The Rancher's Baby
“Which is now a little bit annoying,” she pointed out. “He’s not even dead, and I had to go through all that grief, plus, you know...”
“Thinking about your marriage?”
She snapped her mouth shut, debating how to respond. It was true enough. She had been thinking a lot about her marriage. Not that it had been an actual, physical marriage. More like roommates with official paperwork. “Yes,” she said finally.
“Divorce is hell,” he said, his voice turning to gravel. “Believe me. I know.”
Guilt twisted her stomach. He thought they shared this common bond. The loss of a marriage. In reality, their situations weren’t even close to being the same.
“Will and I were only married for a year,” she commented. “It’s not really the same as you and Cassandra. The two of you were together for twelve years and...”
“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Blessedly, distraction came in the form of the left turn that took them off the paved road and onto the gravel road that took them to her cabin.
“Why don’t you get this paved?” he asked.
“I like it,” she said.
“Why?”
That was a complicated question, with a complicated answer. But he was her friend and she was glad to be off the topic of marriages, so she figured she would take a stab at it. “Because it’s nothing like the driveway that we had when I was growing up. Which was smooth and paved and circular, and led up to the most ridiculous brick monstrosity.”
“So this is like inverse nostalgia?”
“Yes.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I understand that better than you might think.”
He pulled up to the front of the cabin and she stayed resolutely in her seat until he rounded to her side and opened the door for her. Then she blinked, looking up into the sun, at the way his broad shoulders blotted it out. “What about my car?” she asked.
“I’m going to have someone bring it. Don’t worry.”
“I could go get it,” she said.
“I have a feeling it’s best if you lie low for a little bit.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Well,” he said. “Your ex-husband just came back from the dead, and both of you cause quite a bit of media interest. You were named as beneficiary of his estate along with four other women, and that’s a lot of money.”
“But Will isn’t dead, and I don’t care about his money. I have my own.”
“Very few people are going to believe that, Selena,” Knox said, his tone grave. “Most people don’t acknowledge the concept of having enough money. They only understand wanting more.”
“What are you saying? That I’m...in danger?”
“I don’t know. But we don’t know what’s going on with Will, and you were brought into this. You’re a target, for all we know. Someone is in an urn, and you have a letter that brought you here.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Knox.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I swear to God, Selena, I’d rather have you safe than end up in an urn. That I couldn’t deal with.”
She looked at the deep intensity in his expression. “I’ll be safe.”
“You need to lie low for a while.”
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?”
Knox shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the steely determination in his gray eyes. “I figured I would keep you company.”
Three
Selena looked less than thrilled by the prospect of sticking close to home while the situation with Will got sorted out.
Knox didn’t particularly care whether or not Selena was thrilled. He wanted her safe. As far as he was concerned, this was some shady shit, and until it was resolved, he didn’t want any of it getting near her.
All of it was weird. The five women who had been presented with nearly identical letters telling them that they had inherited Will’s estate, and then Will not actually being dead. The fact that someone else had been living Will’s life.
Maybe none of it would touch Selena. But there was nothing half so pressing in Knox’s life as his best friend’s safety.
His business did not require him to micromanage it. That was the perk of making billions, as far as he was concerned. You didn’t have to be in an office all the damned time if it didn’t suit you.
Plus, it was all...pointless.
He shook off the hollow feeling of his chest caving in on itself and turned his focus back to Selena.
“I don’t need you to stay here with me,” she said, all but scampering across the lawn and to her porch.
“I need to stay here with you,” he returned. He was more than happy to make it about him. Because he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. She was worried about him. She didn’t need to be. But she was. And if he played into that, then she would give him whatever he wanted.
“But it’s a waste of your time,” she pointed out, digging in her purse for her keys, pulling them out and jamming one of them in the lock.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I swear to God, Selena, if I have to go to a funeral with a big picture of you up at the front of the room...”
“No one has threatened me,” she said, turning the key and pushing the door open.
