11. Gabriel
Gabriel
A week later, we drive to Billings for the specialist appointment.
Maggie and Delaney won the battle over maternity clothes.
Evie still muttered about being railroaded all the way around the stores, but she’s wearing one of the outfits today—a soft blue top and jeans that don’t make her wince every time she climbs into the truck.
She catches me looking. “What?”
I shake my head. “Nothing.”
It’s a lie.
The truth is, I’ve never seen anything prettier than the woman carrying my little girl.
The clothes fit her.
The ranch fits her.
God help me, she fits here better every day.
The waiting room is quieter than the family clinic. More serious somehow. Evie reads the same page of a horse magazine three times without turning it. I spend twenty minutes pretending not to stare every time a nurse opens the door and calls another name.
The scan takes longer this time.
The doctor studies our daughter’s heart from every angle, measuring chambers and valves, watching blood flow across a screen that means nothing to either of us. He asks about my surgeries. About my most recent echocardiogram. About my mother. Every question knots my shoulders a little tighter.
Then he leans back in his chair, smiles, and says the words I’ve been needing to hear since Evie stood on my porch.
“Her heart looks exactly the way I’d expect it to at twenty-two weeks.”
My breath leaves me in a whoosh, and my shoulders unpin themselves from my ears.
“No signs of the defect you described. Everything looks normal.”
Evie reaches for my hand before I think to reach for hers.
I hold on. Hard.
She looks at me and smiles. Not at the screen. At me. Like the best part of hearing our daughter was healthy was knowing what it meant to me.
The warmth in her eyes hits me hard. I want to drag her onto my lap and kiss her until we’re both breathless, doctor be damned.
The doctor leaves us with another grainy photograph and a handshake. “She’s perfect. Congratulations.”
The words follow us all the way back to the truck.
Neither of us speaks for the first few miles.
Not because there’s nothing to say.
Because relief has a sound too. It’s quiet. Warm.
The highway unwinds ahead of us.
I glance across at Evie. She’s smiling to herself. “What?”
She shakes her head. “I was just thinking... I’ve spent twenty-two weeks waiting for someone to tell me something was wrong.”
My hand finds hers on the console. “They didn’t.”
“No.” She smiles again. “They really didn’t.”
Then something occurs to me. “Have you told your mom?”
She looks out of the window. “Not yet.”
“Are you going to?”
“Yeah.” She says it without hesitation. “Soon.”
I nod. “And your father?”
Silence. Long enough that I almost apologize for asking.
“No,” she says finally.
“You don’t think he’ll want to know?”
“He’ll want to know because it affects him.” She looks out at the highway. “He’ll want to know if it’s a boy.”
“Why?”
One shoulder lifts. “I’m an only child.”
I wait.
“Dad always wanted someone to take over the business one day. He never quite forgave me for not being the son he’d imagined.”
“And if he knew you were having a girl?”
She lets out a small breath. “He’d be disappointed twice.”
Christ. My fucking heart breaks for her. Nobody should grow up believing they arrived as the wrong child.
But she’s not finished. “Remember I told you he called the day I came here?”
I glance across at her. “Yeah.”
“Months of silence, then my phone rings.” She lets out a quiet breath. “For one stupid second, I thought…” She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter what I thought.”
I don’t interrupt.
“He wanted me at another charity dinner.” Her mouth twists. “Said he’d wire me fifty thousand dollars if I showed up.”
My hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Fifty thousand?”
“Apparently, that’s what pretending to be his daughter is worth these days.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“No. Really no. For the first time in my life.” She looks out through the windshield at the passing fields. “I blocked his number after I hung up.”
I glance at her again. “That wasn’t easy.”
She smiles, small and sad. “No.”
Her fingers drift unconsciously over the curve of her stomach. “It wasn’t because I was giving up on my father.” She swallows. “It was because I finally accepted that I never really had one.”
Jesus, what a fucking asshole.
No wonder she’s built her whole life around standing on her own two feet.
No wonder every offer of help sounds like a bargain she hasn’t agreed to.
She’s spent her whole life proving she never needed anybody.
And somehow...
She still made sure our little girl had every chance to have a father. She gave me a choice she never believed she had herself.
She sighs and closes her eyes, leaning her head on the headrest. “The money wasn’t money. It was a leash with a really long lead.”
