The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

Chapter Three

Well, isn’t this the story of my life? Annette thought as Jared arrived moments before the baby furniture delivery guys wrapped up their business in her condo.

Always with the bad timing.

He was at her open door, stopping at the threshold after the delivery man from a store in New Town carried in a box to the second bedroom.

Jared removed his hat, revealing black hair that was so thick and wavy it made her melt.

“Am I interrupting something?” he asked.

All she could do was shrug. “My delivery was late. I was hoping—”

“That I wouldn’t be here to see this?”

“Pretty much.”

A second delivery man saved her when he came up to her with a slip to sign. When they left, she beckoned Jared all the way inside, took his coat and hat, and put them on her dining table.

Capital A awkward, she thought. She’d scheduled the delivery when she knew the bulk of her neighbors, most of whom had jobs in the more modern New Town, would be at work. And, by now, she’d meant to have all the furniture in the baby’s room shut up tight so Jared wouldn’t see it. When the delivery had been delayed, she hadn’t had a phone number for him to put off his coming over.

But her secret was popping out in the shape of her belly, anyway. She knew she’d been lucky it’d happened later rather than sooner in her pregnancy because she’d been dreading having to face the questions.

Why not start with explaining her pregnancy story to Jared? He was the closest thing she had to a friend in town, which was sad. But it’d been her decision to stay private. She still talked to all her old friends—the ones who hadn’t slept with Brett—on the disposable cell phones she bought. She never told them where she’d gone or that she was pregnant, although she assured them she was happy and safe.

Privacy, she thought. And discretion. She didn’t want to do anything to raise a red flag and encourage Brett to find her.

“So,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her chest. She was wearing a baggy sweater, but she still felt as if every pregnant part of her—from her buxom boobs to her belly—was on display. She’d also read that most women started feeling unattractive once they hit their third trimester, but...well, she’d liked the bigger boobs. And she liked the roundness of her belly, too. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag.”

He stuck his hands in his jeans pockets, and that’s when she knew for certain that he’d already guessed she was pregnant.

“Not to be fresh, but your cat’s becoming pretty obvious,” he said.

“How many people do you think have noticed?”

“I have no idea. But it was just the other day when I thought I saw...” He made a slight curving motion with his hand in front of his belly.

“Ah.” A flush steamed up her face. Either the good people of St. Valentine hadn’t been looking very hard at her or Jared had been...

Well, looking more than anyone.

She almost fanned herself at the very thought. It was nice to be looked at by him, even though she wanted to discourage it.

“Pardon me for asking,” he said, “but why do you care if everyone finds out?”

Oh, goody, here it went. The big-league lies.

The words rushed out. “I was seeing the baby’s father when I got pregnant, but he passed away before he ever knew.” Liar. “I came here to start over.”

That was definitely the truth.

Even so, Jared was frowning, as if she’d tripped up in her story already and he’d caught onto the snag.

Did the man have a built-in BS detector or something?

He surprised her by circling around the hundred other questions he could’ve asked, but she could tell the subject was still on his mind.

“It looked as if some of that baby stuff needs assembly,” he said.

“I thought I’d take care of that today while you were in the backyard. I want to start arranging the baby’s room before it gets too hard to move around at all.”

“I’ve got time enough to help out.”

But he didn’t move. Instead, he peered around her condo, as if taking in the details that she was so reluctant to give out to anyone.

What did he see in the sparse furnishings, like the sofa and the curtains she’d bought at a secondhand store in New Town? Or the retro pop prints—the Andy Warhol–inspired panel art featuring old-school starlets—she’d seen in a boutique window and which were now hanging on her walls?

Actually she had splurged on those because she hadn’t been able to afford much after leaving the wedding. She’d cut up her credit cards early on, avoiding a paper trail. All she’d been able to do when she’d left Brett was make a quick trip to the bank and empty what she had in her account, which had been meager at best.

Yes, money had always been modest in the Olsen household.

Until she’d met Brett and fallen for him.

Without waiting for Annette to give the go-ahead, Jared brazenly went for the baby’s room, his boot steps heavy on the carpet.

