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“What are you doing?” she asked, as he led her into a nearby alley, where no passersby could see them.
“I’m doing what I should’ve done the second you came into my office.”
Here it was—the moment she had known was coming. Why had she thought she could get away with seeing him again without any consequences? All she’d wanted to do was get the awkwardness over with, knowing she was bound to run into him sometime.
“I’m here,” he said, his hands planted on his hips, making him more imposing than she’d ever remembered, “to clear the air, because it sure didn’t happen back there in the office.”
She thought of how Mrs. Jackson, with her crisp red suit and her coiffed, bleached hair, had been waiting for Violet in the library parking lot that day, after one of her trysts with Davis in the woods out back, where it was private. They’d been so intent on keeping their relationship from their families in particular, because her dad, a miner, would’ve flipped, grumbling about selfish, greedy rich people and how Davis would only drop Violet when he was done with her. And Davis’s mom? She was as biased as they came against “the less fortunate.”
Sometimes Vi had even wondered if Davis himself liked to maintain their secret because he was afraid of public opinion, but then she’d tell herself she was crazy, that he was nothing like his mother.
Violet rested against the beaten wood wall, resigned. If he wanted to clear things up, they could do that. It was better than having to tiptoe around him for the next couple of months.
“If you want to rehash everything,” she said, “we can do that.”
“I never got a good answer about why you left.”
All right, then. “When your mom said that this ‘thing’ between you and me wasn’t going to last, she sounded so reasonable about it. She said that it’d be foolish to throw away my scholarship on a summer fling.” Violet took a second, waiting for her runaway heartbeat to catch up, then said, “And when she said you were seeing—”
“Other girls. You know that wasn’t true.” Davis said it with an edge that he tamped down by gritting his jaw, looking away, as if his old anger had been rekindled, undying.
She searched for words, finally finding them. “What do you want me to do now, Davis? What would make you feel better?”
His jaw tightened. “Nothing.”
His gaze was tortured, as if there were a thousand things he wanted to say but wouldn’t.
A vibration—a warmth that whirled and just about took her under—consumed her. She’d tried for so long to never be affected by what anyone in this town thought or said, but here she was, thwarted by that very thing—and it was from the man who’d affected her so acutely all those years ago.
She couldn’t let down her defenses in front of him, especially now, when she needed the protection from what everyone thought or said the most.
Besides, who were they to each other anymore? She knew that he’d moved on—she’d heard stories from her mom, gossip. She’d seen the way Jennifer Neeson had glanced at him, as if they knew quite a bit about each other. He obviously hadn’t shut himself away, heartbroken, because of her.
But he wanted to clear the air.
He exhaled roughly, then started to walk away, even though the air was still as thick as steam.
“You were just as confused as I was that day,” she said on a choked note, stopping him. “I saw it in you. You were hurt that I was questioning you, but all I needed to hear was that you hadn’t looked at another girl since we’d started seeing each other.”
“I thought you already knew that.”
She swallowed, her throat one big ache. “I was a kid, and your mom knew I’d be rattled by what she told me.”
“You should’ve known that you changed everything about me, Vi.”
When she glanced up, she saw more yearning in his eyes.
But then it disappeared.
He adjusted his burgundy silk tie, then started to leave again, as if they had finally knotted up their loose ends.
“I only wanted you to know that,” he said.
She could barely nod.
Then after a pause in which she thought he was going to tell her—what? What could he say now?—he moved out of the alley, turning the corner, out of sight.
But not out of her heart or mind.
Chapter Two
Down the street, Violet heard laughter through the swinging doors of the Queen of Hearts, and she headed for the saloon before she made a fool of herself and went running after Davis.
They’d supposedly cleared the air, so why muddle it again?
She kept telling herself this as she walked inside the building, looking straight ahead, feeling the heavy stares of the group of elderly ladies—the knitting club—who met at the table under the rustic wagon wheel light fixture; the collection of old men at the bar who nursed mugs of beer under the whirring ceiling fans; the just-turned-twenty-one crowd who considered drinking at the Queen of Hearts in Old Town a tradition until they moved on to the newer bars in the more modern part of town.
Violet knew that she should risk a smile at them—after all, she’d be waiting on them for the first time tonight—so she tried it.
They all looked away.
Her face heated as she went to the back room, donning her old-fashioned red-and-white-striped half-apron.
“There she is!” Mom rushed up to Violet, standing on her tiptoes to give her a kiss on the cheek.
She smelled like rose perfume. Violet had always remembered that scent, even when she’d been away. It reminded her of when her mom’s hair had been red, not a premature gray.
“Ready for some Friday night action?” Mom asked.