I think about my own father.
One man tried to buy his daughter’s time.
One man couldn’t bear to ask for his son’s.
“Strings,” I murmur.
She nods. “Strings.”
I don’t say the promise out loud. I just make the vow in my head.
Whatever I give this woman, whatever I give our daughter, it’ll never come with conditions.
Love shouldn’t need a receipt.
“You know what I think?”
She glances over. “What?”
“I think our daughter already got the better deal.”
She gives me a soft smile, squeezing my hand. “I don’t think it. I know it.”
I swallow hard. “Can I ask you something?”
She looks over and grins. “You already are.”
I turn my eyes back to the road. “You had… other options.”
She nods. “I know.”
“You could’ve...” I can’t quite say the words.
She does. “Ended the pregnancy.”
“Yeah. You never thought about it?”
“I thought about everything. I thought about adoption. I thought about raising the baby alone.” She pauses, resting a hand over her stomach. “The second I knew she existed”—her voice catches—“she was already mine.
Her gaze drops to our joined hands. “And now she’s ours.”
Ours.
God, I hope she means that as much as I do.
“I never came here hoping you’d fix my life. I just hoped our baby would know its father. I didn’t expect to find the rest of you too.” Her eyes lift to mine, open and vulnerable in a way I’ve never seen before. “I didn’t expect to find you.”
My chest tightens. Is she saying what I think she’s saying? Christ, I hope so. Because this isn’t just about the baby for me either. It never was.
The truth is, I haven’t stopped thinking about this woman since the first time I saw her walk into that rodeo arena like she owned every inch of it.
I carried her with me for four months before she ever knocked on my front door again.
And somewhere between a porch confession in the dark, a heartbeat on a screen, and watching her laugh around my family’s kitchen table, I’ve stopped imagining a future that doesn’t have her in it.
I don’t know exactly when that happened. Maybe it started the first night I saw her. Maybe it happened a little at a time. I just know it’s true.
I don’t just want to be our little girl’s father.
I want to wake up beside Evie every morning for the rest of my life.
I want her muddy boots by my front door.
I want Captain Winky whinnying when he hears her voice.
I want our daughter to grow up believing this ranch has always been her home.
Most of all...
I want Evie to choose me.
Not because of our daughter. Because somewhere along the way, she decided I was worth choosing.
Ethan catches me alone that afternoon outside the barn.
He’s wearing his glasses and that flat expression he gets when every part of him has gone operational. He glances toward the house before he speaks.
“Marlon Ennis is dead.”
The words stop me cold. “What?”
“One of Sheriff Lucas’s deputies found his truck off a county road north of Helena this morning.” Ethan keeps his voice low. “Marlon was inside.”
“Accident?”
“No.”
One word. Certain.
“What happened?”
“I don’t have the full report yet. What we do know is that Marlon disappeared before Jenna named him as the likely local source feeding LandCorp information.” Ethan’s jaw tightens. “Now he turns up dead before anyone can question him.”
“Meaning somebody knew we were looking at him.”
“Or Marlon knew the net was tightening and tried to bargain with the wrong person.”
Neither option sits well.
I think of the bank manager behind his polished desk. Wire glasses. Careful smile. The man who held the future of both Stoneridge and Havenridge in one hand while quietly passing information to the people trying to take it.
“You think they killed him to keep him quiet.”
“I think Marlon knew names.” Ethan pushes his glasses higher up his nose. “Accounts. Shell companies. Who authorized what. Enough to hurt somebody sitting a long way above Vance.”
“Vance is in federal custody.”
“Exactly.” His eyes harden. “And LandCorp’s still moving money.”
My skin prickles. “What does Daniel say?”
“That we stop treating this like we have time.” Ethan looks toward Havenridge, though the other ranch is miles beyond the hills. “Both families. Tomorrow. Everyone gets the full picture.”
The last time we gathered both branches, Jenna stood in front of us with a flash drive and proved that the offers, fires, poisoning, and forged land documents all led back to LandCorp.
“I’ll be there,” I say.
A bucket scrapes against concrete behind us.
Both our heads turn.
Evie comes around the corner carrying fresh feed for Captain Winky.
Ethan smiles, waves at Evie, and leaves like his ass is on fire. The fucker.
