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Prologue
Zeke Carey ended the call, slipped his mobile into his pocket, and congratulated himself on yet another pitch-perfect performance.
He’d clearly missed his true calling.
But that notion made him laugh, because he was nothing if not a rancher. These wild Montana acres were as much a part of him as his own old, creaky bones. There was no part of this land he didn’t love. It had been in the family for generations and he intended to see to it that it would stay in the family for generations more.
He had gone to great lengths to make sure that it would, and he didn’t regret it one bit.
It wasn’t every man who would tell his own sons that he was dying when he wasn’t, and more, that his dying wish was to see all five of them married with some kids on the way.
Zeke prided himself on being the kind of father who always went that extra mile.
He was already two down. There were three more of his obstinate sons to go, all of them chips off the old block by his estimation, so he knew exactly how to get around the unique orneriness each one of the five brought to the table. That was what the call had been about. Zeke had put on an Oscar-worthy performance. He’d stood out here in the barn, talking in a feeble voice like he’d taken to his bed, and interrupted himself by wafting off into the odd coughing fit.
One of these days he was going to bust a rib and rip up his own throat with these games, but even then he’d consider it all worthwhile.
Particularly in this case. His prodigal son was coming home.
It was about damn time.
Zeke finished up the few small tasks he’d come out to the barn to handle. He walked over to the barn door and set about shrugging on his cold-weather gear to brave the winter outside, because even the short walk back to the house was too much at this time of year. Last night’s storm had dumped a few extra feet on the existing snowdrifts, plumping them up nice and high, but that was February. And these were the mountains.
And only a deep and abiding fool—or a tourist from somewhere warmer—underestimated a Rocky Mountain winter.
Zeke was a lot of things, but he’d never been much of a fool. Or a tourist, for that matter.
And a man who’d given his life to the land wasn’t likely to risk it in a little snow. He zipped up his parka and stepped out into the cold.
These days, it was his boys who made sure that there was a shoveled path between the old ranch house and the barn. Zeke didn’t even have to ask. Every time it snowed, one of his sons was out there before it stopped, making sure that Zeke and his beloved wife Belinda didn’t have to worry about a thing.
This confirmed for Zeke that he’d raised them all right. It was a funny thing, bringing up a pack of boys and hoping to make them into good men. You couldn’t do anything but your best, whatever that looked like from one season to the next, and hope it worked out in the end.
So far, Zeke thought it was working out pretty damn great. He’d already managed to get two of his sons married off.
Harlan was the oldest, a stalwart and dependable man who reminded Zeke the most of Alice, Zeke’s first wife. She’d been a rock, too, while she was still with them. The only surprising thing Harlan had done in his life was marry Kendall by putting out an old-fashioned ad, but they’d been together for almost a year now. A perfect match.
And if Zeke wasn’t mistaken—a great rarity, he liked to think, though he knew better than to say such things in the presence of his tempestuous wife—Kendall had been looking a little pale lately. She’d had less of an appetite at Sunday dinner. When asked, she always said she was doing great.
But Zeke had seen two different women carry a Carey child and he was pretty sure he knew the signs. He’d already told Belinda his suspicions, so he could also bask in how correct he was when Harlan and Kendall finally made an announcement.
A happy ending that kept getting more happy.
His second son, the oldest of his twins, had gotten married back in the fall. Wilder had always loved living up to his name, so it had taken the forbidden youngest daughter of the Carey family’s longstanding rivals to sort him out. Leave it to Wilder to not simply find a woman but to find the one woman in the state of Montana that he really shouldn’t go near, thanks to generations of bad blood between the two families.
But every time Zeke saw Wilder and Cat together, they looked happier.
And no need to ask us if we’re having babies, Cat had told them all herself at Christmas. The two formerly feuding families had come together for what should have been an awkward sort of holiday party, but wasn’t, because once they all started talking about the great many things they had in common, even the Careys and the Lisles had more than enough to talk about.
Because you already are? Belinda had asked, making no attempt to hide the way she was eyeing Cat’s figure.
Because it’s rude, Wilder had told his stepmother, though without heat.
And also because we are definitely not even getting pregnant until we’ve been married at least a year, Cat had told the whole room, with that smile on her face that Zeke suspected meant she wanted to poke at her older brothers. Because I know this entire town thinks we got married because Wilder knocked me up.
Everyone except Dallas and me, her oldest brother, Tennessee, had said in his stern, unamused way. Because if he did, he’d be dead.
