Chapter Seven
T hey were past the halfway mark in September and despite more pretty days than not, the growing chill in the early mornings and at night was making it clear that the sunshine and warmth wouldn’t last.
Seasons made sense to Wilder. There was an order to them, a progression. None overstayed their welcome. They had their moment and then moved on, no harm and no foul. It was orderly and expected.
What he couldn’t figure out was how this thing with Cat was still going.
Or how this secret, forbidden, unbearably complicated thing he couldn’t even name had somehow become the longest relationship he’d ever had.
The temperature had dipped down low this morning. He could see his breath as he sat out on the porch, wearing a few more layers to keep the chill away. The coffee was perfect this morning, and he wasn’t a particularly superstitious man, but Wilder did take his ability to make himself a perfect cup of coffee as something of an omen for how the day was likely to go. His brother Boone had once pointed out that Wilder had taken longer to figure out how to make a decent cup of coffee than he ever had with any of the women in his life.
Wilder had obviously responded that he was shocked that Boone was putting himself forward as the poster child for serial monogamy, since he was so busy filling up his hope chest for a married woman—namely, Boone’s constant companion and, sadly, completely platonic best friend, Sierra Tate.
The conversation had deteriorated after that, as he recalled.
But he found himself smirking a little at the memory, even though Boone’s words had, regrettably stuck with him. Even though he’d said it years ago.
He was still thinking about it as he drove to the main part of the ranch later that morning, meeting up with Harlan to ride down into Marietta. They needed to pick up some supplies that the feed store in Cowboy Point didn’t carry.
Harlan drove. Wilder lounged in the passenger seat, looking out at this land he knew so well. “Do you think it’s weird that none of us ever had a long-term girlfriend or an early marriage, or any of that stuff? That it took Dad’s…” He couldn’t say it. “That he figured he needed to kickstart it?”
“Everybody sure thinks it’s weird,” Harlan replied in his usual understated way as he navigated a rough patch in the dirt road that led off their property. He slid Wilder a look and Wilder nodded, making a note to get out here and smooth out the bumps some. “I can’t speak for the rest of you, but I was always too worried about where the ranch was going. You and Ryder, on the other hand, seem to be involved in a belt-notching competition.”
“I wouldn’t call it a competition,” Wilder said with a drawl. “Ryder has always been interested in quantity and flash. Myself? I prefer quality.”
“Yeah, you’re a connoisseur,” Harlan said with a laugh, and took his time shaking his head at the very idea that Wilder could be interested in anything but a single hot night. Something that had always been true before. Something that had never bothered him to admit before, for that matter. Something that sat on him heavy and wrong today.
Harlan finally moved on from the disbelief . “I suppose you could argue that Boone is long-term, anyway.”
Wilder considered that. “He’s been the longest relationship with a woman, I grant you. Too bad she doesn’t know it.”
He pulled out his phone when the signal came back—briefly—as they crested the hill near the lodge and texted Ryder. You’ve been voted the biggest player in the family, known for your excesses and belt-notching. Do they make fancy buckles for that?
I can’t help it if I’m the pretty one , Ryder replied, making Wilder grin.
“Knox, on the other hand,” he said as he put his phone away. “He’s always been the wildcard.”
“He had that girlfriend in high school,” Harlan said. “Didn’t he?” He slid a look Wilder’s way. “All of you blend together for me.”
Wilder ignored that obvious attempt at provocation. “Knox was the only one who brought a girl home, yes. I’m not sure that I would call her a girlfriend, though who can say with him? He’s unknowable.”
“He’s a punk,” Harlan retorted.
They drove in companionable quiet for a while, winding their way down the side of Copper Mountain, and for once, Wilder didn’t completely lose himself in the spectacular view of Paradise Valley as it sprawled out before him, making it seem as if he could almost see all the way from Livingston in the north to Gardiner down south at the gate to Yellowstone. He checked the mountains for the snow line, and he could see the hints of the coming fall all around in the burnt-gold and yellow colors of the larch and the aspen, but he was too busy thinking about other things.
