“Oh, hush. You know you look good, way better than me. Which ain’t fair. You should have ten times more frown lines and gray hair since you had three times as many kids as me.”
“I feel it most days.” She leaned back in her chair. “Does Cal know?”
She shook her head. “I came straight here. I figured after Kade talked to Skylar and saw his daughter, he’d call and let me know the details.”
“Think Cal will be shocked?”
“Yeah. ’Cause like you said, I’d see Kane in this situation long before Kade.”
Carolyn helped herself to a shot glass and filled hers and Kimi’s with whiskey. Then she held her glass up for a toast. “Congrats.”
They both knocked back their shots.
Kimi cocked her head. “And…?”
“And what?”
“I know you were gonna say something else.”
Carolyn grinned. “Like father like son, huh?”
“Oh, piss off.”
“But it’s true,” Carolyn said. “You and Cal went on what? Five dates and then you were pregnant?”
“Something like that. But there’d been a spark between us since the first time we met before you married Carson.” She wagged her finger in Carolyn’s face. “Although Cal swears he wasn’t a monk pining for me, he claims he was waitin’ for me to grow up and come back here.”
After their mother’s death, and after Kimi had graduated from St. Mary’s, she’d sworn she wasn’t returning to Wyoming. She worked in Alaska for a few years, until she finally got homesick. By that time Carolyn and Carson had two boys and no room for an extra houseguest so Kimi ended up staying with Cal. She’d pretty much moved in with him and had never left.
While at first Carolyn had been worried because Cal seemed to have a revolving door to his bedroom, she realized Cal really did worship her little sister. Oddly enough, so did Jed McKay. He had no issue with Cal and Kimi’s hurry-up wedding. And after Jed’s second heart attack, Kimi was the one who suggested he live with her and Cal and the twins.
Carolyn knew part of the reason Kimi had offered was because Carolyn had taken care of their mother the last year of her life. While Carson hadn’t agreed with Carolyn’s insistence on keeping Clara West’s dire diagnosis from her children, he’d honored the request—only after having words with Eli that forced him to hire part-time health care to alleviate the stress on Carolyn.
“What’re you thinkin’ about, Caro?”
She looked at her sister. “Mom dying. Then getting pregnant with Cord and how lucky we are that neither of us inherited her health problems. And I’m thankful that our husbands have always had our backs when it comes to the West/McKay family crap.”
“True. I’m glad that Dad didn’t ignore his McKay grandkids.”
“I think he did enjoy spending time with our boys.” Carson had told her many times to wash her hands of her father. But after having her own children, she’d come to understand how far a parent would go to protect those children. Like most men of his generation, her father’s communication skills were lacking; he just expected his word to be law with no discussion. She remembered one time her Aunt Hulda had told her that Eli West didn’t act out of maliciousness, just ignorance. That didn’t explain away his behavior, but it’d allowed Carolyn to forgive him and move on from the past.
“If it wasn’t for Harland, Darren, Marshall and Stuart’s wives agreeing with us the feud was stupid, I doubt our kids would know theirs at all,” Kimi said.