A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy (The Careys of Cowboy Point #5)

Prologue

“There’s some weather coming in.”

Zeke Carey looked up as his wife came into the room, speaking with a softness that was uncharacteristic for a woman so filled with enough thunder and lightning when she pleased that she was her own weather system. He smiled at her.

Because she was his favorite kind of weather and had been for a long, long time. So long now that he wasn’t sure what he’d do if he found himself without his Belinda’s many storms and seasons, sometimes all in one day.

He didn’t intend to find out.

Zeke knew that she was talking about the Montana winter outside.

It was a blustery night. There was an intense December wind rushing through the mountains that stood high above Paradise Valley, rattling the windows and bouncing off the sides of the house that was set down in the middle of the northern Gallatins.

It was the sort of night that made a man want to settle in, maybe with a proper drink, and think a while on his life.

But he didn’t need to cue up the good country music and get to thinking on his regrets, because Zeke was lucky enough to have precious few of those. And tonight the weather could do as it liked because he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt more content, the wild Montana winter be damned.

He was stretched out on one of the beds that had once belonged to one of his five sons.

They were all grown now and men in their own right, a sweetness that only grew as they lived their lives well, but tonight he had something almost sweeter.

His two grandsons, three-year-old twins Eli and Levi.

He’d been reading the boys a bedtime story and now they’d fallen asleep, curled up on either side of him like sweet little mirror images.

Looking a whole lot like their daddy, Ryder, and his identical twin brother Wilder had when they were that age.

“It smelled like snow earlier,” he said in the same quiet way to Belinda, who’d come in to stand beside the bed now, beaming down at the scene before her.

Their sweet, funny, small boys were staying with their grandparents for Christmas this year, which Zeke and Belinda were over the moon about and didn’t bother pretending otherwise.

The twins’ mother, Rosie, had another set of twins on the way—God bless her—and both she and Ryder were down the mountain in Marietta.

They were staying in a rental not far from the hospital in the much bigger town on the valley floor because they expected her to give birth to her babies any day now and didn’t want to try to navigate the treacherously slippery road down Copper Mountain in the darkest part of the year.

A win all around as far as Zeke was concerned.

“The snow should start coming down soon,” Belinda told him, drifting closer so she could lean in and run a hand over one boy’s cheek and the other’s ruffled hair. “I’ve checked all the flashlights and set up the lanterns. And I saw you brought in more wood for the stove.”

“We’ll stay nice and toasty,” Zeke assured her, though she knew that as well as he did. Because they always had before. Winter was no joke in these mountains, but it was no trouble, either, if a person was prepared.

He hadn’t built this house, but he’d grown up in it.

He knew it as well as he knew the stretch of his own skin across his back, the bones broken and mended inside his own body.

They had a generator these days, because their boys had insisted upon it, but it would take a lot more than a Christmas snowstorm to get Zeke turning his back on the simple pleasures of an old-fashioned wood burning stove that could warm most of the house.

Not to mention the pleasure of lantern light on a cold, dark night.

Simple joys that reminded him of a past long gone.

Thinking about that generator got him thinking about his sons.

The three oldest he’d made with his sweet, lost-too-soon first wife, Alice.

He’d promised her that he’d see to it that their boys would lead good, happy lives, and over the past year and a half he had made that happen.

His oldest son and the wife he’d found by virtue of an old-timey ad in the paper had given birth to their first child in September.

And now, even sleep deprived and filled with all the panic and devotion of the new parents they were, Harlan and Kendall seemed happier than most.

It made Zeke happy too.

His wild twins were doing well too. Wilder and Cat were enjoying their newlywed status, and Cat, who had always worked in her family’s general store in town, had declared her intention to become a nurse and had started taking classes to bulk up on her prerequisites.

Because not everyone went straight to babies, Zeke knew, and as long as they were happy, who was he to complain?

Yet.