Merry Christmas to you too, brother, Wilder had said merrily, and had toasted his in-laws.
“It’s all good,” Zeke said out loud as he navigated the path through the snow. “It’s only going to get better now.”
And when the wind picked up, it sounded like a song, and he knew that was his Alice. Checking in and letting him know that she was with him, still and always. That she approved of what he’d done so far.
Not to mention what was to come.
“You’ll see,” he told the wind. His lost, first love. “They’re going to be happy, my love. Just like we were.”
It had been a dark, late morning. A gloomy day. And now it was fixing to be another long, stormy night. There was already snow coming down as he made his way back from the barn toward the house, but it never failed to make his heart sing a little bit in his chest. The beauty of this place, even covered in winter, that he knew enough to make sure he got out in as often as he could.
Because men who worked the land weren’t meant to be house pets. That he knew. And in winter, folks who lived in places where winter clamped down hard and held on tight, it was necessary to get out there and enjoy the weather no matter how grim it got.
Hibernation only worked if you were a bear.
The lights in the windows of the house beamed out at him as he drew close, beckoning a man in.
He stomped his way into the mudroom, peeled off the heavy outer layers that kept the cold at a reasonable level, and padded into the kitchen in his heavy winter socks. The heat of the house made his cold cheeks feel even colder at first, though they warmed as he made his way inside.
Belinda was sitting at the kitchen table, looking through some papers. There was a big spread of the bespoke spurs and bits that were Zeke’s hobby, gleaming in the light. More than just a hobby now, Zeke thought. That was thanks to Kendall and the booth she’d set up for him at the summer market, and the website she’d built for him too. Things he’d never thought he’d ever do.
Everything around here was changing. For the better.
“Ryder’s coming home,” he told his wife.
Belinda looked up from her stack of papers, a grin breaking across her face. “You really sold it at Christmas. Clutching that blanket around your shoulders like the next draft might take you out was a nice touch.”
“It was some of my best work,” Zeke agreed.
Belinda’s grin widened as she gazed at him, another surefire way to get that song going in his heart.
Zeke was an extraordinarily lucky man. Alice had been a gem. An angel. She had made everything around her better until the day she’d died. Now he spent a lot of time talking to her, and saw the signs she sent him in return, as they both watched over their grown sons.
He had never stopped loving her. He never would.
Belinda was more of a storm. She still swept him away with that smile of hers. She had taken on his first three boys as if they were her own, helped him raise them, and had always treated them like they were no different from the two younger boys she went on to make with him. She had never begrudged his love of Alice, or demanded he get over it.
On the contrary, Belinda grew flowers in the warmer months for Zeke to put on Alice’s grave. In the colder months, she drove down into Marietta to get arrangements from the florist.
Zeke’s life had almost too much love to bear.
So why not add more? Why not pack it as full as it could get?
“Do you know how hard it is for me to see those little boys in town?” Belinda was asking, her grin fading a bit as she shook her head. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it myself.”
“I imagine because Rosie didn’t want any of us to see it,” Zeke said, mildly enough.
Though this was not a topic he felt mildly about, he knew it wouldn’t do them any good to get Belinda too riled up.
Belinda truly riled was far more worrisome than any storm, as he could attest, having done his share of riling her up over time.
It had been late in the fall when he’d figured out the truth. Rosie Stark, a member of an old Cowboy Point family, had shocked the whole community a few years back by coming home after her college graduation pregnant.
With twins, no less, and Zeke had spent a good amount of time kicking himself for not cluing into that. She had a pair of identical boys, had never mentioned the father, as far as anyone could tell, and flatly refused to engage in any of the rumors surrounding her.
Zeke hadn’t thought much of it—aside from the usual pleasure he took in psychoanalyzing his friends and neighbors, a particular joy in a small town where a man could be sure he was providing everyone around him with a similar narrative. Not, that was, until the day that Zeke ran into her and her boys in the store and recognized the dark eyes staring back at him from a little boy’s face.
Alice’s eyes.
More to the point, his three oldest sons’ eyes.
Zeke had known immediately whose babies those were. For one thing, it was clear that Rosie had gotten pregnant down in Austin, where she’d been at school. There was only one of Zeke’s sons who spent any time in Texas, because Ryder had gone off chasing the rodeo when he was still a teenager himself and Texas was one of the places he apparently liked better than home, he was there so much.
He had Belinda had gone round and round on that one, too.
He needs to do right by those babies and that girl, Belinda would mutter in bed at night, glaring at the ceiling while they curled into each other after making sure the sheets were nice and rumpled. All three of us raised him better than this.
