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

Chapter Nine

T he thing about being a parent, Rosie found herself thinking the next day, was that it forced you to do things you wouldn’t have done otherwise.

Case in point: last night what she really would have liked to have done was surrender to all that clawing stuff inside of her that wanted so desperately to get out.

But the boys had been sleeping upstairs. And she wasn’t the sort of person who had screaming fits anyway, as far she knew. She’d been sorely tempted to experiment with that. Maybe it was time to turn over a new, screaming leaf… but, of course, she’d done no such thing.

I can’t think about this now , she had told Ryder, after staring at him so wide-eyed she’d wondered if maybe she’d actually died and what was left was her corpse, and that would make sense of the great howl of emotion and sensation inside of her.

Because he wanted to marry her.

He thought they could just get married, like that wasn’t… Like she hadn’t given up on that as a possibility a thousand times over the years and how could he possibly imagine that he could just swan back into town and touch her and—

Just as long as you think about it , he had replied, looking and sounding completely unbothered, which was maddening.

Trust Ryder Carey to suggest marriage and then seem not to care that much what her answer might be.

If he hadn’t currently been in total possession of her heart, however unwillingly on her part, she might have tried to kill him.

But again, she had children. His children, who had only just met their father. She couldn’t be the reason they lost him again.

He had left not long after, but not before he’d kissed her goodbye. And being Ryder, he had made an entire production out of it, leaving her limp and silly on the couch.

Which, naturally, only made things worse.

Rosie had stayed there for a long time, not sure if she was about to burst into tears, give into that screaming fit that she was sure was just there within reach, or somehow find a way to breathe normally again.

She hadn’t really been making any progress on any front when Matilda came in, with a cat in a carrier and the usual spate of promises that the animal would only stay until she found it a home, or a shelter. This was a relief, because it had given Rosie something else to think about. Namely, that the arrival of any animal in any condition at all meant that Matilda would add it to her little menagerie in their outbuilding out back. The one she had spent one summer transforming from a makeshift toolshed sort of structure into a refuge for the animals she loved so much in any weather, all the while claiming that she would never use it for that purpose.

My intention is to open an actual shelter , she had told Rosie repeatedly. Not have my own in the backyard.

It had long since become necessary to pretend that she didn’t know how many creatures were out there, as it was that or get in pointless fights with Matilda, who never really engaged in that sort of thing. She agreed with everything and mea culpa -ed all over the place and then did exactly as she pleased anyway.

Still, Rosie was usually a lot more snippy about the strays that Matilda collected, despite knowing that it got them both nowhere. But last night? What a welcome distraction to have a furry, orange-colored little demon to take her mind off her own troubles.

Why are you lying around like an opera heroine? Matilda had asked before unveiling the cat.

I have never in my life been operatic , Rosie had retorted. Darkly.

Though it was true that last night she had come awfully close to singing her first aria.

Then, this morning, when what she really would have liked to do was wallow about in bed in much the same way she’d done after that night in Austin, she’d had to get up. She’d had to be one hundred percent a mom, because neither one of her beautiful little boys needed to know a thing about her heart.

Aside from how much she loved them, that was.

What made it even trickier was that today was a special day for the boys, because they were going over to stay at Ryder’s place for the first time.

She and Ryder had been preparing them, but she reviewed it with them on the way over in her regrettably much smoother-handling vehicle, because he lived in an Airstream and she knew they would think that was fantastic. She kind of thought it was fantastic herself, to tell the truth. There was something so appealing about thinking that at any moment you could simply hitch up your home to a truck and drive off somewhere.

What she’d told him last night was true. She liked it here. She intended to stay here and raise her children here. That didn’t mean she didn’t also understand the lure of the open road.

Rosie’s battered heart got a workout on the drive over, because it had snowed again in the night. Everything looked pristine and perfect, because the hesitant March sun made everything sparkle. She remembered this exact view from the times in her childhood she’d climbed around in the lodge and had gazed out into these far-off hills. She knew these ripples of snowcapped mountaintops like waves all the way to the horizon, as far as the eye could see and then some.

