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

  FROM DRIFTER TO DADDY?

  Minutes before saying “I do,” Annette Olsen realized her mistake and bolted—a wedding gown in her trunk and a baby in her belly! In St. Valentine, she found the perfect place to start over…until a handsome drifter blew into her diner, setting the town abuzz with gossip and her heart aflutter with impossible dreams.

  Jared Colton wanted only to find his ties to the town’s legendary founder and move on through. But something about Annette got to him. Maybe it was the secrets she kept, or her tender touch, or how much she needed him. Or maybe it was the spark of longing her kiss awakened in his soul. Either way, Jared found himself wishing for what had eluded him—a family, with Annette and a baby he’d claim as his own….

  Hay and musk… Cowboy and all man.

  She inhaled the scent of him, not stopping to think how crazy it was being a heartbeat away from kissing Jared Colton, the town cipher.

  When his lips brushed hers, she groaned at the burst of electricity that sizzled in her veins. She dropped her hot-chocolate mug to the ground, and heard Jared do the same with his, just before he made a low sound in his throat, then cupped her face in his palms, deepening the kiss.

  It was everything a first kiss should be, and a wave of yearning swept over Annette. Good and bad, because she didn’t want this to stop, even though she knew it should.

  There was something about Jared that made her throw caution to the wind, to forget about how she’d gotten to St. Valentine and why. To forget that she barely knew a thing about him.

  All she knew was that she could stay there all night, in his arms.…

  Dear Reader,

  I wish St. Valentine, Texas, really existed, because I would love to stroll down the Old West boardwalks. I would love to have tea at the St. Valentine Hotel, too, and maybe even stay the night to meet some of its supposed ghosts! Mostly, I would love to meet the heroes and heroines of the books: Violet and Davis, Rita and Conn…and now Jared and Annette.

  Yes, Jared is a lost soul, and Annette is running from her own problems. But they have true grit as they solve the mystery that started in book one about cryptic town founder Tony Amati. Love changes everyone, especially these two as they come together in the end. :)

  If you like contests, you should stop by my website, www.crystal-green.com, and see what’s cooking. Also, I’m now on Twitter at @CrystalGreenMe, so I’d love it if you said hi to me there, as well!

  All the best,

  Crystal Green

  The Cowboy’s Pregnant Bride

  Crystal Green

  Books by Crystal Green

  Harlequin Special Edition

  §§The Texas Tycoon’s Baby #2124

  ‡‡Courted by the Texas Millionaire #2188

  ‡‡Daddy in the Making #2219

  ‡‡The Cowboy’s Pregnant Bride #2241

  Silhouette Special Edition

  *The Black Sheep Heir #1587

  The Millionaire’s Secret Baby #1668

  †A Tycoon in Texas #1670

  ††Past Imperfect #1724

  The Last Cowboy #1752

  The Playboy Takes a Wife #1838

  ~Her Best Man #1850

  §Mommy and the Millionaire #1887

  §The Second-Chance Groom #1906

  §Falling for the Lone Wolf #1932

  ‡The Texas Billionaire’s Bride #1981

  ~~When the Cowboy Said I Do #2072

  §§Made for a Texas Marriage #2093

  §§Taming the Texas Playboy #2103

  Harlequin Blaze

  Innuendo #261

  Jinxed! #303

  “Tall, Dark & Temporary”

  The Ultimate Bite #334

  One for the Road #387

  Good to the Last Bite #426

  When the Sun Goes Down #472

  Roped In #649

  Silhouette Romance

  Her Gypsy Prince #1789

  Silhouette Bombshell

  The Huntress #28

  Baited #112

  *Kane’s Crossing

  †The Fortunes of Texas: Reunion

  ††Most Likely To…

  ~Montana Mavericks: Striking It Rich

  §The Suds Club

  ‡The Foleys and the McCords

  ~~Montana Mavericks: Thunder Canyon Cowboys

  §§Billionaire Cowboys, Inc.

  ‡‡St. Valentine, Texas

  Other titles by this author available in ebook format.

  CRYSTAL GREEN

  lives near Las Vegas, where she writes for the Harlequin Special Edition and Blaze lines. She loves to read, overanalyze movies and TV programs, practice yoga and travel when she can. You can read more about her at www.crystal-green.com, where she has a blog and contests. Also, you can follow her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/people/Chris-Marie-Green/1051327765 and Twitter

  at www.twitter.com/ChrisMarieGreen.

  To the hardworking staff of the Knight Agency. Each one of you is a treasure. Thanks for everything!

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  When Annette Olsen saw the dark cowboy walk into the Orbit Diner, her heart rate nearly spiked through the roof.

  And it wasn’t only because he was a tall drink of water, dressed all in black from his worn boots to his jeans, to the belt with the shiny rodeo championship buckle, to his Western shirt and hat that tilted over his brow.

  No, even though the enigmatic Jared Colton was enough to put steam into any woman’s steps, Annette had been waiting for the man to stop by for his frequent early lunch because, oddly enough, she had come across something she was sure he was going to want.

  She smiled at her only customers as she finished checking on them. “Just let me know when you’re ready to pay up.” Then she headed for the counter and ultimately the back room before Jared could sit in his usual stool by the glass-domed pies.

  “Fancy seeing you here,” she said lightly, passing right by him.

  When his dark-eyed gaze lit on her, her pulse gave a brutal jerk. But she stilled it, as she always did.

  It wasn’t like she had much of a choice, not if she wanted to keep a sense of privacy and stay as far under the radar as she’d been doing these past months.

