Page 30 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
It’s a clinical necessity, she’d told him once. Doctors can’t have reactions all over their faces when patients tell them deeply personal or embarrassing things.
I’m not your patient, he’d replied, and then he’d kissed her until she was flushed and smiling and his.
That poker face of hers had always had the same, very specific effect on him. It still did.
He wanted to find his way beneath it by any means necessary. And usually, the means he’d chosen had led to them both naked and coming apart at the seams.
She sat there across the table from him now, studying him, as if she was thinking about what he’d said about being his first call. She tilted her head slightly to one side, so that the braid dipped down even lower, and he had to order himself not to reach across the table to tug on it, maybe wrap it around his fist and then pull her close.
It felt like an actual, physical pain that he couldn’t. That he didn’t.
“I won’t pretend that I don’t like hearing that,” she told him, when he’d begun to think that she didn’t intend to speak again tonight and then what would he do? “But again, Knox, I have to ask.” She shrugged, a little helplessly, he thought. Or maybe he was mistaking that helplessness, because there was definitely a challenge in the way she was looking at him. “Why?”
Knox felt that panicked sensation inside him tighten, and then, when he thought it might actually strangle him where he sat, he began to feel instead like a spool of thread unraveling. Rapidly. And there didn’t seem to be a single thing he could do to stop it.
The way she was looking at him wasn’t without some compassion, but that made it worse.
“I don’t know,” he managed to say.
He thought he saw a hint of a smile on her face, but it was gone in a moment. “I think that you do.”
Maybe he was having a heart attack. Or maybe he just wanted to have a heart attack, because then his favorite doctor would have to put her hands on him.
Still, Knox also understood what she was doing here. Or he thought he did.
Ramona wasn’t going to make this easy on him. Not this time. She’d been easy on him for too long. She’d let him claim that he was all about the honesty, but that was never really put to the test, was it?
Because she always gave him another chance. She was the one woman he couldn’t charm, or maybe the only one he didn’t try to charm. That hadn’t been true at first, of course. At first it had been nothing but charm and heat and as close to giddy as Knox thought he’d ever been.
But over the course of the year and a half since she’d arrived in town, since they’d started going back and forth, he knew perfectly well that he’d stopped worrying about charming her. He hadn’t defaulted to his usual little act to keep things running smoothly.
And he knew why.
He’d wanted her to wash her hands of him. He’d wanted her to take him seriously when he told her this thing between them was never going to go anywhere. That it was better not to get too attached.
She’d seen him with his mask off every time. He’d wanted that.
And she had accepted him completely, which he could not for even one moment imagine he deserved.
Hell, he knew he didn’t.
Ramona had accepted him. She’d loved him, no matter what kind of asshole he was, and what had he done in return? Each and every time she’d tried to raise the topic of what was happening between them, he’d shut it down.
Like it would have killed him to concede that yes, he’d always known that he didn’t intend to stay in Cowboy Point. And yes, he’d never wanted any kind of entanglement to get in the way of his leaving.
But, also yes, this thing between them had ended up in much deeper water than he’d anticipated.
Right now, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why he hadn’t said those things at least once, even though he knew his own rationale backwards and forwards and to the point that it sometimes drove even him crazy.
But it shook something in him that she wasn’t going to take the lead now, the way she always had before. She wasn’t going to give him so much as a hint of that plausible deniability. Ramona had let him in, but she was clearly perfectly content to sit here and watch him spin in the wind.
The worst part of that was that he knew he had it coming.
It was like he could hear his father in his head, then. His larger-than-life father, who he’d never imagined could die and still hadn’t accepted would. And likely soon—
Knox couldn’t let himself think about that now.
So really, son, drawled the Zeke in his head, what it boils down to is whether or not you’re a coward.