It was all home, and it hurt and it was beautiful and she supposed that was an easy way to describe how it felt to love. Too hard for her own good.

Though it wasn’t the prettiness of the view that was getting to her, not really. It was beautiful, but today was also a major moment in this thing that she and Ryder were doing. Or had been doing before he’d thrown a wrench in it last night.

But no, this parenting thing would continue no matter what. Rosie was certain of that. And this was the first time she was taking the boys to him, so that they could stay at his place.

The first of many times if she didn’t marry him, she told herself as she drove, singing songs with the boys as she went.

She really wasn’t sure how she felt about it. Not that she was concerned about them staying with him, because she knew he would keep them safe. It wasn’t that. But it was one thing to think in reasonable, practical terms about the fact that they would have two homes and quite another thing to think that she was potentially heading toward a future where she only had her babies part of the time.

Rosie already knew that the years went by fast. There were only fifteen years left before they could leave the house entirely if they wanted, and she was supposed to find a way to be okay with that when the truth was, she wasn’t okay with letting them go to their father’s. That didn’t mean she wasn’t going to do it. She knew it had to be done. She knew Ryder deserved time with his kids just as much as she did, and she certainly knew the boys were head over heels for their shiny new daddy.

That didn’t make her okay with any of it.

It all seemed too precarious, suddenly. Like they were being snatched away from her and she was once again being left alone—

But there, on that drive down the far hill past the lodge and on into the hills, she caught herself.

Because first of all, that wasn’t what was happening. Second, and possibly more importantly, he had offered her something to fix this problem, hadn’t he?

She didn’t let herself think about it as she turned into High Mountain Ranch and followed the tracks that had already been laid in the new fallen snow deeper into Carey land. She had never been here before. Or if she had, she didn’t remember it. She followed the directions Ryder had given her, bumping up along the main road and counting off the smaller roads that snaked off of it until she found his. And then took the correct fork, or so she hoped.

For a while there was nothing but the thick forest all around, and the twins shrieking with excitement.

Then, soon enough, they were coming out of the trees to find themselves in a clearing so beautiful that Rosie actually caught her breath.

There was a blue sky today and the sun felt like a miracle after the last little while of snow and gloom. Everything sparkled. The snow on the ground, the snow in the trees, the snow blanketing the mountains in the distance. And Ryder’s gleaming Airstream sat in the middle of all of it, a snow-dusted silver bullet looking out over the roads she’d just driven, back toward the lodge and farther on to Copper Mountain rising in the distance.

And all around them, on all sides, the mountains kept their secrets from mortals and told their stories only to the sky and the wind.

Rosie could have stayed there, staring, forever. She had the strangest feeling as she looked out at this view, almost as if—

But she couldn’t indulge her feelings. Not today.

She drove the last little way, pulling up close to the Airstream. And by the time she got out of the car and went to get the boys out of their car seats, Ryder was there.

Rosie got Eli and he got Levi, and for a moment, she felt disoriented. It was like she’d fast-forwarded into that life he’d been suggesting last night. The two of them stood there for a moment, here on his land with their children and no reason at all that this shouldn’t be their life every day—

Her heart hurt .

And the boys started squirming, so they both put them down. They immediately started running around like maniacs that had never seen snow before, still shrieking out their joy into the trees.

Rosie forced herself to look Ryder directly in the eye. Then she made herself smile, the way she’d practiced for four years in Austin.

“You don’t have to fake a smile, baby,” Ryder drawled, with a look she didn’t try to define in that dark gaze of his.

Meaning it wasn’t a fluke that he’d said it last night. Meaning she was going to have to come to terms with what her body did when he said it. How she melted, everywhere, and wanted nothing more than to stop whatever it was she thought she was doing so she could crawl into his arms.

But she didn’t.

Though she did stop smiling. “Call me if you need anything,” she said, and only had to clear her throat once. “They can be overwhelming.”

“I can be overwhelmed,” he replied. “I’ll figure it out.”

