Chapter Ten #2
Inside, the big lobby had a couple of teenage girls on hand to take all the snowy boots and coats, handing out tickets and running it like a proper coat check.
Ramona had only been to an event here once before.
It had been a surprise reception for Ryder and Rosie last spring, and the place had still felt largely unfinished.
Tonight it gleamed. It had been built in the Victorian style, like the many grand railway hotels that dotted the West, though it was hard to imagine anyone believed trains would venture this high in the mountains.
It was supposed to open fully as a hotel again the summer after next, but Ramona liked that the Starks kept reminding Cowboy Point that it had once been at the heart of the community here.
There was a band in the old ballroom. People were dancing, but Ramona wasn’t a dancer.
She moved around the edge of the ballroom, then walked across the hall into another grand room, where food had been laid out on tables draped in glittering fabrics and decorated with candelabras that looked like they belonged in a Gothic romance.
There was a bar on the other end of the room, and high tables in between for people to cluster around, having drinks and looking entirely unlike themselves.
There were a lot of suit coats and cowboy hats on men she normally associated with plaid shirts and Wranglers.
But then, Ramona was usually in her scrubs and white coat at the clinic, so she wasn’t one to talk.
Tonight she’d gone for the sort of gown she never got to wear here.
It had a high neck, but no arms and no back.
It flowed in gleaming royal blue all the way down to the ground.
She also wore a little bit of sparkle at her ears and had piled her hair up on top of her head into something that nodded toward elegant.
She thought she’d cleaned up all right.
And when Wyatt Stark came toward her, grinning, she figured she’d hit the right note.
“You made it,” he said, in that low drawl of his that Ramona dearly wished she found as effective as it should have been.
He had the dark hair, gray eyes, and stern mouth of all the Stark boys.
Ramona had learned that when people used the term Stark boys, it meant not only Wyatt, his two brothers, and their cousin Jack, but all of the Stark men who had come before them.
Meaning their fathers, living and dead. Maybe their grandfather too.
She knew that Wyatt and his brothers were considered wild and disreputable, but she figured that was mostly because they were all excessively good-looking, and very single.
Ramona didn’t say any of that. She only smiled. “I made it,” she agreed.
He got her a drink and she took it. They stood together at one of the high-top tables, and it was nice. Really, Ramona thought, it was so nice. They talked about nice things. He was interested in what she had to say, he made her laugh, and he was a terrific date. She knew that already.
She should have been having a fantastic time, but instead, she thought that she’d never felt quite so sad and alone in all her life. It was unfair to her date, so she smiled. She laughed.
Maybe if she pretended she was fine, she would be. Eventually.
The music changed in the ballroom. More people came inside. The party got louder, jollier. And then she felt a prickle at the back of her neck.
When she turned, Knox was there.
He was dressed in the Cowboy Point uniform tonight.
A black suit that fit him beautifully, and a dressy black Stetson to go with it.
She knew that if she looked down at his feet, he would be wearing one of his good pairs of cowboy boots.
The kind a man never wore out on the range, but only out on the town.
His eyes found hers immediately, looking dark and coppery tonight. It was like there was a tractor beam connecting them, and nothing made sense until it snapped into place.
And even though Ramona knew better, her heart leaped in her chest. She felt immediately lighter. Better.
Damn that man.
“Ramona,” Wyatt said from beside her. She turned back to him, hoping her face hadn’t betrayed her. But Wyatt was looking across the room, over toward Knox. “I don’t mean to dig too far into your personal business, but I’m guessing that your heart’s not really in this.”
When he turned to look at her again, she got a glimpse of exactly who Wyatt Stark would be for the right woman. Devastating. Calmly authoritative, but in this moment, something like amused.
“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I didn’t mean to get distracted.”
“You don’t look at me the way you look at Knox Carey,” Wyatt said simply. “And between you and me, Knox doesn’t look at anyone the way he looks at you.”
He tipped his hat, and Ramona felt terrible.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“You don’t owe me any apologies,” he assured her. “This is our fourth date and you haven’t even let me pick you up. Much less kiss you. I was beginning to think I’d lost my touch.” His mouth curved. “My ego is happy to discover that it’s just that you’ve already got a claim on your heart.”
Ramona wanted to argue about that, but she was too aware of Knox across the room.
“Happy New Year,” Wyatt murmured, and then walked away.
She wanted to beg him to stay. She wanted to make wild promises she didn’t mean. She wanted to argue with him because what she really didn’t want was to deal with Knox, who was now stalking toward her as if he didn’t realize that there were other people in this room.
He drew close and she shook her head at him. “We have nothing to say to each other,” she told him.
“I feel certain that you have nothing to say to me, Ramona, and that’s okay,” Knox replied. “It turns out, I have a thing or two to say to you.” But he didn’t launch into any speeches. He held out his hand instead. “You’ve never danced with me.”
