Page 71 of Forbidden Cowboy
The same nurse was with us, smiling at Anna while she begged to hear the names we had picked out. She had a pen ready to write them on the cards, and looked at us expectantly. Sierra, still in her wheelchair, placed a hand on the first incubator, who she was convinced was ‘Baby A’, the one that had kicked her every day since he discovered movement.
“This is Noah Beau West,” she said with a smile. “He’s a fighter like his uncle.”
Anna squealed happily, and looked at her little brother.
“Hello Noah,” she crooned, and my heart melted.
“This is your sister, Anna,” I said, pulling her attention over to the middle incubator, “meet Charlotte.”
“What’s her middle name?”
I rolled my eyes, because I didn’t want to say it out loud. We had agreed that it would be a nice thing to give Charlotte a middle name Anna had really wanted, but I didn’t want to have to explain to my daughter in a decade that her sister had lovedFrozenso much that she was named after it.
“Elsa,” Sierra said, smiling wryly, “Charlotte Elsa.”
Anna looked at us both, mouth agape.
“Really?!”
“Really,” Sierra said. “But you’ll be the one telling her that you chose that name.”
“Okay!”
“And lastly,” I said as we all looked in on the ever-calm Baby B, “Carter Wyatt.”
“Isn’t it gonna be weird if he has the same name as Sierra’s last name?”
“Wyatt,” Sierra said, also looking confused, “what are you talking about?”
“You said I could choose his name,” I said.
“Yeah, but Anna is right, it’s gonna be confusing with my last name being his first name.”
I had never felt so sure about anything in my life.
I turned to the woman I loved, the woman I had let go of once and lived to regret it. The universe had given me second and third chances with her, and I’d be an absolute fool to let that go again.
I got down on one knee, and pulled the ring out of my pocket.
Sierra’s eyes went wide, and Anna squealed again.
“Sierra Carter, I was kind of hoping you’d agree to change your last name, because there is no way I’m going to be stupid enough to let you go again. It’s taken seven years and a lot of trouble on both our parts, but I’ve grown, and I hope I’ve grown into a man you’d be proud to be with. I thought I’d never get married again. My last marriage ended because it was born out of a sense of responsibility, but I can see now that I can still have all the best things in life: you, Anna, the triplets, without the obligation. Loving the five of you isn’t an obligation. It’s as natural as breathing, and I don’t want a single day to pass where you and I aren’t together ever again.”
I took a deep breath before finishing.
“Will you marry me?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sierra
Three babies. One eight-year-old. A happily engaged couple.
It was all too much for Eliana. She had grown more distant since I had arrived back in Gunnison, and to no one’s surprise, we all woke up one day and she was gone, with only a note saying she was leaving town as an indicator of her whereabouts. She had changed her phone number, as well. Anna had been upset about that for a couple of days, but she just threw herself into her school work and her new, favorite role as a big sister to distract herself.
And she was the best big sister. I could ask her to check on any one of the babies at any given moment, and she would do so. She enjoyed bottle-feeding them, and even helped change diapers—something even Wyatt wasn’t keen on doing.
Wyatt and I had fallen into some sort of honeymoon-like bliss. We both had infinite amounts of patience, and were so in love with parenting and with each other that nothing, from midnight feedings to spit up on clothes, bothered us.