There was a pause, then. She thought he was very close to saying something about last night, and what he’d said, and possibly her reaction to that. Unless, of course, he’d reconsidered, which wasn’t something she really wanted to think about either. But he didn’t.

Though he might as well have, because she was thinking about it, wasn’t she?

It was kind of a relief to kiss her wild little monkeys, then try not to stumble as she left them with Ryder. It was a relief to get in her car, and get out of there. She drove off of Carey land, then pulled her car to the side of the road and sobbed.

Rosie sobbed for a good long while, and she couldn’t have said why. Or maybe it was simply that there were too many things, all at once. Leaving her babies. Leaving them with Ryder, of all people. Ryder, who she had, at different points, vowed to hate forever.

It was all those things. It was last night. It was the fact that she was used to him now. She was used to his body and having access to it. She was comfortable with him in ways she never would have believed could be possible. It was already more than she’d ever dreamed could happen after that night in Austin.

Yet accepting all of that only made her sob more.

Rosie kept going until she couldn’t. Then she sat up and laughed at herself. She pushed her way out of the car, letting the cold air outside crash into her. One deep breath was like daggers thrust deep into her lungs. Another one, deeper, felt sharper—but better.

She bent down, right there by the side of the road, and got two fistfuls of snow. Then she rubbed it all over her swollen, too-hot, sob-wrecked face.

It felt great .

Or maybe it was a shock to her system, because her next idea was on the loony side.

She stood there, cold everywhere, thinking it through.

“Are you really going to do this?” she asked herself. Out loud, out there on the top of a bunch of mountains, without a soul in sight. “It’s the nuclear option and you know it.”

Her face was stinging from the cold rubdown. She needed to get back in the car before she got too cold, and that was a fine line out this far from civilization. But Rosie desperately wanted some kind of sign—

Then she laughed again, because she was her own damn sign. She could decide on any kind of option that felt right, nuclear or not. She was a fully grown woman who didn’t have her children to take care of today, and if she wanted to drive all the way out to a place that was so far from the middle of nowhere that it was more like the middle of never where, she would.

Sometimes, Rosie assured herself, a girl had to go and see her mother.

Even if that mother was Charlotte.

She climbed back in her car, and jacked up the heat to high, shivering as the blast of it hit her frozen skin. It seemed smart to wait until she was sure she would stop shivering, so she did that. Then, when she turned the heat back down to a normal level because she was starting to feel hot, she unzipped her parka, blew out a breath, and asked herself if this was really what she was doing.

“It is,” she said into the quiet of her car’s interior, because if she’d learned one thing from her mother, it was that some intentions required words spoken aloud to take root.

This felt like one of them.

Intention rooted, Rosie drove back toward the lodge. But before she climbed up the hill that led to it, she took one of the smaller roads that branched out and headed west. Away from Paradise Valley and much deeper into the Gallatin range.

If she was still looking for signs, she decided that one of them was the fact that someone had already driven this way this morning, which was a nice gift from the universe. It was nice to have the tracks in front of her to lead the way.

And she bumped along, cozy in the car with her thoughts, for the next hour or so.

The views were beyond breathtaking. It was normally an hour out from the lodge, though today she wouldn’t be surprised if it was twice that. Because it was winter, and no one could ever really be sure what a mountain might do when it got all icy and cold.

She passed the two-hour mark and kept going, following the same tracks carefully because the road wasn’t always where it ought to be. As always, she smiled in something almost like relief when the road narrowed even further. Moments later she rounded a mountain along a cliff that could only be called treacherous, and then, finally, crossed a familiar one-lane bridge over a frozen creek.

Just like that, she was there.

The trees stretched high above her, covered in snow, but there were lights in them. Fairy lights to lead the way until she saw the big archway to one side, woven together from twigs and branches and what her mother had once called sacred energy from the mountain itself .

Hey, whatever worked.

She drove through and entered Nepenthe Creek, the community where her mother had lived for most of the last decade. Before that, she had been a frequent visitor—especially when she didn’t want to be around her husband or his family.

