# The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

Crystal Green

Minutes before saying "I do," Annette Olsen realized her mistake and bolted – a wedding gown in her trunk and a baby in her belly!In St. Valentine, she found the perfect place to start over… until a handsome drifter blew into her diner, setting the town abuzz with gossip and her heart aflutter with impossible dreams.Jared Colton wanted only to find his ties to the town's legendary founder and move on through. But something about Annette got to him. Maybe it was the secrets she kept, or her tender touch, or how much she needed him. Or maybe it was the spark of longing her tender kiss awakened in his soul.Either way, Jared found himself wishing for what had eluded him – a family, with Annette and a baby he'd claim as his own…

## Hay and musk … Cowboy and all man.

She inhaled the scent of him, not stopping to think how crazy it was being a heartbeat away from kissing Jared Colton, the town cipher.

When his lips brushed hers, she groaned at the burst of electricity that sizzled in her veins. She dropped her hot-chocolate mug to the ground, and heard Jared do the same with his, just before he made a low sound in his throat, then cupped her face in his palms, deepening the kiss.

It was everything a first kiss should be, and a wave of yearning swept over Annette. Good and bad, because she didn’t want this to stop, even though she knew it should.

There was something about Jared that made her throw caution to the wind, to forget about how she’d gotten to St. Valentine and why. To forget that she barely knew a thing about him.

All she knew was that she could stay there all night, in his arms …

The Cowboy’s

Pregnant Bride

Crystal Green


www.millsandboon.co.uk

CRYSTAL GREEN lives near Las Vegas, where she writes for the Mills & Boon® Cherish™ and Blaze® lines. She loves to read, over-analyze movies and TV programs, practice yoga and travel when she can. You can read more about her at www.crystal-green.com, where she has a blog and contests. Also, you can follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Marie-Green/1051327765 and Twitter at www.twitter.com/ChrisMarieGreen.

To the hardworking staff of the Knight Agency.

Each one of you is a treasure. Thanks for everything!

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Excerpt

Chapter One

When Annette Olsen saw the dark cowboy walk into the Orbit Diner, her heart rate nearly spiked through the roof.

And it wasn’t only because he was a tall drink of water, dressed all in black from his worn boots to his jeans, to the belt with the shiny rodeo championship buckle, to his Western shirt and hat that tilted over his brow.

No, even though the enigmatic Jared Colton was enough to put steam into any woman’s steps, Annette had been waiting for the man to stop by for his frequent early lunch because, oddly enough, she had come across something she was sure he was going to want.

She smiled at her only customers as she finished checking on them. “Just let me know when you’re ready to pay up.” Then she headed for the counter and ultimately the back room before Jared could sit in his usual stool by the glass-domed pies.

“Fancy seeing you here,” she said lightly, passing right by him.

When his dark-eyed gaze lit on her, her pulse gave a brutal jerk. But she stilled it, as she always did.

It wasn’t like she had much of a choice, not if she wanted to keep a sense of privacy and stay as far under the radar as she’d been doing these past months.

He gave her one of those lopsided grins of his, a boon that not many others in St. Valentine ever saw, probably because Annette never got into the quiet cowboy’s business or asked him too many questions about why he had stayed around St. Valentine for so long.

She could appreciate a person with secrets, she thought. After all, she had more than enough herself.

“I thought I’d surprise everyone by varying my lunch routine,” he said. “I’m impulsive that way.”

She laughed at his facetiousness, and he did, too. His hat still rode low, giving a slight shadow to the rest of his face, but she could tell that he was running a look over her. The slow brush of tingles down her body didn’t lie.

Before she could stop herself, she rested a hand over her belly, which she’d been trying to hide with a baggier waitress uniform.

She was seven months along, her belly just now popping, and she was trying so hard to keep anyone from knowing. Not yet, at least, because that was when people would start asking about the father.

Had Jared been looking hard enough at her to notice a weight gain? Was he about to ask a million questions that she’d been avoiding ever since she’d come to this town months ago, dirt flying out from under her tires, her wedding dress crumpled in a heap in the trunk of her Pontiac?

If her pulse had been jogging before, it was definitely racing now as she kept waiting for Jared to say something.

Anything.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Annette heard the fifties-flavored Valentine’s-inspired music playing low over the ceiling speakers, heard her only other customers telling her that they’d left cash for their bill and her tip on the table, then the dinging bell as they exited the diner.

Absently, she lifted a hand in goodbye to them, then turned her attention back to Jared.

But all he did was reach for the nearby heart-decorated tin bucket that held all the napkin-wrapped silverware.

If there was anyone else in St. Valentine who understood how precious privacy could be, it was Jared Colton. He’d proved it time and again while keeping to himself after wandering into town shortly before she had, just as much of a cipher as she tried to be, then turning his back on anyone who tried to poke into his reasons for being here.

Even though everyone did have a good idea just why Jared had stuck around.

Her gaze wandered to the hand-drawn pictures hanging above the service window: renderings playfully showing the town’s past in the late 1920s and the stoic faces of the townspeople, including one who was a dead ringer for the cowboy sitting in front of her.

Was Jared related to Tony Amati, St. Valentine’s upstanding town founder? If so, then why hadn’t he admitted it to anyone?

She brushed off the questions, then went behind the Formica-topped counter. It would provide cover for her tummy, even if it was getting too far along to hide.

