The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride (St. Valentine, Texas)

by Green, Crystal

  Sometimes she wore her long, wavy, light blond hair down, the ends brushing the middle of her back. But not today. She’d put her hair in a bun with a pencil stuck out of it.

  Damn, what Jared would give to slip that pencil out of her hair and watch it tumble down, allowing him to bury his fingers in it. She was like a Nordic princess to him, her rosy cheeks hinting at her obvious youth and telling him that she couldn’t be older than her early twenties. She was tall and slender. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her jaw sculpted enough to make him want to trace it.

  Yeah. As if that was ever going to happen. Jared had made a career out of keeping a distance, and it’d have to stay that way, especially because he could’ve sworn that he’d noticed an extra curve to her today.

  Her belly.

  Maybe he was making too much of it, but the bump on Annette had reminded Jared of a series of painful times, like when he’d been awakened late at night by his uncle Stuart, who’d taken him back to his ranch after his parents had died in a freak train wreck.... Like when Jared had, years later, accidently come across a letter in Uncle Stuart’s office from the man he’d thought to be his birth father—a letter mentioning that Jared had been adopted... Like how he’d felt a void after that, leaving the ranch just as soon as he could to travel the rodeo circuit, where he’d found a new family who seemed to understand that sometimes a man liked to keep a distance...

  Like how he’d foolishly and quickly gotten married soon afterward. He’d been much too young, much too desperate to fill the emptiness that had spread inside him after he’d found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was.

  Most of all, there was the day his ex-wife had told him, You’re going to be a daddy. And in the next breath, It’s too dangerous for a father to be in the rodeo, busting those broncs, Jared....

  But he’d loved the rush of those eight seconds on the back of a bucking horse too damned much—it was really the only time he felt full and alive—and he’d argued with her. His attitude had been enough to push Joelle away, into another man’s arms—a good man, just like Tony Amati had been and just like Jared hadn’t.

  His selfishness had been enough to let him know that he wouldn’t have made a good dad anyway, so he had let his ex-wife and daughter be because his ex had asked him to do just that.

  A man of habit, he’d clung to the rodeo, staying on for a while longer, until he’d been thrown from that last bronc. It was a young man’s sport, and thirty was too old to be competitive. So there he’d been—without a wife, without a child, without the rodeo that had given him some definition. And all he had was the memory of his adopted father’s letter to haunt him.

  But when Uncle Stuart had passed on and given Jared the ranch—a property that Jared had sold off—he had succumbed to a curiosity that had nagged him, even as he’d tried to stow it away, and hired a P.I. to find his birth parents.

  It’d probably been the second-worst choice of his life.

  You shouldn’t have come here.... I don’t even know who your dad is.... I gave you up so I wouldn’t have to see you....

  As with most everything else, Jared had stashed the memory of his birth mother far down, to a dark area that he shut nice and tight. Yet something had recently nudged it open a crack—the thought that, if he was related to Tony Amati, the saint of St. Valentine, his mother wouldn’t matter.

  He could really start to have something in St. Valentine. To have someone, and with Tony, it would be in the distant way he preferred.

  In Tony’s photos, Jared could see the better version of himself, and that’s why he’d stayed in this town—to find out who he was.

  Now, from across the counter, Annette glanced behind her. The cook wasn’t at the service window, and when she turned back around, she had a conspiratorial expression on her beautiful face, nodding at the journal.

  “Just read it now, would you?” she said.

  He didn’t need any more urging, and he turned to the first full page, scanning it eagerly.

  Some men keep ledgers of their assets. Some men draw maps of their properties. Some write of their confessions so they might weigh less heavily in the inevitable end.

  Though I should probably lift the burden of all my terrible sins from my shoulders within these pages, I...

  Jared stopped cold, tripping over three words he hadn’t been expecting.

  My terrible sins...

  He closed the journal just as Declan appeared in the service window with a plate of food, ringing the bell to signal that Jared’s ham on rye with fries was up.

  Annette thanked the cook, then grabbed the plate as he left, sliding it onto the counter as Jared placed the book on his lap, where the counter hid it.

  It was obvious that she understood his gesture—she thought that he didn’t want anyone else, like Declan, to see the journal and start asking questions about it. And that’s why he liked Annette—because they didn’t have to talk too much to get each other.

  Annette’s gaze shined. “Anything good so far?”

  My terrible sins...

  Jared shrugged. “I only got halfway down the first page.” And, even now, he wasn’t sure he was going to like what he saw in the rest of the journal. But there was an unidentifiable urge building in him to continue, just like the one that had pushed him to hire the P.I. to find his birth parents.

  What did Tony mean by “terrible sins”?

  And what if the town reporters, Violet and Davis Jackson, who were so bent on reporting every blamed thing about Tony Amati, found out about all the details before Jared could?

  He imagined his ex-wife’s rounded belly before she’d left him, imagined what his daughter might look like today, eleven years old, all knees and elbows and sugar and spice, and he tightened his fingers on the journal. Jared knew what it was like to be utterly devastated by a parent. His birth mom had made him wish he’d never found her. If his own daughter heard about her birth dad and his real family’s “terrible sins,” would she be just as dismayed?

