Maisey Yates - The Rancher's Baby

He looked around the room, at the commotion stirring around them. “It seems Will has come back from the dead.”

Two

Will wasn’t dead.

Selena kept playing that thought over and over in her mind as Knox drove them down the highway.

She wasn’t entirely clear on what had happened to her car, or why Knox was driving her. Or what she was going to do with her car later. She had been too consumed with putting one foot in front of the other while Knox led her from the funeral home, safely ensconced her in his rental car and began to take them... Well, she didn’t know where.

She slid her hand around the back of her neck, beneath her hair, her skin damp and hot against her palm. She felt awful. She felt... Well, like she had passed out on the floor of a funeral home.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“To your place.”

“You don’t know where I live,” she mumbled, her lips numb.

“I do.”

“No, you don’t, Knox. I’ve moved since the last time you came to visit.”

“I looked you up.”

Knox hadn’t come back to Royal since his divorce. She couldn’t blame him. There was a lot of bad wrapped up in Royal for him. Seeing as this was where he’d lived with his family most of the year when he’d been married.

“I’m not listed.” She attempted to make the words sound crisp.

“You know me better than that, honey,” he said, that slow Texas drawl winding itself through her veins and turning her blood into fire. “I don’t need a phone book to find someone.”

“Obviously, Knox. No one has used a phone book since 2004. But I meant it’s not like you can just look up my address on the internet.”

“Figure of speech, Selena. Also, I have connections. Resources.”

She made a disgusted sound and pressed her forehead against the window. It wasn’t cold enough.

“You sent me a Christmas card,” he said, his tone maddeningly steady. “I added your address to my contacts.”

“Well,” she said. “Damn my manners. Apparently they’ve made me traceable.”

“Not very stealthy.”

“And you’re rude,” she said, ignoring him. “Because you did not send me a Christmas card back.”

“I had my secretary send you something.”

“What did she send me?” Selena asked.

“It was either a gold watch or a glass owl figurine,” he said.

“What did she do, send you links to two different things, and then you said choose either one?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t count as a present, Knox. And it certainly doesn’t equal my very personal Christmas card.”

“You didn’t have an assistant send the card?” he asked, sounding incredulous.

“I did not. I addressed it myself, painstakingly by hand while I was eating a TV dinner.”

“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.