Читать книгу The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride - Crystal Green, Crystal Green - Страница 7

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.