Like how unusual it was in a big family like theirs, to have so few of them paired off. That wasn’t how things went around here. Folks tended to marry young, settle down, and have their families early. Come their thirties, those same folks were looking for do-overs in the bars at night.
Wilder had always been of the opinion that his was the wiser path.
But then, he’d never had a glimpse of how it could go the other way, before now. He’d never found it so difficult to imagine walking away. He’d never spent more time than he wanted to admit counting down the hours to the next time he’d see her.
He’d never walked around with this aching beneath his ribs. He’d never showed his hand, going out there on Labor Day weekend to find her—and Lord knew, it was worse now.
And it was getting harder to pretend he wasn’t getting wrecked by the day.
“I think it’s because of Mom,” he said, out loud, into the quiet between the two of them.
Harlan muttered something that sounded like a curse. “You’re going to give me whiplash, Wilder. What’s going on with you?”
He had no intention of discussing what was going on with him with anyone. If it was up to him he wouldn’t discuss it with himself, either. “I’m just saying that there’s a clear demarcation between the three of us who lost our mother, and Boone and Knox, who didn’t. Don’t freak out because I mentioned feelings.”
He had never seen Harlan freak out in his life, but it was always fun to tell people who weren’t worked up to calm down. Entertainment always followed.
But Harlan didn’t take the bait. “Little brother, I’m a married man now. I think about feelings all day, every day. Because making my wife happy is a priority. The priority.” Then he switched back to his older, wiser brother routine. “And besides, I’m the one who remembers Mom the best.”
Wilder felt the usual twist of shame and guilt at that, but he didn’t say anything. Not about that part, anyway. “I remember her too, asshole.”
Harlan looked entirely too pleased with himself for getting that reaction, and Wilder sighed, because if he wasn’t so agitated all the time he would have handled that better. Cat was twisted up inside him. It was making him crazy. “One of the things I’ve always liked is that Dad doesn’t hide Mom away somewhere. There’s no pretending she wasn’t the force of nature that she was. Belinda never pretends either. It’s all out in the open, shared and obvious, all the time. Never a secret.”
He stopped talking when Harlan shot him another look. “Why would she be a secret?”
“Lots of people pretend that a dead person never existed,” Wilder muttered, but that wasn’t the kind of secret he was thinking about. And he knew it.
He felt it with every breath.
His ribs hurt.
“I’ve never seen the point in keeping secrets,” Harlan said, because of course he didn’t. He was light and truth, a steady support to all and sundry. He was direct and forthright in all things, which was why he was the one folks compared to their father.
The highest compliment any of his sons could imagine, because Zeke Carey had always seemed to them as if he carried that big Montana sky on his broad shoulders.
And everyone who encountered them across the span of the Rockies was only too happy to talk about the Carey men at High Mountain Ranch, and how dependable they were. In a remote place like this, that was about the highest compliment that anyone could pay another. They all got put under that umbrella, but Wilder knew it was primarily Harlan and Zeke that folks meant when they said things like salt of the earth .
And okay, now that he was thinking about it, Boone, too. Boone, who had decided he wanted to see if he could start a little dairy and had gotten that business up and running in record time, with a list of customers at the ready.
Maybe what Wilder needed to accept was that he was still the one who was the actual problem. He knew Ryder had always thought the same about himself, which was why he’d left, so that his trophies and his prizes could give people something else to talk about than how not like his revered father and beloved brothers he was. Maybe it was time that Wilder stopped pretending he was anything but the black sheep of the family, since Knox was the baby and got away with murder no matter what he did.
Because the thing was, everyone else already considered him the bad apple. He knew that. He was the one who kept thinking that there was something good in him. That if he thought on it long enough, he could figure out how to be a decent man.
That if he nobly and virtuously refrained from taking Cat the way he wanted to, what they were doing wouldn’t leave the scars he could already feel taking shape inside of him.
With every damned breath.
And he was still pretending not to think about that later, when he dropped off the supplies at the main barn with Harlan and then wandered over to the main house.
