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

Chapter Twelve

R osie was crying, but Ryder got the feeling that it was for the right reasons.

She confirmed it, going up on her toes and pressing her mouth to his. “It’s you and me,” she told him, with a rough sort of certainty in her voice that made everything in him sing. “All the way.”

He pulled her out into the middle of the lodge floor and when he did, the band started playing a sweet old country song in their honor. And Ryder danced with his Montana girl, knit hat on her head and snow boots on her feet, and twirled her around and around until they were both dizzy. Again.

And laughing the way he hoped they always would, like there was nothing else on earth but the two of them.

Then everyone else joined them to dance some more, but the twins came and climbed on their feet and decided that was dancing. So it was the four of them, the way it should have been all along and would be, going forward.

Until they were more than four.

And it wasn’t that it was suddenly less scary, all this intimacy that he’d been avoiding all of his life. It was Rosie.

Rosie was worth stepping out into all that intensity. Rosie was worth not running.

This was them. This was the family they’d made together, with a few years in there of solitude to make them really understand how special this was now.

He had already missed too much of his sons’ lives. He did not intend to miss another moment.

And he didn’t.

Ryder used to ride bulls. He knew that he could do anything, seven seconds at a time. And that was exactly what he did.

He invested in his new life, his new family. The first thing he did was invest in the lodge project, because as much as Rosie had just become a Carey, he’d also become a Stark.

Something he made sure to say at a big Stark family dinner, just to see all the cousins wince. It was glorious.

But later, when he found himself with the three Stark brothers, they all gave him a chin lift. He raised his in return.

“Long as she’s happy,” Noah said, all tough guy.

“Spectacularly happy,” Logan added. “Not just run-of-the-mill, everyday happy. This needs to be on a different level.”

“So happy it hurts,” Wyatt agreed.

The old Ryder might have laughed and told them to take their best shot. But this Ryder knew that these were men who took family seriously. Whatever it might look like to outsiders, they’d done their best to take care of Rosie and the boys.

That meant something to Ryder. It mattered.

“I appreciate that I have you three to keep me on the straight and narrow,” he told them, seriously. “It’s good to know that if I mess up, you’ll be right there.”

“Depend on it,” Wyatt said, but he grinned.

And when they all finished slapping each other on the back, Ryder was pretty sure that he was considered an honorary Stark.

Just as long as Rosie stayed happy, that was.

He encouraged Rosie to open that bookstore. “Why not build it in one of the empty outbuildings up at the lodge?” he asked. “Make that the permanent store. And while you’re at it, why not have a movable, pop-up store? Isn’t that the big thing these days?”

Maybe he shouldn’t have brought up the subject while they were packing up her house to move her and the boys into that Airstream with him. She looked at him over a pile of boxes and shook her head.

“You never seem like a dreamy type. And yet.”

“All I’m saying is that there’s going to be an Airstream available soon. It might as well be yours.”

“I just don’t think—”

“Baby,” he said, and calling her that always made her melt. He could see the way her eyes went unfocused. “Do you remember signing a prenup?”

Those gorgeous blue eyes of hers focused, then narrowed. “You know that I didn’t.”

“Then it’s all your money too.” He shrugged. “Might as well start spending it.”

When she made that face, he went over to pull her into his arms and lay kisses all over her face.

“It’s okay to have dreams,” he told her. “We’re having them together this time. It’s not going to be you on your own in this or anything else. It’s us . I understand if you don’t believe that. But you’ll see. I’m not going anywhere.”

She sighed against his mouth. “I do believe you. I really do.”

He tipped her face back and smiled down at her. “Good,” he said. “Because while we’re talking about the future and building out the things that are important to us, why not build out our family, too?”

Rosie looked up at him, and at first she looked something like stunned. Then, as she continued to stare at him, a wild kind of warmth seemed to take her over. He watched it dawn in her eyes like she was making her own sunshine.

“Really?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “You want another baby?”

And he understood that once again, they were going back to the beginning. He wasn’t going to knock her up this time and leave her to it. They were going to talk about this. They were going to have a baby or they weren’t, but it was going to be something they did together. Every step of the way.

They just kept making this brand-new.

“Baby,” he told her, his voice low and dead serious, “I want everything. And this time, I’m going to be there for every single moment.”

Later, he would maintain that he got her pregnant then and there.

Because by the time they broke ground on his land in April, when the ground was a little less frozen, she’d already missed her period. And they were going to have to wait a while to be sure, but they were both pretty convinced that it was another set of twins.

“You’re going to have to build that house pretty quick,” she told him, as they sat together on that couch in his Airstream, tangled around each other while the boys slept hard in the next room. “And the way we’re going, you better put in a bunch of extra rooms. We might get really crazy and decide we want to try a third time, so we should plan right now for that to turn into two as well.”

But she didn’t sound panicked. On the contrary, she smiled at him as if this was every dream she’d ever had, coming true.

He intended to see to it that they did. He was Ryder Carey, after all, the hometown kid who made himself a star on the circuit, so he knew a thing or two about dreams coming true. And he had four brothers who could help him build her the house she wanted, to start.

“Rosie, love of my life,” he told her, nipping at her chin to make her laugh, “it would be my pleasure.”

And then he made sure, that night and every day forward, that it was her pleasure, too.