Page 28 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
“Neither do I.” His gaze was serious. “But taking her with us wasn’t an option, believe me. I think she might have shot us herself if we’d tried.”
They sat there, then. It was quiet in the kitchen. She had been reading a book on the couch and there was music playing softly from the other room—one of her favorite songs about alchemy. A little too on the nose, Ramona thought, because she wasn’t the one who went around denying the alchemy in the first place—
But it did not do her any good to think about any lingering alchemy between herself and this man. Just like it didn’t do her any good to jump to conclusions about why he was here at ten o’clock at night, sharing these things with her.
He could have texted.
Or, given the state of their relationship these days, he could have kept her out of the loop entirely.
“I’m hoping you’re not here to tell me that you lost two of your brothers to the mountains,” Ramona said instead of launching into a monologue on alchemy. Or, worse, their relationship.
She knew better than to make speeches to him. The last time she had, she’d told him she loved him and that had resulted in her having to stop all things Knox Carey. Cold turkey.
“They’re good,” Knox assured her. “We started back, but it was already dark and rapidly getting much too icy. We figured we were better off not trying to drive all the way back. So we went north and spent the night out at that ridiculously fancy Resort at Ransom Ridge instead.”
Ramona blinked. “I didn’t see that coming. I would have thought that the entire Carey family stood stoutly against luxury resorts of all kinds. Purely on principle.”
The Resort at Ransom Ridge wasn’t just fancy. It was a world-class five-star experience. It catered to high-flyers, who could literally take a helicopter or their private planes in, thereby sparing themselves the indignity of mountain roads and the vagaries of the small towns along the way. It had existed in hotel form while Ramona was growing up. But it had skyrocketed into the luxury space over the course of the past fifteen years or so, and was now considered one of the finest resort experiences in the Rocky Mountains—and the world, having been named a three Michelin key hotel last year.
Knox laughed again. “Some members of the Carey family stand against almost anything that’s new,” he agreed. “The thing about the Resort at Ransom Ridge is that it isn’t new. That family has been around forever.”
He leaned forward, in storytelling mode, and that did not exactly help her keep her heart in one piece. “They all sprang up out there after an outlaw hightailed it out of Livingston in the wake of a botched bank robbery and a shootout. Knowing them to be about as ornery as possible, I bet they decided to make it all fancy and elegant to spite him. That’s the kind of people they are.”
Knox grinned. “And being a hardheaded Montanan myself, I support it.”
“I heard the rooms there start at nearly a grand a night,” Ramona said, shaking her head. “In the off-season. Which this is not.”
“It helps to know people,” Knox said. “But yes, we went from the Delaney off-grid shack situation to the epitome of Western high life, and I’m not sure that Boone will ever recover.” He shrugged. “Wilder and I were fine.”
“You have hardier constitutions when it comes to the finer things.” Ramona laughed. “Or so I’ve heard.”
Knox nodded, and then he spread his hands out on the table, staring down at them like he didn’t know what to do with them. Like he was considering putting them on Ramona, maybe, but didn’t.
She could relate.
She needed to stop relating.
“There was some weather to wait out before we drove back today,” Knox continued after a moment. “It took us a good while. I dropped my brothers off at the ranch, checked in on Hailey and my mom, and then figured I should come down into town and do a little brainstorming with Atticus about my next move. Then I figured I might as well eat, because I was hungry. And since I was already here, I thought I’d fill you in on what happened.”
Ramona searched his face. Her heart was beating a little too fast, still, though she was doing her best to ignore it.
With about as much luck as before.
Meaning, none.
“You’re going to have to go to Billings, right?” she asked him. “I feel like there’s no way forward with anything until you know what’s going on with poor Shoshana.” She flushed a little after she said that. “I don’t know why I’m assuming she’s poor Shoshana, but I am. I can’t help it.”
Knox was watching her, that brooding, intense look on his face again. And she’d never been any good at resisting that face. “I want you to come with me, Ramona.”
She felt her heart stutter a bit. It was like everything suddenly froze, then clattered. She swallowed, and realized her throat was tight.
And it was so easy—too easy—to simply go along with this. To let him in. To talk with him like this, like he often came here and updated her on his life, with all their clothes on. To laugh, and feel cozy in this kitchen, like he belonged here.
But that wasn’t their story.
She could understand why he’d called her on Christmas Eve. It was what he’d said at the time—he’d called the clinic line, because he was calling the doctor. Because there was an abandoned infant in the mix who’d been exposed to the elements for an indeterminate amount of time, and that was a perfectly reasonable thing for him to do.
This was something else.
