Page 9 of A Christmas Baby for the Cowboy
The only fly in all that ointment was Knox.
Because Ramona had met him on her very first night as a Montana resident.
She had driven up Copper Mountain, and parked the truck she now knew that she could live in for weeks at a time, if necessary, behind her grandfather’s old house. She’d spent most of the afternoon caught between nostalgia and overwhelm. Because while it was a delight to be back in the place that she had loved so much as a girl, it also wasn’t the same place she remembered. It had been left to its own devices for far too long.
She had walked around the property, set back from the main road that led into the little community of Cowboy Point, near where the tiny local library stood. There was a falling down shed out back, but the house itself was sturdy. She had already figured out the layout in her head and how she would turn the ground floor into a clinic with her own living area upstairs. Maybe one day she’d renovate the shed, too.
All of those dreams had seemed doable on the drive out here, across the Midwest and through the grasslands and the rolling plains. But once she’d actually arrived, she’d found that she questioned her ability to do any of it.
So she’d taken a long shower and had walked into town to see if there was any food to be had on that first, bright June evening.
She had found Mountain Mama Pizza bustling, with a band out on the patio beneath strings of happy lights. She’d gotten herself a beer and one of their special pizzas, and even though she hadn’t known a single soul in that restaurant that night, she had felt her optimism rising again.
Because it felt like the kind of place she wanted to call her own. It felt like the Cowboy Point she remembered from her summers with her grandfather. He had known everyone in town, just as all those people that night had seemed to know each other. It was different from the town she had grown up in back in New Hampshire that was far more manicured and tailored to the fancy college that was at the center of all life there. They kept the wilderness to the White Mountains in the north and pretty photographs of the snow when it fell in town.
Cowboy Point felt more genuine to her, somehow. Maybe that was why she’d liked it so much all along.
She had finished eating and had been enjoying a second beer when Knox had walked by her table and smiled at her.
And Ramona had debated this a lot, looking back.
Had it been that moment? Had it been as simple as that smile? Or the way he’d stopped still as if he’d hit an invisible wall, and could do nothing at all but stare at her?
She had certainly felt the electricity between them. It should have been shocking—but the way he smiled made it feel more like honey all through her body.
Not less shocking, but sweeter.
“Why don’t I know you?” he had asked, and that smile of his had made what should have been a clichéd sort of line feel new, real, and breathless. “Please tell me who you are so we can rectify that as soon as possible.”
He had sat down with her at that table and that had been the beginning of it all.
Since then, everything between them had been that same explosive, electric conflagration, too sweet and too hot to bear, and time hadn’t dulled it at all.
Over the past year and a half, there had been times when she’d thought that it might work out. When he’d spent every night in her bed, or she’d been a fixture in his, and she had been certain that it all had to mean something.
But it never did.
Or, if she was brutally honest with herself, it had never meant what she wanted it to mean.
And she had come to the reluctant, painful conclusion that if she wanted the life she’d always dreamed about having here, she needed to insist on more.
So she had.
And Knox Carey had declined the offer to step into that kind of intensity. Or anything that hinted at something permanent. It was a line he refused to cross.
That, of course, really should have been the end of it. To her enduring shame, it wasn’t. The end had come much later, after months and months of heartache and hooking up and hurting herself with her own feelings again and again and again.
Now here they were, having not interacted at all in two months, which was a record. And even though she was driving to his house in the middle of the night—not exactly a new thing in their tortured little story—Ramona reminded herself that this was not a booty call.
There was a baby in the mix. In case she had been tempted to think he was making that up, she’d heard the unmistakable sounds of an infant through the phone.
Ramona would like to believe that she wouldn’t have gone if she hadn’t heard those sounds, having moved on and all, but she wasn’t sure that was true—and that was lowering. Extremely lowering.
Up before her in the middle of the swirling snow, she saw the tall posts she was looking for loom up out of the dark. And up on top, the wooden sign that read High Mountain Ranch.
Ramona felt relief wash all through her, though she wouldn’t have admitted it if anyone asked. Especially if that anyone was Knox.
But part of her really had thought that she’d driven off into the unmarked part of the mountains, where it was entirely possible that she would have been lost forever.