“And I’d rather not wait and see if someone does.”
“You’re being hypervigilant,” she returned.
“Yes,” he said. “I am.” He gritted his teeth. “Some things you can’t control, Selena. Some bad stuff you can’t stop. But I’m not going to decide everything is fine here and risk losing you just because I went home earlier than I should have.”
She looked up at him, the stubborn light in her eyes fading. “Okay. If you need to do this, that’s fine.”
Selena walked into the front entrance of the cabin and threw her purse down on an entryway table. Typical Selena. There was a hook right above the table, but she didn’t hang the purse up. No. That extra step would be considered a waste of time in her estimation. Never mind that her disorganization often meant she spent extra time looking for things.
He looked around the spacious, bright room. It was clean. Surprisingly so.
“This place is... It’s nice. Spotless.”
“I have a housekeeper,” she said, turning to face him, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and offering up a lopsided smile.
For a moment, just a moment, his eyes dipped down to examine those breasts. His gut tightened and he resolutely turned his focus back to her eyes. Selena was a woman. He had known that for a long time. But she wasn’t a woman whose breasts concerned him. She never had been.
When they had met in college he had thought she was beautiful, sure. A man would have to be blind not to see that. But she had also been brittle. Skittish and damaged. And it had taken work on his part to forge a friendship with her.
Once he had become her friend, he had never wanted to do anything to compromise that bond. And if he had been a little jealous of Will Sanders somehow convincing her that marriage was worth the risk, Knox had never indulged that jealousy.
Then Will had hurt her, devastated her, divorced her. And after that, Selena had made her feelings about relationships pretty clear. Anyway, at that point, he had been serious about Cassandra, and then they had gotten married.
His friendship with Selena outlasted both of their marriages, and had proved that the decision he’d made back in college, to not examine her breasts, had been a solid one.
One he was going to hold to.
“Well, thank God for the housekeeper,” he said, his tone dry. “Living all the way out here by yourself, if you didn’t have someone taking care of you you’d be liable to die beneath a pile of your own clothes.”
She huffed. “You don’t know me, Knox.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, “I do.”
A long, slow moment stretched between them and her olive skin was suddenly suffused with color. It probably wasn’t nice of him to tease her about her propensity toward messiness. “Well,” she said, her tone stiff. “I do have a guest room. And I suppose it would be unkind of me to send you packing back to Wyoming on your first night here in Royal.”
“Downright mean,” he said, schooling his expression into one of pure innocence. As much as he could manage.
It occurred to him then that the two of them hadn’t really spent much time together in the past couple of years. And they hadn’t spent time alone together in the past decade. He had been married to another woman, and even though his friendship with Selena had been platonic, and Cassandra had never expressed any jealousy toward her, it would have been stretching things a bit for him to spend the night at her place with no one else around.
“Well,” she said, tossing her glossy black hair over her shoulder. “I am a little mean.”
“Are you?”
She smiled broadly, the expression somewhere between a grin and a snarl. “It has been said.”
“By who?” he asked, feeling instantly protective of her. She had always brought that out in him. Even though now it felt like a joke, that he could feel protective of anyone. He hadn’t managed to protect the most important people in his life.
“I wasn’t thinking of a particular incident,” she responded, wandering toward the kitchen, kicking her shoes off as she went, leaving them right where she stepped out of them, like fuchsia afterthoughts.
“Did Will say you were mean?”
She turned to face him, cocking one dark brow. “Will didn’t have strong feelings for me one way or the other, Knox. Certainly not in the time since the divorce.” She began to bustle around the kitchen, and he leaned against the island, placing his hand on the high-gloss marble countertop, watching as she worked with efficiency, getting mugs and heating water. She was making tea, and she wasn’t even asking him if he wanted any. She would simply present him with some. And he wouldn’t drink it, because he didn’t like tea.
A pretty familiar routine for the two of them.
