Page 12 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Even though it hurt.
“I think it’s pretty clear all on its own,” she said.
“Not to me,” he shot back. “But by all means, keep being cryptic in the middle of the night with an abandoned, motherless baby in your arms. That feels like the right path to take.”
Ramona looked down at the little girl, whose eyes were closed as she busily sucked on her bottle. Then she looked back at this man who had ruined her life in too many ways to count—or maybe she’d ruined it herself, because of him, but the end result was still the same—and wished just for one moment he couldn’t be quite so tragically beautiful.
But this was the price of that beauty, wasn’t it? Babies on doorsteps and a sea of broken hearts.
Not to mention all that bright gold heat in his gaze when he was busy showing her, once again, that she was the only person alive in all the world that he was not charming for.
She’d thought that meant something too. Now she suspected it was just that he was an asshole, and surely tonight proved that beyond any shadow of a doubt.
“I didn’t realize it would be hard to follow,” she told him, and kept that smile on her face because she could be an asshole too. “Come on, Knox. She’s obviously yours.”
Chapter Three
If the good doctor had taken a baseball bat to the side of his head, Knox couldn’t have been more shocked.
“Mine?” He couldn’t make sense of that. “What do you mean, mine?”
Ramona was doing her calm, cool, collected thing, but he could see something a lot sharper and brighter in those blue eyes of hers. “What do you think that term normally means, Knox?” She looked down at the baby. “You’re obviously the father of this child.”
“No.” He threw that out, flat and sure. “I’m not.”
Ramona only gazed at him, something too frigid for his peace of mind in her gaze. “I’d estimate that she’s two months old. So if we count back, what you need to ask yourself is who you were sleeping with last winter.”
He found that he was gripping the countertop so hard that he couldn’t tell if he was going to break off a chunk of it or break his own fingers. Both were appealing options just then.
“You know who I was sleeping with last winter,” he gritted out.
The way she shrugged made him feel something like apoplectic, but he tamped it down.
Even when she smiled in a way that made him feel scrubbed raw. “As you made sure to point out to me on approximately ten thousand different occasions, we never had any claim to each other. But here is this baby. Pretty much all the claim necessary to someone, I’d say.”
“Ramona. She’s not my child.”
She moved toward him and Knox didn’t know what he thought she would do, but when Ramona handed over the baby he took her, like it was an automatic response.
“In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we’ll have to assume that she is.” He thought she looked murderous, and it was a problem that something in him found that thrilling, because it was so damn hard to get beneath her surface. But she wasn’t done. “Again, why else would someone leave her here, in the middle of a blizzard, on Christmas Eve?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. He adjusted the soft, warm weight of the baby in his arms. “But I can tell you right now, it’s not because I’m the father.”
Though even as he said that, he could understand why she thought otherwise. Because really. What other reason could there be? It wasn’t like he was a kindergarten teacher. Or a doctor like Ramona.
He was never going to be anyone’s first choice as a babysitter, much less a whole parent.
None of this made sense.
The baby in his arms fidgeted, and he adjusted the way he was holding her to give her better access to the bottle that Ramona had prepared. She blinked open her eyes and looked at him, and it was like he couldn’t help himself. It was like he was falling forward into her gaze, it was so solemn and intent. He made a low, humming sound, that seemed to please her, so he did it again.
It wasn’t that he forgot Ramona was there—he was always entirely too aware of where Ramona Taylor was, to everyone’s detriment—but it took him a moment to look over at her again. When he did, she was watching him with a look he couldn’t read on her face.
That was also nothing new. He took the baby and went over to his favorite chair in this room, an oversized armchair that turned out to be an excellent place to hold a tiny little football of a baby who gave off enough heat to rival his fireplace and was a sweet little deadweight in his arms.
Ramona stayed where she was, her arms crossed over her chest and all her usual shields in place. He told himself he shouldn’t care. That this was none of his business. He’d made sure of that, hadn’t he?
The only noise was a crackle of the fire and the baby’s intense sucking.
