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

by Green, Crystal

  He let her climb into the cab, turn the keys that he’d left in the ignition and take off without him, even though all the fencing equipment he’d bought at the mercantile was still in the back.

  Was she so angry at him that she wasn’t thinking straight? He let her go, hardly blaming her.

  Making his way back to town, he got his cell phone out of his pocket so he could call the ranch for a ride. But as he reached for his cell, his hand brushed the pocket watch Annette had given him as a thank-you gift.

  Just like a watch Tony would’ve worn.

  He held it in his hand as he stopped walking, seeing Annette’s face in the shine of the cover, seeing her smile.

  Seeing what could’ve been.

  * * *

  Annette couldn’t feel a thing.

  As she parked Jared’s truck outside her condo, she barely remembered even driving there because she’d been in such a clouded, numbed state.

  It wasn’t so much that Jared had a sordid past—he obviously had been tearing himself up about it for years, and she knew without a doubt that he had it in him to redeem himself. It was that he didn’t have enough faith in her to stay by his side as he dealt with his problems.

  Didn’t he know that she was stronger than that?

  Hadn’t she grown up a lot herself during the past several months?

  She knew that she had, but it was sad that Jared hadn’t noticed. Or that he didn’t care to.

  She got out of the truck, easing to the ground, and once she had locked it, she stared at the keys dangling from her hand.

  A tremble rumbled in the middle of her chest. Was it...laughter? Heck, why not? She had stolen Jared’s truck and left him stranded beside the road near town. She had ditched a baby shower like some madcap idiot and would have to apologize to Rita for not coming back.

  It was all so ridiculous. It was...

  As the laughter shook her, it turned to tears—great, racking sobs that forced her to lean against the truck, crying her heart out.

  She loved him, and it tore her apart to not be loved back.

  Was it that hard for someone to treasure her as her mom had treasured her dad? What was wrong with her that she kept being thrown back into the single-girl pond?

  She didn’t know how long she cried, but by the time she was done, her head had unclouded slightly, and she brought out her disposable phone to send a quick, efficient text message to Jared.

  Your keys are under my front doormat.

  And that was all. Half of her wanted to say sorry for snaking his truck, but he was the one who should be apologizing, not her.

  Even so, she hoped that he was safe. It wasn’t as if St. Valentine was crime-ridden or frightening at night, and Jared could handle himself, but...

  She dropped the thought, heading for her condo. It took her longer than she thought to get there, though, because a neighbor stopped her under the glow of a walkway lamp.

  “Evening, Annette,” said Mr. Bandy, who lived a couple condos down. He was a bank loan officer in New Town who favored checkered sweater vests, Dockers and loafers.

  “Hi, Mr. Bandy.” She resisted the temptation to wipe at her eyes. They were swollen from crying, so why bring attention to that?

  He seemed not to notice. “Big plans for Valentine’s Day tomorrow?”

  Oh, wow. How had she forgotten?

  Her chest constricted. “I’m just having a quiet night in,” she said.

  “I thought you and your boyfriend might be having some kind of romantic dinner, then digging up more of the land out back. What’re you looking for anyway?”

  She’d had a feeling that neighbors had been talking about Jared’s out-of-the-ordinary activity, and there was no reason to lie about it. “He’s on an artifact hunt of sorts. This used to be Tony Amati’s ranch, so he thought—”

  “A history buff,” Mr. Bandy said. “Say no more. He’s sure devoted, though, isn’t he? But why not, when he’s the spitting image of Tony?”

  Mr. Bandy said good-night, and Annette watched him go back to his condo. Talking about Jared had made things worse instead of better. Would it always be that way?

  She wandered toward her door, shutting off her phone and going inside to a lonely home.

  It was a long night, full of tossing and turning, and when she woke up in the late morning, after sleeping in, the first thing she checked while still dressed in the oversize sweater and sweatpants she’d slept in was her welcome mat outside the door.

  The truck keys were gone.

  Annette slowly closed the door. Jared hadn’t used his spare key to come in. Did that mean she’d pushed him away for good?

  But then she remembered her phone, and she turned it on.

  When it dinged, she checked her in-box. There was a text from Jared.

  Her breathing quickened when she saw other texts come through, indicating how long the message was.

  Last night, I almost let myself in with the spare key you gave me, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I figure you’ll let me know when it’s fitting for me to see you again, so I can tell you what a mistake I made when I let you go. I should’ve chased you down. I don’t want to let you go, Annie.

  She sank against the inside door frame, needing something to hold her up. Her knees had gone rubbery, her throat tender and raw.

  At least some time alone gave me an opportunity to put my thoughts together. My own thoughts this time, not Tony’s, and not from anyone else’s journal.

  For so long, I never thought much of myself. Maybe I’m wrong about that, though, because I recall being happy as a kid, when my parents were around. It was after they died, when I was already at the lowest I could be, that I found the letter about the adoption. That’s no excuse for what I’ve done to my daughter and to you and the baby, Annie, but I needed to say it now, while I can.

