Page 35 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
She’d been holding the line that it was touching him that made the difference, but she supposed she’d known all along that she was splitting hairs.
And now she felt soft and destroyed and molten hot, and he was coming toward her with that burning hot promise all over him.
Ramona knew that if she had any self-respect at all that she would shut this down. Right now before it went any further.
She knew it, but there wasn’t one single part of her that wanted to do that. There wasn’t the faintest hint of any resistance inside of her.
Instead, she thought about the things he’d said, out there in the kitchen, showing her more of himself than she thought he ever had before. And maybe more important, the things that she thought he’d wanted to say, but couldn’t.
Ramona had beat herself up for that a thousand times. Interpreting his silence as admission, when maybe it was really just him not having anything to say.
But she didn’t believe that was true. She didn’t truly believe that she was so delusional that she would make up what she saw in him.
She followed her intuition in her work all the time. She was an excellent diagnostician, so why had she convinced herself that she could read pretty much any human being on this planet except him?
But she knew the answer. He hadn’t responded to her the way she’d wanted him to—the way she needed him to. It was easier to tell herself he felt nothing at all than to sit in the pain of thinking that he felt all the same things, but for some reason wouldn’t step into them the way she did.
The truth of this, she knew with the same certainty she’d felt that first night so long ago, was that she was in love with him.
It had grabbed her that fast, and it had never released its grip.
But she also thought—and had for some time, though tonight cinched it for her—that he loved her.
No matter what he did or didn’t say, did or didn’t do, or how it all made her feel.
It hadn’t escaped her notice that he’d put her on the same level as the father she knew that he adored and the baby he clearly felt responsible for now.
Maybe what she needed to do was redefine her responses to a situation that she was beginning to think she’d been misreading all along.
What did it matter what they called themselves? What did it matter what he thought his future ought to look like when he was making no move toward it? What did it matter if he never spouted her poetry?
Maybe the two of them were the poem.
She’d looked up from a local beer that the Bennett sisters who ran Mountain Mama Pizza had told her they’d imported from Flintworks, a local brewery down in Marietta. She’d thought the local IPA would be the hero of the evening, but then she’d looked up.
Knox had been there and her heart hadn’t belonged to her ever since.
Now, on the other side of so many months of back and forth, he’d admitted that there hadn’t been anyone else for him, either.
Did she really need a bigger declaration than that?
He stretched out beside her and propped his head on his hand. “You look serious,” he said.
“I’m always serious,” she replied. “I’m a doctor.”
Then she smiled and crawled on top of him.
And finally, it was her turn to play.
She had yet to find a single square inch of this man’s body that she didn’t love, but that didn’t keep her from looking. Ramona took her time making sure she hadn’t gotten any part of him wrong in her memories.
But when she kissed and licked her way down that outrageously rich and gorgeous chest of his, following the dark hair that led to the part of him that made her mouth water, he hauled her up again.
“Not now,” he said, with a particular wickedness in his gaze that thrilled her. “I’m too hungry.”
He rolled her over and gathered her to him, so he could reach down and pull one of her knees up high. Then he was there between them, that silken steel of his finally rubbing into all of her white-hot softness.
“If you really haven’t slept with anyone else—” she began.