Rosie had been here a lot. More than she’d wanted to, some years. But Charlotte had never been one to ask for input on her decisions.

Rosie parked her car in front of the first building, because cars were frowned upon here, tools of the world that they were and all. She got out and stretched, then zipped her coat up. There was more of a breeze up here and the cold was piercing, but she decided it felt like clarity.

And she certainly needed some of that.

She rubbed her hands together, did a few squats to loosen up her legs, and then followed the shoveled pathway that led deeper into the community. It was surprising that no one was around, but she didn’t dwell on that. These were the sort of people who could be derailed for hours by an impromptu drum circle or the plight of a wild animal.

Sometimes she envied them, Rosie thought. Sometimes she wished she was brave enough to live outside the bonds of society, to make her own way, and to welcome whatever came with no expectation or judgment.

But that wasn’t her. It never had been her, to her mother’s dismay.

Rosie made her way to the cluster of buildings over near where the creek ran sweet and clean in summer to see if her mother was in the cabin where she lived these days. She went and knocked on the door, even though her mother had told her a thousand times that no one knocked in a place where they all belonged. She did not belong here, Rosie had always thought, but had refrained from saying. She always worried that Charlotte would take something like that as a challenge.

When there was no answer, she continued on down the path to the place the people who lived here called their temple. It wasn’t a church. It was as sacred or profane as they decided it was in any given moment. It was the round building in the center of the community where they gathered each morning and night. They ate there, lounged around there, held their many groups and encounters and festivals. Jack had once called it the community Starbucks, which had not gone over well with the anti-capitalists.

Rosie walked into the temple building, all wooden and built by the hands of community members past. She could admit it was a pretty place, with its soft lights and warmth, and tapestries hung to billow and wave. There was the smell of something like curry mixed in with woodsmoke, and despite herself, it all felt welcoming.

Maybe this whole Ryder situation was mellowing her more than she’d thought.

She’d have to tell Charlotte, who had long maintained that what Rosie really needed was to mellow out and let the universe lead her, or something like that. She’d never paid as much attention as perhaps she should have.

There was the sound of voices and musical instruments from deeper in the building. Rosie knew then that the community was gathered for their morning meeting—perhaps held later today because of the snow—and, as usual, some felt that they could best express themselves by playing musical instruments in the midst of these conversations.

She dutifully shed her outer layers and hung them on a peg by the door, then set her boots in the neat lines that were already there. Then she padded in, past the outer rooms that had only ever been described to her as multipurpose , though no purposes were ever explained. She found the community in the huge central room with the dome ceiling that was painted with constellations, none in their proper place.

There were many familiar faces in this room. Some that Rosie had known forever, some that she’d met last time she’d come here, and some she’d simply seen in town over the summer, selling crafts and wares at the summer market. She put on her smile and looked around until she found her mother in the crowd.

“Moonshadow,” someone said. More than one someone. “Moonshadow.”

It took Rosie longer than it should have to remember that Moonshadow was the name her mother was using these days.

But everyone turned, so Rosie did too, and there was Charlotte. Sitting with her eyes closed, and a look of familiar bliss on her face as she tuned in , as she called it.

The trouble with Charlotte, Rosie thought, was that she didn’t look the way some of her friends here did. As if their bodies had been crying out for the meat and sugar they’d been denied for decades, leaving them a bit gamey, as Matilda had once put it.

Charlotte looked radiant, as ever. Her brow was notably unlined. Her hair was the same strawberry blonde as Rosie and Matilda’s, though it gleamed with a touch of silver, here and there. She liked to keep it full and long and flowing all around her, and when she opened her eyes to see her daughter standing there, she beamed.

“Did I forget that you were coming?” she asked in her lovely, musical voice. “I know that disappoints you.”

And Rosie burst into tears.

Because her mother was a silly woman in many critical ways. Her mother was also a selfish woman, in a whole host of other ways that made even less sense to Rosie now that she was a mother herself. Yet at the end of the day, Charlotte was her mother.

Right now, Charlotte was exactly who Rosie needed.

