Buch lesen: «The Rancher's Baby»
She’s having her best friend’s baby... Only from New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates!
When a torrid, possibly dangerous scandal comes to Royal, Texas, Selena Jacobs is nearly caught in the middle. Until her best friend Knox McCoy ensures her safety—by moving in! Selena has loved Knox for years, but she’s never had the courage to tell him. Now the sparks she’s tried to smother burn out of control...and leave her pregnant. But with the pain in his past, will Knox finally take a chance on love...with her?
Selena felt like she was dangerously exposed.
All of her secrets. All of herself.
“So that’s it?” he asked. “We kiss after all these years of friendship, and you’re fine.”
“Knox,” she said, “you don’t want me to be anything but fine. Believe me. It’s better for the two of us if we just move on like nothing happened. I don’t think either of us needs this right now.” Or ever.
She wanted to hide. But she knew that if she did hide it would only let him know how close he was delving into things she didn’t want him anywhere near. Things she didn’t want anyone near.
“Yeah,” he said. “I guess so.”
“You don’t want to talk about our feelings, do you?” she asked, knowing that she sounded testy.
“Absolutely not. I’ve had enough feelings for a lifetime.”
“I’m right there with you. I don’t have any interest in messing up a good friendship over a little bit of sex.”
Knox walked past her, moving back into the shop. Then he paused, kicking his head back out of the doorway. “I agree with you, Selena, except for one little thing. With me, there wouldn’t be anything little about the sex.”
* * *
The Rancher’s Baby
is part of Texas Cattleman’s Club:
The Impostor series—Will the scandal of
the century lead to love for these rich ranchers?
The Rancher’s Baby
Maisey Yates
MAISEY YATES is a New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty romance novels. She has a coffee habit she has no interest in kicking, and a slight Pinterest addiction. She lives with her husband and children in the Pacific Northwest. When Maisey isn’t writing she can be found singing in the grocery store, shopping for shoes online and probably not doing dishes. Check out her website: www.maiseyyates.com.
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Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
Introduction
Title Page
About the Author
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Epilogue
Extract
Copyright
One
My fake ex-husband died at sea and all I got was this stupid letter.
That was Selena Jacobs’s very dark thought as she stood in the oppressive funeral home clutching said letter so tightly she was wearing a thumbprint into the envelope.
She supposed that her initial thought wasn’t true—strictly speaking. The letter proclaimed she was the heir to Will’s vast estate.
It was just that there were four other women at the funeral who had been promised the exact same thing. And Selena couldn’t fathom why Will would have made her the beneficiary of anything, except maybe that hideous bearskin rug he’d gotten from his grandfather that he’d had in his dorm at school. The one she’d hated because the sightless glass eyes had creeped her out.
Yeah, that she would have believed Will had left her.
His entire estate, not so much.
But then, she was still having trouble believing Will was dead. It seemed impossible. He had always been so...so much. Of everything. So much energy. So much light. So much of a pain in the ass sometimes. It seemed impossible that a solemn little urn could contain everything Will Sanders had been. And yet there it was.
Though she supposed that Will wasn’t entirely contained in the urn. Will, and the general fallout of his life—good and bad—was contained here in this room.
There were...well, there were a lot of women standing around looking bereft, each one of them holding letters identical to hers. Their feelings on the contents of the letters were different than hers. They must be. They didn’t all run multimillion-dollar corporations.
Selena’s muted reaction to her supposed inheritance was in some part due to the fact that she doubted the authenticity of the letter. But the other part was because she simply didn’t need the money. Not at this point in her life.
These other women...
Well, she didn’t really know. One of them was holding a chubby toddler, her expression blank. There was another in a sedate dress that flowed gently over what looked to be a burgeoning baby bump. Will had been too charming for his own good, it seemed.
Selena shuddered.
She didn’t know the nature of those women’s relationships to Will, but she had her suspicions. And the very idea of being left in a similar situation made her skin crawl.
There were reasons she kept men at arm’s length. The vulnerability of being left pregnant was one of them. A very compelling one.
As for the other reasons? Well, every woman in this room was a living, breathing affirmation of Selena’s life choices.
Heartbroken wives, ex-wives and baby mamas.