He was unwrapping his silverware, and when he merely said, “It’ll be the usual for me today,” she almost sank against the counter in pure relief. So he hadn’t seen her swelling belly—or, at least, he wasn’t about to comment on it.

But how long would that last?

After she signaled to the ponytailed, hippy-goateed cook behind the service window for “the usual,” she fetched a glass, filled it with ice and cola, then gave it to Jared. She propped her foot on a step stool that she’d recently put under the counter to take some of the weight off her feet.

“I’ve got your usual,” she said. “And I suppose you expect service to be extra special because you were such a big shot in the rodeo.”

A shadow seemed to pass over him, yet it disappeared quickly enough.

He glanced around the diner, which was painted in turquoise and looked as if it’d been decorated by the Jetsons when they were in a hearts-and-flowers mood, then changed the subject whip-quick. “Apparently, I came during a lull today.”

All right. So she’d already found out that he was a champion subject-changer months ago. But she had also done her fair share of avoiding a lot of topics ever since she’d left behind what’s-his-name.

Okay, his name was Brett. She might as well take some power back from him and just say his damned name.

Brett the Turd. Turdy Brett. Brett Turdwell. She had a thousand names for him.

“This lull is a nice rest,” she said. “We’ve been on fire around here lately.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s amazing how many tourists can be attracted by a good mystery like Tony Amati’s unsolved death.” Violet and Davis Jackson, the owners of the town’s small paper, had uncovered Tony’s odd, unresolved demise months ago, after Jared had appeared in St. Valentine and excited everybody’s interest with his doppelganger looks. The reporters had been after him for interviews, but he never gave any to them.

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.

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 by 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 told 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.

One of them was Annette’s.

As he shut the gate behind him, he corrected himself. I’m not looking for Annette, just a certain garden patch.

He came to a bricked cove with a bank of mailboxes, each with a last name posted on it. But there were no corresponding numbers for the condos.

Okay, then. No worries. He would just continue on his way, and he might run into Annette coming out of her garage or a parking space.

So he went right on ahead. But...

What would he say to her exactly?

How-de-do, I just happened to be in the neighborhood. And, really, I’m not a weird stalker. I’m only interested in doing some archeological work in your backyard.

How lame would that sound?

He almost turned around right then and there, except that’s when he caught sight of some movement in a lower-level window and saw...

My God—a silhouette half-hidden through the sheer mist of yellow curtains.

Jared’s heart slammed into his ribs, and he couldn’t take another step because he could feel it in his bones—it was Annette.

Yeah, he should’ve averted his eyes, but the light was coming from behind her, showing her in a haloed, curvy profile without that waitressing apron that had covered her belly today. Now, without it, there was very clearly a bump in plain view.

A baby.

After she took a step toward the window, apparently to draw the shades, she came into full sight.

She hesitated, then tenderly eased both of her hands over her tummy, sliding them beneath it to cup the child growing within it.

Jared’s chest felt pierced, lanced by an ache.

She obviously already loved that child. But where was the father?

Where were you when your own daughter probably asked the same thing?

Feeling shamed, both because he’d witnessed such a private moment and because of his failures, he fisted his hands and got out of there before she saw him.

* * *

Before work the next day, Annette took a moment to soak her feet, then massage them before she had to stand on them all day at the diner. She’d done the same thing last night before going to bed, and she knew it wouldn’t be long before she’d be craving a foot spa 24/7—and before she would have to significantly cut back on her hours at the diner or take a leave of absence altogether.

Rest, healthy eating and some pampering—that’s what the doctor had ordered when she’d gone to him early in her pregnancy. She’d chosen a practitioner in the new part of town because it was more modern, relatively more crowded and less personal there.

She meant to make good on all the doctor’s suggestions this morning, so she’d eaten scrambled eggs and a yogurt parfait with fresh fruit, granola and almond slivers for breakfast, then left her home an hour before her shift. That gave her enough time to run a couple of errands around the Old West streets of the Old Town portion of St. Valentine. The weather-beaten buildings contained things like a mercantile store and boutiques geared toward tourists. There were even burros roaming around—descendants of the beasts of burden owned by the silver miners who’d once lived here.

Now, of course, the silver mines were gone, along with the kaolin mine that had replaced them, and that’s what had put St. Valentine in the economic dumps. But matters were improving, she thought as she rested on a bench in the town square after dropping by the general store for a few necessaries. And judging from the decent number of tourists she knew would be descending on Old Town and the diner in about a half hour, St. Valentine was rising once again.

She lifted her chin, letting the crisp morning air tweak her cheeks. Truthfully, St. Valentine had Jared to thank for their resurrection. It’d been his appearance that had stirred up interest in Tony Amati and alerted Violet and Davis Jackson to his mysterious death, which had taken place on the same night old Sheriff Hadenfield’s home had been burglarized.

From the church, the sound of the recently restored bells tolled through the cleared-up sky, marking the hour. Outside, some people were decorating the trellises in the yard with white-flowered streamers.

A wedding.

Images crept back to Annette: reflections of a bride in a mirror, her Grace Kelly gown so white that no one would ever guess the results of the pregnancy test she’d just taken. Pictures of a woman who couldn’t keep the news to herself and had rashly left her dressing room intending to tell her husband-to-be that they were going to be parents.

Nightmares of what she’d found when she’d opened his door, only to find him en flagrante delicto with a bridesmaid. And then...

Apologies from him after he’d sent away her friend. Yeah, a “friend,” for God’s sake.

Then the worst of it. A flash of his hand rising in the air after the bride had the temerity not to accept all his excuses and then call off the wedding.

