Courted by the Texas Millionaire

Just as she was about to scream from the tension, her sixth sense tickled her, and she turned around to see a man walking through the swinging doors of the entrance and toward the other end of the bar, near a corner where liquor bottles caught the light.

Another customer in her section, thank God. More reason to keep busy.

To keep away from Davis.

The new guy was wearing a black cowboy hat low over his brow, and he didn’t take it off, even as he slouched onto the stool. He used one hand to pick up a laminated menu and laid the other flat on the wood in front of him, almost as if they’d all gone back in time and he was ready to draw for a gunfight.

But it was only when he tipped back his hat that the room went silent.

“The spitting image,” a customer muttered to his dining partner.

Violet didn’t have to ask what he was talking about—not when she had such clear sight of the thick dark hair over the man’s brow, the coal-black eyes, the rough-and-tumble hardness of a face that she and all the other town folk had seen in many an old picture.

She turned her gaze to the nearby wall, where a grainy photograph of their town founder, Tony Amati, hung.

Thick dark hair, coal-black eyes. Same jaw. Same toughness.

The spitting image, all right. It was downright eerie.

From the way everyone was staring, she could tell that nobody had ever seen this guy before. Who was he?

Her curiosity sharpened, she nonetheless stopped by table three to deliver beverages first, then detoured to table four for their order, running it to her mom, who was cooking at the grill. Then she returned to the stranger’s corner, trying to act as if the entire room wasn’t fascinated by him.

“Hi,” she said, putting on the smiles. “Welcome to the Queen of Hearts.”

“Thanks.” When the man looked up at her, his gaze was dark. Uneasy.

It struck Violet that he knew very well that he was the center of attention. That maybe he had even come in here to accomplish just that.

“Do you need some time to look at the menu?” she asked, pen poised over paper.

“I’ll start with a beer. Bottled.” His voice was raspy, reminding her of a scratched record that someone had unearthed from storage. “Then we’ll go with a buffalo burger, rare.”

“Great.”

He glanced around the room, slowly. Deliberately. “Do all tourists get this much interest from the locals?”

“Not really.” She glanced toward the back of the room, taking care to avoid focusing on Davis, who had his back to her, although she was sure that he was just as aware of her as she was of him.

She fixed her gaze on a photo of Tony Amati hanging near the jukebox. “It’s just that you look like …”

“Who?” he asked casually.

“Tony Amati, our town founder. He goes way back in the history books here.” She cocked her head. “You could be his twin.”

The stranger glanced toward the photo.

“Want to see it up close?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Why not?”

Before she fetched it, she went to the kitchen, handing off her ticket. When she walked out to the bar, Wiley had returned to his seat, hunched over his beer, not saying a word.

Davis caught her by the apron. She stifled a gasp; his hand was near her hip, and the patch of skin under her pants burned with his imprint.

“Who’s that guy?” he asked.

“Don’t know.” She tugged away from him, making it her point to show him that touching her wasn’t allowed, even if they had “cleared the air.”

Her skin was still humming when she left. And to make matters worse, the sensation was spreading along her hip, getting to places that Davis Jackson had no right getting to.

After she fetched the photo from the wall, she got back to the stranger’s table. He seemed to drink in the picture, but she couldn’t get any more than that out of him.

“Tony Amati never had kids, so you couldn’t be a direct descendant,” she said. “Then again, don’t they say everyone in the world has a doppelgänger?”

The stranger narrowed his eyes at the photo. “I suppose we bear a resemblance to each other.”

In spite of all the reading she loved to do, as well as the Founder’s Weekend celebrations, which seemed to honor the town and not the man, Tony had always remained somewhat of a mystery, no matter how much digging she’d done. Evidently, he’d been a private sort who’d never talked about where he’d come from, one who’d reinvented himself out west, as so many others had done. He’d been rumored to be a Texas Ranger and had been wealthy, helping out families in the area. And then there was the matter of his death … the biggest mystery about Tony Amati.

The stranger kept his gaze on the photograph a little longer before handing it back to her. She tried to read him again, but he was like stone, his face etched into a hard-bitten expression that revealed nothing.

She also felt that familiar thrill of a mystery—answers to be chased and caught. She almost even felt just as she used to when she’d gone to her real job every day.

“As interesting as all this is,” he said, “I’m really just passing through this place.”

“Well, it’s good to have you around for however long you’re here …”

“Jared,” he said, offering no more than that.

“I’m Violet, and I’ll be right back with your beer.”

But after she fetched it from the bar, Jared proved very untalkative, settling into his seat, pulling his hat back down over his brow, ignoring the remainder of the stares from the rest of the patrons.

Davis had left the Queen of Hearts long before last call, but that didn’t mean he’d gone home to his ranch on the outskirts of town. He was restless. His mind, his body … neither of them could shut down.

Not with Violet here again.

He’d gone back to the newspaper office, firing up his computer, intending to get some work done. But he kept seeing Violet with her apron around the hips he’d once stroked with his hands, kept seeing her making her way around the bar and grill tonight, chancing smiles at anyone who wasn’t him.

Hell, she’d even seemed more comfortable with that stranger who’d wandered into the saloon.

Davis forced his mind to focus on the Tony Amati look-alike. An idea had sparked in him, in spite of his ridiculous fascination with Violet, and he tried to put all his energies into the distraction now.

Anything to take his mind off her. Anything.

A story about a look-alike such as this stranger would be a hell of an angle for Founder’s Weekend, he thought. The past arises in St. Valentine …

He tried to forget just how personally relevant that thought was as he did a computer search that turned up next to nothing about Tony Amati. Afterward, Davis accessed the digitized archives and skimmed through old editions of the Recorder, just to see if there was anything to keep him even busier.