Close Range Christmas by Nicole Helm (best free ebook reader .txt) 📕

her baby. Maybe he was just hearing garbled nonsense in there, but it was her garbled nonsense.

She wasn’t afraid of being a mother. She’d watched Felicity and Gage deal with the demands of pregnancy and a newborn. Sarah knew it would be hard and exhausting, but she also knew she’d have help and love to get through it.

But no matter how she told herself she’d watched horses and cattle birth their young—and if they could do it out there with no intervention, she could certainly do it in a hospital with an epidural—the worry and fear of actual labor were overwhelming at times.

Now she didn’t have to just fear labor, she had to fear Anth Wyatt. Not just Dev’s half brother, but her own.

She couldn’t wrap her head around it. Her mother had conceived a child with Ace Wyatt. This biological mother she’d never known—but Duke had.

She stood in her room trying to work out how she felt about it, but there were too many realities assaulting her to get too wrapped up in the past at the moment. She was so pregnant she didn’t even want to sit down for fear of not wanting to get back up. The Wyatts were being threatened, which left her sisters all in a dangerous position. Duke knew Dev was the father of her baby and she’d left them downstairs to squabble pointlessly.

How could she stand here and try to understand the mother and father she’d never known, who were dead anyway?

She had to focus on the task at hand, which was packing some things so she could spend the next few days at Grandma Pauline’s with the rest of her family. Grandma Pauline’s house was big, with all sorts of hodgepodge rooms added on over the years, but it’d still be a tight fit even if Jamison’s and Cody’s families stayed in Bonesteel.

She found a duffel bag and packed all of her oversize sweats that managed to fit over her pregnant belly. She tossed in her pregnancy book and set her body pillow next to the bag on the bed. If she forgot something, she could always come back and get it. The houses weren’t that far apart, and just because they were in danger didn’t mean the ranch work got to stop. They’d have to keep going back and forth for the time being.

She heard footsteps on the stairs down the hall. She knew it wasn’t Duke. He didn’t take the steps that fast or with that much...the word menace floated through her mind. But what was menacing about Dev? That he was grumpy? She’d handled that forever.

Or is the thing you can’t handle the fact he said our baby like it matters?

Well.

When he appeared at her doorway, he stayed right there. “Duke’s packing. You shouldn’t be carrying anything you need, so I will when you’re done.”

He stood there looking grumpy, which was his norm, but there was a way he held himself—hands deep in his pockets, gaze refusing to meet hers—that told her he was also very uncomfortable. Not just because he’d never been in her bedroom before, but she was sure because he’d spilled the beans.

He’d said our baby.

She couldn’t fight away the tide of emotion. The want she kept trying to convince herself she didn’t have. Duke knew he was the father because... “You said our baby,” she managed on a whisper.

“It doesn’t matter.” His voice was flat. So were his eyes.

She could be devastated by that, but she’d never been any good at letting other people dictate how she felt or what she should think. “It matters to me.”

“This isn’t a fairy tale, Sarah. You don’t want it to be. Let’s just—”

“Do you want it to be?”

Some of his composure cracked and he raked his hands through his dark hair. “No,” he said emphatically, but there was something wild in his expression—far closer to fear than denial.

“So, it’s not a fairy tale. That doesn’t mean it can’t be something... It doesn’t mean you have to close yourself off from him. He’s ours.”

“Nothing is mine.”

He just cracked her heart in two. She moved to him and touched his face, couldn’t seem to stop touching him lately when she’d always been the perfect paragon of restraint. She wasn’t a touchy-feely person and the random want to touch Dev was always shoved ruthlessly away.

But this baby, and this danger, it changed things...whether she’d planned on it or not. Then there was this old Dev she thought he’d moved past.

“Please don’t go back there,” she said.

“Back where?”

“To that awful shell you were after you came home from the hospital. I know this is hard, and I know you’ve got your guilt complex, and this weird idea you’re somehow less than your brothers, but for ten years you have slowly stepped out of that and into the land of the living. It would break my heart if you lost all that.”

He looked at her like she’d lanced him straight through—which didn’t bother her because it was emotion, not blankness. And he looked at her—met her gaze and didn’t turn away.

There was too much emotion swirling inside of her, too many of the feelings she usually convinced herself were silly fantasies. It was hard here in her room, touching him, her belly between them. Especially when he didn’t move away from her hand, just stood there looking down at her.

And she wanted to kiss him. It wasn’t all that unheard of a feeling. Throughout her teenage years she’d convinced herself she found him repulsive. And obnoxious. He was still obnoxious, but when she’d made any attempts to date outside the ranch, she compared every guy to Dev.

And they all were lacking. Still, even after she’d accepted that—that he was, for whatever reason, the only man she was ever going to truly be able to give her heart to—she’d been completely and utterly determined to just keep her heart to herself.

She didn’t touch him. She didn’t flirt with him. She had asked him for