The Rancher's Baby. Maisey Yates

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.”

       Three

      Selena looked less than thrilled by the prospect of sticking close to home while the situation with Will got sorted out.

      Knox didn’t particularly care whether or not Selena was thrilled. He wanted her safe. As far as he was concerned, this was some shady shit, and until it was resolved, he didn’t want any of it getting near her.

      All of it was weird. The five women who had been presented with nearly identical letters telling them that they had inherited Will’s estate, and then Will not actually being dead. The fact that someone else had been living Will’s life.

      Maybe none of it would touch Selena. But there was nothing half so pressing in Knox’s life as his best friend’s safety.

      His business did not require him to micromanage it. That was the perk of making billions, as far as he was concerned. You didn’t have to be in an office all the damned time if it didn’t suit you.

      Plus, it was all...pointless.

      He shook off the hollow feeling of his chest caving in on itself and turned his focus back to Selena.

      “I don’t need you to stay here with me,” she said, all but scampering across the lawn and to her porch.

      “I need to stay here with you,” he returned. He was more than happy to make it about him. Because he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist. She was worried about him. She didn’t need to be. But she was. And if he played into that, then she would give him whatever he wanted.

      “But it’s a waste of your time,” she pointed out, digging in her purse for her keys, pulling them out and jamming one of them in the lock.

      “Maybe,” he said. “But I swear to God, Selena, if I have to go to a funeral with a big picture of you up at the front of the room...”

      “No one has threatened me,” she said, turning the key and pushing the door open.

      “And I’d rather not wait and see if someone does.”

      “You’re being hypervigilant,” she returned.

      “Yes,” he said. “I am.” He gritted his teeth. “Some things you can’t control, Selena. Some bad stuff you can’t stop. But I’m not going to decide everything is fine here and risk losing you just because I went home earlier than I should have.”

      She looked up at him, the stubborn light in her eyes fading. “Okay. If you need to do this, that’s fine.”

      Selena walked into the front entrance of the cabin and threw her purse down on an entryway table. Typical Selena. There was a hook right above the table, but she didn’t hang the purse up. No. That extra step would be considered a waste of time in her estimation. Never mind that her disorganization often meant she spent extra time looking for things.

      He looked around the spacious, bright room. It was clean. Surprisingly so.

      “This place is... It’s nice. Spotless.”

      “I have a housekeeper,” she said, turning to face him, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and offering up a lopsided smile.

      For a moment, just a moment, his eyes dipped down to examine those breasts. His gut tightened and he resolutely turned his focus back to her eyes. Selena was a woman. He had known that for a long time. But she wasn’t a woman whose breasts concerned him. She never had been.

      When they had met in college he had thought she was beautiful, sure. A man would have to be blind not to see that. But she had also been brittle. Skittish and damaged. And it had taken work on his part to forge a friendship with her.

      Once he had become her friend, he had never wanted to do anything to compromise that bond. And if he had been a little jealous of Will Sanders somehow convincing her that marriage was worth the risk, Knox had never indulged that jealousy.

      Then Will had hurt her, devastated her, divorced her. And after that, Selena had made her feelings about relationships pretty clear. Anyway, at that point, he had been serious about Cassandra, and then they had gotten married.

      His friendship with Selena outlasted both of their marriages, and had proved that the decision he’d made back in college, to not examine her breasts, had been a solid one.

      One he was going to hold to.

      “Well, thank God for the housekeeper,” he said, his tone dry. “Living all the way out here by yourself, if you didn’t have someone taking care of you you’d be liable to die beneath a pile of your own clothes.”

      She huffed. “You don’t know me, Knox.”

      “Oh, honey,” he said, “I do.”

      A long, slow moment stretched between them and her olive skin was suddenly suffused with color. It probably wasn’t nice of him to tease her about her propensity toward messiness. “Well,” she said, her tone stiff. “I do have a guest room. And I suppose it would be unkind of me to send you packing back to Wyoming on your first night here in Royal.”

      “Downright mean,” he said, schooling his expression into one of pure innocence. As much as he could manage.

      It occurred to him then that the two of them hadn’t really spent much time together in the past couple of years. And they hadn’t spent time alone together in the past decade. He had been married to another woman, and even though his friendship with Selena had been platonic, and Cassandra had never expressed any jealousy toward her, it would have been stretching things a bit for him to spend the night at her place with no one else around.

      “Well,” she said, tossing her glossy black hair over her shoulder. “I am a little mean.”

      “Are you?”

      She smiled broadly, the expression somewhere between a grin and a snarl. “It has been said.”

      “By who?” he asked, feeling instantly protective of her. She had always brought that out in him. Even though now it felt like a joke, that he could feel protective of anyone. He hadn’t managed to protect the most important people in his life.

      “I wasn’t thinking of a particular incident,” she responded, wandering toward the kitchen, kicking her shoes off as she went, leaving them right where she stepped out of them, like fuchsia afterthoughts.

      “Did Will say you were mean?”

      She turned to face him, cocking one dark brow. “Will didn’t have strong feelings for me one way or the other, Knox. Certainly not in the time since the divorce.” She began to bustle around the kitchen, and he leaned against the island, placing his hand on the high-gloss marble countertop, watching as she worked with efficiency, getting mugs and heating water. She was making tea, and she wasn’t even asking him if he wanted any. She would simply present him with some. And he wouldn’t drink it, because he didn’t like tea.

      A pretty familiar routine for the two of them.

      “He put you pretty firmly off of marriage,” Knox pointed out, “so I would say he’s also not completely blameless.”

      “You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead. Or the undead, in Will’s case.”

      He drummed his fingers on the counter. “You know, that does present an interesting question.”

      “What question is that?”

      “Who