  Or worse, would she hardly care?

  Letting go of the journal, he told himself it didn’t matter. He’d left well enough alone with his daughter, Melissa, merely sending money to her mom each month. Even if he tried to get in touch with her—as he’d seriously thought of doing out of pure guilt, just after that P.I. had found his birth mother and Jared had hired him to find a few other loose ends—she would be old enough to refuse his phone calls. Old enough to hate him.

  Annette cocked her head, reading him. “You look lost, cowboy.”

  Why did it sound as if she knew just how lost a person could be?

  “Not lost,” he said. Maybe it was time to leave now.

  But he didn’t. He stayed planted in his seat, with a slow, wistful Nat King Cole song playing on the sound system, with him longing to tell someone like Annette everything because he’d been holding it all in for so long.

  It felt as if they were the only two people in the world, much less the diner.

  Still, he couldn’t bring himself to say a word. Why would she give a damn anyway about someone like him—a drifter? A wild card no one really knew?

  Annette came out from behind the counter, going to the table where her customers had left their bill and cash and then moving to the register to ring up the sale. “You had a look in your eyes, like you were thinking extra hard. Like you were thinking about disappearing out of here, just like you do most days in your truck, in the opposite direction of your job on the Harrison ranch.”

  It was the first time she’d ever gotten remotely into his business, and he found that he didn’t mind it so much.

  “Does everyone send out a special bulletin when I even sneeze?”

  She closed the register as he turned in his seat to face her, propping an arm on his leg.

  She looked encouraged b
y the fact that he hadn’t shooed her off, as he did with certain reporters or nosy townsfolk. “You can tell me where you go.”

  He checked the service window. Declan was still AWOL, and it was just Jared and her.

  Aw, what the hell.

  “I’ve got a grandma just out of town,” he finally said.

  He didn’t add that the P.I. had tracked down his maternal grandmother because Jared had been curious about any living relatives around the area. She’d been the reason he’d stopped in St. Valentine in the first place and ended up at that saloon, where he’d seen Tony’s picture.

  “How sweet,” Annette said, coming to the counter again, this time dragging a chair from near the register with her so she could sit in it. So close, yet so far. “You visit your granny all the time. Who would’ve thought?”

  He could smell Annette’s perfume. Lilies? He hadn’t paid attention to flowers in a long time.

  “I might show this to her,” he said, holding up the journal. “She’s kind of a historian, likes telling stories. But when I told her about my twin—” he nodded up at the Tony Amati picture “—she didn’t let me know much.”

  And she’d gotten a strange look when he’d mentioned Tony’s name, making Jared suspect that there was way more to her stories than she was letting on.

  Annette was still bright-eyed. “Sometimes grandmas and grandpas know everything about a place. I didn’t know either of mine very well, but...”

  She trailed off.

  “But...” he said because Annette rarely talked about her own personal life. He’d never asked her to.

  “You’re changing the subject,” she said. “You’re pretty good at that.”

  He wasn’t the only one.

  “Anyway,” she said. “Your grandma...?”

  “She said that she hadn’t seen a picture of Tony in a long while so she couldn’t comment on a resemblance.”

  “And when you told her that you two could’ve been brothers?”

  “She said it has to be a coincidence.”

  “Oh.” Annette frowned. “It’s definitely a marked coincidence.”

  He thought so, too, but that’s where he left the conversation. He didn’t need to add that his suspicions about Tony were so strong that he’d checked into the St. Valentine Hotel at first, poking around the fringes of town in local libraries and on the internet, doing his own seemingly dead-ended research because he was too broke now to hire a P.I. Then he’d gotten a job and rented a cabin on the outskirts of town until he could get more answers.

  The bell on the door rang as new customers entered. Obvious tourists, with their Grand Canyon sweatshirts and white city sneakers.

  Annette went to wait on them, and Jared got to his lunch. The fries were fairly cold by now, but it didn’t much matter. Not when Annette passed by and gave him one of her pretty smiles.

  He finished his grub, stood and put enough cash on the counter to take care of the bill, plus a nice tip for Annette.

  It was his day off from work, but that didn’t mean there was any rest for the wicked, he thought, tucking the journal under his arm as he canted his hat to Annette.

  “Thanks again for the gift,” he said.

  “Thank you.” She held up his bill and grinned, then put the folder into her apron pocket as she went to the customers’ table to take their order.

  He watched her, positive now that he could make out a definite bump under her apron as clear as day.

  But Jared’s smile tamed itself as he thought of his own child, and he walked away just as he had the first time, something foreign gnawing at the edges of his heart.

  Chapter Two

  I never meant to fall in love with her. She is young—eighteen—while I am a man of thirty-five with a past that clings to me like an attached shadow, ready and waiting to tap me on the shoulder....

  Jared set Tony’s journal down on the seat beside him as he sat in his green Dodge truck on Horizon Road, the cracked blacktop stretching through lanes of fences. Around him, pastures dotted by trees reflected a February late afternoon, the branches like stark bones against the gray, rain-heavy sky.

