nothing to poach in this snowy clearing.
The brothers sat there a while, contemplating the night.
“What are you doing wandering around so late?” Ryder asked. Eventually.
Boone shrugged, a rustle of his heavy jacket. “I was down at Sierra’s. Something going on with her generator and there’s a whole lot of winter to get through yet.”
Ryder considered that. “And her husband’s not around to handle that sort of thing?”
He figured that he’d kept his tone sufficiently neutral when it came to the contentious topic of Boone’s lifelong female best friend, because Boone actually answered. “Business trip.”
If Ryder was any other one of his brothers, he would have jumped on that. He would have pointed out that no husband worth his salt would ever have tolerated the relationship that Boone had with Sierra. And no, he didn’t reckon that Sierra’s husband was simply more highly evolved or trusted his wife or any of the other things Boone had said over the years to make it seem like anyone asking was deeply immature.
It was pretty clear to Ryder that he didn’t care.
He could have said all of that, but he didn’t. He had his own problems.
Problems that the entire community of Cowboy Point was going to know all about, likely by morning. Assuming they didn’t already know, thanks to the Stark brothers.
He saw no reason to give Boone a preview.
Besides, he still had no idea what he was going to say once the parentage of Rosie’s twins was public knowledge. The twins themselves had accepted that he was their daddy and that was all that really mattered, he decided.
“I need to get over and see what you’re doing with that dairy,” he said instead. “Though I’ll be honest, I don’t know how to feel about the fact that folks around here are signing up for an artisan milkman .”
“If it wasn’t me I would hate me,” Boone agreed with his big, booming laugh. “That was Sierra’s idea. She lives down in Marietta and has a first-row seat to the kind of crafty, artistic takes on regular things that people are drawn to these days. Everyone wants small, local, and accessible. They want to meet the cow that made their milk and their cheese, and if it could come in a pretty package? Even better.”
“Please tell me you do not have meet and greets with your herd.”
Boone looked over at Ryder. “Oh, it’s on now. This summer? I’m making the herd a tourist attraction. I might give them their own social media account. Just wait.”
Ryder couldn’t engage with the idea of social media cow accounts, which he had a sneaking suspicion probably already existed. “A tourist attraction. Here.”
“The dairy is all the way over on the other side of the creek,” Boone said with a laugh. “Mom made it pretty clear that she didn’t want to wake up of a morning with a dairy smell coming in her windows. But I guarantee you, she’ll be all over it when the weather’s nice and the city people come down from Bozeman to cosplay the farming life for a week or so.”
Ryder tried to imagine Belinda mucking around with the cows. Not that she wouldn’t. He’d never seen his stepmother balk at a thing. But everyone was older now, and with four large, strapping men around to handle things—five, he amended, since he was technically here right now—why should she continue doing anything that looked like labor? He doubted he was the only one who thought she absolutely should not.
“I’m amazed that you even came up with an idea like this,” he said. “I thought the point of the ranch was to do the same thing that’s always been done, except more so, forever.”
Boone slid him a look at that, but didn’t comment. “A man likes to do something that’s his. Besides, one night I was running my mouth about exactly that and Sierra dared me to actually do something about it. So I did.”
He laughed, like he’d told himself a joke. Once again, Ryder didn’t comment, though he was fascinated by every part of that story. The idea of Boone, a man who preferred to let his actions speak, running his mouth at all took some imagining. And then, again, there was the Sierra factor. The best friend thing, when Boone had obviously been in love with her his entire life.
But Ryder was hardly in a position to comment on anyone else’s messy life.
Soon after, when Boone got back in his own truck and drove away, Ryder meant to follow him. Really he did.
Yet instead, he stayed where he was. Maybe it turned out that he liked the view here a lot more than he’d ever thought he would when there was so much world yet to see. There was something about this particular clearing, the specific arrangement of mountains and hills and Cowboy Point in the distance, and the trees that stretched up around him.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, the thought of settling down in a place like this didn’t fill him with that terrible itchiness. That restlessness that snuck beneath his skin, sunk into his bones, and agitated him until everything in him demanded his escape.
He hadn’t felt like that in the week or so he’d been home. That made it something like a record. Usually he was ready to walk to the nearest airport within twelve hours. Maybe he’d been changing even before he saw a whole new world in two pairs of curious dark eyes.
