The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride (St. Valentine, Texas)

by Green, Crystal

  Maybe not, though.

  “The appointment was a breeze,” she said.

  “Don’t they give you pictures or something?”

  After a moment of hesitation, she reached into the pocket of her skirt, pulling out a carefully folded computer-generated picture.

  Without a word, she showed it to him, and it was all Jared could do to swallow away the tightness in his throat.

  He hadn’t been sure just what a third-trimester baby would resemble, but it wasn’t this—a definite child. The picture focused on the face, with the closed eyes and a thumb stuck in a cute little mouth.

  “She’s a girl,” Annette said, her voice wavering.

  A girl.

  Just like the daughter he could’ve had if he’d held on to her.

  The thought pummeled Jared, even as he touched the face on the picture, as if the baby could feel it.

  Another little girl.

  Another chance, he thought, keeping hold of the photo, unwilling to let it go.

  Chapter Ten

  Annette woke up the next morning in the most natural place possible—Jared’s arms.

  After eating last night, they had gone to his bed, fully clothed and intending only to lie down for a short time. She’d been tired from running around all day, and even though her sex drive had certainly been ready and willing, the rest of her had relaxed to the point of slumber. Jared had caressed her tummy, almost as if he was imagining the baby in the ultrasound photo beneath the bump and was lulling her to sleep, too.

  Something had changed with Jared last night, and it seemed to have taken hold after he’d seen that picture. Not that Annette was complaining. It was nice cuddling up to him, feeling as if he could’ve been the father.

  If only.

  As he still slept now, she watched him. When he was awake, his face was so often hard, his jaw gritted, as if he was always ready to fend off anything or anyone that confronted him.

  But now?

  Peaceful, she thought, using her fingertips to brush the dark five o’clock shadow on his cheek. A face a mother would’ve loved if his birth mom had given him half a chance.

  But he had other people who loved him instead. She did, for instance. And Gran.

  As Annette kept tracing the line of his jaw, her mind wandered, dwelling on every step Jared had taken to get where he was today.

  The letter from his adoptive dad...the P.I. who’d told him about his birth mom and then his grandma...

  And that was when something in her head clicked.

  Gran was from his mother’s side of the family. All of a sudden, it seemed like the most important detail in creation.

  She brushed back his dark hair. “Jared?”

  He stirred, moaning a little and bringing her closer to him.

  Normally, she would have put talk by the wayside but not now.

  “Wake up,” she whispered.

  He opened one eye. “Is everything okay?” Then he sat up. “Are you—”

  “No, no, the baby and I are doing well.” She sat up, too. “It’s just that I thought of something important. Jeez, I can’t believe I didn’t ask you before.”

  He frowned.

  “The day before yesterday,” she said, “you told me about how the P.I. you hired tracked down your living relatives here, and Gran was the only one.”

  “Okay...”

  “Gran is your birth mom’s mother. That means you already know who your great-grandma was, and she’s most likely the woman Tony writes about in his journal. I can’t believe I didn’t zero in on that before.” Didn’t they say pregnant women could be scatterbrained? She might be living proof.

  He started looking a little guilty.

  “Jared?”

  “I’ve had my suspicions about it.”

  For a speechless few seconds, she just sat there. Then she said, “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t want to jump to any conclusions without Gran’s input. And she won’t give me any.”

  It was a lame excuse, and he seemed to know it.

  “You didn’t trust me with this particular secret,” she said.

  “Annie, I was getting around to it.”

  “Slowly.” She couldn’t help a note of frustration from creeping in. “Very, very slowly.”

  He gave her a loaded glance that told her he was still used to being the silent guy in black, but then he rested a hand on her arm.

  “If you want to know, I’ll tell you all about it.”

  Why now? Because she’d caught on and he had no other choice?

  His hand trailed away from her. “When I first got to know Gran, she told me about our family. One of her stories was about my great-grandma Tessa Hadenfield. She was the daughter of the first sheriff of St. Valentine and her dad’s pride and joy, basically because her mom died when she was young and she was all he had left.”

  “When did she meet Tony?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve danced around the subject with Gran, but she always tells me he has nothing to do with our family.”

  “That has to be a fib. You’ve got Tony’s looks, and we know Tessa’s your great-grandmother. One plus one equals you.”

  “From what the journal says, we can assume that she and Tony got together before she married my great-grandfather Joseph.” Jared drew up his knees, resting his forearms on them. “So I figure she must’ve passed her child off as his, unless my great-grandfather knew what was going on. Joseph and Tessa got married soon after Tony’s death, according to what Davis and Violet Jackson have written in their articles.”

  “So if Tessa and Tony did have a child...”

  “He’d be my granddad. Gran’s husband, Richard.”

  “And he died before you could meet him. Have you seen pictures, just to compare your looks with him?”

  Jared shrugged. “Sure, but my grandfather resembled Tessa, not Tony. I told you my birth mom doesn’t look much like me, either, so I must’ve had some kind of recessive trait creep into me.”