Selena might technically be an ex-wife, but she wasn’t one in the traditional sense. And she wasn’t heartbroken. She was hurt. She was grieving. And she was full of regret. She wished more than anything that she and Will had patched up their friendship.
But, of course, she had imagined that there was plenty of time to revive a friendship they’d left behind in college.
There hadn’t been plenty of time. Will didn’t have any more time.
Grief clutched at her heart and she swallowed hard, turning away from the urn to face the entry door at the back of the room.
The next visitor to walk in made her already battered heart jolt with shocked recognition.
Knox McCoy.
She really hadn’t expected him to come. He had been pretty scarce for the past couple of years, and she honestly couldn’t blame him. When he had texted her the other day, he’d said he wouldn’t be attending the funeral, and he hadn’t needed to say why.
She suspected he hadn’t been to one since the one for his daughter, Eleanor.
She tried to quell the nerves fluttering in her stomach as Knox walked deeper into the room, his gray eyes locking with hers. She had known the man for more than a decade. She had made her decisions regarding him, and he...
Well, he had never felt the way about her that she did about him.
He looked as gorgeous as ever. His broad shoulders, chest and trim waist outlined perfectly in the gray custom-made suit with matching charcoal tie. His brown hair was pushed back off his forehead, longer than he used to keep it. He was also sporting a beard, which was not typical of him. He had deep grooves between his dark brows, lines worn into his handsome face by the pain of the past few years.
She wanted to go to him. She wanted to press her thumb right there at those worry lines and smooth them out. Just the thought of touching him made her feel restless. Hot.
And really, really, she needed not to be having a full-blown Knox episode at her ex-husband’s funeral.
Regardless of the real nature of her relationship with Will, her reaction to Knox was inappropriate. Beyond inappropriate.
“How are you doing?” he asked, his expression full of concern.
When he made that face his eyebrows locked together and the grooves deepened.
“Oh, I’ve been better,” she said honestly.
A lopsided smile curved the corner of his mouth upward and he reached out, his thumb brushing over her cheek. His skin was rough, his hands those of a rancher. A working man. His wealth came from the chain of upscale grocery stores he owned, but his passion was in working the land at his ranch in Wyoming.
Her gaze met his, and the blank sadness she saw in his eyes made her stomach feel hollow.
She wondered if the ranch still held his passion. She wondered if anything did anymore.
“Me, too,” he said, his voice rough.
“Will is such an inconsiderate ass,” she said, her voice trembling. “Leave it to him to go and die like this.”
“Yeah,” Knox agreed. “His timing is pretty terrible. Plus, you know he just wanted the attention.”
She laughed, and as the laugh escaped her lips, a tear slid down her cheek.
She’d met Knox at Harvard. From completely different backgrounds—his small-town Texan childhood worlds away from her high-society East Coast life—they had bonded quickly. And then... Then her grandfather had died, which had ripped her heart square out of her chest. He had been the only person in her family who had ever loved her. Who had ever instilled hope in her for the future.
And with his death had come the trust fund. A trust fund she could only access when she was twenty-five. Or married.
The idea of asking Knox to marry her had been... Well, it had been unthinkable. For a whole host of reasons. She hadn’t wanted to get married, not for real. And her feelings for Knox had been real. Or at least, she had known perfectly well they were on the verge of being real, and she’d needed desperately for them to stay manageable. For him to stay a friend.
Then their friend Will had seen her crying one afternoon and she’d explained everything. He had offered himself as her solution. She hadn’t been in a position to say no.
Control of her money had provided freedom from her father. It had given her the ability to complete her education on her own terms. It had also ended up ruining her friendship with Will. In the meantime, Knox had met someone else. Someone he eventually married.
She blinked, bringing herself firmly back to the present. There was no point thinking about all of that. She didn’t. Not often. Her friendship with Knox had survived college, and they had remained close in spite of the fact that they were both busy with their respective careers.
It was Will. Whenever Will was added to the mix she couldn’t help but think of those years. Of that one stupid, reckless decision that had ended up doing a lot of damage in the end.
For some reason, she suddenly felt hollow and weak. She wobbled slightly, and Knox reached toward her as if he would touch her again. She wasn’t sure that would be as fortifying as he thought it might be.