This time when he went inside he made his way to that bright little room that he remembered as his mother’s favorite place, filled with sun and her sweet smile. Now it held pictures of her, that smile always kinder than he remembered and sunnier than he deserved. Expecting to spend a moment or two with her, the way he sometimes did, Wilder stopped short when he saw his father sitting in the chair that was set right next to the picture of Alice Carey, young and beautiful and alive .
Zeke glanced up and Wilder nodded a greeting, aware that his head felt stiff on his neck. That he was suddenly standing there like he was wearing someone else’s body as a suit.
“You look like something’s wrong,” Zeke pointed out, all gruff drawl and that clear gaze of his.
Wilder just felt raw today, that was the thing. It had been that way since he’d woken up, still half-tangled in a wildly vivid dream that involved Cat very, very naked and in his bed. He had not been pleased to discover she wasn’t, and worse still, it was the kind of dream that kept its hooks in him all day. He told himself it was because he hadn’t been sleeping a lot these days, since he spent longer and longer in the woods with Cat each night.
It was a reasonable physical reaction, that was all.
It had nothing to do with the way she had looked at him last night, wrapped up in his arms with the stars on her face, and whispered his name.
Nothing at all.
“Nothing more than the usual,” Wilder said. And when Zeke’s expression didn’t change, he frowned. “Maybe you forgot your own announcement, but I didn’t.”
Zeke blinked, as if he didn’t know what Wilder was talking about. As if he didn’t have a clue—then he looked down.
“We’re all dying,” he said, his voice gruffer. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but that’s the only way out of here.”
“That’s very comforting, Dad. Thanks.”
When he looked up again, Zeke seemed his usual brash, unconcerned self. “That’s just the way it is. You work with livestock, so you should know this already. The circle always turns. That’s the game.”
Something about the idea of Zeke—of all people—spouting philosophy sat wrong with him, but Wilder supposed this wasn’t really the time to argue with the old man. “Are you feeling all right?”
Zeke stood up from the chair, maybe a little too easily and quickly, which had to mean he was overcompensating for his illness. He frowned at Wilder. “What if I told you that I didn’t? Are you working on my last request? So far, it seems only Harlan’s taking me seriously.”
“Harlan always takes it seriously. Everything and anything that can be taken seriously, or better yet too seriously, Harlan is the man for the job.”
But while he usually said things like that in what he considered his charming manner, he was notably free of all that today. He was too busy being a wreck of himself.
He definitely needed sleep.
Zeke stuck his big hands in his pockets. He nodded at the photo of Alice, frozen in joy and light forever—and maybe someday that would make Wilder happier than it did sad, the way everyone always told him it would. Eventually. “I asked your mother to marry me two weeks after our first date.”
Wilder was startled. Then he laughed. “You’ve never told us that before.”
“Whether I told you or not doesn’t take away the truth of it.” Zeke reached down and put one fingertip on the glass of the picture, as if to brush Alice’s cheek. “She sure was pretty. Too pretty. I was sweet on her since we were both fourteen, but her daddy told her she couldn’t date until her eighteenth birthday. And my Alice was a good girl. So the day of her eighteenth birthday, I took her out. And I declared my intentions two weeks later. And we were married six months later, which just so happened to be a week after high school graduation.”
“So she wasn’t allowed to date, but you were raring to go anyway.” Wilder eyed his father. “Interesting story to tell your child.”
“Oh, she was ready to date,” Zeke said, with a flash in his dark gaze that reminded Wilder, maybe a little uncomfortably, that his father and late mother really had been teenagers together.
With all those longings and desires that he really wished he’d outgrown when he’d graduated. That he’d thought he’d at least made manageable, anyway, before Cat.
There were a lot of things he’d thought before Cat, he realized, and he wasn’t sure how he was going to unpick all these snarls when he got to the after Cat part. And only partly because he couldn’t imagine after .
“She was not allowed to date,” Zeke told him. “But there was never any question that once she did, it was going to be me. And I’m getting that this skipped a generation, but I’ve always been a man who knows what he wants, Wilder.”
“Just a casual reminder that you’re talking about my late, sainted mother, since you seem to have forgotten that part.”
