Page 43 of Claimed By the Cowboys
I wasn't an idiot. I knew my pack mates felt like they'd hit the jackpot with her. Stunning, kind and sweet, excellent with our daughter, and hot as fucking sin. If it wasn’t for all my experience, I would have assumed she was an angel dropped down from heaven.
Currently, Piper was sipping on a soda, watching the flames in the firepit with a sweet smile on her face.
Montana cleared his throat. “We…uh, we need to talk as a family.”
He was my numbers man, so my mind immediately went to the ranch. Was it a staffing problem, or maybe some of the cattle were having issues? Or it could be a very big vet bill because a few of those had caused problems in the past.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He looked uneasily between all of us.
“I can put Maisie to bed and leave you guys to talk,” Piper said softly, moving to get out of her seat, but Montana held up a hand to stop her.
“No, you should stay. This involves Maisie, so you need to know what's going on.”
Maisie? Why did we need a family meeting about our daughter? My curiosity was quickly turning to worry.
“Oh, okay.” Piper nodded, settling back into her chair and quickly glancing at Maisie in Zeke's lap. She was dead to the world and snoring lightly. Once that little girl was asleep, it took an army to wake her. I did not envy Piper when Maisie started school and needed to be up at seven every morning.
“Is everything okay?” Zeke asked with a frown.
Montana’s face was twisted in concern. “Not really. I had a call today…from Caroline.”
At the mention of that bitch’s name, I sat up straight. It had been a long time since she had darkened our doorstep. Her choosing to get in touch with Montana after all this time couldn’t be good news.
“What the fuck was she doing, calling you?” I growled as the rest of my pack muttered similar sentiments.
Piper, on the other hand, looked between us, her brow furrowed in confusion. “Who’s Caroline?” she asked quietly.
For a brief moment, I closed my eyes, gathering some strength. Piper needed to know the whole story, but I didn't exactly relish telling it.
“She's Maisie's egg donor,” I said, using the term Montana had once used to refer to Caroline. It was useful, becausemotherwas not an applicable term in our situation.
A mother wouldn't abandon her child.
Piper cocked her head to the side. “You guys haven’t spoken about her mother. I never wanted to ask. Maisie hasn't even mentioned her…”
Zeke shook his head, looking down lovingly at our daughter. “That's because she split when Maisie was only six weeks old.”
“Split?” Piper asked.
“Ran for the hills,” I confirmed. “Caroline didn't like being a mother. We weren't bonded because we hadn't intended to get pregnant with Maisie. We were only courting when this little miss happened. We were determined to make the best of it and give Caroline everything she wanted, but nothing was ever enough for her.”
“She resented pregnancy and what it did to her body.” Montana grimaced. “We knew she wasn't overly happy when we got back from the hospital after she gave birth to Maisie, butwe assumed she just needed an adjustment period. We were all struggling with the changes, going from no baby to a newborn, but one morning six weeks in, we found Maisie crying in her crib and a letter from Caroline saying that this wasn’t the life she wanted and she wasn’t coming back.”
“She just left and didn’t even check up on her daughter?” Piper whispered, aghast.
I nodded. “At first, we tried to find her. We thought maybe she was having postpartum struggles and needed more support, and we even contacted a few doctors to see if there was anything we’d failed at. Eventually, we tracked her down in the city, and she didn’t even want to see the baby—she acted disgusted by her. We had to accept that Caroline simply didn't want this life. We brought our daughter home and continued on.”
“Until about a year later, when the bitch decided to extort us,” Montana muttered.
Piper opened and closed her mouth several times, utterly shocked at those words. “She didwhat?”
Montana nodded. “It turns out, one of the reasons she left was because she didn't think we could finance her life the way she wanted. Caroline tended to like fancier things. We are pretty simple guys, no ruffles and frills, so she thought we weren't good enough for her. When she got low on funds, she came crawling back, insisting that we needed to pay her a significant amount of money, or she would fight for rights to her daughter.”
“The daughter she didn't even want,” I grumbled.
“Yeah,” Dakota said, running a hand through his hair, staring into the fire, deep in thought. “She actually reached out to Clay first, and he just paid her. It wasn't until after that he told us what he did and we discussed it.”
