Close Range Christmas

by Nicole Helm

  “My brothers and I got notes, yes.”

  “I didn’t get one. The threat wasn’t against me. If everything you’re saying is true, he doesn’t even know—”

  “We don’t know what he knows, Sarah. Which means we need to take all the precautions we can.” Dev tried to say what needed to be said gently, but his words came out harsh.

  It shouldn’t be so hard to protect someone. Sarah always made it far more difficult than it had to be. This pregnancy was no exception, and because he was already tired of worrying over her on that score, he was not going to tiptoe around this.

  “We don’t know what Anth is capable of. We don’t know what ways Ace warped him. In the moment, I thought him helping me was charity or a conscience. Now...”

  “Now what?”

  “I think it was just like Ace. To let me think I’d survived. To think I was free and clear, only to have a note show up that things aren’t over. I think it was a plan—whether between the two of them or Anth alone—so that when it would hurt even more, he could come after me.”

  He kneeled in front of Sarah, because she had to get it through her thick skull that protecting her was the only thing that mattered. “Maybe he doesn’t know about you, Sarah, but it wouldn’t take much digging for him to figure it out. We won’t know when or if he does, and our baby is going to be here sooner rather than later. I know you’d do everything in your power to protect him, so let us do everything in our power to protect you.”

  Sarah opened her mouth, but whatever she was going to say was lost in Duke’s booming voice.

  In an instant Duke squared off with Dev and demanded, “You better explain that, because it sure as hell sounded like you just said our baby.”

  Chapter Five

  Sarah’s heart leaped into her throat. Dev had said our baby.

  In front of Dad, yes, which was less than ideal. Less than less ideal, if she was being honest. But he’d... In the midst of all his awfulness he’d talked about protecting our baby. As if he held some ownership in this child. The way she’d desperately wanted him to.

  She blinked at the silly tears and swallowed down the laugh that wanted to bubble over at the utter horror in Dev’s eyes as Duke waited furiously for an explanation. Clearly Dev had not meant to say our, but that made it all the more special—it meant he felt it, even if he didn’t want to admit it.

  Though she was moved by the admission, hoped it was the starting point for Dev to see he had this little life to truly live for, she tried to smooth things over. “Dev just meant the royal our. You know. This baby is all of ours,” Sarah said, her voice squeaky. It was with emotion, but she was a little afraid Duke would read it as nerves.

  “Bull,” Duke spat. “Explain this, Wyatt.”

  Sarah winced. Dad using a last name was never good. Dev slowly stood from his kneeling position at her chair. His expression was hard and that blank look that had her heart pinching in her chest.

  She was desperate to get rid of that default reaction in him. She tried to scoot off the chair, but it was an ungainly struggle and she gave up on a huff as Dev and Duke stared at each other in a silent standoff. “Don’t we have more important things to—”

  “Are you the father?” Duke demanded, wholly unconcerned with her at the moment.

  Which had her temper bubbling up over the giddy hope she’d been feeling. She managed to get to her feet this time and stepped in between Dev’s motionless, emotionless form and Duke’s furious one.

  “Dad! I got pregnant because I wanted to have a baby.”

  Duke’s gaze finally left Dev’s and met hers. “With him?”

  She met his fury with her own. “I wanted a baby, and I didn’t want a baby daddy. So Dev did me a favor and supplied the...necessary components.”

  She heard Dev groan behind her and Duke winced a little bit at that himself. Well, good, if she could make both men uncomfortable, maybe they’d stop being angry or defensive or whatever.

  “It was my choice and I begged him to do it. Trust me, he didn’t want to. He did me a favor.”

  “I...can’t pretend to understand any of this,” Duke said, shaking his head.

  “You don’t need to. Anth Wyatt is threatening six of us.” The mention of the real reason they were here sobered both men. “I’ll move into Pauline’s as long as you do too, Dad. I think it’s good for as many of us as possible to be under the same roof. That way we can always pair up to do the chores. Someone can always be with me. It makes sense. You staying here alone does not make sense.”

  “You’re changing the subject,” Duke said, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “For the time being. Because protecting ourselves is a little more important than you acting like you have a say in the matter—” she pointed at her large stomach “—when we’re already here.”

  Duke’s gaze moved back to Dev behind her. Narrowed and angry. Sarah didn’t have to look at Dev to know what the expression on his face would be. Blank. Maybe with the ghost of self-loathing.

  “I’d say both are pretty important,” Duke said at length.

  “I’d say it’s not between you and Dev to work out. It’s between you and me,” Sarah argued. “And I’m not speaking another word about it until we’re all together at Grandma Pauline’s.” With that, she turned on a heel and marched—or, more accurately, waddled—out of the room.

  She had to use the banister for support to help get her up the stairs. She didn’t feel any contractions but she felt heavy as she huffed and puffed up to her room.

  “I’m mostly ready to get you out of there, little man, but you’re probably safer inside and, oh yeah, I’m terrified of pushing you out of me.” She rubbed her stomach, comforted by the little conversation with 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 h
all. 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 a baby, but she’d been determined to leave it at that.

  For the first time in her life, something had blown up in her face. Even without remembering all of it, she knew he was it for her. And he was looking at her. She was touching him. Danger was encroaching.

  Why not go for broke?

