Chapter Seven
Knox was not expecting the question.
His throat was strangely dry. His chest felt tight.
“It feels right that we do this together,” he said, and he meant it, but then he heard those words hanging in the air.
Ramona didn’t change expression. Still, Knox found himself reacting as if she had.
He sat up straighter. “I know that sounds ridiculous. But you were there on Christmas Eve. You were there with us, with me, for days. I feel like we’re both invested in Hailey and also Shoshana, and it just felt right to ask you if you wanted to be part of this, too.”
He didn’t know why he felt like he’d just ran a marathon, a supposed life goal he’d achieved exactly once in college and never needed to try again. He thought he might be sweating. Possibly he was a little bit lightheaded.
Meanwhile, Ramona looked like some kind of goddess of light tonight, and that was not really helpful at keeping him relaxed.
She had braided her hair on one side, and it hung over her shoulder, all of those shades of gold seeming to gleam here in her happy apartment that always seemed to have its own glow.
She was wearing leggings, thick wool socks, and a big, oversized sweatshirt that he knew felt like a cloud to the touch.
He also knew that she wasn’t wearing a bra beneath it, which was information his body did not need to have right now.
All she did was gaze back at him, looking irritatingly serene while he felt like he was coming apart.
“Why?” she asked again.
Knox felt something like panic work its way through him. Because this was not how things normally went with them.
Ramona did not melt and come to him, as he’d expected she would. She didn’t look like she was even considering it.
Usually, it didn’t take much for her to decide the distance between them was too much. She would normally make that move—sometimes emotionally, sometimes impatiently. She would kiss him. Maybe come over and sit on his lap. Reach out and put her hands on him. Something.
And he’d known that she was doing these things, of course. He hadn’t been blind to the way things were between them. Though Knox was pretty sure that until this very moment, he hadn’t really understood how much he relied on her inability to resist him.
He’d known that she was avoiding him these past two months. She’d told him that she never wanted to see him again, and she’d held to that for a lot longer than usual. They had never been apart more than a week since they’d met until she’d called it off in October.
Knox had admired her resolve. And he’d been determined to do his part, if that was what she wanted.
He hadn’t sought her out directly. He hadn’t gone where he knew he’d find her, so he could “accidentally” bump into her.
He had not made sure that she would see him somewhere in town.
It was a point of some shame, in fact, that before he’d done all of that and more.
So you can always claim you weren’t involved, it just happened, it was all me, she’d said the last time they’d talked in October. Plausible deniability until it chokes you, right, Knox?
But it hadn’t dawned on him that she could hold onto that resistance in person.
He ran his hands over his face. “Today my mom asked me how I made it through Christmas Eve and the storm with the baby. When I told her that I called you, she pointed out that it’s very telling who a person calls first when they really need help.
Maybe that’s why I’m here tonight. Just…
” She only waited, her gaze expectant. His throat was so dry he was almost convinced he was coming down with some hideous virus.
“You’re the person I always want to call, Ramona.
The person I want to tell things to. The only person I could think of taking to Billings to do this thing I’m not sure I want to do. ”
He saw something flash in her gaze, but he couldn’t read it. She’d always been like that. She had always been remarkably unreadable when she wanted. She had a better poker face than anyone else he knew and she could maintain it pretty much forever.
It’s a clinical necessity, she’d told him once. Doctors can’t have reactions all over their faces when patients tell them deeply personal or embarrassing things.
I’m not your patient, he’d replied, and then he’d kissed her until she was flushed and smiling and his.
That poker face of hers had always had the same, very specific effect on him. It still did.
He wanted to find his way beneath it by any means necessary. And usually, the means he’d chosen had led to them both naked and coming apart at the seams.
She sat there across the table from him now, studying him, as if she was thinking about what he’d said about being his first call.
She tilted her head slightly to one side, so that the braid dipped down even lower, and he had to order himself not to reach across the table to tug on it, maybe wrap it around his fist and then pull her close.
