Page 26 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Besides, the real truth was, Ramona didn’t have the strength not to let him in. She didn’t have it in her to turn him away. She didn’t know what that made her, but she got up and walked over to the door, padding across the wood floors in her cozy socks and then pulling the door open.
Knox stood there, an intense look on his face, and he was alone. No sign of the baby, though Ramona didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
Or how she felt about it, for that matter.
Ramona didn’t know how she felt about anything, only that her entire body was reacting to him the way it always did—with entirely too much enthusiasm, need and joy and delight—but she stepped back, wordlessly, and let him in anyway.
She’d been kidding herself to think she might ever have done anything else. It was one thing to avoid him around town. It was something else to pretend she didn’t hear him knocking.
That was why she’d picked up his call on Christmas Eve, if she was being honest with herself.
Ramona didn’t have it in her to regret that, either.
As always, Knox was so intensely male that it called the softness of this apartment she’d made into her retreat into high relief. He smelled like the dark and the snow, and the night seemed to rush in all around him before he could close the door behind him.
She watched as he shrugged out of his coat and hung it up on the pegs near the door. He kicked off his boots as well, then ran his hands through his messy dark hair after he took off his hat and the gaiter he wore around his neck to keep the weather out.
Knox looked around, the way he always did, like he found her apartment a surprise every time.
She kind of thought that what took him by surprise every time was the girliness of it all. Not exactly the hallmark of the very Western, very Montanan, very male ranch house he’d grown up in. Not to mention the modernized version of that he’d made himself.
Ramona thought it was probably all the pink.
This apartment had been her big project after she finished pulling the clinic together downstairs. She’d done it herself, over the course of about a year, and she was more than pleased with the result. She had started with all the old carpeting everywhere. Once she’d pulled it all up she’d found sunny wood floors beneath, and that had been her guide for the rest.
She’d made everything bright, with a rosy sort of glow to combat the gloom of the long winters. She’d painted the walls a pale pink that seemed to make its own sunshine when the world outside was dark and gloomy and cold. She’d refashioned the staircase outside, turning it from more of a fire escape into an actual covered stair so she could always have a separate entrance to her home. She’d thought it might be preferable if she ever had a patient stay overnight downstairs. Something that wasn’t out of the question given how far away Marietta could seem in the dead of winter. She’d also maintained the interior staircase, though she’d put a door at the bottom so that she could go back and forth if she liked without having to brave the cold.
Inside, she’d made everything soft, cozy, and serene. Pale colors that complemented each other and felt like a long, deep exhale every time she came inside.
But Knox always made the apartment seem excessively feminine. Almost frothy.
Neither one of them had spoken yet, she realized then.
They were just… staring at each other, and Ramona realized it was probably because this was already nothing like all the other times he’d shown up at her door. They were normally kissing by now, or he’d have hauled her up so she could wrap her legs around him, and they’d be staggering deeper into the apartment and maybe making it all the way to her bedroom. Or maybe not.
She cleared her throat and then motioned him toward the table there in her happy little kitchen, and when she found herself backing up like she didn’t dare turn around, she made herself stop. Then she turned around and walked over to her counter, calmly, instead of racing around because there was too much adrenaline in her now that he was here.
“Do you want something warm to drink?” she asked, as if she had no greater concerns in all the world, nor ever would. As if she hardly noticed that her large, dangerously hot ex had turned up in her kitchen in the middle of the night, and not in possession of the baby who might have made this something other than a personal visit. “It looks hideously cold out there.”
“It’s cold,” Knox agreed, and she thought he sounded a little raspier than usual. She ordered herself not to focus on that. “I wouldn’t say no to coffee.”
Ramona was already aware that this man could chug gallons of coffee all through the night, then immediately lie down and sleep like a baby. She had commented on it too many times already, so it seemed wiser not to say anything now.
He went and took a chair at the table, turning it backwards and straddling it. She busied herself at the counter, making him a real coffee and herself a decaf from her machine, and she could feel it press in all around her as she worked. That sense of intimacy that she always felt when the two of them were alone. Alone, clothed, and sharing the same air like this.
It was the kind of congenial quiet that gave a girl ideas, and she’d already had far too many of those ideas for her own good.
None of which had ever come to anything, lest she forget.
She brought the coffees over in two mugs and set them down on the sweet, tiled table that she’d bought from an artist at the Farm & Craft Market her first summer.
Then she sat down too. And waited, with the coziness of her kitchen all around her and the deep tragedy of Knox Careys extreme and offensive gorgeousness right there in front of her.
Ramona reminded herself that she still hadn’t broken the vow she’d made to herself. She hadn’t touched him since October and given the recent provocation and testing of those boundaries, she thought that required celebration.
Though maybe she needed to get through tonight first.
“Are you all right?” she asked him when he didn’t speak, only gazed at her as if he was… looking for something. Better not to speculate what, she thought. “Did something happen to Hailey?”
