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

the whole process over again, with the same result. She threw everything away, washed her hands and then headed out of the store to her truck.

She was going to believe she’d succeeded. She was pregnant. Maybe she didn’t feel different yet, but she would. As she went through everything she had to do, she’d have more and more belief, until there was a little baby in her arms.

Her own baby. Someone who shared her blood. Someone she’d be able to look at and maybe see her own eyes or nose. A mix of her and...

Dev.

She couldn’t tell anyone else yet, but she could tell him. She drove back home, deciding she’d stop by the Reaves ranch.

She wanted a baby for herself. Someone to belong to her. Her sisters were all off married or living with their Wyatt boyfriends. The Knight house was quiet with just her and Dad. Much as Sarah loved her adopted father—the only father she could remember—she wanted more than just...the two of them.

She wanted to be a mother. She wanted a child. The plan had been a little far-fetched but it had given her exactly what she wanted—what she needed.

It was all about her. She convinced herself of that over and over again. Until she parked her car next to the barn on the Reaves Ranch.

She walked inside. Dev was brushing down his horse, that permanent scowl affixed to his face. He said it was just his expression, but Sarah knew it was pain. After a long day of riding, his leg hurt him.

She stood in the doorway of the barn and admitted that as much as she’d done this for her own self, she’d also harbored a tiny hope that the reality of a baby might...reach Dev. He was a good man—as good as his brothers. The problem was, since his injuries had kept him from returning to law enforcement, he considered himself less than those brothers.

He wasn’t, but he’d have to come to that conclusion on his own.

So if a baby woke him up out of the dark cloud he kept himself in, that would be icing on the cake. She wouldn’t expect it, but she could hope for it.

“Help you?” he demanded when she thought she’d been staring unnoticed.

Still, she didn’t startle. She was too used to his grumpy preternatural observations. So she stepped forward. The faint light of the barn highlighted him, and his face looked...hard. There was something edgy and dangerous about him in this light.

It gave her an odd shiver of foreboding, but she pushed that away. She came up to stand next to him. “Well, it worked. The whole baby thing.”

He looked down at her, expression guarded. “Congratulations,” he said, with absolutely no inflection on the word.

“Thank you. It’s early yet, and I’ll have to go to the doctor, but...” She felt teary, surprisingly emotional over telling him. But it was big. Huge. “Thank you, Dev. I don’t think I could ever tell you how much it means to me that—”

“Don’t mention it. Ever. Really.”

He didn’t ask her anything else, but he gave her a brush and they worked in companionable silence. It felt...right. He’d given her what she’d always wanted, and now things would go back to normal.

Until she had to tell her family. Until she started to show. Until she had a baby.

She laughed and shook her head. Life was about to get flipped on its head, and that was fine. That was what she wanted. But there was more to this than what she wanted. Something she hadn’t predicted. “If you ever want to—”

“I don’t,” he said, and there was more emotion in those two words than everything he’d said so far.

“Okay, I’m only saying it because you’re alone, Dev. Not because I need you to be involved. You’re just the only one who...” She trailed off. It seemed cruel to point out all their siblings were building lives, she was having a baby and Dev was still...in a black cloud of his own making.

“I’m exactly where I have to be,” Dev replied. He took the brush from her and tossed it in a pail. “I’m heading inside for dinner. I’m sure Grandma Pauline made enough.” Then he walked away with that kind-of invitation hanging there.

Sarah could only frown after him, mulling over what he’d said. Because have to be wasn’t the same as want to be.

Chapter One

In June, Sarah had broken the news to her family. She’d refused to name the father no matter how they’d prodded. From there, she’d begun to adjust to her new normal. It wasn’t all that different than her old one.

If she lived with the tiny hope Dev might slowly come around, she didn’t let on to that expectation to him or anyone else. She kept it buried deep.

In August, she’d found out she was having a boy. While her sisters all had girls, she was going to have a boy. Much as she would have been happy with any healthy child, a boy was a relief. Sarah wouldn’t know what to do with a girl. She barely knew what to do with herself when it came to all the girly things her sisters seemed so natural at.

Now, as November rolled on toward Christmas, she was having to come to grips with the reality of being a very pregnant woman on an isolated ranch during a severe, unpredictable winter.

She would say Dev didn’t act any differently toward her—they still argued and bickered. He was annoyingly high-handed about decisions that affected both ranches. But he sneakily kept her from overtaxing herself, especially in these later months, and he had a way of watching her that made goose bumps pop up on her arms and had her casting back for any dim memory of that night.

She reminded herself, almost daily, that she had gotten exactly what she’d wanted, and any lingering weirdness she sensed was both a figment of her imagination and something that would disappear once the baby was born.

Baby