Page 5 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
But he stopped again, and this time, he was sure he heard something.
He crossed back to the door and peered through the small window again but he couldn’t see anything. He flipped on the outdoor lights, and saw what he expected to see: swirling snow coming down on the other side of his porch, and nothing but darkness beyond it.
Though something tugged at him.
Knox frowned as he realized that it looked a lot like someone or something had been out there. He couldn’t think what sort of animal would be out walking around right now. Much less up onto his porch in weather like this.
Still, what he could see was that there were impressions on the stairs, like some kind of tracks.
He reached for the rifle that he kept by the door, because this was Montana and grizzlies were no joke, then pulled the door open and let the blast of the winter cold rush in.
But he hardly noticed it. Because there wasn’t a grizzly bear waiting for him on the other side of the door.
There wasn’t anything at all out here save what looked like the portable car seat he’d seen Harlan and Kendall carry their baby boy around in. His first thought was that they must have come down and left the baby here—because he heard, next, that little cry that must have been what had stopped him inside.
It was high-pitched, not quite a wail.
But that was ridiculous. His brother wasn’t going to leave his child on a doorstep strapped into a car seat. No child should be on a doorstep in this weather.
Or at all.
Knox shot a look around the snowy, blustery dark, but he couldn’t see anything or anyone else. And what must have been the footsteps of whoever had left this baby here on his porch steps were filling in rapidly, so there would be no track to follow even if he wanted to run out into the dark.
Which he couldn’t do, because there was now a baby here who needed him a lot more than he needed to satisfy his curiosity.
He picked up the car seat with one hand and stepped back inside. He slammed the door behind him, then put his rifle back up on the wall where it belonged.
What Knox Carey knew about babies was pretty much zero. But he did know a thing or two about the cold in general and Montana winters in specific, and how dangerous these things were even if someone was fully grown.
He carried the car seat over to the rug laid out before the fire. Then he crouched down with it as he set it there in the heat that the fireplace threw off.
All he’d seen on the porch was a hint of a little round cheek nestled in layers. But now, as he squatted down, he could see that those cheeks were flushed and that the baby was wrapped up in a whole lot of what looked like fleece. And that fleece was mostly pink, so Knox concluded that he was looking at a baby girl.
“Hey baby girl,” he murmured, and her eyes fluttered open at the sound of his voice, then fixed on him.
Her eyes were a fascinating shade of amber-brown ringed with a darker green. Her mouth was a perfect little rosebud, and was working a little. Her cheeks were chubby and round and he thought, for some reason, that it was probably a good thing that they looked flushed instead of cold and pale.
He realized after a moment that she was wiggling in her seat, batting her arms and legs. And then that tiny little face screwed up and she let out a wail that was so loud it was more like a howl.
Knox panicked, because he had no idea what to do.
But then he thought about visiting Kendall and Harlan a couple of months ago when little baby Ezekiel James, named after his grandpa but to be known as Kiel, was brand-new. Kendall had laughed at him, told him he looked poleaxed, and said, He’s a baby, Knox. Not a poisonous snake. You know what to do with baby cows. Baby humans aren’t really that different.
So he reached in and found the straps that were keeping her in her car seat, undid them, and then picked her up. When he did, he held her before him for a moment and looked at her seriously.
She fussed and shook her arms a little like she was dancing in place in midair. And also like she was mad. But then she seemed to be staring right back at him.
“This is not an ideal situation,” he told her gravely, and she blinked in much the same way. “We are going to have to get through this together, you and me, and it might be a little bumpy. Where is your mother?”
But of course, she was a baby, no matter how intently she seemed to be staring back at him. She didn’t reply, beyond blowing a few bubbles at him.
And he couldn’t stop thinking about how cold it was out there. How quickly the snow had filled in what tracks there were, which made him hope that the baby had only been out there a few minutes.
But he didn’t know that for sure.
What he knew about cold exposure had nothing to do with babies specifically, but he figured it might be the same thing. Skin to skin was always the way to go, to make sure that everyone was warm and toasty and getting blood into all the extremities.
He peeled off his flannel shirt. Then he set the baby down on her back, carefully. She didn’t like that very much, and started kicking and making noise. That wasn’t exactly helpful when he needed to get her layers off her tiny little body, but Knox had in fact spent a lot of his life wrangling calves—as baby cows were more commonly known—and all other kinds of farm animals. Little mammals had more in common than not. He found himself murmuring soothing things, nonsensical or not, as he found her little zippers and tiny snaps and stripped the baby down until she was wearing nothing but her diaper.
