Page 16 of Promised to the Cowboy

“That was not the reassuring part.” I lean back on my hands. “Your family gets stranger every hour.”

“You’ve barely started.”

After a minute, he turns to me. “What about you? Your people?”

I shrug. “It was just Mom and me. My father wasn’t around.”

The words have been sitting inside me for years, shrinking instead of healing. My father is a wound I keep a tarp over.

“Mom always said he was busy.” I turn the turquoise ring on my finger. “When I was little, I believed her. Then I got old enough to realize people make time for those they love.”

Gabriel doesn’t interrupt.

“He’d disappear for months. Sometimes longer. Birthdays. Christmas. Rodeos.” Another shrug. “Didn’t seem to matter.”

I pick at a loose thread on my jeans. “The last time I ever went looking for him was when I was sixteen. I’d made the state barrelracing finals.” I laugh softly, embarrassed by my younger self. “Some stupid part of me thought if he just saw me ride—if he saw the one thing I was actually good at?—”

I swallow. “He took a phone call halfway through my run and walked outside.”

The memory sits heavy in my chest.

“I waited for him afterward.” I look out across the pasture. “He never came back.”

I let out a slow breath. “I still saw him after that. Charity dinners. Fundraisers. Award ceremonies. Whenever having a daughter standing beside him made for good photographs.” I give a small shrug. “I always told myself maybe this would be the night he stayed for coffee afterward. Or asked how I was.”

I smile at my hands. “He never did.”

I look back along the pasture.

“He called yesterday. For one ridiculous second—” I shake my head. “I thought maybe he’d decided he wanted a daughter.”

I laugh quietly, more at myself than anything else. “He wanted me at another charity event.”

I meet Gabriel’s eyes. “That was it. I finally understood that I wasn’t saying goodbye to the father I had.” My fingers tighten around the turquoise ring. “I was saying goodbye to the father I’d spent twenty-six years hoping he might become.”

Gabriel doesn’t say, “I’m sorry.” He doesn’t say, “That’s terrible.” He doesn’t try to fix it or reframe it or tell me his was worse, which I’m beginning to suspect it was. He just sits on the tailgate and lets the sentence be true in the air between us.

Eventually, he says, “A father doesn’t get to clock out. If you choose to have a kid, you show up. Every day. Even when it’s hard.”

He says it like it’s obvious. Like there isn’t another way to be.

I didn’t come to Montana looking for promises.

But somehow...

I think I just heard one.

I have the sudden, insane urge to slide over until my shoulder touches his arm, to absorb some of that quiet certainty with my body.

I don’t say anything else. I just sit beside the man I spent one glorious night with and think,Be careful, Evie. This is how it starts. This is exactly how it started last time. A man who was careful when you handed him yourself. You expected him to drop you, but he didn’t.

“You’re easy to talk to,” I say finally, like an accusation.

His mouth twitches. “I’m told it’s the brooding.”

The almost-smile hits me harder than it should. I catch myself staring at the shape of his mouth and force my gaze to the hills again. My pulse is not behaving. Twenty weeks and some change, and my body still wants him like that night at the motel—no,worsebecause now it knows exactly how he feels inside me.

Then I remember I’m sitting here with a secret. The thought sits in my stomach alongside everything I’m not saying.