“He put you pretty firmly off of marriage,” Knox pointed out, “so I would say he’s also not completely blameless.”
“You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Or the undead, in Will’s case.”
He drummed his fingers on the counter. “You know, that does present an interesting question.”
“What question is that?”
“Who died?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“There were ashes in that urn. Obviously they weren’t Will’s. But if he’s not dead, then who is?”
Selena frowned. “Maybe no one’s dead. Maybe it’s ashes from a campfire.”
“Why would someone go to all that trouble? Why would somebody go to that much trouble to fake Will’s death? Or to fake anyone’s death? Again, I think this has something to do with those letters. With all of the women in his life being made beneficiaries of his estate. And this is why I’m not leaving you here by yourself.”
“Because you’re a high-handed, difficult, surly, obnoxious...”
“Are you finished?”
“Just a second,” she said, taking her kettle off the stove and pouring hot water into two of the mugs on the counter. “Irritating, overbearing...”
“Wealthy, handsome, incredibly generous.”
“Yes, it’s true,” she said. “But I prefer beautiful to handsome. I mean, I assume you were offering up descriptions of me.”
She shoved a mug in his direction, smiling brilliantly. He did not tell her he didn’t want any. He did not remind her that he had told her at least fifteen times over the years that he did not drink tea. Instead, he curled his fingers around the mug and pulled it close, knowing she wouldn’t realize he wasn’t having any.
It was just one of her charming quirks. The fact that she could be totally oblivious to what was happening around her. Cast-off shoes in the middle of her floor were symptoms of it. It wasn’t that Selena was an airhead; she was incredibly insightful, actually. It was just that her head seemed to continually be full of thoughts about what was next. Sometimes, all that thinking made it hard to keep her rooted in the present.
She rested her elbows on the counter, then placed her chin in her palms, looking suddenly much younger than she had only a moment ago. Reminding him of the girl he had known in college.
And along with that memory came an old urge. To reach out, to brush her hair out of her face, to trace the line of her lower lip with the edge of his thumb. To take a chance with all of her spiky indignation and press his mouth against hers.
Instead, he lifted his mug to his lips and took a long drink, the hot water and bitterly acidic tea burning his throat as he swallowed.
He really, really didn’t like tea.
“You know,” she said, tapping the side of her mug, straightening. “I do have a few projects you could work on around here. If you’re going to stay with me.”
“You’re putting me to work?”
“Yes. If you’re going to stay with me, you need to earn your keep.”
“I’m earning my keep by guarding you.”
“From a threat you don’t even know exists.”
“I know a few things,” he said, holding up his hand and counting off each thing with his fingers. “I know someone is dead. I know you are mysteriously named as a beneficiary of a lot of money, as are a bunch of other women.”
“And one assumes that we are no longer going to inherit any money since Will isn’t dead.”
“But someone wanted us all to think that he was. Hell, maybe somebody wanted him to be dead.”
“Are you a private detective now? The high-end health-food grocery-chain business not working out for you?”
“It’s working out for me very well, actually. Which you know. And don’t change the subject.”
A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
He was genuinely concerned about her well-being; he wasn’t making that up. But there was something else, too. Something holding him here. Or maybe it was just something keeping him from going back to Wyoming. He had avoided Royal, and Texas altogether, since his divorce. Had avoided going anywhere that reminded him of his former life. He’d owned the ranch in Jackson Hole for over a decade, but he, Cassandra and Eleanor hadn’t spent as much time there as they had here.
Still, for some reason, now that he was back, the idea of returning to that gigantic ranch house in Wyoming to rattle around all by himself didn’t seem appealing.
There was a reason he had gotten married. A reason he and Cassandra had started a family. It was what he had wanted. An answer to his lifetime of loneliness. To the deficit he had grown up with. He had wanted everything. A wife, children, money. All of those things that would keep him from feeling like he had back then.
But he had learned the hard way that children could be taken from you. That marriages crumbled. And that money didn’t mean a damn thing in the end.
