TWELVE
COLT
Holy. Fucking. Shit.
I’m gonna be a daddy.
Blair’s having a baby. My baby.
It’s all I can think about as Cade tries to rip me a new one, my ass barely making it into my chute before it’s time for my ride to start.
“Make sure Blair stays put,” I tell him as I toss my hat his way, replacing it with my helmet.
“What? Whittaker, you’re driving me up a wall lately, you know that? Between your?—”
“I ain’t got time for your bullshitting, McAllister. Keep the other guys away from her and make sure no one bumps into her or anything.”
“Who—”
“The pretty brunette with the green hoodie,” I tell him, nodding at the gateman and settling my weight onto the back of the very angry bull beneath me. I can’t focus on anything else because I am all of a sudden 110% sure I don’t want to be a bull rider anymore.
The gates open and the bull shoots out of the chute, immediately trying to buck me off .
One second: I see Blair’s tear-filled eyes as she over-explains our baby in my motel room and begs me to believe her.
Two seconds: I picture her raising that baby alone because a bull has crushed my skull or ribs and put me straight into a coma, or worse.
The bull twists beneath me as the neon clock hits three seconds and I think about Maddox. What would he do? What was the right thing to do?
Four seconds, and it’s obvious: I’ve gotta retire.
At five seconds, I almost lose my grip, but I’ll be damned if I don’t get my full eight seconds out of my last ride. Plus, my girl’s watching me and I still wanna impress her.
Six seconds, and a new mental picture enters my mind.
Blair and a faceless little one running around with Rainy and catching fireflies in the evening light while Maddie lights a bonfire and Jamie makes burgers on his porch.
Blair in my lap, watching them play with a smile on her face and a hand on her round-again belly.
Seven seconds and everything snaps into place. The clarity I’ve been seeking every night on the roofs of various buildings around the country. My purpose .
Eight seconds. The buzzer sounds and I hop off the bull, darting for the fence. The bull wranglers distract the animal long enough for me to get away. They corral it out of the arena while I dart back toward my woman with a giant grin, plastering a wet kiss on her forehead.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The sound of the windshield wipers fills the otherwise silent cab of my pickup as we ride back to the hotel, and that’s mostly my fault because my head’s whirling a hundred miles a minute with things I’ve gotta do.
I’ve gotta quit smoking. And all the other shit too.
I’ve gotta go see Maddox and ask if I can come home… if we can.
Well, before that, I also probably need to convince Blair to come back to Montana with me. I don’t know what her life in California is like or if she’d want to leave it, but I need to be by her side for this more than I’ve ever needed anything.
I should probably buy some books on how to be a good dad.
I’m not the best reader, but shit can get confusing with so many different opinions on the internet, so I think books would be better.
Plus, it’s a lot harder to publish a book with your opinions on a topic than it is to type them into Reddit, so surely that provides some level of reliability.
And Blair probably needed a lot of stuff too. I didn’t know what… hopefully the books would help with that, too. But she’d definitely need… things.
“Do you have anything you need right now?” I finally snap out of it and ask, turning my attention from the road for a second. “Like… I don’t know… are you craving anything? I can go get you anything you’d like.”
Blair’s lips twist as I turn my truck into the motel parking lot, and I think there’s a joke I’m not getting, but she doesn’t elaborate when I ask again.
I put it in park and turn toward her. She’s fidgeting with her fingers again.
I notice she does that a lot. The skin around her nails is all rough.
I take her hands in one of mine to stop her from doing further damage.
“I don’t want you to feel trapped, you know? If you want to be involved, I’m definitely happy to let you be, but that doesn’t mean I expect you to rush out to buy me whatever I’m craving or like, go to the appointments or anything. I know you’re busy and you travel a lot for your job?—”
“I’m retiring,” I tell her, more sure of this choice than I’ve ever been of anything else .
But she just looks confused and exasperated as she finally looks up from her hands and over to me.
“Colt, twenty-six is too young to retire.”
I raise a brow at her. My age wasn’t on the list of things we’d discussed during our romp all those nights ago. Her cheeks pink as she comes to the same realization.
“Your age is practically public knowledge,” she grumbles, and I grin at the petulance. My girl likes her research.
“Lots of bull riders retire by twenty-six.”
She gives me a look like she knows better, but I highly doubt she does. I’d bet my left nut that the age bull riders retire wasn’t a part of her incessant Googling.
“Come on, let’s go inside. I’ve got about a million and ten questions for you.”
Blair reaches for her door handle while I turn off the truck.
