Page 2 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Zeke didn’t turn on the lights as they walked into the room, and not only because they were likely to go off soon. Together, he and Belinda went to the window, where he could see that the snow was already beating at the glass, swirling down in that relentless Montana fashion that made it clear it intended to keep going some while.
“Looks like it’s going to be a minute before we get back into town,” he said.
“I like being tucked up on the ranch at Christmas,” Belinda murmured, gazing out into the dark. “Besides, all this snow means anything can happen.”
Zeke pulled Belinda closer so he could wrap his arms around her and rest his chin on her head. Alice had been a sweetness that warmed from within. Belinda was a simmering fire that was never quite banked. She turned into him, running her hands down his back and nestling into him.
“We have to do something about Knox,” Zeke said in a low voice.
“We’re running out of time,” she agreed. “Sooner or later one of the others is going to mention the fact that you’ve become an apparent miracle of medical science, and then what? How on earth will you convince that boy to settle down?”
Zeke laughed. “He thinks I’m dying and he hasn’t been convinced yet.”
“He’s always been that way,” Belinda said, but there was approval in her voice. “Hard-headed no matter how much he smiles his way through things. He gets that from my side.”
“Right,” Zeke drawled. “Because Careys are known for being pushovers. Not stubborn at all.”
“It’s a different kind of stubborn,” Belinda maintained. “You know as well as I do that he wanted to leave Cowboy Point. Maybe even Montana. You might not have convinced him to marry and start on some babies with your little stunt, but he’s still here. That’s not nothing.”
Zeke thought about his youngest. The most charming of the Carey brothers, some said. The most easygoing, others claimed, though that always made Zeke laugh. Because Knox was the only one of his sons who had been determined to go to college and had made it happen. Knox was the only one who had taken his high school football years, turned them into a scholarship, and had gone to the University of Montana on the other side of the Rockies in Missoula. He’d done well at UM as a college athlete and had also gotten excellent grades and a business degree.
Maybe he came off charming and easygoing to those who took him at face value, but Zeke knew better.
Knox was the only one of his children who could, if he liked, go anywhere to make his living. He was the only one who wasn’t necessarily a rancher in his blood and bones, despite the land that had been in their family for generations. This wasn’t to say that Knox didn’t love the Carey family ranch or the years he’d spent working it side by side with his brothers—no matter that his brothers liked to pretend that wasn’t the case.
Harlan was a salt of the earth kind of a man who had dedicated his life to High Mountain Ranch and would no doubt teach his children to do the same. Boone was made in the same mold, though he was more independent, and had opened his own artisan dairy that had already been a huge success. Wilder and Ryder were different. Wilder was happy to work the ranch and support his new wife as she chased her dreams, because he didn’t have an ego the way some men did. Ryder, on the other hand, had made a name for himself on the rodeo circuit because he’d wanted something that was his, but he’d done that. Now he seemed perfectly content to build a family with Rosie and settle in.
The lives they’d lead were a lot like the life Zeke had led, and it was a damned good life.
But there were other ways to live this ranch life. Zeke knew that. Just like he knew that it was Knox who could change things up around here, if he stayed here. If he made a life here. It was Knox who had the big ideas about the kind of things they could do with the ranch so that his brothers didn’t have to work themselves to death on this sometimes unforgiving land the way so many of their ancestors had.
The way he likely believed Zeke had, for that matter.
But he also knew that Belinda was right. Knox had a restlessness in him. His youngest needed a reason to stay right here in Cowboy Point, and that wasn’t going to come from family pressure.
Or not only from family pressure.
What Knox needed was to get his head turned around, and Zeke was pretty sure there was only one woman around these parts who had ever managed that feat. He had to hand it to his boy—Knox had excellent taste and, like his father, clearly liked women that were much too good for him.
A secret to a happy marriage, and Zeke would know. He was on his second.
He’d spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to hasten that head turning along, before his charming youngest son with his eyes on the horizon decided he needed to go somewhere else to make his way in this world.
Something that would break his mother’s heart.
And Zeke’s too, come to that.
But as the snow kept coming down, and the wind blew harder and wilder, Zeke felt a kind of settling deep in his chest.
Because this was Montana. His Montana, he often thought, though he knew better than to truly believe he had any ownership of land this untamable, this vast, this deeply wild and unknowable. He knew he was a steward at best.
Zeke was at peace with that. He had to be, or he wouldn’t have managed to live here this long, much less actively encourage his children to carry that torch.
Still, Careys had lived here in these mountains for a good long while now, and Zeke understood that there was a kind of magic that happened in these hills. There always had been. Mountains were wily things. They were never quite where you left them, and they had a way of making their wants and needs known—like it or not.
These particular mountains that spread out behind Copper Mountain liked to claim those who were part of them—like it or not. They knew who needed their brand of magic the same way they always knew who didn’t.
A Montanan knew how to respect the mountains, or he wasn’t much of a Montanan.