It felt like an actual, physical pain that he couldn’t. That he didn’t.
“I won’t pretend that I don’t like hearing that,” she told him, when he’d begun to think that she didn’t intend to speak again tonight and then what would he do?
“But again, Knox, I have to ask.” She shrugged, a little helplessly, he thought.
Or maybe he was mistaking that helplessness, because there was definitely a challenge in the way she was looking at him. “Why?”
Knox felt that panicked sensation inside him tighten, and then, when he thought it might actually strangle him where he sat, he began to feel instead like a spool of thread unraveling. Rapidly. And there didn’t seem to be a single thing he could do to stop it.
The way she was looking at him wasn’t without some compassion, but that made it worse.
“I don’t know,” he managed to say.
He thought he saw a hint of a smile on her face, but it was gone in a moment. “I think that you do.”
Maybe he was having a heart attack. Or maybe he just wanted to have a heart attack, because then his favorite doctor would have to put her hands on him.
Still, Knox also understood what she was doing here. Or he thought he did.
Ramona wasn’t going to make this easy on him. Not this time. She’d been easy on him for too long. She’d let him claim that he was all about the honesty, but that was never really put to the test, was it?
Because she always gave him another chance. She was the one woman he couldn’t charm, or maybe the only one he didn’t try to charm. That hadn’t been true at first, of course. At first it had been nothing but charm and heat and as close to giddy as Knox thought he’d ever been.
But over the course of the year and a half since she’d arrived in town, since they’d started going back and forth, he knew perfectly well that he’d stopped worrying about charming her. He hadn’t defaulted to his usual little act to keep things running smoothly.
And he knew why.
He’d wanted her to wash her hands of him. He’d wanted her to take him seriously when he told her this thing between them was never going to go anywhere. That it was better not to get too attached.
She’d seen him with his mask off every time. He’d wanted that.
And she had accepted him completely, which he could not for even one moment imagine he deserved.
Hell, he knew he didn’t.
Ramona had accepted him. She’d loved him, no matter what kind of asshole he was, and what had he done in return? Each and every time she’d tried to raise the topic of what was happening between them, he’d shut it down.
Like it would have killed him to concede that yes, he’d always known that he didn’t intend to stay in Cowboy Point. And yes, he’d never wanted any kind of entanglement to get in the way of his leaving.
But, also yes, this thing between them had ended up in much deeper water than he’d anticipated.
Right now, he couldn’t think of a single good reason why he hadn’t said those things at least once, even though he knew his own rationale backwards and forwards and to the point that it sometimes drove even him crazy.
But it shook something in him that she wasn’t going to take the lead now, the way she always had before. She wasn’t going to give him so much as a hint of that plausible deniability. Ramona had let him in, but she was clearly perfectly content to sit here and watch him spin in the wind.
The worst part of that was that he knew he had it coming.
It was like he could hear his father in his head, then. His larger-than-life father, who he’d never imagined could die and still hadn’t accepted would. And likely soon—
Knox couldn’t let himself think about that now.
So really, son, drawled the Zeke in his head, what it boils down to is whether or not you’re a coward.
Because a coward would pretend he didn’t know what was happening here and leave everything the way it was. Out of the same fear that had gotten him here in the first place.
Knox had never considered himself cowardly before.
Not out on the football field, not academically, not with his business ventures.
In fact, the only thing he could point to in his entire life that might fit that definition was the way he’d acted with Ramona since he’d met her, because she had taken him completely by surprise.
He hadn’t wanted to meet a woman who could make him want to change his whole life.
Truth was, he still didn’t. But he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t get up and do something to prove that whatever else might happen, he wasn’t only the plausible deniability guy.
The wildest part of that was that even as he sat there thinking this, he still felt as if the chair at her kitchen table was holding him in place.
Which, even in his own head, sounded a lot like some increasingly weak excuses.
But he’d been too restless to stay home when he’d gotten back there today. And yes, he’d wanted to talk to Atticus, but he could have called the deputy sheriff just as easily.