Page 44 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
The fact was, Ramona thought now as she closed up the clinic late on the afternoon of December 31, she had completely forgotten that she had a date with Wyatt Stark. She had completely forgotten about the existence of the man, along with pretty much everything else that wasn’t Knox or Hailey. It had come back to her as she’d been regretting her urge to storm off from Knox’s house.
She hadn’t regretted leaving. She had regretted that it was a harder walk than it should have been because of the snow piled high all around. It was all packed down into twin grooves by the truck wheels that had run over it, but it still wasn’t quite as smooth a walk as she might have liked.
Ramona had stomped along and it was almost like she’d suffered too huge a loss to be able to look at it directly. It was too all-encompassing. There were too many implications to face head-on out there on a cold afternoon, the December light eking away toward the west when it had barely had time to establish itself.
It had been easier to focus on the way he had flinched when she’d told him she loved him.
What was there to say about that? It spoke for itself. It spoke loudly. It was more of a shout, really.
She hadn’t cried. She hadn’t shouted. What was the point? She had done all of that so many times and she’d still ended up right back there in the same place.
She’d also realized while stomping around out there in the cold that she’d kind of forgotten what day it was. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe the fact that it was New Year’s Eve the following night could make everything right, she had thought. She could turn the page. It would be a new year and she knew that she would start that year on a date with a man who had already proven himself to be good company. Wyatt was easy to talk to. Ramona found him entertaining. He was undeniably good-looking.
The only thing she had ever not liked about him was that he wasn’t Knox.
Even thinking that had stiffened her resolve as she’d clambered through the woods.
The Starks in Wyatt’s generation had been redoing their family’s showpiece lodge for years now. They intended to open the main lodge in the next summer or so. In the meantime, they had renovated the smaller cottages and outbuildings that stood around the Lodge proper and trickled down the hill toward Cowboy Point’s main road. They had taken in their first guests in the cottages this fall, and had also rented the cottages closer to the Lodge to local business owners, like Rosie. To celebrate all of these steps forward after a generation of disrepair before them, they were throwing a big New Year’s Eve bash.
There were fancy parties down in Marietta, like in the beautiful Graff Hotel, but this would be the first time that there was a destination requiring a nice dress on this side of Copper Mountain.
On the upside, Wyatt had told her with a grin, if the weather turned bad they had a lot of places for people to stay—even if it was still a little more like camping in some parts of the old lodge.
Ramona locked the door to the clinic behind her and headed up the inside stairs to her apartment. Her head had been so full of baby Hailey and Knox and going to Billings to find Shoshana, that it had taken her a solid hour or two to decompress once she’d finally gotten home yesterday. She’d taken a long bath. She’d tried to cry it out, but no tears had come.
Slowly, slowly she had started breathing again.
The real problem with all of this, she acknowledged now as she moved through her apartment and stripped off her work clothes to get in the shower, was that his being a jackass didn’t change the fact that she was in love with him.
Nothing seemed to change that.
She knew too much about him, though. She had her theories about why he was the way he was—not that it ever seemed to help her any since he didn’t want to face himself.
It didn’t matter what she thought. It mattered what he did.
And once again, he’d done the same thing he always did.
If she wanted to change things, she was going to have to do it herself. By herself.
“It’s okay,” she told herself as she got out of the shower tonight and wrapped herself up in her warm, soft towel. “Everyone backslides now and again. It’s all about starting over. Again.”
Though she could feel how different it was this time, deep in her bones. No sobbing—so intensely that sometimes she’d thought she might throw up. No raging into her pillows, punching them all so hard that one time she’d actually made feathers fly up all around her.
It came to her while she was getting dressed that all of the times she’d grieved him before, some part of her had still held on to hope.
But it was the person who lived who grieved, she thought as she zipped up her dress. This felt like a death.
Wyatt had offered to pick her up, but Ramona had insisted that she would drive herself. It was a particular Montana kind of fancy, she thought, to dress up pretty and do her hair and makeup just so. And then wrap herself up in a huge coat, a hat that would likely wreck her hair, and have to carry her shoes because she needed boots to get out to her truck.
She drove herself through Cowboy Point, and blew out a long sort of breath as she did. It was still so pretty here. That was something she kept coming back to, every time her heart broke.
It was tempting to think that she could pick up and move somewhere else, then get over Knox by virtue of geography. But she figured that then she would be just as sad and also somewhere that wasn’t here, which seemed like punishment.
This had always been her favorite place in the world.
Ramona didn’t see why Knox’s continuing emotional constipation should take Cowboy Point away from her too. This was her home now, no matter what he did or didn’t do.
The tiny little town looked pretty on the last night of the year. Everything was closed, but all of the shop owners had put up lights and made it festive. The main street sparkled there against the wild Montana dark. There were lights up on the surrounding ridges, little outposts against the presence of the towering mountains.
