The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

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.”