Page 25 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
“I don’t want to add to her tough time,” Knox said after a moment, digesting what he knew about Devil’s Gorge, places like it, and what that probably meant for the poor girl who’d been so desperate she’d given up her baby the way she had. “But I would like to know why she picked my name out of the hat.”
Behind him, Boone made a noise. “Devil’s Gorge isn’t just off the grid. It’s off the hook. Folks go out there sometimes and don’t come back.”
“That is unfortunately a fact,” Atticus agreed. He leveled a look at Knox. “I don’t blame you for wanting answers. But I’m not sure you’ll find any. The Delaneys aren’t the friendliest or most welcoming bunch. I find it’s best to talk to them from the right side of a jail cell and even then, they’re not exactly forthcoming.”
When Knox only shrugged, because there were presently no Delaneys in the tiny holding cell, Atticus pulled out a map. Then they all took some time debating how best to get out to a place where the inhabitants didn’t want to be found and the geography was inhospitable enough to feel like collusion. All without driving off into oblivion in mountains that were particularly unfriendly right now, in these dead days of late December.
“If you must go out there,” Atticus said, “and I can see that you’re going to, watch your backs.”
“A full-time occupation,” Wilder assured him with a grin.
They all went back outside and took a few bracing sort of breaths in the frigid air. Right there by the library where Knox could look across the road and see the sign at the end of Ramona’s drive, beckoning patients into her clinic.
He had to stand there and take a few breaths to clear his head of her, instead of preparing for whatever lay ahead in Devil’s Gorge, a place most locals weren’t foolish enough to go looking for.
Boone and Wilder stood with him, and he didn’t know what they were thinking. He wasn’t about to ask, either. They all watched as Matilda Stark drove by in her antique red pickup, her usual disheveled braids poking out from beneath a brightly colored knit hat, with what looked like an entire litter of dogs in the back seat. She saw them all standing there and waved through the window with that big, wide smile of hers that some folks found weird.
Knox had always found her adorable, though he’d been wise enough to keep that opinion to himself. She had far too many large and disreputable cousins, and they all liked to brawl.
The air was so cold that it hurt his face, but it also made him feel alive. Awake. He also felt like it made his brain work at its normal capacity for the first time in a few days.
And he wanted nothing more than to go across the road and tell Ramona where they were going and why.
Then he remembered, with a kind of thud in the center of his chest, what his mother had said about the person he wanted to call first. And for help and…maybe just in general.
You find out who really matters, Belinda had said.
It occurred to him then that maybe playacting having a baby with a woman he didn’t actually have a baby with, but had a whole long and complicated history with instead, had messed him up some.
But Wilder slapped him on the back and he had to let that go. Beside him, Boone nodded, like the starting gun had sounded.
Boone looked at Knox with challenge in his gaze, like this was the best adventure they’d had since they were little kids battling pretend monsters in the barn.
“Guess we’re going off-roading, little brother,” he drawled. “So we better get into those mountains before it gets dark.”
Chapter Six
It was getting late that night when Ramona heard the knock on her door.
She knew immediately who it was.
Who it had to be—and the knowledge that he was here, right there on the other side of her door, made her breath catch and her pulse kick into high gear. The way it always did.
Because the knock came on the private, outside entrance to the second floor of her house, not downstairs at the clinic entrance. And there was only one person she could think of in all of Cowboy Point who would show up there unannounced. Much less this late.
It seemed like it had been a lifetime since she’d left Knox’s house early yesterday morning. It had felt like she was tearing off her skin to simply… sink back into her actual life. The life she’d worked so hard to make here.
The life she knew, deep down, she loved fiercely, even if it didn’t feel that way while in the middle of her first Knox hangover in a couple of months.
She’d seen some patients. She’d updated her endless backlog of notes. She had woken up today to more of the same, and had decided that it was probably a good thing that Cat had taken a couple of weeks off for the holidays. Ramona knew somehow that her colleague and friend would have a whole lot to say about the Knox of it all.
Ramona had wanted to check in on little Hailey more than she’d wanted to breathe, but she’d held herself back. She’d decided that she would call Knox when she was truly—and only—interested in the welfare of the child.
She wasn’t quite there yet.
And now she stared at the door off her little kitchen, frozen solid in her living room. She really shouldn’t let him in. She knew better than that. She’d worked so hard to make herself immune to him, and the only reason she’d gone out there on Christmas Eve was Hailey. Him showing up on her doorstep couldn’t possibly lead anywhere good…
But the knock came again, and it wasn’t like he didn’t know she was in here. He could see that all her lights were on.
