Page 1 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Prologue
“There’s some weather coming in.”
Zeke Carey looked up as his wife came into the room, speaking with a softness that was uncharacteristic for a woman so filled with enough thunder and lightning when she pleased that she was her own weather system. He smiled at her.
Because she was his favorite kind of weather and had been for a long, long time. So long now that he wasn’t sure what he’d do if he found himself without his Belinda’s many storms and seasons, sometimes all in one day.
He didn’t intend to find out.
Zeke knew that she was talking about the Montana winter outside. It was a blustery night. There was an intense December wind rushing through the mountains that stood high above Paradise Valley, rattling the windows and bouncing off the sides of the house that was set down in the middle of the northern Gallatins. It was the sort of night that made a man want to settle in, maybe with a proper drink, and think a while on his life.
But he didn’t need to cue up the good country music and get to thinking on his regrets, because Zeke was lucky enough to have precious few of those. And tonight the weather could do as it liked because he wasn’t sure he’d ever felt more content, the wild Montana winter be damned.
He was stretched out on one of the beds that had once belonged to one of his five sons. They were all grown now and men in their own right, a sweetness that only grew as they lived their lives well, but tonight he had something almost sweeter. His two grandsons, three-year-old twins Eli and Levi. He’d been reading the boys a bedtime story and now they’d fallen asleep, curled up on either side of him like sweet little mirror images.
Looking a whole lot like their daddy, Ryder, and his identical twin brother Wilder had when they were that age.
“It smelled like snow earlier,” he said in the same quiet way to Belinda, who’d come in to stand beside the bed now, beaming down at the scene before her.
Their sweet, funny, small boys were staying with their grandparents for Christmas this year, which Zeke and Belinda were over the moon about and didn’t bother pretending otherwise. The twins’ mother, Rosie, had another set of twins on the way—God bless her—and both she and Ryder were down the mountain in Marietta. They were staying in a rental not far from the hospital in the much bigger town on the valley floor because they expected her to give birth to her babies any day now and didn’t want to try to navigate the treacherously slippery road down Copper Mountain in the darkest part of the year.
A win all around as far as Zeke was concerned.
“The snow should start coming down soon,” Belinda told him, drifting closer so she could lean in and run a hand over one boy’s cheek and the other’s ruffled hair. “I’ve checked all the flashlights and set up the lanterns. And I saw you brought in more wood for the stove.”
“We’ll stay nice and toasty,” Zeke assured her, though she knew that as well as he did. Because they always had before. Winter was no joke in these mountains, but it was no trouble, either, if a person was prepared.
He hadn’t built this house, but he’d grown up in it. He knew it as well as he knew the stretch of his own skin across his back, the bones broken and mended inside his own body. They had a generator these days, because their boys had insisted upon it, but it would take a lot more than a Christmas snowstorm to get Zeke turning his back on the simple pleasures of an old-fashioned wood burning stove that could warm most of the house. Not to mention the pleasure of lantern light on a cold, dark night.
Simple joys that reminded him of a past long gone.
Thinking about that generator got him thinking about his sons. The three oldest he’d made with his sweet, lost-too-soon first wife, Alice. He’d promised her that he’d see to it that their boys would lead good, happy lives, and over the past year and a half he had made that happen. His oldest son and the wife he’d found by virtue of an old-timey ad in the paper had given birth to their first child in September. And now, even sleep deprived and filled with all the panic and devotion of the new parents they were, Harlan and Kendall seemed happier than most.
It made Zeke happy too.
His wild twins were doing well too. Wilder and Cat were enjoying their newlywed status, and Cat, who had always worked in her family’s general store in town, had declared her intention to become a nurse and had started taking classes to bulk up on her prerequisites. Because not everyone went straight to babies, Zeke knew, and as long as they were happy, who was he to complain?
Yet.
Besides, he’d only realized in the last year that Rosie Stark’s twin babies, the ones she’d had after college off in Texas and had moved home to raise, were Ryder’s. He would have been happy to welcome the little boys into the Carey family no matter what happened between their parents, but he could admit that he’d hoped for what had ended up happening instead: Rosie and Ryder falling in love, marrying, and wasting no time expanding their little family.
And by extension, Zeke’s family.
He had two sons with Belinda, too, though it was always funny to separate them out that way. Belinda had treated Alice’s boys as her own from the day she’d met them, and while no one ever forgot Alice or ever would, Belinda had mothered them all. Boone, the oldest of the boys she’d given birth to herself, had gotten married to the woman he’d been in love with his whole life on Labor Day. He’d been resigned to call Sierra his best friend, and nothing else, while she soldiered on through an unhappy marriage—but the summer had changed all that. It was early days yet with them, Zeke knew. He couldn’t get a read on whether they wanted to dive straight into making a family, or spend some more time basking in each other.
Either way, they were happy. And so Zeke was happy.
And, sure—had he engaged in the tiniest bit of deception to bring all this about? Damn right he had.
He had taken it upon himself to announce at Easter, the year before, that he only had a year to live. And yes, he’d already passed that year mark and was headed toward his second Easter of health and happiness despite his supposed diagnosis. Boone had already called him on the lie.
But Zeke couldn’t come clean.
Because his youngest son, the charming and clever Knox, was still depressingly single.
He moved from the bed, shifting the little boys so that Belinda could cover them up with the cozy comforter and tuck them in, humming the same song she’d sung to all their boys over the years.
They stood there a moment, smiling down at the toddlers the way they had smiled down at so many of their children tucked up in their beds. And when they walked out of the room, they held hands as they made their way to their own bedroom.