  I hope I’ve been clear with you, because I can’t live without you—and it isn’t just because I’m trying to make up for the way I treated my daughter. Tony never was clear with the woman he loved. I don’t want to run out of time like it seems he did.

  I want you in my life, Annie. I want your little girl in it, too. It’s up to you as to whether you’ll have me.

  She kept the phone out, even as the glow of the screen dimmed. It was up to her, he’d said.

  Did she trust him enough for her to stay? Or would she be another runaway would-be bride?

  The sound of her doorbell clanged through her, and she started. Her heart was in her throat.

  She was so excited, believing that Jared had come back, that she didn’t look through the peephole, and she opened the door, her smile taking her over.

  But when she saw who it was, her breath caught in her chest, tightening, choking.

  She tried to close the door, but before she could, he stopped her.

  “Don’t, Annette,” he said, pushing it open. “You’ve got to let me in.”

  She gripped her phone, paralyzed by fear as she looked into Brett Cresswell’s eyes.

  * * *

  After Jared had sent the text to Annette last night, he’d slept with the phone by his bed.

  He couldn’t really call it “sleeping,” though, because he hadn’t gotten in a damned wink. And when she hadn’t returned the message, he had forced himself to go about his business this morning, not caring if it was Valentine’s Day, not caring that he had the day off and could spend it however he wanted to.

  He only yearned to be with her, coddling her and the baby, showing her that he was going to be a changed man.

  His own man.

  At least, that was how he’d started off the day, showering, preparing to find something to do with himself while he waited for a sign from Annette.

  When he’d gotten a phone call, he’d jumped at
it.

  But it hadn’t been Annette on the other end.

  “Jared,” said Davis Jackson.

  It was right then that Jared knew something big was going down, so Jared had gone to the newspaper office again. This time, though, Violet was there with her husband.

  What they had told Jared this morning was enough to send him straight over to Gran’s house, where he knocked on the door and waited for her to answer.

  When she did, she apparently realized there was something amiss, and she invited him in to her family room and to sit on the same couch he’d sat on all those times he’d asked her about his roots.

  He hunched over, his hat next to him on the cushion as he peered up at the delicate old woman on the chair nearby, her hands gripping the armrests.

  “Tony’s name was really Sean Mullaney,” Jared said. “He wasn’t even Italian, even though he could pass for it. He was Irish, and he changed his name and heritage when he came out West because he had to. Then again, you knew that, didn’t you, Gran?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  He let out a long breath.

  “Don’t be disappointed in me, Jared,” she said. “The family always promised never to let the truth out of our family.”

  “And I’m not part of your family?”

  “Don’t say that.” She raised her finger. “The moment I saw you on my doorstep, looking so much like Tony, I realized that this was it—the time we’d all been fearing—and I was the only person left to stand for what pride my husband had in his family until his dying day. I had hoped you would just drop all those questions you had about Tony, and I thought you eventually would. You kept saying you weren’t sticking around here for very long.”

  “So you wondered why I should know everything if it seemed that I wasn’t really going to be a part of the family?”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought at the time.”

  He girded himself for the answer to his next question. “If I’d have told you that I wanted to stay around St. Valentine, would you have told me all about Tony?”

  “I would’ve gotten around to it. But maybe I’m a lot like you—lacking in the trust other people come by so easily.”

  His birth mom had done a lot of damage to both of them—he was sure of it. She’d taught them to be extra careful, to always guard yourself, no matter how much you wanted to be a part of someone, as Gran no doubt genuinely did with him.

  He just hadn’t given her much reason to.

  “Then can we set things to rights now?” he asked.

  She gave him a weighted glance, and he added, “Family’s honor, Gran. I already know more than you wanted me to, and I won’t say a word to the reporters about anything you tell me.”

  She took his promise seriously. “Understand, Jared, that we were protecting Tessa and Tony. She was on her deathbed when she revealed the truth to my husband, her son, and made him promise to keep it to ourselves. She only wanted to relieve her soul before she passed—and she wanted my Richard to know about his real father. She believed Tony was the best of men, even if she found out the truth about him on the night he died.”

  Something Annette had said to Jared last night haunted him. How many more secrets do you have? And what kind of damage are they going to cause?

  Come to find out that Tony’s secrets had caused plenty in the end.

  Good God, why hadn’t Annette returned his text? He wanted to tell her he understood now, that he wanted to get on with their life before fate took it away, just as it obviously had with Tony and Tessa.

  But he hadn’t heard a word from her yet.

  Would he ever?

  Gran had started to talk again. “From what Tessa told your grandfather, Tony really had been a Texas Ranger. He used to entertain Tessa with his adventures on the border, and she used to think of him as such a hero. At the end of his career, he was wounded by a bullet, and he eventually found himself without a job or a badge. It was the late twenties, and like a lot of others, he went to the big city looking for work.”