“I’m hoping for it.” And so was the bank account that had dwindled during the months when she’d relied on it during a job hunt that had never borne fruit. It’d also suffered from the money she’d invested in the saloon after her parents had bought it with the last of their savings, plus all the times she’d put in more money to keep the bar and grill afloat during off-season months.
When her father came in, resplendent in the type of outfit a bartender might’ve worn in the late ‘20s, back when old Tony Amati had settled in what would become St. Valentine, she gave him a great big hug.
“Together again,” he said, patting her on the back.
“I’m glad to be with you,” she said.
He grinned right before he retreated to the main room’s bar and her mom took over in the kitchen.
Smoothing out her apron and inhaling deeply, then exhaling, Violet followed her dad.
People were just starting to trickle in for early-bird dinners, and as Violet took orders, everyone was civil, if not a little cool, to her.
She wished they could see just how much her time away had helped her grow out of the dreamer who’d announced her big aspirations to anyone within range—that she wasn’t merely an arrogant girl who’d thought the town was beneath her.
She was several orders in when Wiley Scott, the former owner and editor of the Recorder, called after her.
“Why, if it isn’t my favorite story chaser!” he said.
“Boisterous as ever,” she said, going over to where he sat at the bar.
They hugged, and if she didn’t know better, she would’ve thought that Wiley was putting out an extra effort to welcome her amid the other cold shoulders.
He held her away from him, giving her a paternal once-over. He was a man who looked far more likely to be at home at a chuck wagon than anywhere else. His silver hair stood up on one side, as if he’d had his hand against that part of his head as he leaned his elbow on the bar.
It was obvious that there was true pride in him as he squeezed her arm. Besides her family, he’d been one of the first people she’d told about the journalism scholarship for the University of California. Such an earned honor didn’t happen to very many miner’s kids in St. Valentine.
“How’re you doing?” she asked.
“I hate retirement. I should’ve never sold the paper to Davis. That’s how I’m doing.”
At the sound of Davis’s name, a tap-tap-tap went off in Violet’s chest. She blushed and hoped Wiley didn’t notice.
“Speaking of which,” he said kiddingly, “I saw you going into the Recorder while I was walking here. You looking for a new job?”
Obviously, her parents hadn’t told him about the layoff yet.
“No.” She fiddled with her ordering pad. “The Times had to cut staff, but something’s bound to come down the pike any time now.” She didn’t add that she hopefully would be back on her feet and in the city long before she even had time to settle at a desk here.
“That’s a real shame, but if anyone can land on all fours, it’s you.” He drained his beer mug. A line of foam clung to his bristled upper lip before he wiped it away with his flannel shirtsleeve. “Too bad you won’t stick around for a place on the Recorder, though. You and Davis made a good team back in the day. I remember how well you two worked together whenever you’d come in to get the school paper printed in the office.”
She thought of standing next to Davis just under a half hour ago, thought of how good he still smelled, like cedar chips, fresh and manly.
Manly. He was a man, no longer a boy, and her body was reacting to that.
She realized it’d been like that, too, back in high school, every time he’d stood close by, leaning over her shoulder while she’d typed up a story.
And she would’ve pretended to ignore him before he’d broken open her emotional dam with one kiss. But, deep down, she would’ve gone weak, her pulse warbling as she wished he would tease her some more. That he would adore her just as much as she did him, even though she would’ve died before admitting it first.
Not that any of it mattered now, even as Wiley gave her a mischievous glance, as if he could tell just what she was thinking.
Obviously, when he’d retired from reporting, he hadn’t left everything behind.
Violet signaled to her dad behind the bar so he’d get Wiley another beer. “Anything else you need?”
He rested a hand on her arm. “Yeah. I need for you to keep that chin up, even as you’re eating humble pie.”
He didn’t have to explain—not when he was sending a loaded look to the rest of the people in the room.
Like her great-aunt Jeanne, Wiley had pumped up all her aspirations. It was just that he hadn’t died and left her with the final advice of Follow your dreams for me, okay? That push had persuaded Violet that she needed to leave this little town and go for it outside someday.
She half smiled at his suggestion. Humble pie. Sounded appropriate for a person who’d returned here temporarily to lick her wounds. But how could she take that first step with everyone, show them that she didn’t hold St. Valentine in contempt as much as they probably thought she did?
Before she could ask Wiley, his gaze widened as he looked at something behind her.
When she turned around, she almost smacked into the wall of a man’s chest.
She looked up into Davis Jackson’s face, his blue eyes unreadable, and her blood began to churn in her veins.
She couldn’t do much more than stare up at Davis, who had loosened the tie from around his neck, giving him a devil-may-care appearance. He’d shocked her with his unexpected presence, and now desire was flaring over her, sending the fine hairs on her arms to standing straight.
