Page 31 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
Because a coward would pretend he didn’t know what was happening here and leave everything the way it was. Out of the same fear that had gotten him here in the first place.
Knox had never considered himself cowardly before. Not out on the football field, not academically, not with his business ventures. In fact, the only thing he could point to in his entire life that might fit that definition was the way he’d acted with Ramona since he’d met her, because she had taken him completely by surprise.
He hadn’t wanted to meet a woman who could make him want to change his whole life.
Truth was, he still didn’t. But he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t get up and do something to prove that whatever else might happen, he wasn’t only the plausible deniability guy.
The wildest part of that was that even as he sat there thinking this, he still felt as if the chair at her kitchen table was holding him in place.
Which, even in his own head, sounded a lot like some increasingly weak excuses.
But he’d been too restless to stay home when he’d gotten back there today. And yes, he’d wanted to talk to Atticus, but he could have called the deputy sheriff just as easily.
Of course you should go down to Cowboy Point, his mother had said in what was, looking back at it, an alarmingly serene tone of voice. When Belinda was not known for her smoothness of temper. I’m sure you have any number of things to take care of.
Knox had kissed his sweet little Hailey on her forehead, and then on her nose because she was so cute and she made her little noises at him, and then he’d gone.
To talk to Atticus, he’d told himself. But he’d known the whole time that he would end up here.
Really it came down to the advice Zeke had given all his sons at one point or another. Shit or get off the pot.
Simple and to the point, a lot like Zeke himself.
Knox took a breath, straight into that place near his solar plexus where he still felt like he was coming apart. And he comforted himself with the knowledge that no matter what happened now, no matter if he really did put himself out there for once with her, he couldn’t make their situation more messed up.
It was oddly cheering.
He moved then, and then had to admit that it felt good to watch her eyes go wide. As if she’d expected him to do something even less than he already had.
That stung.
But it didn’t stop him.
He thought there might have to be a reckoning at some point, to figure out why it was that he had no fear at all strolling into Devil’s Gorge where literally anything could have happened to him and no one would ever have found his remains, but a little bit of vulnerability scared the hell out of him.
But even as he thought that, standing beside the table, looking down into Ramona’s unfathomably pretty face, he knew the answer.
The love in his family came with a whole lot of mockery, and Knox had long ago decided that he was never going to let them see that they got to him. Not as the youngest. He already got the worst of it. If they knew they bothered him, it would have been worse. They couldn’t help themselves.
He didn’t know when it had turned into a cage he didn’t know how to get out of.
Ramona wasn’t his family. And vulnerability with her would never become a joke the way it would with his brothers, because that wasn’t who she was.
Maybe he’d known that all along.
Maybe he’d known that if he was going to go in at all, he’d have to go all the way.
There’s no maybe about it, he told himself then.
But he was getting ahead of himself. He wasn’t going anywhere, in or out in any other direction. He was still just standing here, looking at her.
Knox reached down into that place that felt like it was unspooling, and decided that if there was a way out of the cage he hadn’t understood he was in until now—this was it.
And it felt a lot like it was now or never.
He moved around the table and knelt down beside her chair. That put him just about at eye level—though because he was on his knees, she had to look down at him a bit.
This close, he could not only hear but see it when she sucked in a breath. He could also see the beginnings of that flush he loved to watch roll out over her skin like a quiet, rosy thunderstorm.
