The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

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.