Page 14 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
That way, whatever happened, there might be some emotions but there could be no real surprises.
It had always served him well.
Maybe that was why he’d never known how to tell Ramona that she was a greater temptation than any he’d faced before. She wasn’t like anyone else. He had always told her the truth. Every time.
Trouble was, the truth for him kept changing.
He’d accepted a while ago that any way he looked at it, he came out the dick in this scenario. That didn’t make him happy, but he couldn’t see any way to change it, either.
It seemed to take her a minute to jerk her gaze away from his. Then she opened the plastic bag and pulled out what was inside. And for a long moment, she was quiet as she read what was in front of her, shuffled the pages, then read more.
“What does it say?” Knox asked.
Ramona looked over at him, her face suspiciously blank. He knew that served her well in the work she did, but he’d never liked it aimed at him.
He liked it even less tonight.
She went and put the papers on his coffee table, and then took the baby from him. She kissed the tiny girl on her forehead, taking the bottle away and then shifting the baby to her shoulder. He watched her do this with an expert ease, not entirely sure why that, too, made that familiar hunger inside of him grow bigger. With fangs.
Ramona went back into the kitchen and rummaged around in the bag she’d brought, then tossed a soft towel over one shoulder. Knox watched, still mesmerized, as Ramona began to jiggle the baby on that shoulder, tapping gently on her tiny back and rubbing it in small circles.
She caught his eyes on her and her gaze darkened. “She needs to be burped before we put her down to sleep.”
They both seemed to hear that we in the same moment, and it clearly hit both of them the same way, Knox thought. He was sure he saw Ramona flinch a little bit.
And as for him, there was something about all of this that was hitting him the wrong way.
Or hitting him too hard, maybe.
Either way, it was hard to get his bearings, so he turned his attention to the packet of papers Ramona had left on the table. The first one looked like a timetable, and after frowning at it he realized it was a feeding schedule. When the baby ate, how much, and then how and when she slept. Straightforward enough.
The next took a minute to figure out, but he was pretty sure it was a vaccination schedule, indicating which ones the baby had already gotten and which ones she was still set to receive. All good.
But the third page stopped him cold. Like a stake through the heart.
Because it was a photocopy of a birth certificate. The date of said birth was October 24. Exactly two months ago. But Knox didn’t have time to be impressed with how Ramona had nailed the baby’s age, because he was too busy looking at the rest of the information on this document.
Where it said mother’s name, it said Shoshana Delaney. A name he’d never heard in his entire life.
The baby’s name was what made his heart start to kick hard in his chest. The baby’s name was recorded as Hailey. That was fine. Cute, even.
But the last name was listed as Carey.
And on the line for the father, he read his own name.
For a moment it was like everything went blank.
When he could access his brain again, he counted back from October 24. But no matter how many times he did it, he came up with the same result.
The reality was that there were times in his life where he would have had more cause to worry that something like this was real. More cause to be concerned that a condom had broken without his knowledge, or something else had happened to make it less effective. No matter how careful a person was, it was always a risk.
But that didn’t hold true for this past winter.
“I have no earthly idea who Shoshana Delaney is,” Knox said, his voice low, and not really sounding much like his own.
“That makes it even better,” Ramona replied with a small laugh that wasn’t exactly filled with merriment. Knox couldn’t even look over at her. She cleared her throat and looked at him with a kind of weaponized politeness. “Well, Knox, how many nights do you think you had with strange women whose names you never got? Maybe we can work backwards from there. Can you pick out any identifying features from your memories? Were there any personality traits that might help you differentiate between them?”
And it had been a long night already. Knox had gone from contemplating a quiet whiskey on a holiday night to caring for a two-month-old baby in an instant and he wasn’t sure he was handling the transition well. He had no idea what would happen next. And he had a copy of the baby’s birth certificate with his name on it.