  She rose to her toes and pressed her mouth to his. He didn’t exactly kiss her back, but he didn’t push her away or dart off. He let her move her mouth softly against his, igniting a memory of the night they’d conceived their child.

  He’d told her not to kiss him and that they should just get it over with. So she’d kissed him right then and there in the hotel hallway because he did not get to tell her what to do—drunk or sober.

  Except all those months ago he’d kissed her back, with a passion that had surprised her then and now as she remembered it. Could that have really been Dev? Kissing her? Was her memory just some overactive imagination...when she’d never had one of those before?

  She couldn’t hold herself up on her tiptoes any longer, so she had to pull away, back to her normal height.

  * * *

  DEV GENTLY PUSHED Sarah back a full step. Then he took his own steps backwards and away from her.

  Why had she kissed him? Why had he let her? Everything was messed up and he could not let that continue.

  “I’m sure that was pregnancy hormones or something,” he muttered, offering her any excuse to let this go.

  But fury leaped into her eyes and her hand balled into a fist. “No, this is pregnancy hormones or something.” And before he realized what she was doing, she landed a jab right in his gut. He bent over with an oof, the air whooshing out of his lungs.

  He straightened his shoulders, sucked in a breath and glared at her. “Pack your bag, Sarah.”

  “It’s packed, Devin. I have to grab my toiletries.” With that she sailed out of the room like some queen on high, belly and all.

  Dev huffed. Women. He grabbed the duffel off the bed and slung it over his shoulder, stuffing the pillow under his arm. It was pregnancy hormones. And fear. Because Sarah had never been so gentle with him. She’d never given him stark honesty about the state he’d been in after his injuries...or the way he’d slowly crawled out of the dark space.

  Not that he’d crawled into a light space. He wasn’t an optimistic guy, and he wasn’t as good as his brothers—that much was certain in a million different ways. He didn’t want the families they were building, but he also wanted to, well, live. Take care of the ranch and Grandma. It had taken him a few years of being in a bad place to get there, but he had gotten there.

  Would he go back? Just because a truth he’d hidden had come back to bite him in the butt? Would he fight off that feeling just because Sarah had said it would break her heart if he didn’t?

  He grumbled to himself all the way down the stairs. Duke was already ready, standing in the kitchen. When Dev entered, he glowered.

  Dev sighed. “She’s getting her toiletries.”

  Duke huffed. “Good. I have more to say to you. Whatever she thinks, I do have a say in all this. I’m her father and it’s my job to protect her. I don’t know what the hell you were thinking, but—”

  He’d been thinking he could give Sarah something, no strings attached. He’d been thinking he could feel like some kind of help for once. Of course, he’d never actually felt any of those things, even before this moment, but that’s what he’d been thinking.

  “—you will do right by her.”

  Dev shook his head. He wasn’t going to explain himself to Duke. Or anyone, for that matter. “Hate me if you want, Duke, but this is between...” Except it wasn’t between anybody. It was up to him. He’d done what Sarah had asked of him, and now they had to keep it a secret at all costs. “I get to decide what’s right, and it clearly isn’t whatever you think is.”

  Duke’s brow furrowed and he studied Dev with a sincerity and perception that made Dev shift uncomfortably on his feet.

  “You want me to hate you,” Duke said after a while, as if it was some dawning realization.

  Dev snorted, perhaps a little too loud. He didn’t want anyone to hate him. He just wanted everyone to understand things were better when he was on the periphery. Didn’t this whole thing with Anth prove that? “I don’t want you
to—”

  “You do. You want to feel guilty. You want everyone to hate you so you can mope around this ranch feeling sorry for yourself. So you can keep yourself separate and consider it noble. You might have gotten away with that for too long, but time’s up. You’ve got people to protect, and a baby to be a father to—whether that’s Sarah’s plan or not.”

  Panic bloomed in his chest, but something bigger than that. Fear. A blinding, terrifying fear. At the word father. At Sarah depending on him to protect her, when he knew he wasn’t any good at that. “It’s not her plan.” His voice was too rusty, but he couldn’t let Duke think any of what he wanted was ever going to come to fruition. “She doesn’t want a partner in this. She—”

  “Bull. She wants you as a partner, boy. God knows why.”

  Dev thought of that kiss, but refused to accept what Duke was saying. Sarah was...churned up. Maybe she didn’t want to call it hormones, but she wasn’t herself. She’d have the kid and go back to being... Sarah. Real Sarah who didn’t touch him or cut him open with a few words, showing just how well she saw through him. “I can’t... Don’t you see the danger that puts her in?”

  “I’ve got five of my daughters married to or living with your brothers. I tried to warn every last one of them off, because trouble is in the Wyatt name and in the Wyatt blood. Boy, I know. I was like you once upon a time. But they all chose love and life over fear. You might not have that in you, Dev, but Sarah sure does.”

  With that, he took the duffel out of Dev’s hands and headed for the door. Leaving Dev alone, holding a body pillow, with far too many revelations, and way worse, far too many emotions.

  Chapter Six

  Sarah woke up in a strange bed. For all the hubbub, and the giant stomach impeding any comfortable movement, she had slept pretty well. At least imminent danger couldn’t disrupt her sleep schedule like a baby was inevitably going to.