“You look a little lost,” said a man’s voice.

It shocked Annette, partly because she hadn’t expected anyone to be nearby, but mostly because she recognized who it was and because he left a twist of need spiraling through her.

She looked up to find Jared standing there in his black coat with Tony Amati’s journal tucked under his arm.

Her blood surged, sending her pulse scampering.

“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” she asked, putting a smile on her face for him.

He smiled back in that lopsided way that took the edge off him. Then he gestured toward the bench.

“May I?”

She scooted over and pulled her long felt coat around her, as if that would protect every vulnerable angle he’d just seen.

But it didn’t do any good—not when she could smell the hay scent of him, even over the fresh air, and surely not when she was all too aware of his broad shoulders under that coat.

He tilted up the brim of his hat, and she couldn’t take her eyes off his strong profile.

“I think I got a little lost yesterday myself,” he said.

“In the diner?” she asked, remembering their conversation after he’d first looked in the journal. He’d definitely seemed lost enough for her to have commented on it.

“Not in the diner.” He laughed. “I’m embarrassed to admit that I got it into my head that your garden would be some kind of burial place for more Tony Amati artifacts. So I drove out there, hoping to just knock on your door and see if you’d let me do a little Indiana Jonesing.”

Her skin flushed, just as if he’d spread fire over it. “You paid me a visit?”

“Before my better sense got to me, yes. I did.”

A feeling of warmth and excitement expanded in her, and the awareness spilled over, alerting her to their proximity on the bench. Only a small space separated them. If she would only move her hand an inch, she would feel a vibration from his leg, a sense of being closer to him than ever.

What if she dared?

She didn’t. The last thing she needed was to get involved with a guy she knew next to nothing about. A guy who rattled her as Brett had first done with his own manly presence, and look how that had turned out. She was better off not trusting her first impressions.

Besides, her baby needed more than a drifter. Actually, all her child needed was her, not any man at all.

Jared must have interpreted her silence as wariness, and he grabbed the journal from under his arm. “I ended up going home and rereading this entire thing in depth last night. It changed my mind again about approaching you.” He offered it to her. “There’s not a heck of a lot in here unless you’re looking for a love story, so I’m hoping to find more—even if it’s in your garden.”

She took the journal. “Just like a man. If there aren’t explosions and car chases, you’re not interested.”

“I’m interested, all right. I just didn’t expect Tony to be...” He motioned with his hand.

“A sap for love?”

“Maybe.” He paused. “All he talks about is some girl he fell for.”

“I’d ask if he married her, but I know Tony never took a wife.”

“Right. He wrote about how they met in secret all the time. She was engaged to marry someone else, though Tony says she didn’t love him.”

“She was a bad girl? How progressive for the time.”

“Nah, from what Tony says, she was an angel. But her father disapproved of him, and it wasn’t because of their age difference. Evidently, Daddy thought Tony didn’t ‘suit’ his daughter.”

“Ooh—a forbidden romance.” She wanted to ask if Tony had “gone digging in the girl’s garden,” but there were limits to flirting, especially with someone like Jared.

He leaned back, resting his arms on the top of the bench. His coat brushed her shoulder and she shivered.

“It’s weird, though,” he said. “Tony never wrote about the...details when it came to him and his girl.”

“Details?”

Jared raised an eyebrow, and she understood.

Intimacies, she thought, thankful that Jared hadn’t put it out there.

Was he feeling the tense atmosphere between them, too? Did he want to avoid it just as much?

He went on. “Tony doesn’t even give her name. It’s not that kind of notch-on-the-bedpost journal.”

“What kind is it then?”

“The type of crap Romeo would’ve written about. You know, ‘What light through yonder window breaks?’ That sort of flowery stuff.”

Annette playfully narrowed her eyes at him. “You know your Shakespeare.”

“No, I don’t.” He looked disinterested. “I just had to read it freshman year in high school. The girls in class had this thing where they’d go around quoting it whenever they were sighing over some guy.”

And how many of those girls had quoted lines about him?

“Anyway,” he said, once again the persistent subject-changer, “you can read the journal if you want to, but later, after I show it to my grandma. I owe you that much for bringing it to me. But, if you do take it, I’d ask that you keep it out of sight.”

Annette didn’t know how to respond. He’d said it so casually, but she got the feeling that letting her in on this was a big deal for Jared Colton.

She treated his gesture with the respect it deserved. “I’ll do just that, Jared.”

At the sound of his name coming from her, he met her gaze. It was as if his irises had heated to dark fire, and she had to glance back down at the journal to keep from getting scorched.

Without looking at him, she said, “And if you want to do some digging, you’re welcome to come over to my place.”

Because it was no big deal, right? Besides, she meant digging in the sense of “investigative labor,” not...well, “digging in her garden.”

His voice lowered, scratching over her skin. “Then I’ll do that. Dig, I mean.”

What precisely did he mean by “dig”?

Whatever it was, she would avoid it. He could be a friend, and that would be easy enough because she got the feeling he’d be leaving just as soon as he satisfied himself about Tony Amati for whatever reason.

That made everything pretty simple.

He stood, reaching out a hand to help her to her feet. When she grabbed it, a blast zipped up her fingers, heating her hand, her arm. Her chest.

Everywhere.

“I’m off work tomorrow if that suits you,” he said. “Maybe I could drop by sometime early?”