She didn’t have to guess what he was seeing in her—her eyes were probably like a fawn in the headlights. And the heat on her cheeks …
Probably couldn’t be more obvious.
As they locked gazes, someone turned on the jukebox, and a Carrie Underwood song brought Violet back to earth.
“Your party’s over?” she asked over the tune as Davis stood by a bar stool next to Wiley.
“I skipped dessert but said my good-nights and closed up the office. The mayor is kindly handling the stragglers in the tents out back.” He glanced around, and a redhead Violet didn’t know gave Davis a look that just about shouted out that he knew her. As in maybe even biblically.
“The night’s still young enough here,” he said, loosening his tie even more as he nodded to the woman. She raised an eyebrow at him then went back to the man she’d been talking to.
Violet was confused. Why had Davis even come to the saloon when he should’ve been avoiding her?
Maybe he was just bent on making some kind of point to her—that he could move on with a social life, and certainly already had.
That had always been his reputation with the girls. But Vi had discovered there was much more to him—a soul filled with longings about the world outside, a boy who missed the father who’d died when he was only four years old.
He was a person who was capable of finding someone to love, even if he seemed to be the last guy who’d ever fall into it….
Wiley got up from his seat, saying something about a trip to the john. Davis hovered, staring down at Vi, even as she tried to avoid his gaze.
She felt it, though, as if he were the only other person in the room. The weight of that stare thrilled her through and through.
“Davis,” she whispered. A warning, slightly panicked because of what he was doing to her—what she couldn’t afford during this temporary detour in her life.
When she finally risked a glance at him, he had that look again—the same fervent one he’d worn after he’d first kissed her all those years ago.
Then it disappeared, as if it’d never happened.
“Whiskey,” Davis said to her, sitting on the stool next to Wiley’s.
He doffed his jacket, leaving her with a view of muscle underneath linen, the hint of tanned skin at his neck.
She tried not to look, even though it was hard not to.
She left him so she could place his order and take care of her other tables, but the entire time she knew he was there, at the bar, watching.
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.
He didn’t know a whole lot of personal stuff about the town founder, and, from the looks of it, there was a whole lot less than Davis had expected to discover about a man who’d been so key to this town’s development.
But, after about an hour of frustration, he finally did uncover something. A tidbit that would require much more research.
An article with the headline: Amati Dies of Unknown Causes.
The text was extremely vague, just an extended obituary about Amati’s love of privacy and his leadership qualities. It was as if Tony’s death hadn’t rocked St. Valentine much at all. Then again, common knowledge had always maintained that he’d died alone, out of the public eye.
When Davis saw another article, planted deep in the back of the same edition, he looked even closer.
Sheriff Kills Burglars in Home.
Davis went over that story, too, yet it offered about as much as Amati’s obituary had.
He didn’t know what it was exactly, but something was poking at him—the “other” sense all reporters relied on.
That nudge-nudge that kept them up at nights.
There wasn’t much else to go on, but it was a mystery Davis decided to pursue in his spare time, between overseeing the next biweekly edition and reporting on preparations for Founder’s Weekend so the story could go out to bigger outlets, hopefully attracting some visitors to St. Valentine in a week.
It’d be just what this town needed … and what he needed for them.
He locked up the office at midnight, spying Mr. and Mrs. Osborne and Violet coming out of the bar and grill down the street.
Was it his imagination when he saw Violet hesitate as they secured the big doors in front of the saloon’s entrance? Was she looking toward the newspaper office because her reporter radar was up and running, too, after meeting the stranger?
Or was she looking down here for a different reason altogether, one that made Davis’s reluctant heartbeat race? Was she just as eager to see him once again as he was her?
As Davis caught Violet’s gaze under the moonlight, he couldn’t move. He was frozen by the hunger for her that had only grown hour by hour, sending him to the Queen of Hearts after his party, even after he’d made it crystal clear that he’d found closure with her.
But had he?
Violet seemed to be under the same spell, unmoving, as her parents headed toward their truck, which was parked in an alley beside the building.
Davis couldn’t stay away, and he moved toward Violet. Standing near their vehicle, her father watched Davis from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat.
“Gary,” Davis said, nodding to him, then greeted his wife, as well.
Andrea Osborne smiled at Davis but her husband merely grunted out Davis’s name. Despite their having worked together to shut down the mine, there was still an avalanche of disappointment there—a father’s hard feelings for the kid who’d broken his daughter’s heart once upon a time.
Davis came to a stand in front of Violet, who was still near the bar’s doorway. His blood sang through him—all he wanted to do was touch her, just as free and easy as they had been in high school.