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Nine
“Well. He asked me to marry him.”
“Good,” Juniper said. “If he had done anything else I would’ve hung him out to dry and...”
“I said no.”
“What?” Her sister’s voice was a shriek in her ear.
“I said no, Juniper. I’m not going to marry him just because I’m pregnant.”
“Okay. Forgive me. But I don’t understand why not. Because you want a family, Shelby...”
“No. I wanted a family with the man I was married to. We were a family. I am not in love with Kit.” The words stuck something tender and hollow at the center of her chest.
She wanted to cry all of a sudden. She had made it through that whole thing with him mostly without crying. Mostly. And she just couldn’t...
She couldn’t. This was too hard. It was scraping against things she didn’t want to examine. It was making her... Feel things.
She hadn’t even been tempted to say yes to him for a second, though. Because the idea of Kit and marriage just didn’t go together. The idea of taking the thing that they were, this wild, untamed thing, the sharp edges that made her feel exhilaration and shame all at once, and pushing them into the life that she’d had before... She just couldn’t imagine that. Of course, she couldn’t quite imagine him being a father.
The father of her child. She had spent a lot of time imagining herself being a mother, and in that picture, she was soft. Sitting in a rocking chair, holding a baby. She was a different sort of woman.
Definitely not the woman who had climbed all over Kit Carson and encouraged him to do dirty, incendiary things to her in that bedroom.
That was not the woman bursting with maternal instinct who wanted more than anything to nurture a child.
That woman had been a moment out of time. A moment of insanity. A moment to inhabit a different reality.
That woman could not be the one who took control now.
She looked around her house. Small and humble. She tried to imagine Kit filling the space.
She couldn’t. But then, she had no idea what her life was now. She had no idea what she was doing.
And she had a feeling that she wasn’t going to find answers anytime soon.
But the sad thing was, there was a timer ticking on her getting things sorted out now. A timer growing in her womb.
So sort things out she was going to have to do. Starting with her family. Kit Carson was a problem for another day.
All his brothers were assembled at the Thirsty Mule. Well. All except for Buck. But that was normal. Another shitty normal in the Carson family.
This was all of them now.
It had just so happened that they were all available. He hadn’t actually purposefully put the whole squad together for this announcement. And really, he probably should’ve first told his mother, who was going to be so thrilled about having a grandchild she wasn’t going to be able to deal, but that was part of the problem. She was going to want to see Shelby. She was going to want assurances that the kid was going to be around all the time. And frankly, he had no such assurances. So, his brothers were going first.
“Surprised the old ball and chain let you out of the house,” Jace said, slapping Chance on the back.
“The old ball and chain is on call, and was also exhausted after a day working the ranch. She’s got too much pride to let me pay for everything, so she’s just still working her ass off. But you know, I like that about her.”
“That she’s stubborn?”
“Yeah. Believe me. It’s one of her better attributes.”
And unfortunately, Kit knew exactly what his brother was getting at, since he had tasted the steely determination that family had. And found that it was very good indeed. Though, it was also a source of irritation for him right now.
“It’s good,” Kit said, “that all of us are together. Because I have something that I need to tell you all. So it’s probably best that I only have to do it once.”
