Chapter Eleven
R osie found herself holding her breath, not sure what Ryder was going to do next.
She had never seen an expression like this on his face before. He looked… taken aback, maybe. At first. But then he’d looked around the lodge as if he’d never seen it before. Or had never seen all the people crowded into the expansive lobby before, when she knew full well he knew every single one of them.
It had seemed as if he’d looked at every single one of them and as he had, he’d changed. He’d stood a little bit taller. A kind of resolve seemed to settle over him. It was the exact opposite of what she’d expected when she’d said what she’d said to him.
She hadn’t meant to say anything like that, and especially not after the sheer delight of Livingston. Rosie had been so nervous, thinking that they were just doing this to get it out of the way for the kids—or he was, anyway—and there she was with her overfull heart that might capsize her at any moment.
The whole drive to Livingston, she’d done her best to manage her expectations. She’d told herself, firmly, that she needed to view this as a fancy dress trip to the DMV, nothing more. And she’d thought she had it all under control… but no one had told Ryder how they were supposed to behave.
He’d acted like there was nothing more romantic in all the world than the two of them slipping away with only a pair of witnesses to say their vows. Like this was how they would always have chosen to do this, that there were no extenuating circumstances—both currently nursing extreme sugar highs, she could see at a glance—and they simply wanted to keep something for themselves.
Rosie had completely forgotten that she was keeping herself in check.
They had danced in that dark, perfect bar, spinning around and around until she wasn’t sure if she was dizzy from the movement or if it was still just him. Always and only him.
They had sat together on that bed in their suite, sharing snacks they’d liberated from the minibar and actually… talking. In some ways, she thought she was the most dazed from that. From touching so casually. From talking about nothing and everything, but none of the deep, important, life-altering things that had characterized the whole of their relationship up until now.
Really, Rosie had thought at one point, that had been what she’d imagined when she’d daydreamed about could have beens with Ryder. When she wasn’t too busy trying to make herself hate him.
Walking into the lodge had been like every romance novel she’d ever read. All the people she loved, gathered together, and the rest of this town she loved too. Jack must have worked his fingers to the bone. The lodge looked like it could start taking guests again. The lights made all the old wood and sweet, Old West details shine. The floorboards creaked and the grand old chandelier gleamed, and it was nothing short of a dream come true.
She had never felt so loved in all her life.
Rosie had felt she had no choice but to give him the same thing in return, and so she had, as best she could.
She’d expected him to drawl something kind and hot at once, the Ryder Carey specialty. She’d thought he would say the right things, but that she’d see relief all over his face. Instead, he’d looked at her like he didn’t understand a word she was saying.
And now there was a light in the dark gaze of his that she was sure was new. She’d never seen him look like this.
He kissed her fingers again, and it was such an odd, old-fashioned, courtly sort of gesture that it made butterflies flutter inside of her.
Maybe because their entire relationship was inside out. Maybe they’d been going back to the start the whole time, and this was it. Courtly actions, butterflies. Next, who knew? He might ask Jack for her hand.
“You stay right here,” Ryder told her.
Rosie didn’t want to let him go. She didn’t know what he planned to do, but she had the strangest notion that she had to stop him, that he would ruin everything —
But she caught her mother’s calm gaze from across the room. Charlotte was dressed in flowing shades of pink and orange this afternoon, and that seemed to underscore the way she looked at her daughter from afar. Beside her, Matilda was talking to Tennessee Lisle as if she couldn’t see his customary scowl, but Charlotte was looking straight at her.
Rosie could practically hear her mother speak in her head. Practice non-attachment , Charlotte would say. It had never been helpful.
Yet today, it was. Rosie decided to simply… wait and see what Ryder did instead of trying to predict it and run around it and get out in front of it. This was actually giving the man freedom, not just talking about it.
This was putting her money where her mouth was. No matter how hard it was.
She let go of his hand. She even smiled, and not the way she’d learned as a sorority girl. Ryder smiled back, but he still looked resolved .