Based on his regular appearances at the diner, he had to know that tomorrow was her day off, too. But she had some baby furniture being delivered at nine, and she didn’t want him there to see proof of her condition. Not before she was ready for the dirt to hit the fan in this town and for her to have to tidy up all the growing lies she would have to tell.

“How about eleven?” she asked, going for something a little later than an early-rising cowboy probably had in mind.

“Sounds like a plan.”

They hadn’t disconnected hands yet, and when she realized it, she stepped away, finally distancing herself.

Her skin still burned, though. Wanting, needing.

She gave him back the journal, and when he started to walk away, the hunger didn’t ease off, as her stomach tumbled with what had to be a thrill.

Suddenly she found herself asking him something better left unasked.

“Just why is it so important that you find out everything you can about Tony?”

His shoulders stiffened as he paused. But then he shrugged, and he almost pulled it off, too, except for the way his smile seemed strained.

“It’s not important,” he said as he lifted a hand in farewell, then sauntered toward his truck parked near the entrance to the mercantile, where he’d probably be filling it with supplies for the Harrison ranch.

It was the first obvious lie he’d ever told Annette, but she reminded herself that it was for the best.

She should be grateful for the distance he was putting between them, step by step.

And heartbeat by wistful heartbeat.

* * *

After Jared had banked some hours on the Harrison ranch, doing maintenance around the stables, he headed for dinner at Gran’s house.

She lived in what he thought of as a gingerbread cottage, with brown planked walls and white trim around the doors and windows. He’d found out that the hand-painted decorations on the flower boxes under the windows had been done by his grandpa, back in the day, before his heart attack had left Gran alone for going on ten years now.

When he knocked, it took her a few minutes to answer, but he knew she’d get around to it just fine.

And when she did, she had a smile on her face as she opened her arms to him and gave him a great big hug.

“It hasn’t been but a few days, but I missed you silly,” she said as she pulled away, lifting her hands to pat his cheeks.

Jared hadn’t ever had his cheeks patted like that before, and he felt his face going red. Gran thought that was pretty funny, and she had a good laugh.

He waited her out, still cautious around her because he’d never had a grandma before. His adoptive mom and dad had been older, both orphaned, and that’s why Uncle Stuart, who’d never planned to have kids, had taken him in. In his own way, he had shown Jared that he wasn’t very wanted.

He supposed that’s why Tony held such an appeal for him—the man wasn’t here to ever turn him aside, whereas a real-live grandma just might turn Jared away someday.

When she was done with her chuckles, she waved him inside, where it smelled like gingerbread, too. And casserole. And mothballs. But it was a comforting combination of smells that had already grown on him as much as he would ever allow it to.

“Take a seat,” she said, gesturing to a battered recliner that had seen better days.

She settled on the worn doily-decorated sofa next to him, pouring sodas into waiting glasses, just as efficient as always.

She’d already donned a flowery housedress, as if it was a gown she used for entertaining guests—or, conversely, as if she’d become so used to him that she didn’t mind what she wore when he came over. Her silver hair was in a low ponytail, and she was far too delicate to resemble a cowgirl who’d once helped to run a ranch with her husband before they sold it off years ago.

He set the oilcloth-wrapped journal on the table, and she stopped pouring.

“I thought I saw you bearing a gift, Jared, but I’m more of a roses or chocolates woman.” She touched the oilcloth. “Just what is this?”

“I asked the same thing yesterday when a friend brought it to me.” He explained who it belonged to and why his friend had found it in her garden.

It didn’t take Gran but a second to pounce on the item. Her creased forehead told him that she was worried about the contents.

“Don’t fret,” he said. “I didn’t find out a whole lot about the man.”

“I’m not fretting.” But she used her finger to help her speed through each line of each page anyway.

While she did that, Jared drank his soda. He even grabbed the remote to turn on the old TV and flip through the channels.

He wanted to ask Gran if she wouldn’t mind getting out all the old photo albums she’d shown him over the months. Pictures of her wedding to his grandfather, images of Grandpa as a dimple-cheeked blond child.

Photos of Grandpa’s mom, Tessa Hadenfield, in particular, with her blond hair and dimpled, spritely smile.

When Gran was done reading, she took the remote from him and turned off the tube. She was no longer frowning.

“Find anything worrisome?” he asked.

“Hardly. I kept a diary when I was younger, too, but I was a teenager. Tony must not have had many friends to talk to.”

“Just the journal.”

“He was terribly sweet on whoever this girl was, though. That’s clear.”

And doesn’t that make you connect any dots? Jared thought. Isn’t there a possibility that Tony and this girl got together even outside of marriage and had a kid, and that kid had their own child, and then...that child had him?

Even more to the point, because the P.I. who’d directed him to Gran had told him that she was his maternal grandmother, Jared suspected that Tony had perhaps fallen in love with his great-grandmother Tessa, who’d been the sheriff’s daughter.

And the woman who’d gotten married to someone who wasn’t Tony.

Was that what Tony meant whenever he mentioned terrible sins?

But Jared knew it was fruitless to ask Gran about all this because, for whatever reason, she wouldn’t talk about Tony in anything but broad strokes.

So Jared took the less obvious route.

“Who do you think the woman was?” he asked.

“Tony’s dreamboat? I have no idea.”

Uh-huh. Jared knew lies from truths, and this was a prime example of the former. But he also knew his gran by this time, too, because he’d spent several months in her company at their weekly dinners.

She wasn’t going to give up anything to him she didn’t want to.