She made a face. “That’s because I hate dancing.”
“That’s because you’ve never danced with me,” he retorted.
He didn’t take her hand himself, though he could have. He waited.
And Ramona hated this. She needed to be done with him. That had been absolutely clear to her yesterday. There could be no backsliding again—she wasn’t sure she’d survive it.
Then again, he’d come here tonight. He’d sought her out, and not in the dark of night.
She’d spent a lot of time thinking about that yesterday.
She’d curled up in the fetal position on her couch and she’d wondered why it had never really dawned on her that everything they did they did alone.
Isolated. Usually at night, and then snuck away by morning.
He’d never taken her on a date. He’d never taken her anywhere, except to Billings.
But another thing he’d never done was walk up to her in a crowded room and then stand there, his hand outstretched.
She knew that people were watching. She could even hear a few whispers.
Knox didn’t say another word. He just kept that gaze of his locked to hers, and his hand hanging in the air between them.
“Fine,” Ramona said, crossly.
She pretended it was because she didn’t want to be stared at anymore. She pretended that this was simply the expedient way out of this situation, and she slid her hand into his.
They were staring at each other, so she knew she wasn’t the only one to feel that immediate spark between them when they touched, and then to see the answering flare of it in his gaze the way she knew it was in hers.
There was nothing expedient about touching Knox.
He held her hand for a moment, like he was winded, but to Ramona it seemed like a lifetime.
It had to be at least a lifetime and several eternities later when he turned and tugged her with him as he wound his way through their friends and neighbors, stopping for none of them, and took her out onto the dance floor.
He was right, they had never danced together. If they had, she would have known better than to agree to it now.
Because he pulled her into his arms, and this wasn’t some historical drama. He didn’t break out in a waltz.
He put his arms around her, his hands on the naked skin of her back. And she lifted her arms so she could put her hands on his shoulders, which meant she was pressed against him.
And it suddenly struck her as outrageous that people were allowed to do this in public.
She braced herself as they swayed back and forth, while one of the old-timers who hung out at the General Store most days did a surprisingly good Frank Sinatra impression at the mic.
There were no speeches from Knox. No inadequate discussions of how much he cared about her.
They just danced. One song, then the next.
Ramona wondered if he was doing this deliberately. If he knew that the more he touched her, the more she would find herself helpless to refuse him anything.
Try a spine on for size, she snapped at herself, the way her grandfather had—though he’d done it with a twinkle in his eye. Ramona did not feel twinkly.
After the third song, he led her off the dance floor. She thought that he was going to head back into the other room with the bar and the food, but instead he ducked down a smaller hall that led away from the party.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Trust me,” he replied.
She wanted to tell him that was the last thing she was likely to do, but she didn’t. Because as strange as it seemed, she did trust him. Maybe not to take good care of her heart, but with everything else.
With that baby, for one thing. It hadn’t once occurred to her to call social services because she’d known he had it covered. With his family. With his friends. With all the parts of the life he didn’t think he wanted, and yet had arranged around himself just the same.
He led her up a flight of stairs that looked very different from the grand set of stairs that swept down from the second-floor landing of the Lodge and ended, splendidly, in the lobby. But when they arrived at the top, she saw they were up at the top of those grand stairs anyway.
“There’s a back way?” she asked with a laugh. “What are those, the servants’ stairs?”
“Exactly,” Knox supplied.
And on this side of the landing, they weren’t within sight of anyone below. Instead, they were closer to the huge window that was the focal point of the stairs and the lobby, rising high above both.
The window looked out over Cowboy Point, over to Copper Mountain, and beyond.
The smudge in the distance, that string of light, had to be Marietta.
Ramona could see the whole of her little community, but from a different perspective than she usually had when she was driving up and down the same roads far below.
It looked magical. Enchanted, even.
And when she looked back at Knox, he was watching her as if he found her both of those things.
Her heart seemed to skip a beat.
“I love you,” he said then, fiercely.
And her breath left her body entirely.
“I have a lot of other things to say, Ramona, but I figured I’d start there,” Knox continued in that same darkly determined way.
“Because I want to make sure that you hear me. I love you. You’re absolutely right—I think I’ve been in love with you since the moment I saw you sitting at that table in the pizza place.
I’ve just been trying to run away from that ever since. ”
And it turned out that when he finally said the very thing that she had been wanting him to say for all of these months—since the moment she’d met him, even—she didn’t have the slightest idea how to respond.
She stared back at him and she couldn’t tell if she was flushed bright red or gone pale as a ghost.
Maybe both.
And then, at the worst possible moment, that was when her body decided that it was the perfect time to give in to all the emotions stampeding around inside of her—and cry.