Page 4 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
These days he had houses he rented out in Missoula, Bigfork and Whitefish up by Flathead Lake, Bozeman, and Livingston. They all paid for themselves and made him money besides.
Something his brothers liked to laugh at around the Sunday dinner table, but every last one of them had asked him for details in private.
He could have turned on his generator to handle the dark and the cold, but when he got out into the living room he looked at the fireplace he’d made into the kind of vast hearth he’d always wanted and decided a fire would be better.
Besides, it was Christmas Eve.
His father had once told him that there were certain nights meant for contemplation, and Knox had always found that Christmas Eve was one of them.
Thinking about his father made him blow out a breath, because he was pretty sure that the past almost two whole years had been nothing more than his family fooling themselves and sinking deep into denial. A diagnosis was a diagnosis.
No matter how healthy Zeke looked—and the old man still looked as sturdy as a mountain—he wasn’t. It was a false spring hiding a killer storm. It couldn’t be true.
He hated thinking that, but it was reality.
Zeke was dying.
Though Knox had made himself a solemn promise when he’d heard the news at Easter that year. He’d never intended to spend the rest of his life in Cowboy Point. It was one of the reasons he’d gone all the way to Missoula for school. He would have gone farther if it had been up to him. Not right after college, because he’d agreed to spend his twenties pitching in on the ranch. It was the least he could do, he’d thought and still thought now, because he respected what his family had built. What his father and his brothers had dedicated their lives to.
He’d wanted to make sure he was a part of that too.
But he’d been ready to try something else when his father had made that fateful, terrible announcement.
And it was tempting, now, to think that it was a miracle that the year Zeke had been given to live was coming up on two. But if there was one thing Knox had figured out over the years, it was that miracles weren’t real.
Cancer didn’t magically disappear. People died.
This world the Careys lived in was going to change, and probably soon, whether his family liked it or not.
It didn’t exactly make him happy to think these things, but Knox had always considered himself a realist. Maybe it hit a little harder tonight, because it was Christmas Eve and he liked to think of the old man up the hill from him, still walking tall. Still working with his hands, though these days that was more for the bespoke spurs and bits he’d started selling at the Farm & Craft Market.
Still here, he thought.
Knox built the fire, aware that almost everything he knew how to do with his own hands was a direct result of his father’s more weathered hands showing him the way.
It turned out he had to swallow at that, and hard.
He watched the fire as it grew and when he was satisfied, he moved away and ran through his options. Was it a whiskey sort of a night? It felt like it, but the other side of that was the fact that it was Christmas tomorrow morning—and here it was close to midnight—and his mother was definitely going to expect an appearance even if he had to snowshoe the whole way up the side of the hill. And if Belinda got the faintest hint of an idea that he’d indulged himself in too much whiskey or anything else tonight, she would inevitably turn to one of her time-honored traditions.
That being pounding pots and pans together to make the most noise possible, to teach her rowdy boys a lesson.
The lesson Knox had learned from watching her do such things to his brothers was to make sure she never saw him hungover.
The power flickered on again then, but Knox was happy he’d made the fire because he knew better than to trust that it would stay on tonight.
There was the blustering sound of wind slamming into the side of the house, and he moved over to the front door. He peered out through the window he’d built there for exactly this purpose, but there was only snow coming down in sheets on the far side of his porch, looking relentless.
It was also looking more like a blizzard than a storm to his eye, though sometimes it was hard to tell the difference this high in the mountains.
He turned away, thinking he’d head into the kitchen to find himself something to eat and maybe dream a little bit of far-off cities that never got cold and had beaches at the ready, but stopped.
Knox didn’t know why he’d stopped. But, suddenly, it was like every sense he had was on high alert.
Had he heard a sound? What sounds were there to hear out there? It wasn’t just wild weather, all that howling and driving snow. It wasn’t just cold and dangerous and dark, which was basically run of the mill for this part of the world at this time of year.
It was Christmas Eve. Most folks stayed home or had returned home from their merrymaking and churchgoing at this hour.
He shook it off, thinking he was imagining things—one more reason to start plotting his exit strategy again, though that was a whole lot less fun now that it was going to be predicated on a deep loss he wasn’t sure he was going to recover from—