  “Tessa was lucky that her son didn’t look like Tony. It really saved her from having to give some hard explanations.”

  “Until I showed up years later.”

  “Well, she doesn’t have to worry about that now.”

  He sent her a sheepish glance, and she wanted to ask him why it had been so damn hard to tell her about Tessa. It had seemed in the past that they were pretty good brainstorming partners when it came to working out his family tree.

  Hadn’t he noticed that they partnered well in every way? Or was he so used to working alone that the act of including someone else was too tough for him to handle?

  She traced a seam on the quilt bunched under them as Jared measured her with his gaze.

  “Do you feel better now?” he asked.

  She nodded, even though the whole trustworthiness issue still lingered in the pit of her stomach.

  Would she ever know all of Jared? Or would he always be revealing his life to her piece by piece, maybe even keeping things back until he had no other choice?

  He got up from the bed, going to the hallway, and she thought the subject was closed. For now at least.

  She sighed, reaching for her cell phone on a nightstand and checking her text messages. She’d heard a ding sometime during the night but had been too tuckered out to check her phone.

  When she accessed her in-box, she found a short-but-sweet invitation from Violet Jackson for Rita Niles’s baby shower in a couple of days.

  Annette smiled, appreciating the gesture, even if it probably was an afterthought spurred by her recent meetings with Violet and Rita.

  Jared came back in the room, and she put the phone down. He was holding Tony’s journal, which was opened to a specific page
.

  “I want you to know that I can’t have you losing faith in me, Annie.”

  It was the last thing she’d expected him to say.

  “Thing is,” he continued, “I’m not a man who’s very good with words, and it’s hard for me to say stuff like that. Tony was good, though.”

  As he sat on the bed, he looked down at the journal, starting to read from one of the last pages.

  “‘I can only hope that they bury me next to her when the time comes,’” he said softly. “‘She knows that, in life, all I wanted to show her was that she is my everything. Yes, it takes time to do that, and I do not know how much of that we have. But, just as I want to spend every moment with her while we live, I want an eternity beside her, too.’”

  Jared shut the journal, and Annette held a hand out to him. He took it, connecting with her.

  But the darkness was still in his eyes, even if he was doing his damnedest to chase it away.

  She just about went weak with feelings for him. “I understand, Jared. Just like Tony, you need time to show me how you feel and who you are.”

  As Annette brushed her thumb over his, she knew that, no matter what, she was going to give him time enough to say in his own words everything Tony had said.

  Luckily, unlike Tony and Tessa, they had all the time in the world.

  * * *

  The next two days passed with both of them working—Jared on the ranch and Annette at the cash register of the diner. At the end of their shifts, Jared would end up at her place, digging until he retired to her condo, where he’d bought her a bigger bed and moved the old one out.

  “A thank-you gift for your thank-you gift,” he’d told her when the bed had been delivered yesterday.

  She’d clearly been tickled by his care and, in appreciation, they’d made good use of the gift.

  Yup, things were smoother than ever between them. But how long was that going to last when he finally got up enough courage to come clean with her about everything in his past?

  He’d almost told her about his daughter the other morning, when Annette had bristled at not knowing the truth about Tessa Hadenfield. But he’d decided that she was already too angry for him to add insult to injury, and he would sit her down and have a long talk soon.

  Yet wasn’t he always saying “soon”?

  He dwelled over that question while he was in town today, rounding off his afternoon by picking up some fencing supplies from the mercantile.

  But then he got a phone call that shook his schedule to bits.

  It was Davis Jackson on the other end of the line, and after they got the hellos over with, Jared didn’t even bother to ask the millionaire owner of the town paper how he’d gotten his number.

  He was too stunned by what Davis had to say.

  “Do you have any free time?” he asked Jared. “And I’m not angling for an interview. I need to talk with you about something Vi and I found out.”

  If a bolt of lightning had hit Jared, it wouldn’t have rocked him any more than this.

  News. They had uncovered something about Tony, hadn’t they?

  Even though Jared had been digging for his own answers, a sense of dread raked through him.

  “I’ve got some time,” he said warily, “and I’m in town.”

  “Good. Vi is at Rita Niles’s baby shower, but I’m at the newspaper office.”

  Jared remembered Annette had been planning to go to the party, too. “I’ll be there in a few.”

  He hung up, leaning against the tailgate of his truck, which he’d just shut after loading the fencing supplies.

  Davis’s tone had set Jared on edge. It had sounded like a prelude to bad news, and on the screen of his mind, he saw his image of wonderful town founder Tony Amati crumbling.

  But Jared wasn’t going to find out a thing by standing around, so he headed for the newspaper office just off the boardwalk, past Whitefeather’s Jewelry Boutique.

  When he walked in, Davis, who’d dressed down today in a casual Western shirt with jeans, was huddled over one of the computer desks.