Because that was Belinda. Always making sure Alice was a part of this family she’d helped make.
I don’t think he knows, Zeke usually said after these rants of hers. All focused on the horror of thinking one of her boys was a deadbeat, in the end. The shame of it would kill her, she was sure—but she planned to make sure Ryder felt it too.
He will, Belinda would say, darkly. Believe you me, he will know.
Zeke couldn’t believe that Ryder could know. Ryder was a big rodeo star these days and Zeke had a good idea what sort of attention went along with that, especially from women, but this was still Ryder they were talking about. The child who’d always had a strict code that he’d adhered to from birth, more or less.
He wouldn’t tattle. What he would do was claim that any wrongdoing was his if he thought he could take fire from one of his brothers. Always happy to take the fall, even when innocent, that was Ryder.
Because, like every other member of the Carey family, Ryder secretly believed he alone was the tough one. Zeke was familiar with the pathology, having had it pointed out to him sweetly—but consistently—by one wife, and a whole lot louder by another.
No way would Ryder let Rosie suffer. That was the thing. Relationships were complicated, but Ryder would never let a woman with his babies worry where her kids’ next meal was coming from. He would never leave anyone exposed to town gossip and scandal thanks to him. That wasn’t how he was made.
It had been tempting to tell him straight out.
But Zeke had decided they needed a plan. They couldn’t demand that Ryder come home without telling him why. And Zeke and Belinda agreed—eventually—that Rosie and Ryder had to be the ones to have the conversation. It wouldn’t help any to insert themselves.
He’ll either know those little boys are his on sight or he’s an idiot, Belinda had said. As I plan to tell him myself.
Besides, there was Rosie herself to consider.
Cowboy Point was a small place. Zeke had known Rosie her whole life, and her parents for their whole lives too. Belinda was friendly with Rosie’s mother, the dreamy, impractical Charlotte who was forever declaring that she had entered a new era and therefore had a new name to go with it.
Most recently, if Zeke was keeping up, Moonshadow.
Moonshadow Stark, of all things.
How a flighty woman like Charlotte had ever married Jimmy Stark, who had been curmudgeonly even when he was small, no one would ever know. He had shuffled off the mortal coil far too young and left no answers behind him. Just three kids spread out over some fifteen years. Rosie was the youngest.
Charlotte Moonshadow, or whatever she was calling herself these days, spent most of her time out in the hippie enclaves deeper into the mountains with like-minded folks. Art, she liked to say, usually without solicitation, was what called her to rise each morning and face the new day. And art was what lulled her to sleep again at night.
Zeke had no squabble with art. He’d always made his own. It had never been clear to him what Charlotte’s art was.
She could usually be found talking intently about intentional communities, festivals of authenticity—whatever those were—and communal experiences whenever a person happened to stray too close to her in a public place. Zeke kept his distance.
Belinda liked to get as close as possible, mostly so she could report back on the state of New Age Nonsense Ranch, which was not, sadly, the actual name of the spread an hour deeper into the hills and over unmarked dirt roads from Cowboy Point. It was called Nepenthe Creek, though Zeke liked to pretend he couldn’t remember that.
Charlotte was about as untethered to reality as a person could be without requiring medical intervention. Rosie, on the other hand, had always been practical and levelheaded. It hadn’t surprised anyone that when she left for school after high school, she was one of the few who didn’t come crawling back within the year. She was the sort of kid that everyone expected would stay gone. Visiting at the holidays, but building a life somewhere far away from this tiny little mountain community.
Rosie Stark coming back home as a single mom had never been on anyone’s bingo card.
Belinda moved toward him there in the kitchen and Zeke wrapped her up in his arms, automatically. Then, when she was close, he tucked her against him and felt the way their bodies immediately melted into one.
There was no end to it, this dance of theirs.
How could he not want this for his own sons? Especially with a girl like Rosie, who had always had that core of steel in her. She’d need it, with a man as skittish as Ryder had always been.
Zeke wasn’t above teaching Ryder a few of the necessary steps, just to help him along. The only trick would be doing it without Ryder catching on to the fact that Zeke knew about those babies before he did, and kept it close.
But as Zeke held Belinda close, swaying back and forth in their cozy, brightly lit kitchen to the music only the two of them could hear—while the snow came tumbling down outside and somewhere down south, rodeo hero Ryder Carey was finally headed back home to stay a while and meet his future head-on—he liked his chances.
End of Excerpt