His take-charge attitude sent that thrill through her again, but she banished it. Brett had been a real I’ll-take-care-of-this guy, too, and with every footstep she heard, the reminder was stamped into her.

She followed Jared into the second bedroom, which showed hints of the baby who would make this place into a real home in a short time. A Thumper wall hanging was the first decoration she’d purchased out of her initial waitressing paycheck, and she’d bought something small each time afterward: a mobile that was sitting in the corner and waiting for a crib to dangle over, a pile of soft blankets, a rocking chair she’d found at a yard sale a month ago. She’d finally had enough money to get the real big stuff just last week, and she planned to buy even more when she could afford to after putting aside a chunk of funds for medical bills and maternity leave.

Jared was standing in the midst of the baby paraphernalia, completely out of place, just like Gulliver in Lilliput.

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.”

“You got a mind of your own at college.”

“I did. My mom was really into art, and among other things, she’d given me an appreciation for it, too. So I majored in art history, maybe to feel close to her more than anything, since her death was still pretty fresh, then decided that I wanted to work with children through the arts.” She stopped, and brought her explanation back on topic. “Anyway, I started to date other men—regular guys, some who didn’t have a penny to their name. But, what do you know, I finally met someone my mother would’ve highly approved of.”

Much to Annette’s surprise, Jared went ahead and fixed the drape canopy over the bassinet—something that she had expected him to save for her. “He was Mr. Right. Right?” he said.

“Ultimately, I came up with a few other choice names for Brett besides ‘Mr. Right,’ but at that point, I thought that’s what he was. The perfect man for me. He was charming, could talk for hours about what we both enjoyed and he was friendly to everyone. His family just happened to be rich, and he was a star athlete. He courted me in a whirlwind, and when he proposed, I said yes.”

Jared slowly fixed the ruffled skirt to the bottom of the bassinet. “Then you got pregnant.”

He had that tone of voice again—almost as if he was mired in something so deep and thick that he couldn’t make his way out of it.

Almost as if, once upon a time, he’d had his heart torn out of him just as thoroughly as hers had been.

As Jared waited for her to answer, he stood and parted the drape canopy of the bassinet. With every piece of baby furniture he’d seen today there came figments of imagination—a little girl in this frilly cradle, in the bath, in the room where Annette’s child would soon be coddled by Bambi blankets and with as much love as a mother could give.

But that baby would have only half of a family, just as he’d made sure his own girl had, before she’d found a whole one with another man.

He’d never seen Melissa in those cute baby outfits with footsies attached to them. He’d never given her a bath. He hadn’t even been there when she was born because that had been the role of her new father, and Jared had stayed away, knowing that he wasn’t welcome. And knowing that he didn’t even deserve any part in her life, after he’d chosen his one true love—the rodeo—over everything else.

So why had he stuck around here today, putting things together for Annette if it was so painful?

The answer was easy: he kind of liked that he knew her secret and that he was even a teeny, helpful part of this baby’s life, putting together his or her first furniture.

It even made him feel as if, for a fantasy-filled moment that would never materialize, he was a kind of family man who had atoned for his mistakes.

Maybe that’s why he’d started tossing questions Annette’s way when he’d never done much of that before.

“Didn’t your fiancé want the baby?” he asked now as he rested his hand on the rim of the bassinet. “Why would he have married you if he didn’t want a family?”

“I never told him about the baby.” Annette slid down the wall until she came to the shag carpet, seeming exhausted just at the thought.

Jared wanted to pull her close to him, ease his hand down the hair that she’d worn long today. Even in her khaki pants and loose sweater, she still possessed that higher-class vibe that had struck him much earlier. Now he knew the reason.

If he’d thought she was out of his league before, there was no denying it now. To think—a rodeo bum and a woman who had an art history degree.

What a pair.

“Why didn’t you tell him about the pregnancy?” he asked.

“I was going to. I thought he’d be just as happy as I was, but then...” She shook her head. “I took the pregnancy test right before the wedding ceremony. I hadn’t done it before because everything was in such chaos—dress fittings, last-minute details, rehearsal dinners. By the time the big day rolled around, I realized that... Well, I had an idea something was different about me.”

