Page 7 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
But this time she’d believed that she was finished.
This time she was really and truly moving on—she’d even started actually dating, because it wasn’t like she was going to meet someone better for her poor heart while sitting alone in her house.
She was doing everything right, at last.
So the last thing in the world she should have been doing right now was driving out to his house.
Especially in this weather, she thought, as she inched her way over the hill on the far side of the small valley that made up Cowboy Point. The local Stark family’s lodge was a kind of beacon at the top of that hill, the grand old Cowboy Point Lodge that they were restoring to its former glory, starting with the cottages they’d renovated and opened for business this fall. One of them was the only bookstore in the community, which made Ramona happy—though not at the moment.
There were lights beaming out into the dark through the driving snow, some of them jolly Christmas lights, but Ramona couldn’t get too excited about them. Because she knew that the rest of the drive to Knox’s house on his family’s ranch would be dark. Entirely without light, and on questionable mountain roads.
Good thing, then, that she knew this particular drive of shame like the back of her hand.
He had told her that he would bring the baby to her, but she had refused.
We don’t want to expose her to the elements again, she’d said, grateful for all the hours she’d spent perfecting her clinical manner. It was an excellent defense not only against Knox Carey himself, but against her own treacherous and traitorous heart. I’m perfectly capable of driving out there to examine her.
I don’t know that you are, he’d replied.
She hated everything about him, Ramona told herself as she remembered the way he’d said that. That unbearably confident drawl of his, low and husky even in the middle of the night.
Or maybe what she meant was, especially in the middle of the night.
Ramona hated the way it wound itself around her neck like some kind of smoke, but not the sort that made her cough. That would have been helpful. That might have been some kind of protection against it.
The kind of smoke Knox created did nothing but kick up fires inside of her that only he could put out.
And she already knew where that led.
“No,” she told herself now, leaving the lights of Cowboy Point Lodge behind and driving carefully into the snowy dark, her hands gripping the wheel of her truck so tightly that her knuckles ached. But she didn’t loosen her grip. “You will not slip into old patterns of thinking. He does not put out any fires. He is a trash fire all his own, and that’s all you need to know about him.”
But that was not all she knew about Knox Carey. That was the problem.
I will gather some supplies and make my way to your house, she had told him coolly on the phone. She’d already jackknifed up from her bed, and had been frowning around her room, trying to decide what to wear out into all that weather at this time of night. Meanwhile, the other half of her brain had been cataloging what infant supplies she had in the clinic because she was certain Knox didn’t have anything on hand.
Ramona. He’d said her name. That was all.
And it wasn’t fair, of course. Her name in his mouth like that, like they were intimate. Like they were still the kind of intimate they’d been only two months ago—
Anyway, he needed to call her doctor now, she’d thought then. For everyone’s safety. But she couldn’t tell him that without giving herself away and God knew, she’d done enough of that with this man.
So she’d said nothing, angrily pulling on her long johns as she’d clamped her cell phone between her shoulder and the side of her face.
You’re not from here, he’d been saying. You don’t know how to handle snow like this. Particularly not in the middle of the night.
You don’t know how to handle a baby, she retorted. So I’m going to hang up, gather my supplies, and come see how that baby is doing. I don’t know how long it will take me. If I’m not there by morning, I would appreciate you calling 911.
She’d hung up. Because that was safer.
Now she was all alone in her truck, doing her best not to drive off the side of the Gallatin Range, or lodge herself in a gorge, not to be discovered until the spring melt at the earliest. She’d been worried that she might fall asleep on the way, but it hadn’t taken her more than a couple of minutes of navigating her way out of her own driveway to realize that wasn’t going to be a problem.
Because this was terrifying. Her adrenaline was kicking at her. Hard.
The fact that she had driven this road a million times should have helped, but it didn’t. The snow made everything bewildering, and scary. She’d grown up in New Hampshire, which was certainly snowy and wintry enough to call itself the northern state it was, but it was nothing like this.
Still, she knew enough to keep driving slowly, the whole world narrowing down to the distance between one pole stuck in the drifts to mark the side of the road, and also to mark the level of snowfall, and the next.
Ramona knew that eventually, this road ended up at High Mountain Ranch. And after that, it was a relatively short shot to Knox’s house. Just up the main drive past the first pasture, down the first offshoot that wasn’t really a road, and then there sat his house on the right.