When she popped out of her seat to see to the meal, Jared took the journal in his hands again, opening it to another passage that he’d lingered over last night.

She’s an angel, and when the sunlight catches her hair, it’s as if I can catch a glimpse of a found paradise....

And, just like last night, Jared couldn’t help but picture a woman who resembled his own blond angel, even though he didn’t have a devil of a chance with her.

Chapter Three

Well, isn’t this the story of my life? Annette thought as Jared arrived moments before the baby furniture delivery guys wrapped up their business in her condo.

Always with the bad timing.

He was at her open door, stopping at the threshold after the delivery man from a store in New Town carried in a box to the second bedroom.

Jared removed his hat, revealing black hair that was so thick and wavy it made her melt.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

All she could do was shrug. “My delivery was late. I was hoping—”

“That I wouldn’t be here to see this?”

“Pretty much.”

A second delivery man saved her when he came up to her with a slip to sign. When they left, she beckoned Jared all the way inside, took his coat and hat, and put them on her dining table.

Capital A awkward, she thought. She’d scheduled the delivery when she knew the bulk of her neighbors, most of whom had jobs in the more modern New Town, would be at work. And, by now, she’d meant to have all the furniture in the baby’s room shut up tight so Jared wouldn’t see it. When the delivery had been delayed, she hadn’t had a phone number for him to put off his coming over.

But her secret was popping out in the shape of her belly, anyway. She knew she’d been lucky it’d happened later rather than sooner in her pregnancy because she’d been dreading having to face the questions.

Why not start with explaining her pregnancy story to Jared? He was the closest thing she had to a friend in town, which was sad. But it’d been her decision to stay private. She still talked to all her old friends—the ones who hadn’t slept with Brett—on the disposable cell phones she bought. She never told them where she’d gone or that she was pregnant, although she assured them she was happy and safe.

Privacy, she thought. And discretion. She didn’t want to do anything to raise a red flag and encourage Brett to find her.

“So,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She was wearing a baggy sweater, but she still felt as if every pregnant part of her—from her buxom boobs to her belly—was on display. She’d also read that most women started feeling unattractive once they hit their third trimester, but...well, she’d liked the bigger boobs. And she liked the roundness of her belly, too. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, and that’s when she knew for certain that he’d already guessed she was pregnant.

“Not to be fresh, but your cat’s becoming pretty obvious,” he said.

“How many people do you think have noticed?”

“I have no idea. But it was just the other day when I thought I saw...” He made a slight curving motion with his hand in front of his belly.

“Ah.” A flush steamed up her face. Either the good people of St. Valentine hadn’t been looking very hard at her or Jared had been...

Well, looking more than anyone.

She almost fanned herself at the very thought. It was nice to be looked at by him, even though she wanted to discourage it.

“Pardon me for asking,” he said, “but why do you care if everyone finds out?”

Oh, goody, here it went. The big-league lies.

The words rushed out. “I was seeing the baby’s father when I got pregnant, but he passed away before he ever knew.” Liar. “I came here to start over.”

That was definitely the truth.

Even so, Jared was frowning, as if she’d tripped up in her story already and he’d caught onto the snag.

Did the man have a built-in BS detector or something?

He surprised her by circling around the hundred other questions he could’ve asked, but she could tell the subject was still on his mind.

“It looked as if some of that baby stuff needs assembly,” he said.

“I thought I’d take care of that today while you were in the backyard. I want to start arranging the baby’s room before it gets too hard to move around at all.”

“I’ve got time enough to help out.”

But he didn’t move. Instead, he peered around her condo, as if taking in the details that she was so reluctant to give out to anyone.

What did he see in the sparse furnishings, like the sofa and the curtains she’d bought at a secondhand store in New Town? Or the retro pop prints—the Andy Warhol–inspired panel art featuring old-school starlets—she’d seen in a boutique window and which were now hanging on her walls?

Actually she had splurged on those because she hadn’t been able to afford much after leaving the wedding. She’d cut up her credit cards early on, avoiding a paper trail. All she’d been able to do when she’d left Brett was make a quick trip to the bank and empty what she had in her account, which had been meager at best.

Yes, money had always been modest in the Olsen household.

Until she’d met Brett and fallen for him.

Without waiting for Annette to give the go-ahead, Jared brazenly went for the baby’s room, his boot steps heavy on the carpet.

His take-charge attitude sent that thrill through her again, but she banished it. Brett had been a real I’ll-take-care-of-this guy, too, and with every footstep she heard, the reminder was stamped into her.

She followed Jared into the second bedroom, which showed hints of the baby who would make this place into a real home in a short time. A Thumper wall hanging was the first decoration she’d purchased out of her initial waitressing paycheck, and she’d bought something small each time afterward: a mobile that was sitting in the corner and waiting for a crib to dangle over, a pile of soft blankets, a rocking chair she’d found at a yard sale a month ago. She’d finally had enough money to get the real big stuff just last week, and she planned to buy even more when she could afford to after putting aside a chunk of funds for medical bills and maternity leave.

Jared was standing in the midst of the baby paraphernalia, completely out of place, just like Gulliver in Lilliput.

He pointed to a box. “It says bathinette. Did they misspell it?”

“No.” She held back a smile. “You’re thinking of a bassinet. I have one in my room since the baby will be in there at first. A bathinette is a combination of a bath and a changing station.”

“I see.”

Now he seemed even more uncomfortable, and she would’ve merely chalked it up to him being an alpha male who couldn’t stand the notion of diapering a baby...except for that dark shadow that seemed to cover him every once in a while.