Besides, he’d only realized in the last year that Rosie Stark’s twin babies, the ones she’d had after college off in Texas and had moved home to raise, were Ryder’s.

He would have been happy to welcome the little boys into the Carey family no matter what happened between their parents, but he could admit that he’d hoped for what had ended up happening instead: Rosie and Ryder falling in love, marrying, and wasting no time expanding their little family.

And by extension, Zeke’s family.

He had two sons with Belinda, too, though it was always funny to separate them out that way.

Belinda had treated Alice’s boys as her own from the day she’d met them, and while no one ever forgot Alice or ever would, Belinda had mothered them all.

Boone, the oldest of the boys she’d given birth to herself, had gotten married to the woman he’d been in love with his whole life on Labor Day.

He’d been resigned to call Sierra his best friend, and nothing else, while she soldiered on through an unhappy marriage—but the summer had changed all that.

It was early days yet with them, Zeke knew.

He couldn’t get a read on whether they wanted to dive straight into making a family, or spend some more time basking in each other.

Either way, they were happy. And so Zeke was happy.

And, sure—had he engaged in the tiniest bit of deception to bring all this about? Damn right he had.

He had taken it upon himself to announce at Easter, the year before, that he only had a year to live. And yes, he’d already passed that year mark and was headed toward his second Easter of health and happiness despite his supposed diagnosis. Boone had already called him on the lie.

But Zeke couldn’t come clean.

Because his youngest son, the charming and clever Knox, was still depressingly single.

He moved from the bed, shifting the little boys so that Belinda could cover them up with the cozy comforter and tuck them in, humming the same song she’d sung to all their boys over the years.

They stood there a moment, smiling down at the toddlers the way they had smiled down at so many of their children tucked up in their beds. And when they walked out of the room, they held hands as they made their way to their own bedroom.

Zeke didn’t turn on the lights as they walked into the room, and not only because they were likely to go off soon.

Together, he and Belinda went to the window, where he could see that the snow was already beating at the glass, swirling down in that relentless Montana fashion that made it clear it intended to keep going some while.

“Looks like it’s going to be a minute before we get back into town,” he said.

“I like being tucked up on the ranch at Christmas,” Belinda murmured, gazing out into the dark. “Besides, all this snow means anything can happen.”

Zeke pulled Belinda closer so he could wrap his arms around her and rest his chin on her head. Alice had been a sweetness that warmed from within. Belinda was a simmering fire that was never quite banked. She turned into him, running her hands down his back and nestling into him.

“We have to do something about Knox,” Zeke said in a low voice.

“We’re running out of time,” she agreed. “Sooner or later one of the others is going to mention the fact that you’ve become an apparent miracle of medical science, and then what? How on earth will you convince that boy to settle down?”

Zeke laughed. “He thinks I’m dying and he hasn’t been convinced yet.”

“He’s always been that way,” Belinda said, but there was approval in her voice. “Hard-headed no matter how much he smiles his way through things. He gets that from my side.”

“Right,” Zeke drawled. “Because Careys are known for being pushovers. Not stubborn at all.”

“It’s a different kind of stubborn,” Belinda maintained. “You know as well as I do that he wanted to leave Cowboy Point. Maybe even Montana. You might not have convinced him to marry and start on some babies with your little stunt, but he’s still here. That’s not nothing.”

Zeke thought about his youngest. The most charming of the Carey brothers, some said.

The most easygoing, others claimed, though that always made Zeke laugh.

Because Knox was the only one of his sons who had been determined to go to college and had made it happen.

Knox was the only one who had taken his high school football years, turned them into a scholarship, and had gone to the University of Montana on the other side of the Rockies in Missoula.

He’d done well at UM as a college athlete and had also gotten excellent grades and a business degree.

Maybe he came off charming and easygoing to those who took him at face value, but Zeke knew better.

Knox was the only one of his children who could, if he liked, go anywhere to make his living.