And the thing about Charlotte was that she wasn’t good at the day to day. She wasn’t good at routines, or self-sacrifice, or putting other people’s needs above her own. She, in fact, would tell anyone who listened that these things were her strengths .

Rosie had always found that debatable, to put it mildly.

What Charlotte was great at, however, was this.

A moment of crisis. An opportunity for connection.

Rosie’s relationship with her mother was a necklace of sorts, one jewel-like moment strung together with the next, with nothing in between. No real parenting, but she’d come to terms with that a long time ago. And there had always been Jack.

But there was also this.

There was the way Charlotte rose to her feet in that graceful way of hers and moved across the floor, a vision in flowing white clothes—all of them appropriate for yoga, or perhaps joining a cult.

Not that Rosie cared when her mother wrapped her in a hug that smelled of weed and roses, murmured lovely things in her ear, and then led her off into one of those multipurpose rooms after all.

It turned out it was a kind of study, with beanbag-type cushions strewn about the floor on a cozy warm rug. That was where they sat. Charlotte rocked Rosie like she was a baby and didn’t ask her a single thing until she sat up, wiped her face again, and let out a long, hard sort of breath.

“There you go,” Charlotte said, with a nod, as if she understood what was happening on a deep, cosmic level that transcended actual communication. For all Rosie knew, she did. “Emotion is a gift, Rosie. If you allow it to do what it will, there’s no need for it to storm like this, taking you out with it.”

“I don’t know,” Rosie said. “This feels like a storm.”

And then she poured it all out. She told her mother about Ryder and what had happened in Austin. Because this was Charlotte, who had very few boundaries in general and none when it came to intimate relationships, she really did tell her everything. She told her about how it had been since he’d come here and found out the secrets that she been keeping. She told her about how their relationship had shifted and what he’d offered, money and marriage, and how she’d reacted. To the money thing, and then, in a much bigger way, to the marriage thing.

She told Charlotte how much she hated all this.

Or wished she hated it, more like.

“Now he’s offering the thing I’ve secretly wanted the most,” she said, and something in her shattered, hard, because that was true. And she’d had no idea it was true until she said it out loud, raw and inarguable. “I want it, but I can’t do it this way, can I?”

She wiped at her face. Charlotte only made a sound to show she was listening, though she didn’t speak.

“Shouldn’t I hold out for love?” Rosie could barely get that out. She shook her head. “But he’s so hard to resist and he’s my babies’ father. And Mom…” Charlotte looked surprised, likely because Rosie hadn’t called her Mom in years. Rosie should probably have been surprised too. “They adore him already. And how can I break their hearts? Not now, but eventually. Eventually they’ll understand that they could have been a family.”

That word made her cry all over again.

“Rosie.” Charlotte rubbed her hand over Rosie’s hair, and then rubbed circles on her back, a throwback to Rosie’s childhood that made her realize this was why she rubbed Levi and Eli the same way. “Tell me about this man in ways that don’t have to do with motherhood. Or fatherhood. Where does he stand in his divine masculinity?”

Rosie sighed at that. “I love him,” she told her mother, because if she started talking about his divine masculinity she was going to get entirely too graphic. Charlotte might not care, but she would. “I’ve always loved him. I fell in love with him hard and fast in one night, and then I spent these years hating him because he’d changed my life forever.”

Charlotte nodded, as if this was only to be expected, which was oddly comforting.

Rosie kept going. “And then he walked back into my life and changed it again, and I tried so hard to keep hating him, but I never did. I never really did, did I? I’ve loved him all along.” She sucked in a breath, and it felt the way it had when she’d been out there in the snow. Daggers down deep. “He wants to marry me. This is my dream come true.” She heard the sound she made as she sucked in a breath then, because it hurt. “But he doesn’t love me.”

Charlotte only gazed back at Rosie, holding the space. Another thing that Charlotte was good at.

“He doesn’t love me,” Rosie said again, and it didn’t hurt less, but it made her feel less raw and torn apart to say it. To stop hiding from it. “And you can’t love someone into loving you. You just can’t.”

