Chapter Two
Dr. Ramona Taylor had vowed to herself that she would never fall for Knox Carey again.
She had broken this vow numerous times before, so many times that she’d often despaired of herself, but this time she’d meant it. This time, she’d gone cold turkey.
And she’d actually kept herself clean for going on two months now.
Ramona was proud of herself for that. She’d spent a year and a half caught in the push and pull that was Knox, and the truth was, she was bruised.
Emotionally battered and raw straight through.
She needed, desperately, to really and truly be done with this maddeningly unavailable cowboy who’d stolen her heart at first glance, turned her inside out with a touch, and had made her cry into her lonely pillow too many times to count thereafter.
It was embarrassing. It was heartbreaking. There wasn’t enough Taylor Swift in the world to handle it.
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.
She just had to trust that this would happen. She had to trust that no matter how strange and otherworldly everything looked, and how much longer it all seemed to take, she was moving in the right direction and would get where she needed to go. Eventually.
In the meantime, she thought about how grateful she was for this truck.
When she had decided to move out here, all the way into a middle of nowhere Montana town that none of her friends in Chicago could believe she would consider, she had tried to be as practical as possible.
Because there was a lot of sentimentality in moving into her grandfather’s old house.
There was nothing but emotion as far as that was concerned.
But if she wanted to really live in that house, and work there, it would require practicality.
Her grandfather had been a blustery, laconic, gruff old man who Ramona had loved to distraction.
He had been her mother’s father and Ramona had spent her summers out here with him, riding horses in the mountains and listening to him complain endlessly about how built-up everything was getting, here in a place where they could go days without seeing another person unless they wanted to.
He had done ranch work his whole life and in his old age, with aching bones, he’d settled into part-time work at the feed store in Cowboy Point and a whole lot of storytelling with the other old-timers out in front of the diner that was connected to the General Store.
He had never married again once he’d put his beloved Isabella into her grave down in the churchyard along the creek.
He’d had his own name carved next to hers, so there could be no doubt about where he was headed.
Ramona’s mother found him impossible, too hardheaded, too set in his ways, too obstinate. She had tried to get him to move out east to be closer to her, but he’d always refused.
He had died when Ramona was in college, and she’d known by then what she’d wanted to do.
She’d known it since she was a kid and her grandfather had told her stories about things like water rights in the West, the trouble rural communities had living so far away from everything, and how painful it was to have to make the choice between living the way they wanted to live—wild and free beneath the great big sky—or clustered in somewhere surrounded by other people because that was where things like hospitals were.
Didn’t rightly seem fair, to her grandpa’s way of thinking.
He’d left her his house, which her mother claimed he’d done simply to be spiteful.
Because he’d known, Bettina Taylor claimed, that she would obviously have sold it off and freed the family from its Montana fever, and he was an ornery old man who’d written off his only daughter when she’d moved away.
Or, Mom, Ramona had said—more than once, he knew that I loved it there.
Don’t be silly, Bettina had always replied. It’s a wide spot in a forgotten road. Nobody loves it there.
Needless to say, Bettina had not been remotely supportive when Ramona had told her that she was moving back to Bettina’s hometown. Not for the summer, but for good.
But you’re a doctor, Bettina had said, staring at Ramona without comprehension. You could live anywhere. Why on earth would you go back there?