The only place he went tonight was back up the snowy drive. He eased his truck into the other road that forked off and led down around to Wilder’s house.
He turned his lights off before he came out of the trees, because he didn’t want to disturb Wilder and Cat. He made sure the door to his Airstream didn’t slam shut.
Once inside, he marched to the back bedroom, crawled into his bed, and lay there. He stared up at his ceiling, sure that he would fall asleep at any moment.
But he didn’t.
Instead, he found himself going over every single moment of that night in Austin, and by the time he finally slept, it seemed to be for no other purpose than to slide out of memory and into dreams of the same thing.
Rosie. Always Rosie.
When he finally got up the next day, he’d slept most of the morning away. There was an insistent sort of snow coming down, crafted specifically to build up the snowpack, not to adorn anything or make it pretty.
He messed around in his kitchen until he got the coffee going, then looked out his windows and saw that there were a number of trucks parked outside Wilder’s house. His brothers’ trucks. And he had the feeling that he was looking at an intervention, so he decided he didn’t need any part of that. He wasn’t ready to defend himself.
And he certainly wasn’t ready to let Rosie be the topic of conversation. Or her boys.
Our boys , he corrected himself.
Instead, he threw on some clothes, went out to his truck, and headed down into Cowboy Point, ignoring the gathering at Wilder’s completely.
He heard his phone buzzing, but ignored that too.
Without even meaning to, at least not consciously, he didn’t take the road all the way down into town. Instead, on the crest of that hill where the old lodge stood he turned off winding his way into the trees until the road looped him around to Rosie’s house.
When he knocked on the door, she answered, already frowning at him.
“They’re napping.” Her voice was short. He didn’t like it. “You can’t just show up here, Ryder.”
“You could maybe ratchet back on that tone of voice that suggests I show up here all the time, out of the blue, when you and I both know that’s not the case.”
“You literally showed up yesterday. Out of the blue.”
“You’ve known that you’re a parent for a lot longer than I have, Rosie,” he said then, in a low voice. Her expression changed, so he continued. “That’s not me blaming you for that. That’s me asking you for a little slack while I figure this out.”
She blew out a breath. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this since you left last night. Obviously. And I think that there’s no reason we can’t be civilized about it. If we both commit to putting the boys first, I don’t see why we can’t come to a mutual agreement on the best way forward.”
There was nothing inherently wrong with what she’d said. And yet he still didn’t like it.
Maybe because he wasn’t feeling anything like reasonable right now, standing on her front step with snow coming down on the both of them.
“Rosie.” His voice sounded deep and urgent, but he couldn’t change it when he heard it. It was the only tone that fit. “Twenty-four hours ago, I didn’t know that we made anything that night but memories. I had no idea I had one child, much less two. You want to sit here and talk visitation rights and custody battles and whatever else? I’m not there yet. I’m still trying to understand how the hell I’m supposed to turn myself into a father overnight. Meanwhile, I think you and I both know there’s no possible way your cousins didn’t tell everyone in town.”
She bristled at that, just a little, but he saw it.
“They’re mine,” she said. “Same way they’ve always been. Nothing to talk about.”
“Sure,” he said. “Except the part where you’ve made sure that I’ll always be known as a deadbeat dad.”
She opened her mouth and then shut it again.
Ryder took that as reluctant agreement. “I’m starting off behind, that’s all I’m saying. Explain to me how you think I should go from not having the slightest idea that those boys exist to worrying about being civilized in less than a day. Do you think you could do that? Because I have to say, I don’t think I’m being unreasonable that I’m finding this a little… That I’m finding this a lot .”
He said all of that a little too quickly, maybe. A little too intently. It was the best he could do with all the competing storms crashing around inside of him.
Then he braced himself, because he really thought she was going to blow up at him, but she didn’t.
Something changed in her face. Her eyes softened. She looked at him like she was trying to take him in for a long moment, then away.
He couldn’t tell what she was looking at. The snow. The hills. The whisps of smoke from other people’s chimneys that made the air smell rich and woodsy.
When she looked back she seemed to see too much of him. But instead of backing away, she gave him a jerky sort of nod.
“You better come inside,” she said quietly, like there was the same sense of something like inevitability, or fate, heavy in her chest, too.
Then she opened the door wider and let him in.