Zeke laughed. “I’ll tell you this for free. It isn’t the knowing that matters the most. That helps, because it gets the ball rolling, but what really matters is being prepared to act . That’s what separates the men and the boys.”
He touched Alice’s face once more and then walked out of the room, leaving Wilder there alone. All the bright light of the room danced around, and his mother’s smile seemed a part of it, but Wilder couldn’t escape the feeling that his father had just delivered a stinging sort of chastisement.
Like he knew.
When of course he couldn’t know .
Fun fact , he texted Ryder. Dad claims he had eyes on Mom since they were fourteen and chicken hawked her eighteenth birthday. If I have to know that, so do you.
Fun fact , Ryder replied. I never liked you.
But even that exchange didn’t manage to get what Zeke had said out of his head. It hung on, then seemed to take up lodging directly beneath his ribs, like what he really needed was another ache to add to his collection.
That night he told himself that he was going to stay home, get a good night’s sleep, and maybe rethink some things while he was at it.
Instead he found himself in his truck the same as every other night. He eased out from the ranch, headlights doused, so that none of his brothers—or worse, his stepmother, Belinda, who was like a bloodhound when it came to her boys’ shenanigans—would see the lights and wonder what he was up to. A lot like he was not, in fact, a grown man, since last he’d checked grown men did not sneak around like teenagers.
But he didn’t turn around. He didn’t take his grown ass home.
He turned the headlights back on when he reached the first of the many unmarked dirt roads that crisscrossed up here, leading all the way to Mount Chisolm, deeper into the Gallatin range, even over to the Absarokas and up to the Bridgers. Eventually.
But he was headed for a patch of woods near a hill, not a proper mountain.
No matter how much he was trying to convince himself he wasn’t.
When he coasted over the hill to Cowboy Point, he noticed that there were lights on in the lodge—but only in the back, where no one but folks coming in late on these empty mountain roads would see. Wilder took some comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the only one out here, trying to keep himself under the radar.
He always drove through town first, to get a sense of whether people were out and about and therefore likely to notice his truck and where it was headed. But it wasn’t summer any longer, no matter how folks tried to keep hold of it in the early weeks of September. The rodeo was over. The Farm & Craft market was over for the season. Mountain Mama’s patio tried to stay open on the weekends, with heaters when there was no snow, but it was a weeknight tonight. The pizza place was closed, indicating that summer hours were over.
The only place in town that was open was the Copper Mine, and he recognized pretty much every truck he passed. All locals. That was how to really tell that the summer was over. Cowboy Point shrunk back down to size. And much as Wilder had always enjoyed a tourist experience, when he thought about his hometown it was always like this. Empty enough so a man could hear the beat of his own heart echoed back from the mountains that were always there, sentries and sentinels alike. Quiet enough that it sometimes seemed he had the mountains’ thoughts in his head, not his own.
The smaller it was here, the bigger it felt.
Something in him seemed to break loose when he realized that Cat made him feel the same way.
But that still didn’t get him to turn back.
He drove down the line of tall pines, pretty sure that they were all looking down on him disapprovingly. Pines were like that. He flipped a U-turn at the library square, then waited there a moment with his headlights off again. Just to make sure the coast was clear.
While he waited, he saw a familiar-looking truck pulling out of the road that led back to the new doctor’s place where Cat was working—something he fully supported, if only because she’d said that her so-called defection from Lisle Hill had given her brothers matching coronaries.
You should keep working there, he’d told her, letting her scent wash all over him while he held her, his face in her hair. Become a nurse and really work there.
Cat had shifted to look up at him, a strange expression on her face. It’s hard to become a nurse, you know. It’s not a sexy Halloween costume. You have to get a degree.
He’d smoothed his hand over her hair, all that lavender and rosemary wrapped in sugar, wishing she didn’t affect him like this and yet reveling in the fact that she did. She always did. Who says you can’t get a degree, kitten?
Wilder rubbed his hand over his eyes, convinced he could smell that scent here and now, when she wasn’t even here. He focused on the pickup easing its way into the main road, a lot like its driver was as concerned about spectators as Wilder was.
It sure was a curiosity, he thought.