But then the doors to the funeral home opened again and she looked up at the same time Knox looked over his shoulder.
And the world stopped.
Because the person who walked through the door was the person who was meant to be in that urn.
It was Will Sanders, and he was very much alive.
Then the world really did start to spin, and Selena didn’t know how to stand upright in it.
That was how she found herself crashing to the floor, and then everything was dark.
* * *
Fucking Will. Of course he wasn’t actually dead.
That was Knox’s prevailing thought as he dropped to his knees, wrapping his arm around Selena and pulling her into his lap.
No one was paying attention to one passed-out woman, because they were a hell of a lot more concerned with the walking corpse who had just appeared at his own funeral.
It was clear Will was just as shocked as everyone else.
Except for maybe Selena.
Had she loved the bastard that much? It had been more than ten years since Will and Selena had been married, and Selena rarely talked about Will, but Knox supposed he should know as well as anyone that sometimes not talking about something indicated you thought about it a whole hell of a lot.
That it mattered much more than the things that rolled off your tongue with routine frequency.
As he watched the entire room erupt in shock, Knox was filled with one dark thought.
At the last funeral he had attended he would have given everything he owned for the little body in the casket to come walking into the room. Would’ve given anything to wake up and find it all a nightmare.
He would have even traded places with his daughter. Would have buried himself six feet down if it would have meant Eleanor would come back.
But of course that hadn’t happened. He was living a fucking soap opera at the wrong damned moment.
He looked down at Selena’s gray face and cupped her cheek, patting it slightly, doing his best to revive her. He didn’t know what you were supposed to do when a woman fainted. And God knew caregiving was not his strong suit.
His ex-wife would be the first to testify to that.
Selena’s skin felt clammy, a light sweat beading on her brow. He wasn’t used to seeing his tough-as-nails friend anything but self-assured. Even when things were terrible, she usually did what she had done only a few moments ago. She made a joke. She stood strong.
When Eleanor had died Selena had stood with him until he couldn’t stand, and then she had sat with him. She had been there for him through all of that.
Apparently, ex-husbands returning from the beyond were her breaking point.
“Come on, Selena,” he murmured, brushing some of her black hair out of her face. “You can wake up now. You’ve done a damn decent job of stealing his thunder. Anything else is just showing off at this point.”
Her sooty eyelashes fluttered, and her eyes opened, her whiskey-colored gaze foggy. “What happened?”
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.
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.
“Why don’t you get this paved?” he asked.
“I like it,” she said.
“Why?”
That was a complicated question, with a complicated answer. But he was her friend and she was glad to be off the topic of marriages, so she figured she would take a stab at it. “Because it’s nothing like the driveway that we had when I was growing up. Which was smooth and paved and circular, and led up to the most ridiculous brick monstrosity.”
“So this is like inverse nostalgia?”
“Yes.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I understand that better than you might think.”
He pulled up to the front of the cabin and she stayed resolutely in her seat until he rounded to her side and opened the door for her. Then she blinked, looking up into the sun, at the way his broad shoulders blotted it out. “What about my car?” she asked.
“I’m going to have someone bring it. Don’t worry.”
“I could go get it,” she said.
“I have a feeling it’s best if you lie low for a little bit.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Well,” he said. “Your ex-husband just came back from the dead, and both of you cause quite a bit of media interest. You were named as beneficiary of his estate along with four other women, and that’s a lot of money.”
“But Will isn’t dead, and I don’t care about his money. I have my own.”
“Very few people are going to believe that, Selena,” Knox said, his tone grave. “Most people don’t acknowledge the concept of having enough money. They only understand wanting more.”
“What are you saying? That I’m...in danger?”
“I don’t know. But we don’t know what’s going on with Will, and you were brought into this. You’re a target, for all we know. Someone is in an urn, and you have a letter that brought you here.”
“You’re jumping to conclusions, Knox.”
“Maybe,” he said, “but I swear to God, Selena, I’d rather have you safe than end up in an urn. That I couldn’t deal with.”
She looked at the deep intensity in his expression. “I’ll be safe.”
“You need to lie low for a while.”
“What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?”
Knox shrugged, the casual gesture at odds with the steely determination in his gray eyes. “I figured I would keep you company.”