He went over to a storage unit and ran his hand over the smooth birch wood. “So this baby of yours...do you know what it is?”

“It?”

He still wasn’t looking at her.

She frowned. “I don’t know the sex yet. I wanted to be surprised at the birth, but...”

That’s when he finally met her gaze, and what she saw ripped into her. A sense of understanding?

Just what was going through his mind?

His voice was hoarse when he said, “But you’re starting to wonder now. Boy or girl. You’re starting to look at the little outfits in the stores and think, ‘Should I buy this in blue or pink?’”

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you know something about that, Jared.”

He froze, then gathered himself and knelt in front of the bathinette box. “I don’t know a thing about what it’s like to have a child.”

The words hovered like a thick mist near the ceiling but never descended.

Instead, he began to read the directions on the box. Then he opened it, as if that looming reminder of what he’d just said wasn’t even there. “This one is easy enough. It just folds open.”

As she watched, he got it ready. It took mere minutes.

When he was done, Annette’s hand went to her chest. She could just see her boy or girl on top of the changing station, smiling up at her, waving tiny hands and feet, gurgling and looking at her as if she was the only person who mattered in the world.

Strangely enough, when she glanced at Jared, he was staring at the top of the bathinette, too, as if he was seeing a child.

But he brusquely turned away from it. “You said there’s a bassinet?”

“In my room. That’ll take some assembly, though.”

“I’ve got it. Do you have tools?”

She was almost embarrassed to get her silly little kit for him, but it had screwdrivers and a hammer and wrenches and the most basic single-girl items she might need in a rented condo where she could just call the owner—her manager at the diner—for some help. Even so, she knew how to use what she had.

When she returned, he’d left the baby’s room and gone into her master bedroom, with its equally Spartan decorations: more pop art on the walls, a single dresser and a wicker trunk at the foot of her twin bed.

In an oddly intimate moment, she swallowed at the sight of him standing near the mattress.

Big enough for only one, she thought, unless she wanted a really cozy night with someone.

Like Jared?

She handed over the kit, stepping away from him just as fast as she could. “Clearly I won’t be building a cabinet or anything in the near future, but these tools should do.”

“They’re just fine.” He grinned at her, taking her breath away. Without his hat, he didn’t resemble the Black Bart he seemed to want to be every time he walked into a building in St. Valentine. He seemed less like a badass legend in the making and more like a man who would help out a woman anytime she needed it.

As he extracted the parts from the box, she felt as useless as a bike without wheels.

She pointed to the door. “I’m just going to...”

Finally, he seemed to register the results of that BS test that had obviously been running through his brain this whole time, ever since she’d lied to him about how she’d gotten pregnant. “You know that you don’t have much of a poker face.”

“What do you mean?”

“Annette...” He seemed to have trouble getting past the sound of her name. It was the first time he’d ever used it with her.

She liked hearing it, though. Probably too much.

He tried again. “When you were telling me about the father of your baby, you got this...expression. As if you didn’t think I’d believe what you were spinning.”

Seriously? Sure, she’d had to create a bit of a story when she’d been hired on at the diner, but it had worked then. She’d even seemed trustworthy enough to Terry, the manager, that after about two weeks, she’d moved out of the St. Valentine Hotel and into this condo that he owned, paying cash on the barrel to rent it.

Why couldn’t she pull the wool over this guy’s eyes?

“You want to tell me the real story?” he asked while beginning to put together the bassinet.

“If I told you, would you keep it under wraps? I’m serious about that.”

He looked over his shoulder and grinned at her, and she couldn’t help but trust him. Then he nodded.

Boy, what he did to her with just a glance...

She inhaled, then dove in, realizing right away that it actually felt good to unload like this. Just as good as Tony Amati had probably felt when he’d written in his journal.

Besides, it seemed she couldn’t lie to Jared, anyway, and she needed someone here in St. Valentine. Why not him—the man who was putting together her baby furniture, the constant gentleman who sat like a sentinel at the diner counter most days?

“I did have a boyfriend,” she said. “Or, rather, a fiancé. It was back in Tulsa.”

“A fiancé is pretty serious.”

“Oh, I felt serious enough about him.” She leaned back against a wall, resting her hands under the curve of her tummy. It felt so reassuring. “But there’s way more to this story than that. Before I go on, I should tell you that I was raised in a...certain way. It started after my dad died when I was about ten. Cancer.”

Jared stopped working. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Thanks. It was a long time ago. But everything about it stayed with my mom and me for a long time. She was heartbroken—it was hard for me to see that on her face every day. Also, the medical bills from his illness were astronomical, and even though my parents came from good families, they’d hit some hard times over the years. So my mom and I ended up as what Blanche DuBois might refer to as ‘the genteel impoverished.’”

He must’ve known who Blanche was because he didn’t ask. He only went back to work.

“At any rate,” she said, “my mom never lost hope that I would find some security for my future. She drove that into me. Pretty old school, isn’t it? But I wanted to take care of her, too, and I didn’t think much about being a gold digger or whatever you want to call it. I was just a kid back then, and I liked the way boys looked at me when my mom dressed me up and told me how to flatter them. And when I got old enough to date, I liked being taken to nice places. She always told me that I should make the best match possible, and it wasn’t until she passed away just before I went off to college on a scholarship that I started thinking about how sketchy her coaching was.”

“You got a mind of your own at college.”