  He hadn’t made it too far out of the old town before he’d choked off the truck’s engine and opened the journal, fueled by curiosity as he scanned it. He’d even made it through the entire thing, but...

  This passage. It was the one he would come back to time after time, as if it were tar that sucked at his boots, keeping him from continuing.

  My terrible sins...

  A past that clings to me like an attached shadow...

  He couldn’t get those phrases out of his head. And they frustrated the hell out of him because, as it turned out, the journal was filled with vague statements like these. In fact, the book was actually more of an outlet for a side of Tony that Jared had never expected: a lovelorn man who’d scribbled his innermost thoughts down over the course of a few months, as if the pages were the only things he could talk to.

  And by the last page, when there should’ve been so many answers about who Tony was and what exactly those terrible sins of his were...

  The entries just ended.

  Par for the mysterious Tony’s life, huh?

  Jared gave the journal the stink eye. As much as he was interested in this nameless woman Tony had crushed on way back when—and Jared already had a guess as to who she was—he wanted to know the nitty-gritty. The past Tony kept referring to. The confessions he should’ve been making.

  Then again, there was a part of Jared that didn’t want to know the man’s dirty deeds at all because Tony the saint—and Jared’s possible great-grandfather—had a hold on him that wouldn’t quit.

  To think, he would’ve finally been proud of something in his life besides the championship rodeo belt buckle he wore—an object that seemed more tarnished than anything to Jared.

  He stared down the road out his windshield, which was speckled with a few stray drops of rain.

  So Tony had a few sins. What if all his good deeds overcame everything else about the man?

  Jared shook his head. He had always looked out for the shadows instead of the sunlight—it was how he’d been raised by Uncle Stuart, an emotionally inaccessible man. Sure, Stuart had gruffly seen to it that Jared had everything he needed, but he hadn’t been a real parent, and he’d seemed to be keenly aware of that. He’d never even tried to live up to the title, leaving four-year-old Jared in a room down the hall shortly after his parents had passed on, his blankets pulled up around his neck, his brain refusing to let him go to sleep because of all the shadows on the walls and all the things out there that would get to a person, whether it was a trick of the nightlight making warped shapes near the closet door or even a nightmare about a train that went off the tracks.

  Jared had learned early on to be tough, to close his eyes until his heartbeat smoothed out. To hold back the tears and take care of himself rather than call to his uncle for help, even though Stuart had told him that he could.

  Yes, growing up, Jared had learned to distance himself from fear and love because both could disappear if you just closed your eyes.

  But this time...shouldn’t he open them, just to see if there was something else out there besides the shadows, like the love Tony had recorded in his journal? What if Tony was related to him and it turned out that he didn’t really have much as far as “terrible sins” went?

  Jared longed to find out, to maybe even believe that a good man like Tony might’ve welcomed him into the family more than his granddaughter, Jared’s birth mom, had.

  He took his gaze off the book, tapping his fingers on his steering wheel. He could see the cluster of brick condo buildings through the dots of rain on the glass.

  The complex they’d built on Tony’s old ranch property.

  Annette had tol
d Jared that she’d dug up the journal in her garden. What were the chances that old Tony had buried more there?

  Family documents? Pictures? Another journal in which he actually let those terrible sins off his chest?

  And what were the odds that Annette might have finished her early shift at the diner by now?

  A burst of fire roared through his veins. That shiny moon-blond hair, her creamy skin, her lips...

  Jared chuffed and wiped a hand down his face. His mind—or whatever it was—didn’t belong on a woman. He’d had his share of them in the past, both buckle bunnies and cowgirls, and he’d overstayed his welcome only once. It’d been a mistake he was still living with.

  Yet, all he needed from Annette was access to that garden of hers.

  He sat there for a while longer—time enough for him to turn on the radio for a marathon of country songs. Time enough for him to tell himself that he should probably just drop this and move on.

  But then, through the dusk, he saw a bright red Pontiac pulling into the complex and passing the iron gates with a rustic arch that spelled out Heartland—the name of Tony Amati’s original ranch.

  Jared rested a hand on his door latch. Didn’t Annette drive a Pontiac? He’d seen it in the parking lot every time she worked.

  He blew out a breath.

  This was crazy. Was he really thinking of going through with this ridiculous mission?

  Then he opened the door. Hell, yeah, he was thinking of it. He hadn’t stayed in St. Valentine because of the meatloaf or ham sandwiches. Or because of the gorgeous blonde who served them.

  Right?

  As a niggling thought permeated him, he shook it off, pulled his dark shearling coat out of the truck cab, then shut the door. The air smelled as if the earlier rain had made everything new, and that made him think that maybe this was a better idea than he’d first thought.

  He ambled to a rose-lined walkway that led to a gate in a brick wall. At the same time, he pulled up the collar of his coat, minding the threat of the moody sky. Up ahead, the walk was sprinkle-damp, and yellow lights from condo windows beckoned.