Page 30 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

True to his word,after dinner Ben pulled me to the couch and settled next to me with a big stack of leather photo albums. Zack also kept his word, disappearing with a big black garbage bag to go take care of the drain. Adam and Brax, I noted, slipped out after him.

“Should we go chronologically?” Ben asked. I had the feeling that even though he had lured me here with photos of Zack’s mother, he was most interested in the photo album on top labeled “1800-Something.”

“Sure,” I agreed. I pulled the photo album into my lap. “We’ll start in the past and work toward the present.”

“The oldest one is from 1859 or so, best we can figure,” Ben explained. He pointed to the first photo, a sepia-toned black-and-white photograph of a group of old men with bushy mustaches standing in front of a mine entrance. “That’s whenThomas Hale came west to Colorado from Vermont looking for gold. He’s my great-great-great”—Ben paused, his eyes darting sideways as he counted up the generations in his head—“great grandfather. I’m not allowed to touch those photos, because they’re so old.”

I nodded. “That makes sense. Paper is fragile, and the oils from our fingers could make them disintegrate even faster.”

Forty minutes later, when Zack and his brothers returned from cleaning out the drain, we had made it through the great-grandparents and had just started in on Ted and Jenny. I glanced from the photo of his mom smirking at Ted, her golden hair blowing in the wind, and then at Zack.

“You were right, Ted,” I said. “Zack looks so much like her.” I leaned over the pages, peering closer, then up at Zack again. “It’s not so much your features. It’s your expressions.”

Ted smiled, looking a little wistful. “That’s exactly it.”

“Scooch, duchess.” Zack swatted my thigh. I wiggled closer to Ben, and Zack sat down next to me. He looked over my shoulder, then pointed at their wedding photo. “You know that rose garden out front? That’s where they got married. It looks different now, because they built up the house and added a driveway, but that’s the spot.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“The next few pages are pretty boring,” Zack said. “Just baby pictures of Adam and Brax, mostly. Skip ahead to where I come in. That’s when it gets good.”

“Uncle Zack! We have to go in order!” Ben protested.

“Hannah lives all the way in town, bud. If we keep her out too late, she’ll have to sleep here.”

“Are you offering to take the couch, Zack?” Essie’s wide blue eyes were the picture of innocence. “Brax and I are staying at Lodestar tonight, so his cabin isn’t available. Hannah will have to stay with you.”

Zack draped an arm along the back of the couch. His fingertips grazed my ear and I broke out in goosebumps. “Of course I’m offering Hannah the bed. I’m a gentleman, darlin’.”

He did not, I noticed, say he would be taking the couch.

I also took note of the endearment.Darlin’. He used that a lot. Sugar, too. Me, Essie, random acquaintances. If a woman wasn’t his relation, she was his darlin’, sugar, or honey.

Duchess, though. That one was new. And, so far as I could tell, reserved for me alone.

I wasn’t sure how to take that. Was it a compliment or an insult? Maybe he thought I was an uppity snob.

“Skip ahead, Ben,” Adam urged. “Show her the photos of my baby sister.”

My head jerked up in surprise. “Sister?”

Adam, Brax, James, and Essie burst into laughter.

“What?” I asked, looking between them. “What am I missing?”

“The story of how Zack got his name,” Brax said, smirking. “Do you want to tell it, little sis, or should I?”

“I’lltell it,” Ted said. “You tell it wrong.”

I looked at Zack to see how he was taking the teasing, but he didn’t seem at all perturbed. “Go for it, Dad.”

“It’s like this,” Ted said. “Jenny always wanted a big family. We settled on the idea of five kids, if we were blessed. Jenny had this idea in her head that we’d go down the alphabet, A through E. All through her first pregnancy, she insisted she didn’t care if we started with a boy or a girl, but deep down she had strong feelings about it. She wanted a boy first so we could name him Adam, and our fifth baby would be a girl named Eve.” He paused, staring into space, remembering. “It’s funny, isn’t it? She was rational about everything else, but she dreamed about this the way most folks dream of winning the lottery.”

“Everyone has a little crazy in them,” I said. “That’s what makes us interesting.”

Ted chuckled. “That we do, Hannah. That we do. Anyway, Brax was next. Another boy. Jenny loved our boys more than anything on this earth, but they were also a handful. Not enough to scare us off adding a third baby to the mix, but enough to hope that we’d be blessed with a girl. Jenny prayed for her every night. Had a name picked out and everything. Charlotte. She was so sure the baby would be a girl that she refused to let the doctor tell us the gender. She just went right on ahead and bought girl clothes.”

Zack nudged my arm. “Turn the page, duchess. See for yourself.”

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