The Cowboy's Pregnant Bride

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“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.

Or maybe that’s just what he wanted to see there.

His pulse seemed to fill the slight space between them.

Bang, bang. Each sound echoed against her, then right back at him, hitting him hard in the chest, the belly.

But then she blinked, as if she were coming out of a spell, and he did, too, barring his chest with his arms out of a lack of any better response.

She laughed, cutting the tension, and started to walk out of the room. But then she turned back, her voice a bare, nearly shaking whisper, as if she’d suddenly realized that she shouldn’t have told him a thing about herself.

“Jared, Brett doesn’t know where I am.”

That protective streak reared up again. Good God. She’d run away from Brett?

She was watching him closely. “You’re going to keep my secret, just like I’ll keep the one about Tony’s journal, right? Because I’m going to have to lie to the rest of this town. I don’t want Brett to ever find me.”

That vulnerability he’d only now discovered in her clutched at his rarely used heart, and he couldn’t help giving himself over to her, just this once.

His voice was as quiet as hers when he said, “I won’t say a word.”

Chapter Four

As the clouds parted to reveal a splash of afternoon sun, Jared tipped back his hat and got to his haunches, surveying the garden.

And the mess.

He’d started near the white picket fence, which lined the little concrete patio and herb-spotted patch of dirt that Annette called a backyard. It’d been obvious where she’d been digging when she’d come upon the journal—almost right up against the fence itself, near a dying butterfly bush that she’d told Jared she wanted to take out. It seemed that, when the fence had been put in, the workers had just missed hitting Tony’s journal with the posts.

So Jared had started there.

Yup, he’d been honest with Annette when he’d said he was going to do some damage, far more honest than he’d been a couple of hours ago, when he’d told her, I don’t know a thing about what it’s like to have a child.

All the time he’d been working, the lie had stabbed at him. But why should he feel compelled to spill his guts to her just because she’d done it for him when she’d talked about her ex-fiancé?

Maybe it was because, even now, years after Jared had left his daughter behind, the guilt still weighed heavy on him. Could that be the reason a part of him wished he could unburden himself to someone?

He wouldn’t do it, though. Couldn’t. Especially to Annette because he couldn’t stand to think of the look she’d probably give him if she found out that he was just as immoral a man as her ex-fiancé had been in a lot of basic ways.

Behind him, the screen door slid open. He didn’t have to turn around to know Annette was there because he could feel her presence, tickling his back like the soft touch of fingers over skin.

“Hungry yet?” she asked.

He brushed off all the heaviness that’d been perched on his shoulders. “You planning on rewarding me with food for tearing up your backyard?”

She laughed. “After you taste my food, I’m not sure you’ll be calling it a reward.”

He finally looked over his shoulder. She was still wearing that simple white baggy sweater over khaki pants, but it was enough to send his libido pumping. It seemed that all she had to do to turn him on was appear.

And if that wasn’t a dangerous thing, he didn’t know what was.

Standing, he brushed off his jeans with his glove-covered hands. “I’m sure your cooking is good.”

“I’m no Top Chef, but I’m no bottom one, either. Why don’t you just take a break and see for yourself?”

Smiling, she stood aside as he stripped off the gloves, dropped them to the patio, then moseyed toward her and the condo. While he wiped his boots on a fake-grass mat with a plastic daisy blooming in the corner, he tried not to let the smell of her hair get to him. Was it lilies?

Once inside, the aroma of her meal took over, and he went to the washroom, taking care not to make an even bigger mess than he already had outside as he soaped off the dirt and got himself halfway presentable. He even doffed his Resistol, hanging the hat on a hook on the back of the bathroom door, for lack of a better idea.

Just before he left, he caught sight of himself in the mirror, and he quashed the urge to run his fingers through his dark hair to wrangle it into some kind of style.