Evie sets the bucket down. She looks at the empty space where Ethan was, then back at me. “What was that?”
I rub the back of my neck. “Ranch business.”
“What kind of ranch business?”
“The boring kind.”
She folds her arms. “Judging by the looks on your and Ethan’s faces, I don’t think it was.”
No. It wasn’t.
For a second, I consider lying. But I can’t—won’t—do that to Evie. She deserves the truth.
“You’re right.”
She waits.
I blow out a breath. “Daniel and Henry have called a family meeting tomorrow at Havenridge.”
“Henry is your eldest cousin, right?” she asks.
“Right.” I filled her in on my cousins after we told the family we were pregnant last week.
“The last time both ranches got together, Jenna laid out everything she’d uncovered.
Shell companies buying up land around us.
Lawyers working through different corporations.
Purchase offers coming in under different names. ”
Her brow furrows. “Purchase offers?”
I nod. “Stoneridge. Havenridge. Neighboring ranches too. Folks who’ve been here for generations getting letters pressuring them to sell.”
“So someone’s trying to buy up all the land?”
I nod. “They have been for years.”
“But... why?”
“Jenna figured that part out.” I lean back against the fence. “There’s gold and lithium under a lot of this valley. Enough that somebody decided the easiest way to get to it was to own the land sitting on top.”
Her eyes widen. “You’re serious.”
“I wish I wasn’t.”
She looks across the pasture toward the mountains. “So they just... keep making offers until somebody gives in?”
“That was the plan.”
“And when people didn’t?”
I hesitate.
Her eyes narrow. “What?”
I let out a slow breath. “We almost lost Angus’s wife, Luna, in a barn fire.”
Her expression changes immediately. “Oh, my god.”
“We couldn’t prove it was deliberate.”
“But you think it was.”
“I do. We all do. Accelerant was used.”
Her hand comes up to cover her mouth.
“And Kitty, Tom’s wife...” I shake my head.
“What happened?”
“Somebody contaminated the Havenridge well.”
She gasps. “They poisoned her?”
“She has severe allergies, so she was vulnerable. It put her in the hospital.”
Captain Winky noses Evie’s shoulder, looking for another peppermint. She absently scratches between his ears without taking her eyes off me. “All because they wouldn’t sell?”
I nod.
She looks back at the house. At the ranch. At the miles of open country she’d begun to trust. “That’s not business.”
“No.”
“That’s terrorism.”
I don’t argue.
After a long moment, she says quietly, “I can’t imagine wanting anything badly enough to do that.”
Neither can I.
She lets out a slow breath. “So what changed?”
I hesitate. “There was another development this morning.”
Her expression sobers. “What happened?”
“They found Marlon Ennis this morning.”
She frowns. “Who was he?”
“The manager of the local bank.” I pause. “Ethan believed he was feeding information to whoever’s behind all this.”
“What kind of information?”
“Who was struggling. Which ranches were vulnerable. Where to apply pressure next.”
Her eyes widen. “You think he was murdered?”
“We can’t prove that.”
“But Ethan thinks he was.”
I exhale a heavy breath. “Yeah.”
She studies me for a long moment. “Because he knew too much.”
“That's what Ethan believes.”
“About the people behind all this?”
“Yeah.” I scrub a hand over the back of my neck. “Marlon sat in the middle of every loan, every land transfer, every piece of financial information that moved through this county. If he decided to start talking…”
She looks away, rubbing Captain Winky’s neck. “So somebody panicked.”
“It looks that way.”
“And tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow, we sit down as a family and decide what happens next.”
Her gaze returns to me. “Do you want me there?”
The question catches me off guard. “Why wouldn't I?”
She shrugs, but there’s nothing careless about it. “It’s family business.”
“Evie.”
She meets my eyes.
“You’re carrying my daughter.”
Her gaze flickers away.
I step closer. “More than that, I want you there.” I wait until she looks back at me. “How many times do I have to tell you? You’re part of this family now.”
“I’ve never been part of a family before.” She gives a tiny shrug. “Not really.”
“Well,” I say quietly, “you are now.”
Captain Winky nudges her shoulder again.
She smiles, slipping him another peppermint from her pocket before looking back at me. “I’ll be there.”
“Good.”
Because I can’t imagine walking into that room without her beside me.