The Rancher's Baby

“A TV dinner?” he asked, chuckling. “That doesn’t jibe with your healthy-lifestyle persona.”

“It was a frozen dinner from Green Fair Pantry,” she said pointedly, mentioning the organic fair-trade grocery-store chain Knox owned. “If those aren’t healthy, then you have some explaining to do yourself.”

She was starting to feel a little bit more human, but along with that feeling came a dawning realization of the enormity of everything that had just happened.

“Will is alive,” she said, just to confirm.

“It looks that way,” Knox said, tightening his hold on the steering wheel. She did her best not to watch the way the muscles in his forearms shifted, did her best to ignore just how large his hands looked, how large he looked in this car that was clearly too small for him. One that he would never have driven in his real life.

Knox was much more of a pickup truck kind of man, no matter how much money he made. Little luxury vehicles were not his thing.

“I guess I don’t get his bearskin rug, then,” she said absently.

“What?”

“Don’t you remember that appalling thing he used to have in his dorm room?”

Knox shot her a look out of the corner of his eye. “Not really. Hey, are you okay?”

“I am... I don’t know. I mean, I guess I’m better than I was when I thought he was ashes in a jar.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry. Are you okay, Knox? I realize this is probably the first—”

“I don’t want to talk about that,” he said, cutting her off. “We don’t need to. I’m fine.”

She didn’t think he was. Her throat tightened, feeling scratchy. “Okay. Anyway, I’m fine, too. My relationship with Will... You know.”

Except he didn’t. Nobody did. Everyone thought they did, but everyone was wrong. Unless, of course, Will had ever talked to anyone about the truth of their marriage, but somehow she doubted it.

“How long had it been since you two had spoken?” Knox asked.

“A long damn time. I don’t believe all the things Rich said to me before the divorce. Not anymore. He was toxic.”

As little as she tried to think about her short, convenient marriage to Will and what had resulted after, she tried to think about Will’s friend Rich Lowell even less. Though she had heard through that reliable Royal grapevine that he and Will had remained friends. It made her wonder why Rich wasn’t here.

Rich had been part of their group of friends, though he had always been somewhat on the periphery, and he had been...strange, as far as Selena was concerned. He had liked Will, so much that it had been concerning. And when Will had married Selena, Rich’s interest had wandered onto her.

He had never done anything terribly inappropriate, but the increased attention from him had made her uneasy.

But then... Well, he had been in their apartment one night when she’d gotten home from class. He’d produced evidence that Will was after her trust fund—the trust fund that had led to their marriage in the first place. And she needed that money. She needed it so she would never be at her father’s mercy again. The trust fund had been everything to her, and Will had said he was marrying her just to help her. She’d trusted him.

Rich had been full of some weird, intense energy Selena hadn’t been able to place at the time. Now that she had some distance and a more adult understanding, she felt like maybe Rich had been attracted to her. But more than a simple attraction...he’d been obsessed with Will. It almost seemed, in hindsight, as if he’d been attracted to her because he thought Will had her.

And what Rich had said that night... Well, it had just been a lot easier to believe than Will’s claim that he wanted to help her because they were friends. Trust had never been easy for her. Will was kind, and that was something she’d wanted. Not because she was attracted to him, but because she had genuinely wanted him to be a real friend. After a life of being thoroughly mistreated by her father, hoping for true friendship was scary.

Selena had spent most of her childhood bracing herself for the punch. Whether emotional or physical. It was much easier to believe she was being tricked than to believe Will was everything he appeared to be.

She and Will had fought. And then they had barely limped to the finish line of the marriage. They’d waited until the money was in her account, and then they’d divorced.

And their friendship had never been the same.

She had never apologized to him. Grief and regret stabbed her before she remembered—Will wasn’t actually dead.

That means you can apologize to him. It means you can fix your friendship.

She needed to. The woman she was now would never have jumped to a conclusion like that, at least not without trying to get to the bottom of it.

But back then, Selena had been half-feral. Honed into a sharp, mean creature from years of being in survival mode.

The way Knox had stuck by her all these years, the kind of friendship he had demonstrated... It had been a huge part of her learning to trust. Learning to believe men could actually be good.

Her ability to trust hadn’t changed her stance on love and marriage. And she fought against any encroaching thoughts that conflicted with that stance.

It didn’t really matter that Knox sometimes made her think differently about love and marriage. He had married someone else. And she had married someone else. She had married someone else first, in point of fact. It was just that...

It didn’t matter.

“I know this dredges up a lot of ancient history,” Knox said, turning the car off the highway and onto the narrow two-lane road that would take them out to her new cabin. Now that she had the freedom to work remotely most of the time—her skin-care company was so successful she’d hired other people to do the parts that consumed too much time—she had decided to get outside city limits.

Had decided it was time for her to actually make herself a home, instead of living in a holding pattern. Existing solely to build her empire, to increase her net worth.

Nothing had ever felt like home until this place. Everything after college had just been temporary. Before that, it had been a war zone.

This cabin was her refuge. And it was hers.

Nestled in the woods, surrounded by sweetgrass and trees, and a river running next to her front porch.

Of course, it wasn’t quite as grand as Knox’s spread in Jackson Hole, but then, very few places were.

Besides, grandness wasn’t the point. This cabin wasn’t for show. Wasn’t to impress anyone else. It was just to make her happy. And few things in her life had existed for that reason up to this point.

Having achieved some happiness made her long for other things, though. Things she was mostly inured against—like wanting someone to share her life with.

She gritted her teeth, looking resolutely away from Knox as that thought invaded her brain.

“Which is now a little bit annoying,” she pointed out. “He’s not even dead, and I had to go through all that grief, plus, you know...”

“Thinking about your marriage?”

She snapped her mouth shut, debating how to respond. It was true enough. She had been thinking a lot about her marriage. Not that it had been an actual, physical marriage. More like roommates with official paperwork. “Yes,” she said finally.

“Divorce is hell,” he said, his voice turning to gravel. “Believe me. I know.”

Guilt twisted her stomach. He thought they shared this common bond. The loss of a marriage. In reality, their situations weren’t even close to being the same.

“Will and I were only married for a year,” she commented. “It’s not really the same as you and Cassandra. The two of you were together for twelve years and...”

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”

Blessedly, distraction came in the form of the left turn that took them off the paved road and onto the gravel road that took them to her cabin.