“Don’t think so, pretty girl. When you’re with me, you don’t touch door handles.”
She huffs, and I almost think I spare myself from hearing the what for by getting out of the truck, but by the time I make my way around to the passenger side and pull open her door, she’s still geared up to argue anyway.
“I’m pregnant, not incapable.”
I put my hand out to help her down from the seat.
“Never said you were incapable, but you’re a woman. Women don’t touch door handles. Just to get it out of the way, I’m not gonna let you pump your own gas either, so I’ll be filling up that car of yours before you leave me again so you won’t have to stop.”
She’s quiet while I lock the truck and rifle through my wallet to pull out the keycard for my motel room.
“You’ve got something you wanna say?”
“Trying to decide if that’s red-flag behavior or not,” she admits as I pull open the motel room door for her next. Her cute little nose scrunches and I have to grin at her .
“Darlin’, I’ve probably got a million red flags but that’s not one of ’em.”
Blair huffs, her hand on her stomach as she slips past me into the motel room. Even slightly annoyed with me and wearing sweats, she looks like a goddamn goddess.
“Would it be rude of me to ask if you’re showing yet?”
She snorts as she makes her way over to her little folder of paperwork, reorganizing what I’d rifled through before we had to leave so suddenly.
“Generally, yes, but I guess you have a right to.”
She’s nervous again, and I smile at her antics. There’s no need for her to be nervous. There’s next to nothing I wouldn’t do for her now. The mother of my child.
“Will you let me see?”
“I feel like I need to remind you just one more time that I don’t expect anything. You don’t have to stick around. I’m not after your money?—”
“Blair,” I interrupt her, getting frustrated.
The only thing that stops me from letting it show is the worry in her eyes as she takes a seat on the edge of the bed and starts chewing on her lip again.
I close the distance between us and drop to my knees so we’re eye to eye, but she just averts her gaze further.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I feel like I’m annoying you, but I just want you to know?—”
“Baby, I know .” I reach for her cheeks, tilting her head back so she has no choice but to look at me. “I know you don’t expect me to stick around and I know you don’t need me to, but I want to. Please, Blair. Please let me be a part of our baby’s life. I want to. Believe me.”
She gives me the oddest look—a mix between tortured and unsure.
“I believe you,” she says anyway. I don’t think she does, but that just means I’ll have to keep proving it.
Blair sighs and pulls away from me just enough to pull up the bottom of her hoodie. With it on, no one would be able to tell she was pregnant. Even without it, her bump isn’t all that big. Just a slight swell from her stomach that makes my world stop again.
“Can I?”
She gives me a small smile and a tentative nod. My hands cover her stomach entirely. It keeps hitting me over and over again that everything’s changed.
“When will… it be born?”
Her lips quirk. “ She will be born in November, most likely. I’m due on the eighteenth.”
The heels of my boots dig into my ass as I fall back on them, hands slipping from her stomach.
“She?”
Blair nods, biting her lip again. I’ve gotta get her out of that habit, but right now, all I can think about is another pair of big green eyes staring up at me one day, begging me for a pony or some shit.
God, I won’t have a fucking chance in hell.
These girls are gonna have me wrapped so tight around their little pinkies.
“Is that okay?” she finally asks, unsure.
I can’t help but snort. “Yeah, baby. That’s okay. More than okay. I think I’ll make a damn good girl dad. Besides, we can always try again for a boy in a couple of years if you want one of each.”
She blinks, her head jerking back. I grin at her with dimples on full force to hide the panic in my stomach at how she obviously doesn’t feel the same way I do.
“We don’t have to be together just because we’re having a kid.”
“You’re right,” I tell her, finally standing and pressing a kiss to her forehead. “We don’t gotta be, but I wanna be. Ball’s in your court with that I suppose.”
I change the topic before she can start arguing again, heading into the bathroom to wash my hands in the sink. I should’ve done that before touching her pretty body.
“In the meantime, if you’re not too stuck on California, I’d like it if you came home with me to Montana. There’s lots of land and, if I can talk my brother into it, we’ll even have a cabin of our own.”
“Whoa, cowboy. You’re being… You should really think about this for a bit.”
I realize I’m not gonna get anywhere with her if she thinks I’m acting impulsively, so I nod, drying my hands on a spare towel in the bathroom.
“Alright. Two weeks for both of us to think, how’s that sound?”
In reality, I don’t even need a week. I don’t know shit about pregnancy, but I know I’ve already missed a pretty good chunk of hers, which pisses me off a bit, but bygones and all that, I suppose.
“Two weeks,” she agrees.
I’ll let her think she won.