Page 18 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Ramona spent so much time with so many people thanks to her job that she found solitude to be an extravagant indulgence. She’d been looking forward to it.
But the truth was, this was better.
And if she let herself, Ramona was sure that she could have fallen head over heels into this little scene of domestic bliss without even noticing it was happening. Not until it was too late.
She had to keep a hard, painful grip on herself to keep from plummeting off that cliff, because she already knew that the landing sucked.
Because this was pretty much the exact dream she’d had about Knox since day one. This cozy togetherness that didn’t require words or activities and, yes, a baby or two to make them a family. She’d seen wedding bells at first glance.
There’d been times she’d felt a lot of shame about those feelings, but she couldn’t beat herself up about that now. Because no matter what he said when she tried to talk to him about these things, they worked.
She could feel how well they worked even now, on precious little sleep and too much careful sidestepping of their history. No matter what else happened, the ease she felt in his presence never ebbed.
Sure, he was beautiful in that way that should have felt dangerous and untrustworthy, but he’d never felt that way to her. Even if she didn’t exactly love his harsh honesty—he would call it simply honesty—and had tried her best to hate him, she’d never quite gotten there.
And she really had tried.
Deep down, she’d always imagined that the two of them could be happy together if they gave it a real chance. This unexpected Christmas wasn’t doing her any favors in that department.
It would have been better if it was all a little less blissful.
But she couldn’t bring herself to break the spell.
Hailey started fussing, and Ramona watched as Knox settled her down, soothing her to sleep on his wide shoulder.
“My mother is already determined to redo Christmas,” he said, his gaze on the fire. Ramona could have told him she’d overheard that, but it seemed… too intimate, somehow. “She never misses a chance for a holiday. And I can’t blame her. Not when my dad…” He shook his head.
Cowboy Point was a small town. Ramona knew that Zeke Carey had supposedly been given a year to live, and had hit that year mark last Easter. She also knew that he looked remarkably healthy for someone who was on that particular journey.
But he wasn’t her patient. And no one had directly asked for her opinion, so she kept it to herself.
“Families are important,” she said instead.
He looked at her then, over Hailey’s little tuft of coppery hair. “You don’t talk that much about yours.” His mouth curved into something self-deprecating. “Or you don’t talk to me about your family, anyway.”
“I thought everybody knew,” Ramona said. When Knox just continued looking at her in that way, as if he was drinking her in—a look that had gotten her in trouble more times than she could count—she blew out a breath. “My mom grew up here. The way she tells it, she couldn’t wait to get out of this no-stoplight, no-stop-sign little town. She left when she was eighteen, moved to Boston for college, and never looked back. She met my dad there. They had me, and we stayed in Boston until I was six. Then we moved up to New Hampshire, where my father is a professor and my mother works in development at a private school in the area. Neither one of them has ever come back to Cowboy Point. I’m not sure my father has ever set foot in Montana, to be honest.”
“How did you end up liking it so much if your mom hated it?” Knox asked.
“I’m sure I told you before that I spent my summers out here with my grandfather,” Ramona said, frowning at him. Because it wasn’t like they hadn’t talked over the past year and a half. Not that she knew if he’d retained any of that.
But he nodded. “You did.”
He shifted the baby, who made a few soft, gurgling sounds but didn’t wake up as he transferred her back into that little crib of pillows between them. Then that intense hazel gaze of his consumed her from his side of the barrier. “I guess I’m just surprised that she would let you come back here when she went to so much trouble to stay away herself.”
“She’s often said that she never would have let me come back here in the summers if she thought I’d end up moving here,” Ramona replied with a laugh. “And I don’t know that I blame her for how she feels about this place.”
She thought of Cat, who Ramona had first met when the other girl was at something of a crossroads in her life. Cat had laid out how hard it was to be a local, known by everybody, and yet truly known by few. Held securely in place by her family name, and all that history, and yet held back from any dreams she might have had by those same names and histories.
“Some people like living in a place where everyone knows their story,” Ramona said. “But not everybody does. I get that.”
He was studying her and she could feel it like a touch. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t. “Do you normally go back home for Christmas?” he asked.
“I haven’t in a long time.” She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in the same long johns and T-shirt she’d been wearing since she arrived and had shrugged out of the merino wool sweater she usually wore as a base layer. There was no particular reason she should feel so overheated, suddenly, but Knox was giving her all of his attention. She’d always been susceptible to that. “For a long time I was on call at Christmas. It was easier not to set any expectations, so I’d usually go and see my parents at other times. When it’s easier to get in and out of airports, and drive into the New Hampshire wilderness, such as it is.”
He didn’t look overheated as he leaned back against the couch and stuck his legs out toward the fire. He looked lazy and intrigued. “How does it stack up?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said, and laughed. “I wouldn’t want to get stranded in some of New Hampshire’s less settled places. A mountain is a mountain, even in the east. But nothing is as formidable as Montana.” She studied him. “You want to travel more, don’t you?”