She waited for her mother to say something that would be maddening and yet true. About rivers that always made it to the place they were heading, no matter how many rocks or rapids they found. Something about the sun that always rose, and wouldn’t it be a shame if there wasn’t a whole night first to make it possible to love a sunrise so much.

Charlotte nodded, as if she was thinking, and her hair flowed over her soft white garments. She kept rubbing circles on Rosie’s back. But there was a look in her eyes Rosie wasn’t sure she’d seen before.

“You don’t love a person into loving you, Rosie. You just love them.”

The way she said that made something deep inside of Rosie ache in a whole new way. Because it almost felt as if her mother was talking about all kinds of love. Even this kind of love—their kind of love.

She could swear that somewhere in Charlotte’s always-opaque blue gaze, there was something encouraging Rosie to think about the fact that Charlotte really did love her. And how Rosie experienced that love was Rosie’s problem.

And that maybe that wasn’t as messed up as she’d always thought it was.

She could almost see it, like a glimmer of light in the middle of a long, dark night.

Almost.

“You just love them,” Charlotte said again. “That’s truly all you have in this world.” She leaned closer. “And it’s actually beautiful, my darling girl. Someone loving you back is a marvel, a miracle, a gorgeous communion of souls. But that’s not what love is. Love is its own reward, or it isn’t love.”

Something inside of Rosie seemed to settle at that. She took another breath, then let it out, deep and long.

And it was as if that something in her finally let go.

As if all those padlocks around her heart had not only opened, but fallen away, and she was breathing them out. Because she didn’t need them anymore.

There was no need to hide. There was only love.

She sat with Charlotte for a while, and when her mother moved to the kitchen and made them both some of that spicy, fragrant tea she loved, Rosie took it. Then she kissed her mother on both of her cheeks. She namaste -ed her way out of the temple, then settled in for the drive back, feeling much lighter than she had on the way out.

It was late afternoon but still light out as she came out of the back roads and onto the slightly wider and better maintained road that led to High Mountain Ranch. She wasn’t supposed to pick the boys up until tomorrow, but she turned toward Ryder’s place anyway. She bumped her way up along the road, feeling focused. Determined.

Ready, maybe.

Or not afraid any longer, which felt a lot like magic.

She sent her puzzle of a mother her thanks and trusted the universe Charlotte arranged her life around would deliver it. It would have to, as Charlotte didn’t believe in cell phones.

When she got to the Airstream, she could hear laughter inside. She didn’t knock. She walked right in and found her boys and the man that she loved desperately whether he loved her or not at his table, playing with heaps of Play-Doh.

And it was everywhere. All over the boys, in their hair, and more fascinatingly, all over Ryder, too.

He looked up at her and grinned, all slow delight, and she understood then that this had always been a lost cause. She been lost long ago.

There was only one way to find herself again.

It seemed counterintuitive. She knew that. It was impractical, and she knew that too.

But she was going to do it anyway.

“There you are,” Ryder said, as if she’d been meant to be here all along. Here, with her family, covered in the muck they’d made because when they did it together, it was art.

Maybe that was a lesson too.

The boys raced over to her and put their hands—covered in that maybe not so artsy muck—all over her, but her eyes were on Ryder.

The boys were telling her every single thing that had happened since she’d been gone, in unintelligible words and high-pitched noises, or maybe she couldn’t understand them because she was looking at him.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

For a moment he didn’t get it, then he did. His whole face changed. Suddenly, everything in him went still.

Intent.

She almost wanted to shiver.

And then, slowly, Ryder smiled.

“You sure?” he asked.

“I’ve never been more sure of anything,” she told him, and she meant it.

“Good,” he said. “Because neither have I.”

And they didn’t mean that the same way. She knew that. But she remembered what Charlotte had told her. And she basked in the warmth and light of his kitchen, her boys jumping and squealing all around her, and that light in his gaze; the promise of everything she’d ever wanted.

Almost everything, anyway.

But maybe that was enough.

She told herself it would have to be enough.