  When Davis saw him, he said, “Thanks for coming,” and gestured to a chair.

  As Jared sat down, Davis handed over a computer-generated grainy black-and-white picture.

  “This is from an old newspaper,” he said, “circa late 1920s Chicago.”

  Jared scanned the photo. A man was in the foreground, his arm propped on a railing in some sort of office. He was smiling, his slicked dark hair parted on the side, his chin emphasized by a dimple. He’d taken off his suit jacket, revealing a long-sleeved white shirt, a black tie with tiny designs that Jared couldn’t make out and a vest. He had his arm around a random man in a suit, the guy’s face halfway cut off by the camera.

  “Who is he?” Jared asked, focusing on the main subject. “And what does he have to do with Tony?”

  Davis leaned back in his chair. “That’s George Moran. His nickname was ‘Bugs.’”

  Who?

  The reporter continued. “They say Moran ran liquor during Prohibition and was set up by Al Capone to take the fall for the execution of his own men during a massacre in his warehouse. Seven guys were killed that day by hired assassins who were pretending to be cops on a raid. They were supposed to get Moran because he was a rival in the booze business with Capone, but Bugs wasn’t there. You’ve probably heard about this slaughter by its more famous name.”

  Jared shook his head.

  “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” Davis said.

  St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

  St....Valentine?

  Jared’s gaze went fuzzy as he forced his attention to the man next to Bugs Moran in the picture.

  Only half a face, but now that Jared looked more carefully, beyond the greased hair and the fancy suit...

  No.

  It had to be someone else. Not Tony.

  But then the name of this town suddenly took on new, awful meaning for Jared, and he tried to deny what was already locking together in his mind.

  “Hey,” Davis said, sitting on the edge of his chair, “we’ve got a lot more research to do, and we don’t know exactly what Tony might’ve had in common with the massacre or with Bugs. We found this picture in a whole batch of archived Chicago newspaper photos from Tony’s era, but the second we identified him—”

  “We don’t know that it is him,” Jared said.

  Davis took a second, then said, “Now that we have a lead, we’ve been able to isolate other pictures of Bugs and his cohorts. It seems that Tony’s in a few of those photos.”

  After extracting more printouts from a manila folder, Davis pushed them on the desk toward Jared.

  He didn’t look at them, though, because none of this could be true.

  The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre? Al Capone?

  It had to be a fever dream conjured up by two reporters who wanted to make a buck for this town by creating a whale of a tale. And what a story it was.

  But the big hole in the entire narrative was that Tony was a good man. He had founded this town and had helped families get back on their feet with the money he’d made from oil. He had been a revered presence whose only faults were that he liked his privacy and he’d secretly fallen in love with a woman who was soon to be married to another man.

  Then an unwelcome detail wormed its way into Jared’s mind. Tony had referred time and again in his journal to escaping some kind of past.

  He felt fragmented, as if the identity he’d craved, based on his new family, had begun sifting apart, just like the beginning of an avalanche.

  “Jared?”

  He finally registered Davis’s voice, and it seemed as if he’d been saying his name more than once.

  Jared set the first picture down on the desk, and it
covered all the others as Davis spoke.

  “Violet and I wanted to talk to you before we pursued this...or published anything.”

  “There won’t be anything to publish about Bugs and this—” Jared indicated the pictures “—this other man who’s not Tony.”

  Davis offered the other photos again. “Look, it’s true that we haven’t absolutely confirmed the identity of the guy in the pictures with Bugs yet, but...”

  On a burst of doubt, Jared grabbed the other pictures that Davis had wanted him to look at. Much to his relief, none of them had a clear picture of Tony.

  “These mean nothing,” he said, pushing them away. “The only thing you have on Tony are the stories you already know, all of them saying that he was an upstanding citizen.”

  “Jared—”

  He came close to telling Davis about Tony’s journal, which would prove his probable great-grandfather was a decent man deep down, no matter what.

  But that would be desperate, and even if there was a small, wailing part of Jared that threatened to believe the worst about Tony, he wouldn’t expose his innermost thoughts to a reporter, not for any reason.

  The other morning he’d realized that Annette was the only person he’d trusted, ever. And when he told her about this...

  Maybe she’d calm him down, as she always did.

  He got up from his chair. “I appreciate your wanting to let me in on this, but it wasn’t necessary.”

  “We’re not stopping the investigation,” Davis said.

  Panic jarred him, but what was he going to do? Plead with Davis to leave well enough alone? Beg him to preserve what might be a fantasy about Tony and all the hopes Jared had pinned on him?

  “You do what you need to do for this town,” Jared said, going toward the door. “But I guarantee you’ll come to another dead end with this latest lead.”

  As he exited, he thought about Annette again. She would put this all into perspective. She would know that Tony couldn’t possibly be what it seemed like he might’ve been—a criminal.

  A black hat.

  * * *

  “You’re getting close...closer...” said the baby shower guests in the St. Valentine Hotel’s tearoom.