  “Chicago,” Jared said. Davis and Violet had confirmed as much today, based on what they’d found out by contacting some historians and interviewing descendants of a few main players in this story. “Tony got caught up with Bugs Moran and liquor running.”

  “Tessa said he ran liquor because he needed the money for a sick mother.”

  Jared waited until Gran met his gaze again. “Davis and Violet told me about the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, too. They got a hold of a hidden eyewitness account that said Tony was definitely one of the men in that warehouse, but he made it out before the bullets started flying.”

  Until someone had ended up killing Tony in this St. Valentine.

  Jared was at the point where the story didn’t do much of anything to him anymore. The numbness of knowing that Tony wasn’t a hero at all had settled in like shrapnel that had hit him hard and buried itself near his heart.

  Now there were just more questions, and one of them kept dogging Jared.

  In spite of the promises he’d made to Annette, would he revert back to his lineage? Would all the bad blood he had come boiling up again?

  Gran wouldn’t know that, though.

  “I don’t get why Tony would name this town after something that almost killed him,” he said, getting back on track.

  Gran shrugged. “Tessa said that Tony had a wild streak. He hid it well after he bought land and struck oil down here and became Mr. Respectable, but it was there. You could say he was even hiding in plain sight, and a perverse side of him was daring anyone who knew that he’d gotten away to come and find him on his own terms and his own territory. He was cocky with a gun, being a former Ranger. He didn’t have much fear, and he probably never dreamed that it would turn out the way it did after he met Tessa.”

  “The sheriff’s daughter.”

  “Yes. I don’t think he ever thought he’d fall in love at all, much less with the daughter of a lawman. He was planning on spending his life in solitude. But then they saw each other at the spring picnic, after the sheriff was hired on.”

  Jared could imagine how Tony had felt. He had been the same when we he had spotted Annette working at the diner on the day that had changed his life.

  He thought of Tony’s journal entries, his confessions of “terrible sins.” He knew what those were now, but it really hit hard because, like Jared, Tony had a woman who’d brought him out of his darkness.

  Wasn’t there hope for Jared then?

  “All along,” Jared said, “I knew Tessa was the woman in Tony’s journal. After a time, Davis and Violet seriously suspected it, too, but they didn’t want to publish it without confirmation.”

  When they’d told Jared this, he had been stunned that they’d kept it a secret. Yet the reporters were pros for a reason: they’d taken Jared’s resemblance to Tony and put it together with Gran’s heritage and wanted proof before going public.

  How long would it take everyone else in town to shout out the obvious? Surely a lot of others would suspect it, too, just as soon as more people caught wind that Jared had a maternal grandma just out of St. Valentine.

  Gran said, “Outside of a DNA test from you, how will the Jacksons have enough proof to run a story about Tessa and Tony?”

  “They’re debating what to do from this point on, but I think they truly want Tony to remain a good guy. At least, I’m hoping so.”

  “Well, that’s a blessing because a day did come when Tony was found by Capone’s men. Al never liked his strings to be left loose.”

  This was the reason Jared had come to Gran. Davis and Violet hadn’t known the details of Tony’s death, and he held his breath, hoping, praying that he would hear something that would give him a reason to think people could change.

  That Tony had lived up to every word
of that journal.

  “Two hired killers came to town,” Gran said. “They blended in, identifying Tony as Sean Mullaney, watching his daily routines, noticing that he couldn’t keep his gaze off the sheriff’s daughter when she strolled down the boardwalk with her friends.

  “Tony made them, though, but just before he confronted them, one of the assassins sneaked into the Hadenfield house, taking Tessa hostage and calling for Tony to surrender so they could wrap up one of Al’s ‘loose ends.’ He’d been jailed for income tax evasion by then, but that didn’t stop him from giving orders from his cell.”

  Jared couldn’t move. “They threatened her?”

  “At gunpoint. And they told her all about the ‘Irish pig’ and his past, just to degrade Tony. She was made of steel, though, and she didn’t break. She yelled at Tony to run away, but he didn’t.”

  Something blipped within Jared. Hope?

  Gran smiled, tears in her eyes. “He went into that house and tried to save her, but they got him first. He died in front of Tessa just as the sheriff barged in with his deputy and took the killers out.”

  It was as if something burst inside of Jared, and he pushed back at his own pulsing emotions.

  Gran said, “The sheriff’s office whitewashed the entire incident, calling it a break-in. That’s what the papers reported. And when it became obvious that Tessa was pregnant, he sped up her engagement to her fiancé. Joseph was a good friend of the sheriff’s, older, a widower, and they passed off Tessa and Tony’s son, your grandfather, as their own. It turned out that her husband couldn’t have children, so he raised Richard with a lot of love.”

  Jared thought of Tony’s last request in his journal, which must’ve ended just before the killers had come to town.

  Bury me next to her...

  “Where is Tony really buried, Gran?”