He turned around and made his way through the crowd, nodding at folks as he passed them, but not stopping. He went over to the band, said a few words to the singer, and then took the mic.
Rosie was staring at him, deeply surprised that he felt this was the time to make a speech. Or that any time was a good time to make a speech, really.
She looked around again, surprised to find Wilder and Cat and the rest of the Carey family on one side of her. And then on her other side, Sara Jane came to stand beside her, flashing that silver gaze of hers all around in her best librarian fashion, as if expecting lip from their friends and neighbors. Before Rosie could tell Sara Jane that it was perfectly fine if she wanted to get back to one of her intense conversations with Atticus Wayne, the sheriff’s deputy, and his fascinating sister Esther who fancied herself some kind of amateur detective, complete with a true crime podcast, Matilda came and pushed her way between them. She smiled apologetically at Sara Jane, then slid an arm around Rosie’s shoulders and kissed her on the top of her head.
“So,” she said, directly into Rosie’s ear. “Anytime you want to share the details on how you got Ryder Carey to the altar…”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Rosie said in the same tone. She grinned at her older sister. “Just go get knocked up. Works like a charm.”
They both laughed at that, despite the quelling look that Jack sent their way as Ryder began to speak.
“I sure appreciate everyone coming out tonight,” he said, and he seemed to know exactly how to hold a microphone so that his voice filled the lobby without any feedback or other mishaps. Because of course he did. “I know this was all a lot of short notice, but when Rosie and I decided to get married, we didn’t want to wait any longer.”
He nodded towards Levi and Eli, who had crept up toward the stage. They were now sitting there before it, gazing up at him as if they expected him to start pulling rabbits out of hats, or some such thing.
Ryder grinned down at them, and wasn’t that a picture. Such a gorgeous man and his two ridiculously cute little boys. Rosie’s heart thumped at her so hard she was surprised everyone couldn’t hear it.
“There was some concern,” Ryder drawled, “that if we waited any longer, they’d be in high school.”
That got a laugh from just about everyone.
To Rosie’s right, she heard Zeke laugh too, as if he was surprised. “Who knew that Ryder was charming?” he asked.
“It’s alarming,” Harlan agreed.
Boone and Knox raised their brows at each other, but Wilder, Rosie noticed, only smiled. And maybe held onto Cat a little tighter.
“I know that I haven’t necessarily treated this place as well as I should have,” Ryder continued, and nodded in a way that seemed to take in not just this lodge and these people, but the whole of their lovely valley outside and down below them, and maybe the better part of Paradise Valley, too. “I knew when I was a teenager that I had to leave fast or I’d be held here, and it’s not that being held here is bad thing. I hope I never gave off that impression. I just had that itch to get out and see the world a bit. I wanted to wake up where no one knew me, and spend days without ever hearing my name spoken out loud. I wanted to see what the opposite of a place like this felt like, and I did.” He smiled. “I can’t pretend I didn’t enjoy it. I know some of you here today have never seen the ocean, and I think that’s a shame. It has a pull on a person, a lot like these mountains that we all know have always had that kind of hold on us.”
There was a murmur of agreement, from those who’d traveled their share and others who Rosie knew had never seen another state, much less a whole ocean. She agreed with Ryder that it was a sad thing that some folks had never gone that far away from these mountains.
She’d seen the ocean down in Texas. Her sorority sisters and she had often made the drive down to the Gulf and she could still remember the first time she’d walked down to the water’s edge and put her feet in the ocean. It had felt so huge. So overpowering.
It had felt a lot like falling in love.
Rosie remembered the warm Texan sun on her face and the clear water off Padre Island. How she’d felt inside out. She’d wanted to run straight out into the ocean. She’d wanted to let it carry her away.
She felt the same way tonight, listening to Ryder—her husband , she reminded herself. He was her husband , and that felt as tremendous and important as it had to stand there as an eighteen-year-old girl from Montana who’d never seen the ocean before and soak it all in, thinking her whole life was ahead of her the same way all that water was, stretching out to meet the sky.
