Keeping the Cowboy's Baby novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Closed Pass
A blizzard shuts the highway on her first night in town, and a quiet rancher offers her a cabin; at dawn his phone shows a name and the voice she hears is her ex's.
The highway closed at six o'clock, and I had been in Montana for less than an hour.
A trooper in an orange vest waved my car into the lot of the Hitching Post and told me to wait out the storm.
I had a duffel bag, a thin denim jacket and eleven dollars in cash.
I also had a job waiting at a diner thirty miles down a road I could no longer see.
The bar smelled of woodsmoke and spilled beer.
I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu and sat at the end of the counter with my wet hair dripping down my back.
"You're going to freeze in that jacket," a man said.
He was on the next stool with a cup of black coffee.
He was big, with a gray hat pulled low and a beard trimmed close to a face the sun had worked on for years.
Silver ran through his black hair at the temples.
He looked at my boots, then at the puddle under them.
"Those aren't boots, they're a mistake," he said.
"They were on sale," I said.
"That's how you know."
I laughed before I could stop it.
It was the first time I had laughed in five months.
He told me his name was Boone.
I told him to call me Gwen, because I was tired of my whole name and everything that had happened to it.
He didn't ask why.
He asked what a woman in a summer jacket wanted with Sweet Grass County in a blizzard.
"A fresh start," I said. "I hear they sell them here by the pound."
"Not this week. The pass is closed till Monday."
"Then I'll sleep in my car."
"You'll die in your car."
"Then I'll die with a very good attitude."
He looked at me for a long moment.
His eyes were hazel, and they did not hurry.
"I have a line cabin up the high pasture," he said.
"Forty minutes on a road I can drive in the dark."
"There's a stove and a real bed."
"That's a very specific offer."
"It's a cabin," he said. "I'm not good at offers."
I looked at his hands wrapped around the cup, the long white scar down his left forearm, the callus on his thumb.
I thought about the man who had left me by text five months ago and taken every dollar I'd saved.
I thought about how tired I was of being careful.
"Do you have food?" I said.
"I have beans and a lot of coffee."
"Then I'm in."
The cabin was one room with a cast-iron stove, a quilt on an iron bed and a wall of firewood.
He lit the fire while I stood dripping on the rug.
He handed me one of his flannel shirts without a word.
I changed behind a quilt he hung on a rope.
When I came out his eyes went over me once, slow, and stayed.
The shirt hung to my thighs.
Neither of us said anything.
The stove ticked, and the wind leaned on the walls.
"I should stay over there," he said, and did not move.
"You probably should," I said, and crossed the floor.
I put my hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going hard.
He took my face in his rough hands.
He kissed me.
My back hit the log wall.
His hat fell somewhere and neither of us looked for it.
I pulled his shirt out of his jeans and got my hands on warm skin and hard muscle.
He groaned into my mouth, low, and lifted me onto his hips.
"Bed," I said against his jaw.
"Rug," he said. "It's closer."
He was right.
He laid me down on the rug in front of the stove and pulled the flannel over my head.
The firelight moved over my skin, and he looked at me.
"God, Gwen," he said roughly. "Look at you."
I dragged his shirt off him.
He was huge, scarred in a few places, and warm everywhere.
I kissed the scar on his arm, and he made a sound I wanted to hear again.
He kissed down my throat and over my breasts.
He took one nipple in his mouth until I arched off the rug and said his name.
His beard scraped my stomach.
His mouth went lower.
He pushed my thighs wide and put his tongue on my clit, slow and hungry.
I grabbed his hair and held on.
I was shaking in under a minute.
He didn't stop.
He licked me through it.
Then he slid two thick fingers inside me and curled them until I came again, loud, with the wind screaming outside.
"Boone," I gasped. "Now. Please."
He stood to shed his jeans and I saw all of him, thick and hard and heavy.
He came back down between my legs and lined himself up.
I wrapped my legs around his waist and pulled him in.
He pushed inside me inch by inch, and I felt every one of them.
We both groaned.
"You feel so damn good," he said into my neck.
"Move," I said.
He moved.
He fucked me slow at first, deep and steady, his forearms braced either side of my head.
Then I raked my nails down his back and said harder, and he gave me exactly that.
The rug slid under us.
I came with my heels digging into the backs of his thighs.
He followed a few strokes later with a low shout, his whole body pressed down on mine.
We lay there breathing.
Later he carried me to the iron bed, and we did it again slowly, the quilt kicked to the floor.
Once more near dawn I rode him with his hands gripping my hips.
I fell asleep with my head on his chest and his heart under my ear.
I woke to a buzzing on the table.
The room was gray.
Boone was already out on the porch, a dark shape against the snow, stacking wood.
His phone lit up beside the bed.
It was on speaker, and the voice that came out of it was a voice I knew better than I wanted to.
"Big brother, it's me. I'm home Friday. Put a steak on for me and my fiancee."
The screen said DALTON.
The only Dalton I had ever known had told me his last name was Miller.
He had told me he had no family at all.
He had also taken fourteen thousand dollars from my account and left me with a text that said, "Sorry. It's not you."
I stood there in his flannel shirt, with Boone's bed still warm behind me.
Outside, the door of the cabin swung open.
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