Crystal Green - The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

He took a drink, then said, “You know, every time I turn on the TV I see St. Valentine and Tony Amati. It’s all over the place.”

“And that’s exactly what Violet and Davis want. So does the chamber of commerce, especially shortly before the Valentine’s Day Festival.” Annette only hoped that the town wouldn’t get too much of a profile.

She couldn’t afford it.

Subtly, she skimmed a hand over her stomach. I’m going to make sure no one knows where we went.

“One would think,” she said, “that you don’t like watching those profiles about Tony and St. Valentine.”

He didn’t say anything, just took another drink of soda, as secretive as ever.

“Okay, Mr. Strong but Silent,” she said, grinning a little, “I guess you wouldn’t be interested in something I dug up about Tony Amati this morning, then, would you?”

Now he put the cola down.

Gotcha.

With a tiny shrug, she went to the back room and dipped her hand in the patchwork purse she’d bought at some dime store back when she’d stocked up on cheap clothing and necessities with the only cash she’d had on hand before lucking into this job. She came out with a rectangular metal box wrapped in bulky oilcloth.

By the time she returned to Jared, he’d tipped his hat back so that she could see all of his face, which might not be considered handsome as much as strong and manly, with a square chin set off with a slight cleft and an eternal five o’clock shadow covering his lantern jaw and his cheeks. He had the type of nose that you’d see on Roman statues and the same type of body, too—hard and muscular, with a strength that made adrenaline fly through her veins.

But that’s how she’d felt when she’d first met Brett, too—the all-American college quarterback and youngest son of the oil-rich Tulsa Cresswell family.

The man who’d raised a hand to her on their wedding day before she’d left him to eat her dust.

She put the package on the counter, but Jared merely stared at it.

“Go ahead,” she said. “It won’t bite.”

Still, he glanced at her as if it might do just that. “What is it?”

“A brand-new car. I was in a giving mood when I bought it.”

That got a chuckle out of him.

Out of patience, Annette unwound the material from around the box, then opened it. She unwrapped more oilcloth from the contents and presented him with the final product.

He looked at the journal, with its hard-crusted covers sandwiching the yellowed, swollen pages.

Annette put it on the counter again. “I like to do some gardening. It’s a calming thing, but...well, that’s not what you want to hear, is it? What matters is that I was digging deep to loosen the soil in a part of the yard I hadn’t been using when I hit something in the dirt.”

“This,” he said.

“A journal. And I peeked inside, just to see what it was, but when I got a load of Tony Amati’s name written on the front page...”

“It’s...Tony’s?”

The question was infused with a quality she’d never heard from this man before—almost a hopeful vulnerability.

Had she and the rest of the townsfolk been wrong about him? Did he have more than a passing interest in Tony Amati?

She lowered her voice, even though Declan the cook was busy in the kitchen, judging from the faint noise of pots and pans. “I rent one of the condominiums they built on Tony’s old ranch property, and I suppose he buried this journal at some point. Who knows why? It could give a reason in that journal, but I didn’t have time to read it before work to find out. I’m curious like you wouldn’t believe, but I thought maybe you should have the honor of looking at it first—”

Jared grasped the book in his big hands and opened it, just as if he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life.

* * *

The first thing Jared saw was a fine scrawl of semi-blurred ink on the front page.

Amati.

And that’s all it said. That’s all it had to say in this town because everyone knew who Tony Amati was, even though no one seemed to have known him well.

He’d been a former Texas Ranger who’d struck oil in the late 1920s, founded St. Valentine and acted as a patron to those who needed jobs. A man who’d lived alone, shut away on his ranch. A taciturn guy who’d died without much more fanfare than a dutiful obituary in the local paper.

Ever since Jared’s initial glimpse of Tony Amati’s picture in the Queen of Hearts Saloon months ago, he’d known that he’d finally found what he’d been looking for all these years—roots, a possible identity.

Maybe even family?

But Jared had no proof of that, just a suspicion, based on the similarity of his and Tony’s faces. After he’d left the rodeo circuit (too old and broken to be busting broncs after he’d tweaked his back during a tumble) and after he’d drifted from ranch to ranch and job to job for three years afterward (too ornery to be content in one place), he hadn’t known where he was going or why. Yet, for once, Tony had given him a reason to linger.

He rested his fingertips on the first page, right by Tony’s last name. He smiled.

Annette’s soft voice floated to him. It was a sound that never failed to stir Jared, whether that was a good thing or not.

“Are you going to read it right now?” she asked.

“I could.”

He looked up at her, and she grinned at him, her deep blue eyes sending those same swirls of heat from his chest to his belly. God, she was a sight, even in a pink waitress uniform and white apron. It was as if she didn’t belong in a diner—she seemed too well-bred for it for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on. She had a way of carrying herself that made him think more of champagne parties and diamond rings than coffee and flatware.

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.