“I did. My mom was really into art, and among other things, she’d given me an appreciation for it, too. So I majored in art history, maybe to feel close to her more than anything, since her death was still pretty fresh, then decided that I wanted to work with children through the arts.” She stopped, and brought her explanation back on topic. “Anyway, I started to date other men—regular guys, some who didn’t have a penny to their name. But, what do you know, I finally met someone my mother would’ve highly approved of.”

Much to Annette’s surprise, Jared went ahead and fixed the drape canopy over the bassinet—something that she had expected him to save for her. “He was Mr. Right. Right?” he said.

“Ultimately, I came up with a few other choice names for Brett besides ‘Mr. Right,’ but at that point, I thought that’s what he was. The perfect man for me. He was charming, could talk for hours about what we both enjoyed and he was friendly to everyone. His family just happened to be rich, and he was a star athlete. He courted me in a whirlwind, and when he proposed, I said yes.”

Jared slowly fixed the ruffled skirt to the bottom of the bassinet. “Then you got pregnant.”

He had that tone of voice again—almost as if he was mired in something so deep and thick that he couldn’t make his way out of it.

Almost as if, once upon a time, he’d had his heart torn out of him just as thoroughly as hers had been.

As Jared waited for her to answer, he stood and parted the drape canopy of the bassinet. With every piece of baby furniture he’d seen today there came figments of imagination—a little girl in this frilly cradle, in the bath, in the room where Annette’s child would soon be coddled by Bambi blankets and with as much love as a mother could give.

But that baby would have only half of a family, just as he’d made sure his own girl had, before she’d found a whole one with another man.

He’d never seen Melissa in those cute baby outfits with footsies attached to them. He’d never given her a bath. He hadn’t even been there when she was born because that had been the role of her new father, and Jared had stayed away, knowing that he wasn’t welcome. And knowing that he didn’t even deserve any part in her life, after he’d chosen his one true love—the rodeo—over everything else.

So why had he stuck around here today, putting things together for Annette if it was so painful?

The answer was easy: he kind of liked that he knew her secret and that he was even a teeny, helpful part of this baby’s life, putting together his or her first furniture.

It even made him feel as if, for a fantasy-filled moment that would never materialize, he was a kind of family man who had atoned for his mistakes.

Maybe that’s why he’d started tossing questions Annette’s way when he’d never done much of that before.

“Didn’t your fiancé want the baby?” he asked now as he rested his hand on the rim of the bassinet. “Why would he have married you if he didn’t want a family?”

“I never told him about the baby.” Annette slid down the wall until she came to the shag carpet, seeming exhausted just at the thought.

Jared wanted to pull her close to him, ease his hand down the hair that she’d worn long today. Even in her khaki pants and loose sweater, she still possessed that higher-class vibe that had struck him much earlier. Now he knew the reason.

If he’d thought she was out of his league before, there was no denying it now. To think—a rodeo bum and a woman who had an art history degree.

What a pair.

“Why didn’t you tell him about the pregnancy?” he asked.

“I was going to. I thought he’d be just as happy as I was, but then...” She shook her head. “I took the pregnancy test right before the wedding ceremony. I hadn’t done it before because everything was in such chaos—dress fittings, last-minute details, rehearsal dinners. By the time the big day rolled around, I realized that... Well, I had an idea something was different about me.”

He supposed she’d missed her period and was just too much of a lady to say it in front of him.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

“I ignored what everybody always says about keeping the bride and groom away from each other before the ceremony. It’s supposed to be bad luck if you see one another at that point, right? But I rushed to his dressing room, anyway.” She fidgeted with the edge of her sweater. “He wasn’t alone.”

Jared tensed up.

Annette noticed. “I see you guessed it. I wasn’t the only member of the bridal party who was saying ‘I do’ that day. And the worst part of it was that she was a friend. A good one, I thought.”

“Annette...”

“No, don’t be sad for me.” She tugged down the sleeves of her sweater, wrapping her hands in them, making her appear more soft and vulnerable. “Something came over me at that moment, just as she was fixing her dress and he was telling her to get out. I knew deep down that I could never love him after that. I felt stupid because I’d never even guessed he’d do something so awful.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Okay, maybe ignorant is the better word because I never had all the information I needed about him. Looking back, I should’ve known that he was staying out late for more than oil company meetings with his family. Or that he was taking midnight calls in his study from more than business partners. Maybe I didn’t want to believe anything was wrong and I ignored the details.”

Jared couldn’t believe any man could be so idiotic as to play a woman like Annette. But maybe Casey, his ex-wife’s husband, had thought something similar about him.

Annette said, “I called the wedding off then and there. Turns out that Brett didn’t have the same conclusion in mind.”

“He wanted to go through with it, even after that?”

“Yes. He actually tried to justify himself. He told me that his father had been doing it for years and his mom didn’t seem to mind. ‘Everyone does it,’ he said. It was all very Kennedy-esque.” She laughed shortly. “Then there was the topper—he tried to apologize for me seeing him in the act.”

It struck Jared that she had a maturity that went beyond her years. Maybe that came with the class she carried, even in a small-town waitressing uniform.

“I imagine,” Jared said, “that you put him in his place.”

“I did.” Her face went pink, but she didn’t add any more.

Something about her reaction made a protective streak flash through him, but when she got to her feet before he could go over to help her up, he realized that Annette didn’t need any help from anyone.

