Page 3 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Zeke couldn’t help but think that this Christmas, it was Knox’s turn to find his way home at last.
Not just stay here a while longer on Zeke’s deathwatch, but to sink in a few roots at last and finally figure out that he wasn’t just born here, he belonged here.
That hummed in him like a Christmas carol and he knew that was the mountains’ doing too.
“Make a Christmas wish,” he told Belinda, smiling down at her pretty face, even prettier after all these years and the blessings of time and care. “I have a feeling it’s going to come true.”
She looked up at him the way she always did, her gaze filled with lightning and love, and she stretched up to wrap her arms around his neck.
“My dreams always come true, Zeke Carey,” she told him, his full name like a song in her mouth. “I accept nothing less.”
And then she laughed as he picked her up and swung her into his arms, because he might have been older than should have been possible these days, and dying according to some, but he still knew how to hold his woman and carry her over to their bed.
Where they kept each other warm late into the night, when the wind picked up and the house lost power, and as far as Zeke could tell, the mountains were out there doing their wild and wintry best to bring the magic on home.
Chapter One
Knox Carey was working late when the power went out, again. He’d lost count of how many times it had gone out this week—and most of those times had been over the last few days when a nasty front moved in and squatted down over Paradise Valley. The weather had eased up the slightest bit today, but he’d known better than to imagine it was done.
This was Montana in December. Storms were only to be expected.
It had been snowing on and off for days now, blanketing the hills and making everything look like the kind of Christmas cards his mother loved to send out. Knox had the one she’d hand-delivered the day after Thanksgiving on his refrigerator—the only decoration marring the sleek steel surface.
Because a wise man didn’t argue with his mother.
In fact, no one argued with Belinda Carey, because it was a lost cause.
He laughed at that. Then he rubbed his hands over his face and pushed back from the desk he’d been sitting at for far too long tonight.
Knox checked to make sure that his work was saved, something he’d always been paranoid about after growing up in this place of iffy power and capricious electricity. It had only taken one lost homework assignment when he’d been in middle school to teach him that it always paid to be that kind of paranoid.
Tonight it paid off again. He hadn’t lost a thing.
He left his small, efficient office and roamed out into the main part of the house. He was proud of this house, built the farthest away from the rest of his family, down near the bottom pasture along the drive that led up to the main house. The rest of his brothers had their houses in a sort of line, though with a whole lot of space between them, on the western side of the drive. They assumed Knox had chosen the eastern side, and the closest plot to the road that led into Cowboy Point, to make a statement.
Truth was, he liked the view—but he didn’t care if they assigned him all manner of darker motivations. He was the youngest of five bullheaded brothers. He liked to keep them guessing.
He’d built this house with the help of those bullheaded, mouthy, annoying brothers when he was eighteen, as was the family tradition. And he’d endured the usual complaints from them that his preferences (they’d called them demands) were too much.
Knox liked things the way he liked them. His only tragedy was that he’d been raised with four older brothers who truly felt that it was their sacred duty to comment on and usually heavily critique every last thing that Knox did.
There had only been two ways to go with that, growing up. One path would have been to become a neurotic people pleaser, forever scrabbling around for approval that was unlikely to come—but that wasn’t him. Knox might have been the youngest, but he was still a Carey.
He had taken the other route. The more his brothers teased him and reproached him and complained about him—usually good-naturedly, he liked to think, but still—the more set in his own opinions Knox became.
His oldest brother, Harlan, liked to call him stubborn as a mule. Knox was aware that jackass was the preferred term amongst the others.
But he didn’t care. He’d laughed along with them and built the house he wanted.
His brothers might have built themselves rustic cabins on the pieces of property to go along with their whole Montana cowboy thing. All of them had gotten land when they were eighteen too, the better to give them their mountain men bona fides, and their cabins had reflected that. Except Ryder, who hadn’t built because he’d taken off to ride bulls and live in an Airstream—a different sort of cowboy song.
Knox had always liked details. He’d always been one to slow down and see to them.
And he’d never cared for hand-me-downs or leftovers, guess why.
His house was where he’d experimented first. After building the basic structure with his brothers that first summer, he had spent years renovating the place on his own. Trying out one thing and another to see what he liked better, experimenting with different sorts of projects until he figured out what he was good at. This house was where he’d taught himself how to create properties that people wanted to live in, and better yet would pay to live in.
Thanks to this house, Knox felt confident that he could renovate anything. And he’d more than proved it.