He supposed she’d missed her period and was just too much of a lady to say it in front of him.

“Then what happened?” he asked.

“I ignored what everybody always says about keeping the bride and groom away from each other before the ceremony. It’s supposed to be bad luck if you see one another at that point, right? But I rushed to his dressing room, anyway.” She fidgeted with the edge of her sweater. “He wasn’t alone.”

Jared tensed up.

Annette noticed. “I see you guessed it. I wasn’t the only member of the bridal party who was saying ‘I do’ that day. And the worst part of it was that she was a friend. A good one, I thought.”

“Annette...”

“No, don’t be sad for me.” She tugged down the sleeves of her sweater, wrapping her hands in them, making her appear more soft and vulnerable. “Something came over me at that moment, just as she was fixing her dress and he was telling her to get out. I knew deep down that I could never love him after that. I felt stupid because I’d never even guessed he’d do something so awful.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“Okay, maybe ignorant is the better word because I never had all the information I needed about him. Looking back, I should’ve known that he was staying out late for more than oil company meetings with his family. Or that he was taking midnight calls in his study from more than business partners. Maybe I didn’t want to believe anything was wrong and I ignored the details.”

Jared couldn’t believe any man could be so idiotic as to play a woman like Annette. But maybe Casey, his ex-wife’s husband, had thought something similar about him.

Annette said, “I called the wedding off then and there. Turns out that Brett didn’t have the same conclusion in mind.”

“He wanted to go through with it, even after that?”

“Yes. He actually tried to justify himself. He told me that his father had been doing it for years and his mom didn’t seem to mind. ‘Everyone does it,’ he said. It was all very Kennedy-esque.” She laughed shortly. “Then there was the topper—he tried to apologize for me seeing him in the act.”

It struck Jared that she had a maturity that went beyond her years. Maybe that came with the class she carried, even in a small-town waitressing uniform.

“I imagine,” Jared said, “that you put him in his place.”

“I did.” Her face went pink, but she didn’t add any more.

Something about her reaction made a protective streak flash through him, but when she got to her feet before he could go over to help her up, he realized that Annette didn’t need any help from anyone.

And that was fine by him, seeing as how knowing this much about her lent him a sense of responsibility that hadn’t been there before. It was a strange feeling for a man who’d never wanted any of it in his life.

She strolled over to the bassinet, just as if she hadn’t revealed anything about herself to him. “You did a great job. Thank you so much for everything.”

“It was nothing.” But that wasn’t true. This afternoon had been something.

When she smiled up at him, it was as if his bones turned to hot water, which was apt considering that, if he got too much deeper into her, that’s what he’d be in.

Hot, scalding, bubbling water that was likely to strip him bare.

“You have that journal with you?” she asked.

“It’s in my coat pocket.”

“Mind if I read it while you see to the garden?”

“Not at all.” He absently stroked the whiskers on his chin. “There’s something I was going to mention about that garden, though.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid I’ll make a mess of it.”

She widened her gaze. “How much of a mess?”

“A mess that might have me repotting and replanting.”

She didn’t answer for a moment, and he saw his chances at finding any more Tony Amati relics circling a drain. He even wondered if he should start knocking on her neighbors’ doors to see if they wouldn’t mind a stranger making a disaster zone out of their own backyards.

But a second later, she was smiling at him again. “Your peace of mind is far more important than some herbs. Dig away.”

Jared never tolerated big shows of emotion, but he definitely felt a victorious inner fist pump inside of him now.

“Great. Thanks, Annette.” He had the grace to seem sheepish. “Truth is, I have pots and tools from Gran’s in the back of my truck already.”

Her eyes sparkled, just as they did when they were in the diner across the counter from each other. But this time, there was no barrier between them, and his heart started doing a panicked, stimulated dance.

“You can predict what I’ll do that easily?” she asked.

He managed a small laugh because she was leaning closer to him.

And when she was just inches from him, he thought—no, he wished—that she would stand on her toes to plant a kiss on his cheek. The very idea seemed to shine in her eyes.