Page 19 of Promised to the Cowboy

We’ve turned toward each other somewhere in the last few minutes without either of us noticing. Everything in me is leaning toward this woman. The gap closes to almost nothing. Her breath is shallow, and so is mine.

And the whole time, the careful part of me is checking her face for the no. Watching for the pullback, the breath that means stop, the way I watched in Bigfork. It’s the only kind of close I’ve ever known how to offer anybody. Slow and watching and ready to be told no.

She doesn’t tell me no. Her chin tips up the last half inch. The gap goes to the last sliver, to the place right before?—

“Gabriel.”

She says my name in a way that takes something apart in me.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” she says.

I go still. All of me listening. Waiting.

She searches my face as if she’s looking for something, like she's checking the ground before she steps on it barefoot.

Whatever she’s looking for in my face, she takes a long time finding it. Long enough that my wrong-built heart knocks against the inside of my chest.

She must find what she’s looking for because she takes a deep breath and says it.

“I’m pregnant.”

I don’t move. Nothing moves.

“And it’s yours.”

Everything pauses, that held breath before the world tips and doesn’t level out.

I’m pregnant. And it’s yours.

I count my heartbeats. They’re keeping time, loud and uneven and very much present.

Evie hasn’t moved either. She’s watching me the way she watched me in Bigfork—steady, direct, ready to take whatever comes. She drove from Nevada to tell me, and now she’s braced, her expression open in a way I’ve only seen once—the night I was inside her.

The best night of my life.

“How long?” My voice comes out hoarse.

“Twenty-one weeks, give or take.” A beat. “I didn’t say anything straight away because I needed to be sure first. About what I was walking into.”

She means me. She needed to be sure about me. And she came anyway, which means she decided I was worth the risk, or she decided the alternative was worse. I don’t know which one yet, but it doesn’t matter right now.

I pick my hat up off the bench and set it down again. My hands need something to do. “Give me a minute.”

She gives me the minute without fidgeting, without filling it. I use it to do the math—not the old math where I come out as the problem. A different equation. New variables.

Evie. A child. This ranch. Me.

I think about Daniel and Delaney. Ethan and Jenna. I think about how my brothers have found their way to something real. I think about what Evie said tonight—that’s a lot of weight to carry for somebody who was a baby—and how nothing has landed like that in thirty years.

And I think about the boy who grew up with a father who couldn’t look at him.

“Okay,” I finally say.

Her eyes widen. “Okay?”

“We need to discuss practicalities.”

Evie freezes. “If you’re about to reach for a check book, don’t. I make my own money. I’ve put a roof over my own head since I was nineteen.”