Close Range Christmas by Nicole Helm (ebook reader for laptop TXT) 📗

your mind about not wanting a family? Are you going to change your mind about running Reaves Ranch?”

He could lie and say a person never knew what might change, but no. Those were the two tenets of his life—keeping everyone at arm’s length and running his grandmother’s ranch, which had been in his family for generations. Something good his blood had done with this earth.

Sarah knew it just as well as he did, so he said nothing.

But she nodded as if he’d agreed with her. “And I’m not going to change my mind about wanting to be a mother, and not really wanting a partner to do it. You’re the only guy I know who doesn’t want a family and isn’t going to change his mind, but who I know well enough to...you know. So I’m not letting this go. Might as well give in.”

The worst part was knowing that when Sarah got an idea in her head, she did not let it go. He’d have to keep fending her off for...forever.

She touched his arm so he had to look down at her. Sarah was usually all sharp edges and sharper words, but her expression was open and vulnerable here. Which was horrifying.

“You’re the only one who can help me, Dev. Please.”

Dev couldn’t remember Sarah ever saying please to him, or worse, asking him for anything. No one asked him for anything anymore. Ever since he’d barely survived his father’s attack on him over a decade ago, leaving him permanently damaged—body and spirit—the best he could hope for was ranching. For being considered the grumpy Wyatt brother, whose only use was keeping an eye on Grandma Pauline. Not that she needed any tending.

Sarah wanted to get pregnant and raise a baby on her own, with no one knowing he was the father. Which didn’t bother him because he didn’t want to be a father or a husband. He had plans to be alone for the rest of his life.

Still, she was asking him to...sleep with her. Maybe the reasons were biological. The act was personal, though.

It was wrong, but she was looking up at him, blue eyes sincere rather than piercing daggers like usual. Her touch was light instead of the random punches she usually aimed at him if she was going to touch him.

Because Sarah was the only one in his life who rarely treated him like he was fragile. Enough that she was asking him for this. She thought he could do it. Give her this thing she so desperately wanted that she’d been bugging him about it for weeks. Hounding him and refusing to find another alternative. Because she wanted it this way.

And she needed him.

No one should need him, and he shouldn’t fool himself into thinking he could help. Not anymore.

He tried to fight the overwhelming need to give in. Maybe Sarah knew what she wanted, but she didn’t know what she was asking. She couldn’t want help from him. No one could.

“Dev. Just once.” She slid her hand up his arm, and of all the ways she’d touched him in the twenty-some years he’d lived with his grandmother at Reaves Ranch with Sarah next door at Knight Ranch, she’d never once touched him like that. “If it doesn’t work,” she continued, leaning in so that her painted mouth was all too close to his, “I’ll let it go. Promise.”

He’d be stupid to believe her. She’d never let it go. And just once would be...well, something like a catastrophe.

Aren’t you intimately acquainted with catastrophe?

He downed his beer. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t. But he had a very bad feeling he was going to end up doing it, one way or another.

“Better drink up,” he muttered, heading for the bar.

SARAH WOKE UP the next morning with a pounding headache, and only fuzzy memories of Dev in her hotel room. Much as it had been her idea, and she’d relentlessly hounded Dev until he’d given in, she’d still been more than a little nervous to have sex with someone she’d known her whole life. With the sole purpose of getting pregnant. So getting really drunk had been an excellent plan.

She even applauded herself for it as weeks passed. That’s what she’d wanted. The act that led to a baby, not the act that meant something. She tried not to think of the night that was just fuzzy memories of a few kisses and touches and laughing a little too hard at Dev Wyatt kissing her.

When she did think about it, she was glad for the lack of memory. She couldn’t remember what Dev looked like naked, which was good considering how closely they worked together on their neighboring ranches. Sometimes she wasn’t even sure they’d actually done anything, considering how Dev didn’t treat her any differently as the weeks piled up. Maybe he’d just let her think they had.

Or maybe her plan had worked.

From that morning after, she’d counted down the days until the earliest moment she could take a pregnancy test. Now she just had to pray that one drunk hookup with one of her best friends in the world had yielded what she’d always wanted.

A baby.

She inhaled sharply. Today was the day. She’d driven two towns over to buy the pregnancy test. In the Walmart bathroom, she’d discovered that her insane plan had indeed worked.

She was pregnant. The test in her hand said so.

It didn’t feel real. She’d expected to be magically transformed. Her plan had worked. There were still a hell of a lot more steps to go: a doctor’s appointment, lying to her family that she’d hooked up with a random stranger, and then actually preparing for a baby. But she’d expected to feel settled and ready once she’d seen the positive result.

She was thrilled. Ecstatic. But...was there really a baby in there? She hadn’t had any noticeable symptoms. She’d overanalyzed every cramp, every moment of tiredness, and determined that nothing was all that different.

Maybe the test was wrong. She went through