“This time,” Ryder was saying, “I came home to stay. I’m not a young man with a wild soul like I once was. I’ve done my time in the bull-riding ring and managed to walk out on my own two feet, which is more than a lot of us can say. I want to settle down, spend time with my family, and build myself the sweet little life I’m pretty sure I’ve been running toward all along, right here where I know from experience that life is pretty sweet already.”
“Hear, hear,” Zeke boomed into the crowd, going out of his way to make sure his voice carried, Rosie was pretty sure.
Straight over to the Sheen family, unless she was mistaken, which only made her wonder what they’d said not to her face.
“But if I’m honest,” Ryder was telling the crowd, “what I’ve been running toward all this time only became clear to me when I saw the prettiest girl in Cowboy Point—and in all the world, I reckon—in Austin.”
Next to her, Matilda squeezed her harder and Rosie found that it was suddenly hard to breathe. She told herself it was all the eyes on her, but she was used to that. The only pair of eyes she really cared about were Ryder’s.
He stared straight at her, as if they were all alone in this grand old room her brother—and probably her cousins, to give them their due—had made pretty again.
“I loved you then, Rosie,” Ryder said, right there where everyone could hear him. And where she could hear him too. “I love you now. I looked at you and I never wanted to look away. Then we went ahead and made the two most perfect baby boys in the entire world.”
He looked down at his sons, still there at his feet, and they both cheered too. Likely because the people around them did the same, and Rosie thought that it was the cutest thing she’d ever seen.
She wanted to cry. Or maybe she was crying.
“Things didn’t move in a straight line for us,” Ryder told the crowd. “It’s my observation that the best things never do. And I imagine some of you spent the years while things were twisted coming to some conclusions on your own. I can’t blame you.” But his tone suggested that, really, he could. And did. “So let me make sure we’re all on the same page. I’m the one who had to convince Rosie to marry me. And when she finally, graciously consented, we decided that it made the most sense to take this thing that was a little too public and keep it private. Something that was just ours, since even that magical night in Austin is a story people tell these days, and not always in the way I would. So let me do it now.” He looked at Rosie again. “We were both there, so we know. It was unexpected. It was beautiful. It was love, and I messed it up, because that’s what foolish men do. Rosie came back here and when I moved home too, I went after Rosie.”
By this point, Ryder’s gaze was on the Sheens in the corner, and he didn’t pretend otherwise. By the same token, Rosie stopped pretending she was doing anything but sobbing, her hands over her mouth.
“As some of you may have noticed,” Ryder said, with a hint of that grin when he looked back at the crowd, then back at the twins, “Rosie and I managed this level of perfection outside of marriage. Just imagine what we’ll do now.”
He left the mic with the band, and cut his way through the crowd again. He walked straight to Rosie, inclined his head at Matilda and Sara Jane on one side, his family on the other. Then he pulled Rosie into his arms.
Then, just for her—although he clearly didn’t care if everyone else heard him—he bent closer to her and fixed her with that beautiful gaze of his.
“I love you,” he said, very distinctly, just in case she’d decided to believe she’d mistaken what he’d said into that mic. “I appreciate you setting me free, but I’m not going anywhere.”
“Ryder…” she whispered, and she was sure her mascara had to be all over her face, but for once she didn’t care. “Ryder, I—”
He reached over and put his fingers over her mouth, and it made her breath hitch.
“I’ve got a few years to make up for, to start,” he said. “And I like the team that you and I have built. You’re already a good parent and I think I can be too, one day, and together?”
“You’re a great parent,” she told his fiercely, fully aware that it was the greatest compliment she could give anyone, but especially him—because the only parenting he was doing was of her boys. Their boys.
“All I want is a shot at forever, and I don’t care what that looks like,” Ryder said in that low, intense, gorgeous voice of his. “Rosie, baby, you have to know by now that all I really care about is that I get that forever with you.”