But in order to ask his baby brother Knox what he was doing with the good doctor at such an uncivil hour, Wilder would have to reveal the fact that he was out there creeping around the streets of town himself.
So he filed it away while he waited for Knox to head off toward the ranch. Once he was gone, Wilder pulled out of the library parking lot, found his way to the head of his favorite dirt road, and bumped his way along it like he did every night now. He could do it in his sleep. He could do it blind.
His guiding light was Cat.
And he still didn’t understand how it had happened.
He texted her when he arrived at the usual spot, then got out and settled back against the front bumper of his truck, happy that the night had turned so cold already. It felt sharp, and the sharpness felt like clarity.
It had taken a couple of weeks for him to admit that this was actually happening, it wasn’t an accident, and therefore he needed to make sure that he had her phone number. Because he didn’t want her waiting around in the woods randomly—or heading out to dance in bars instead of the kind of dancing they did when they were alone.
Sometimes they texted other things. Wilder admitted, out here in the bite of a night too filled with truth, that he liked that.
A lot.
That dream he’d had still had claws, sunk in deep.
Tonight it took her longer than usual, but soon enough he heard her coming. It made him smile, because though she tried her best to be stealthy, moving through the forest swiftly, he could still hear her.
Like she was the thing the mountains sang about, deep inside him.
And he smiled when she appeared, because he couldn’t help himself. Because his Cat always looked the same to him.
So wildly, easily beautiful, with her dark hair all around her and that look on her face, like she couldn’t believe her luck.
When Wilder was pretty sure that he was the one who was lucky in this scenario.
Cat ran to him, because she always did. She ran, she jumped, and he caught her, every time.
He’d been lying to himself about how good that felt, too. That she trusted him enough to jump.
That he’d never failed to catch her.
And there was something about all of this tonight that felt unwieldy and edgy inside of him. It was all part of that same raw ache, and that grief-edged conversation he’d had with his father, and he couldn’t account for it. He didn’t understand it.
The only thing that seemed to make it better was his hands deep in her hair and his mouth on hers.
And maybe the real story here was that he was a weak man, after all. Maybe all this time that he’d been so sure he was doing his own thing, he’d just been running—the same as Ryder was. Running and running from the things that mattered, and claiming that he wasn’t doing exactly that because he wasn’t some weird loner. He was a Carey. He had more brothers than necessary, too many old friends, and this tight community of people here that he’d known his whole life.
He was fulfilled, was the thing. He liked his work. He loved the ranch. Even more than that, he had an abiding reverence for the land and he treasured his connection to it.
But when he kissed Cat Lisle—every time he kissed her, no matter if it was the first kiss of the night or the thousandth—it was like he was seeing that big Montana sky for the very first time.
Tonight he kissed her over and over, not sure why he’d made all these rules in the first place. It was getting harder to understand why he hadn’t seen her fully naked yet, or why he hadn’t buried himself in her the way he dreamed about, too often to count.
Last night being a case in point.
“Hi,” Cat said against his mouth, he could feel the way her lips curved. “I missed you.”
He wanted to protect her, even from his own self. He wanted to lecture her—again—about the perils of being so wide open, so vulnerable. Especially with a man like him.
Because she looked at him like he was a good man. A man of honor. A man worthy of her, but he knew better.
And the truth was, he’d missed her too. It was getting so he always missed her. He just wouldn’t say it.
So he kissed her instead, holding her high against his chest and making them both a little giddy, until he finally put her down once more.
And he felt like something inside of him was breaking open. Or breaking free, maybe—but it hurt. It felt gigantic. Impossible.
“Cat,” he said, low and urgent. “We need to talk—”
“The only thing you need to do,” came a harsh, furious voice from the trees, “is get your filthy Carey hands off my sister.”
Tennessee.
“Or announce your intentions to marry her on the spot,” came a second voice, sounding much too much like the first. Dallas. “Because it sure looks a whole lot like you’ve already taken a few liberties and there’s only one way to make that right. Is that what it looks like to you, Tennessee?”
“What it looks like to me,” Tennessee replied, hard and sure, “is a death wish.”