If he’d had a choice, if the universe would have asked him, he would have given up the money first.
Of course, he hadn’t realized that until it was too late.
Not that there was any fixing it. Not that there had been a choice. Cancer didn’t care if you were a billionaire.
It didn’t care if a little girl was your entire world.
Now all he had was a big empty house. One that currently had an invitation to a charity event on the fridge. An invitation he just couldn’t deal with right now.
He looked back up at Selena. Yeah, staying here for a few days was definitely more appealing than heading straight back to Jackson Hole.
“Okay,” he said. “What projects did you have in mind?”
* * *
He never said he didn’t like tea.
That was Selena’s first thought when she got up the next morning and set about making coffee for Knox and herself. Selena found it singularly odd that he never refused the tea. She served it to him sometimes just to see if he would. But he never did. He just sat there holding it. Which was funny, because Knox was not a passive man. Far from it.
In fact, in college, he had been her role model for that reason. He was authoritative. He asked for what he wanted. He went for what he wanted. And Selena had wanted to remake herself in his mold. She’d found him endlessly fascinating.
Though she had to admit, as she bustled around the kitchen, he was just as fascinating now. But now she had a much firmer grasp on what she wanted. On what was possible.
She had felt a little weird about him staying with her at first, which was old baggage creeping in. Old feelings. That crush she’d had on him in college that had never had a hope in hell of going anywhere. Not because she thought it was impossible for him to desire her, but because she knew there was no future in it. And she needed Knox as a friend much more than she needed him as a...well...the alternative.
But then last night, as they had been standing in the kitchen, she had looked at him. Really looked at him. Those lines between his brows were so deep, and his eyes were so incredibly...changed. Physically, she supposed he kind of looked the same, and yet he didn’t. He was reduced. And it was a terrible thing to see a man like him reduced. But she couldn’t blame him.
What happened with Eleanor had been such a shock. Such a horrible, hideous shock.
One day, she had been a normal, healthy toddler, and then she had been lethargic. Right after that came the cancer diagnosis, and in only a couple of months she was gone.
The entire situation had been surreal and heartbreaking. For her. And Eleanor wasn’t even her child. But her friend’s pain had been so real, so raw... She had no idea how he had coped with it, and now she could see that he hadn’t really. That he still was trying to cope.
He hadn’t come back to Texas since Eleanor’s death, and she had seen him only a couple of times. At the funeral. And then when she had come to Jackson Hole in the summer for a visit. Otherwise...it had all been texts and emails and quick phone conversations.
But now that he was back in Texas, he seemed to need to stay for a little while, and she was happy for him to think it was for her. Happy to be the scapegoat so he could work through whatever emotional thing he needed to work through. Knox, in the past, would have been enraged at the assessment that he needed to work through anything emotionally. He was such a stoic guy, always had been.
But she knew he wouldn’t even pretend there wasn’t lingering damage from the loss of his little girl. Selena had watched him break apart completely at Eleanor’s funeral. They had never talked about it again. She didn’t think they ever would. But then, she supposed they didn’t need to. They had shared the experience. That moment when he couldn’t be strong anymore. When there was no child to be strong for, and when his wife had been off with her family, and there had simply been no reason for him to remain standing upright. Selena had been there for that moment.
If all the years of friendship hadn’t bonded them, that moment would have done it all on its own.
Just thinking of it made her chest ache, and she shook off the feeling, going over to the coffee maker to pour herself a cup.
She wondered if Knox was still sleeping. He was going to be mad if he missed prime caffeination time.
She wandered out of the kitchen and into the living room just as the door to the guest bedroom opened and Knox walked out, pulling his T-shirt over his head—but not quickly enough. She caught a flash of muscled, tanned skin and...chest hair. Oh, the chest hair. Why was that compelling enough to stop her in her tracks? She didn’t even have a moment to question it. She was too caught up. Too beset by the sight.
