Page 47 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
They just danced. One song, then the next.
Ramona wondered if he was doing this deliberately. If he knew that the more he touched her, the more she would find herself helpless to refuse him anything.
Try a spine on for size, she snapped at herself, the way her grandfather had—though he’d done it with a twinkle in his eye. Ramona did not feel twinkly.
After the third song, he led her off the dance floor. She thought that he was going to head back into the other room with the bar and the food, but instead he ducked down a smaller hall that led away from the party.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Trust me,” he replied.
She wanted to tell him that was the last thing she was likely to do, but she didn’t. Because as strange as it seemed, she did trust him. Maybe not to take good care of her heart, but with everything else.
With that baby, for one thing. It hadn’t once occurred to her to call social services because she’d known he had it covered. With his family. With his friends. With all the parts of the life he didn’t think he wanted, and yet had arranged around himself just the same.
He led her up a flight of stairs that looked very different from the grand set of stairs that swept down from the second-floor landing of the Lodge and ended, splendidly, in the lobby. But when they arrived at the top, she saw they were up at the top of those grand stairs anyway.
“There’s a back way?” she asked with a laugh. “What are those, the servants’ stairs?”
“Exactly,” Knox supplied.
And on this side of the landing, they weren’t within sight of anyone below. Instead, they were closer to the huge window that was the focal point of the stairs and the lobby, rising high above both.
The window looked out over Cowboy Point, over to Copper Mountain, and beyond. The smudge in the distance, that string of light, had to be Marietta. Ramona could see the whole of her little community, but from a different perspective than she usually had when she was driving up and down the same roads far below.
It looked magical. Enchanted, even.
And when she looked back at Knox, he was watching her as if he found her both of those things.
Her heart seemed to skip a beat.
“I love you,” he said then, fiercely.
And her breath left her body entirely.
“I have a lot of other things to say, Ramona, but I figured I’d start there,” Knox continued in that same darkly determined way. “Because I want to make sure that you hear me. I love you. You’re absolutely right—I think I’ve been in love with you since the moment I saw you sitting at that table in the pizza place. I’ve just been trying to run away from that ever since.”
And it turned out that when he finally said the very thing that she had been wanting him to say for all of these months—since the moment she’d met him, even—she didn’t have the slightest idea how to respond.
She stared back at him and she couldn’t tell if she was flushed bright red or gone pale as a ghost.
Maybe both.
And then, at the worst possible moment, that was when her body decided that it was the perfect time to give in to all the emotions stampeding around inside of her—and cry.
Chapter Eleven
Knox swept a glance over her, taking it all in, and nodded. Of course he’d finally said the thing and she was crying. Maybe some men would take that as a slap. He couldn’t see it that way, but even if it was one, he had it coming.
Though he was going to have to come to terms with how little he wanted to see Ramona cry, for any reason.
He hated it, in fact.
“I can see that you really didn’t think I was going to come back,” he said after a moment. “And that’s pretty shitty. Of me. I hate that I make you feel this way, Ramona. But we’ll circle back around on that.”
He led her closer to the window and then sat her down on the little banquette that ran along the bottom of the great Lodge window like a cozier version of a windowsill.
Knox didn’t join her there. He stood in front of her, staring down at her like he could share all the things that he wanted to say with the force of his mind. He wished he could.