And that was fine by him, seeing as how knowing this much about her lent him a sense of responsibility that hadn’t been there before. It was a strange feeling for a man who’d never wanted any of it in his life.

She strolled over to the bassinet, just as if she hadn’t revealed anything about herself to him. “You did a great job. Thank you so much for everything.”

“It was nothing.” But that wasn’t true. This afternoon had been something.

When she smiled up at him, it was as if his bones turned to hot water, which was apt considering that, if he got too much deeper into her, that’s what he’d be in.

Hot, scalding, bubbling water that was likely to strip him bare.

“You have that journal with you?” she asked.

“It’s in my coat pocket.”

“Mind if I read it while you see to the garden?”

“Not at all.” He absently stroked the whiskers on his chin. “There’s something I was going to mention about that garden, though.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid I’ll make a mess of it.”

She widened her gaze. “How much of a mess?”

“A mess that might have me repotting and replanting.”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and he saw his chances at finding any more Tony Amati relics circling a drain. He even wondered if he should start knocking on her neighbors’ doors to see if they wouldn’t mind a stranger making a disaster zone out of their own backyards.

But a second later, she was smiling at him again. “Your peace of mind is far more important than some herbs. Dig away.”

Jared never tolerated big shows of emotion, but he definitely felt a victorious inner fist pump inside of him now.

“Great. Thanks, Annette.” He had the grace to seem sheepish. “Truth is, I have pots and tools from Gran’s in the back of my truck already.”

Her eyes sparkled, just as they did when they were in the diner across the counter from each other. But this time, there was no barrier between them, and his heart started doing a panicked, stimulated dance.

“You can predict what I’ll do that easily?” she asked.

He managed a small laugh because she was leaning closer to him.

And when she was just inches from him, he thought—no, he wished—that she would stand on her toes to plant a kiss on his cheek. The very idea seemed to shine in her eyes.

Or maybe that’s just what he wanted to see there.

His pulse seemed to fill the slight space between them.

Bang, bang. Each sound echoed against her, then right back at him, hitting him hard in the chest, the belly.

But then she blinked, as if she were coming out of a spell, and he did, too, barring his chest with his arms out of a lack of any better response.

She laughed, cutting the tension, and started to walk out of the room. But then she turned back, her voice a bare, nearly shaking whisper, as if she’d suddenly realized that she shouldn’t have told him a thing about herself.

“Jared, Brett doesn’t know where I am.”

That protective streak reared up again. Good God. She’d run away from Brett?

She was watching him closely. “You’re going to keep my secret, just like I’ll keep the one about Tony’s journal, right? Because I’m going to have to lie to the rest of this town. I don’t want Brett to ever find me.”

That vulnerability he’d only now discovered in her clutched at his rarely used heart, and he couldn’t help giving himself over to her, just this once.

His voice was as quiet as hers when he said, “I won’t say a word.”

Chapter Four

As the clouds parted to reveal a splash of afternoon sun, Jared tipped back his hat and got to his haunches, surveying the garden.

And the mess.

He’d started near the white picket fence, which lined the little concrete patio and herb-spotted patch of dirt that Annette called a backyard. It’d been obvious where she’d been digging when she’d come upon the journal—almost right up against the fence itself, near a dying butterfly bush that she’d told Jared she wanted to take out. It seemed that, when the fence had been put in, the workers had just missed hitting Tony’s journal with the posts.

So Jared had started there.

Yup, he’d been honest with Annette when he’d said he was going to do some damage, far more honest than he’d been a couple of hours ago, when he’d told her, I don’t know a thing about what it’s like to have a child.

All the time he’d been working, the lie had stabbed at him. But why should he feel compelled to spill his guts to her just because she’d done it for him when she’d talked about her ex-fiancé?

Maybe it was because, even now, years after Jared had left his daughter behind, the guilt still weighed heavy on him. Could that be the reason a part of him wished he could unburden himself to someone?

He wouldn’t do it, though. Couldn’t. Especially to Annette because he couldn’t stand to think of the look she’d probably give him if she found out that he was just as immoral a man as her ex-fiancé had been in a lot of basic ways.

Behind him, the screen door slid open. He didn’t have to turn around to know Annette was there because he could feel her presence, tickling his back like the soft touch of fingers over skin.

“Hungry yet?” she asked.

He brushed off all the heaviness that’d been perched on his shoulders. “You planning on rewarding me with food for tearing up your backyard?”

She laughed. “After you taste my food, I’m not sure you’ll be calling it a reward.”

He finally looked over his shoulder. She was still wearing that simple white baggy sweater over khaki pants, but it was enough to send his libido pumping. It seemed that all she had to do to turn him on was appear.

And if that wasn’t a dangerous thing, he didn’t know what was.

Standing, he brushed off his jeans with his glove-covered hands. “I’m sure your cooking is good.”

“I’m no Top Chef, but I’m no bottom one, either. Why don’t you just take a break and see for yourself?”

Smiling, she stood aside as he stripped off the gloves, dropped them to the patio, then moseyed toward her and the condo. While he wiped his boots on a fake-grass mat with a plastic daisy blooming in the corner, he tried not to let the smell of her hair get to him. Was it lilies?

Once inside, the aroma of her meal took over, and he went to the washroom, taking care not to make an even bigger mess than he already had outside as he soaped off the dirt and got himself halfway presentable. He even doffed his Resistol, hanging the hat on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, for lack of a better idea.

Just before he left, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, and he quashed the urge to run his fingers through his dark hair to wrangle it into some kind of style.