Genuinely. She was completely immobilized by the sight of her best friend’s muscles.
It wasn’t like she had never seen Knox shirtless before. But it had been a long time. And the last time, he had most definitely been married.
Not that she had forgotten he was hot when he was married to Cassandra. It was just that...he had been a married man. And that meant something to Selena. Because it meant something to him.
It had been a barrier, an insurmountable one, even bigger than that whole long-term friendship thing. And now it wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. He was walking out of the guest bedroom looking sleep rumpled and entirely too lickable. And there was just...nothing stopping them from doing what men and women did.
She’d had a million excuses for not doing that. For a long time. She didn’t want to risk entanglements, didn’t want to compromise her focus. Didn’t want to risk pregnancy. Didn’t have time for a relationship.
But she was in a place where those things were less of a concern. This house was symbolic of that change in her life. She was making a home. And making a home made her want to fill it. With art, with warmth, with knickknacks that spoke to her. With people.
She wondered, then. What it would be like to actually live with a man? To have one in her life? In her home? In her bed?
And just like that she was fantasizing about Knox in her bed. That body she had caught a glimpse of relaxing beneath her emerald green bedspread, his hands clasped behind his head, a satisfied smile on his face...
She sucked in a sharp breath and tried to get a hold of herself. “Coffee is ready,” she said, grinning broadly, not feeling the grin at all.
“Good,” he said, his voice rough from sleep.
It struck her then, just what an intimate thing that was. To hear someone’s voice after they had been sleeping.
“Right this...way,” she said, awkwardly beating a path into the kitchen, turning away from him quickly enough that she sloshed coffee over the edge of her cup.
“You have food for breakfast?” he asked, that voice persistently gravelly and interesting, and much less like her familiar friend’s than she would like it to be. She needed some kind of familiarity to latch on to, something to blot out the vision of his muscles. But he wasn’t giving her anything.
Jerk.
“No,” she said, keeping her voice cheery. “I have coffee and spite for breakfast.”
“Well, that’s not going to work for me.”
“I’m not sure what to tell you,” she said, flinging open one of her cabinets and revealing her collection of cereal and biscotti. “Of course I have food for breakfast.”
“Bacon? Eggs?”
“Do I look like a diner to you?” she asked.
“Not you personally. But I was hoping that your house might have more diner-like qualities.”
“No,” she said, opening up the fridge and rummaging around. “Well, what do you know? I do have eggs. And bacon. I get a delivery of groceries every week. From a certain grocery store.”
He smiled, a lopsided grin that did something to her stomach. Something she was going to ignore and call hunger, because they were talking about bacon, and being hungry for bacon was much more palatable than being hungry for your best friend.
“I’ll cook,” he said.
“Oh no,” she said, getting the package of bacon out of the fridge and handing it to Knox before bending back down and grabbing the carton of eggs and placing that in his other hand. “You don’t have to cook.”
“Why do I get the feeling that I really do have to cook?”
She shrugged. “It depends on whether you want bacon and eggs.”
“Do you not know how to cook?”
“I know how to cook,” she said. “But the odds of me actually cooking when I only have half of a cup of coffee in my system are basically none. Usually, I prefer to have sweets for breakfast. Hence, biscotti and breakfast cereals. However, I will sometimes eat bacon and eggs for dinner. Or I will eat bacon and eggs for breakfast if a handsome man fixes them for me.”
He lifted a brow. “Oh, I see. So you have this in your fridge for when a man spends the night.”
“Obviously. Since a man did just spend the night.” Her face flushed. She knew exactly what he was imagining. And really, he had no idea.
That was not why she had the bacon and eggs. She had the bacon and eggs because sometimes she liked an easy dinner. But she didn’t really mind if Knox thought she had more of a love life than she actually did.
Of course, now they were thinking about that kind of thing at the same time. Which was...weird. And possibly responsible for the strange electric current arcing between them.