He was the only one who wasn’t necessarily a rancher in his blood and bones, despite the land that had been in their family for generations.

This wasn’t to say that Knox didn’t love the Carey family ranch or the years he’d spent working it side by side with his brothers—no matter that his brothers liked to pretend that wasn’t the case.

Harlan was a salt of the earth kind of a man who had dedicated his life to High Mountain Ranch and would no doubt teach his children to do the same.

Boone was made in the same mold, though he was more independent, and had opened his own artisan dairy that had already been a huge success.

Wilder and Ryder were different. Wilder was happy to work the ranch and support his new wife as she chased her dreams, because he didn’t have an ego the way some men did.

Ryder, on the other hand, had made a name for himself on the rodeo circuit because he’d wanted something that was his, but he’d done that.

Now he seemed perfectly content to build a family with Rosie and settle in.

The lives they’d lead were a lot like the life Zeke had led, and it was a damned good life.

But there were other ways to live this ranch life.

Zeke knew that. Just like he knew that it was Knox who could change things up around here, if he stayed here.

If he made a life here. It was Knox who had the big ideas about the kind of things they could do with the ranch so that his brothers didn’t have to work themselves to death on this sometimes unforgiving land the way so many of their ancestors had.

The way he likely believed Zeke had, for that matter.

But he also knew that Belinda was right. Knox had a restlessness in him. His youngest needed a reason to stay right here in Cowboy Point, and that wasn’t going to come from family pressure.

Or not only from family pressure.

What Knox needed was to get his head turned around, and Zeke was pretty sure there was only one woman around these parts who had ever managed that feat. He had to hand it to his boy—Knox had excellent taste and, like his father, clearly liked women that were much too good for him.

A secret to a happy marriage, and Zeke would know. He was on his second.

He’d spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to hasten that head turning along, before his charming youngest son with his eyes on the horizon decided he needed to go somewhere else to make his way in this world.

Something that would break his mother’s heart.

And Zeke’s too, come to that.

But as the snow kept coming down, and the wind blew harder and wilder, Zeke felt a kind of settling deep in his chest.

Because this was Montana. His Montana, he often thought, though he knew better than to truly believe he had any ownership of land this untamable, this vast, this deeply wild and unknowable. He knew he was a steward at best.

Zeke was at peace with that. He had to be, or he wouldn’t have managed to live here this long, much less actively encourage his children to carry that torch.

Still, Careys had lived here in these mountains for a good long while now, and Zeke understood that there was a kind of magic that happened in these hills.

There always had been. Mountains were wily things.

They were never quite where you left them, and they had a way of making their wants and needs known—like it or not.

These particular mountains that spread out behind Copper Mountain liked to claim those who were part of them—like it or not. They knew who needed their brand of magic the same way they always knew who didn’t.

A Montanan knew how to respect the mountains, or he wasn’t much of a Montanan.

Zeke couldn’t help but think that this Christmas, it was Knox’s turn to find his way home at last.

Not just stay here a while longer on Zeke’s deathwatch, but to sink in a few roots at last and finally figure out that he wasn’t just born here, he belonged here.

That hummed in him like a Christmas carol and he knew that was the mountains’ doing too.

“Make a Christmas wish,” he told Belinda, smiling down at her pretty face, even prettier after all these years and the blessings of time and care. “I have a feeling it’s going to come true.”

She looked up at him the way she always did, her gaze filled with lightning and love, and she stretched up to wrap her arms around his neck.

“My dreams always come true, Zeke Carey,” she told him, his full name like a song in her mouth. “I accept nothing less.”

And then she laughed as he picked her up and swung her into his arms, because he might have been older than should have been possible these days, and dying according to some, but he still knew how to hold his woman and carry her over to their bed.

Where they kept each other warm late into the night, when the wind picked up and the house lost power, and as far as Zeke could tell, the mountains were out there doing their wild and wintry best to bring the magic on home.