  He gave her one of those lopsided grins of his, a boon that not many others in St. Valentine ever saw, probably because Annette never got into the quiet cowboy’s business or asked him too many questions about why he had stayed around St. Valentine for so long.

  She could appreciate a person with secrets, she thought. After all, she had more than enough herself.

  “I thought I’d surprise everyone by varying my lunch routine,” he said. “I’m impulsive that way.”

  She laughed at his facetiousness, and he did, too. His hat still rode low, giving a slight shadow to the rest of his face, but she could tell that he was running a look over her. The slow brush of tingles down her body didn’t lie.

  Before she could stop he
rself, she rested a hand over her belly, which she’d been trying to hide with a baggier waitress uniform.

  She was seven months along, her belly just now popping, and she was trying so hard to keep anyone from knowing. Not yet, at least, because that was when people would start asking about the father.

  Had Jared been looking hard enough at her to notice a weight gain? Was he about to ask a million questions that she’d been avoiding ever since she’d come to this town months ago, dirt flying out from under her tires, her wedding dress crumpled in a heap in the trunk of her Pontiac?

  If her pulse had been jogging before, it was definitely racing now as she kept waiting for Jared to say something.

  Anything.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, Annette heard the fifties-flavored Valentine’s-inspired music playing low over the ceiling speakers, heard her only other customers telling her that they’d left cash for their bill and her tip on the table, then the dinging bell as they exited the diner.

  Absently, she lifted a hand in goodbye to them, then turned her attention back to Jared.

  But all he did was reach for the nearby heart-decorated tin bucket that held all the napkin-wrapped silverware.

  If there was anyone else in St. Valentine who understood how precious privacy could be, it was Jared Colton. He’d proved it time and again while keeping to himself after wandering into town shortly before she had, just as much of a cipher as she tried to be, then turning his back on anyone who tried to poke into his reasons for being here.

  Even though everyone did have a good idea just why Jared had stuck around.

  Her gaze wandered to the hand-drawn pictures hanging above the service window: renderings playfully showing the town’s past in the late 1920s and the stoic faces of the townspeople, including one who was a dead ringer for the cowboy sitting in front of her.

  Was Jared related to Tony Amati, St. Valentine’s upstanding town founder? If so, then why hadn’t he admitted it to anyone?

  She brushed off the questions, then went behind the Formica-topped counter. It would provide cover for her tummy, even if it was getting too far along to hide.

  He was unwrapping his silverware, and when he merely said, “It’ll be the usual for me today,” she almost sank against the counter in pure relief. So he hadn’t seen her swelling belly—or, at least, he wasn’t about to comment on it.

  But how long would that last?

  After she signaled to the ponytailed, hippy-goateed cook behind the service window for “the usual,” she fetched a glass, filled it with ice and cola, then gave it to Jared. She propped her foot on a step stool that she’d recently put under the counter to take some of the weight off her feet.

  “I’ve got your usual,” she said. “And I suppose you expect service to be extra special because you were such a big shot in the rodeo.”

  A shadow seemed to pass over him, yet it disappeared quickly enough.

  He glanced around the diner, which was painted in turquoise and looked as if it’d been decorated by the Jetsons when they were in a hearts-and-flowers mood, then changed the subject whip-quick. “Apparently, I came during a lull today.”

  All right. So she’d already found out that he was a champion subject-changer months ago. But she had also done her fair share of avoiding a lot of topics ever since she’d left behind what’s-his-name.

  Okay, his name was Brett. She might as well take some power back from him and just say his damned name.

  Brett the Turd. Turdy Brett. Brett Turdwell. She had a thousand names for him.

  “This lull is a nice rest,” she said. “We’ve been on fire around here lately.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It’s amazing how many tourists can be attracted by a good mystery like Tony Amati’s unsolved death.” Violet and Davis Jackson, the owners of the town’s small paper, had uncovered Tony’s odd, unresolved demise months ago, after Jared had appeared in St. Valentine and excited everybody’s interest with his doppelganger looks. The reporters had been after him for interviews, but he never gave any to them.

  He took a drink, then said, “You know, every time I turn on the TV I see St. Valentine and Tony Amati. It’s all over the place.”

  “And that’s exactly what Violet and Davis want. So does the chamber of commerce, especially shortly before the Valentine’s Day Festival.” Annette only hoped that the town wouldn’t get too much of a profile.

  She couldn’t afford it.

  Subtly, she skimmed a hand over her stomach. I’m going to make sure no one knows where we went.

  “One would think,” she said, “that you don’t like watching those profiles about Tony and St. Valentine.”

  He didn’t say anything, just took another drink of soda, as secretive as ever.

  “Okay, Mr. Strong but Silent,” she said, grinning a little, “I guess you wouldn’t be interested in something I dug up about Tony Amati this morning, then, would you?”

  Now he put the cola down.

  Gotcha.

  With a tiny shrug, she went to the back room and dipped her hand in the patchwork purse she’d bought at some dime store back when she’d stocked up on cheap clothing and necessities with the only cash she’d had on hand before lucking into this job. She came out with a rectangular metal box wrapped in bulky oilcloth.

  By the time she returned to Jared, he’d tipped his hat back so that she could see all of his face, which might not be considered handsome as much as strong and manly, with a square chin set off with a slight cleft and an eternal five o’clock shadow covering his lantern jaw and his cheeks. He had the type of nose that you’d see on Roman statues and the same type of body, too—hard and muscular, with a strength that made adrenaline fly through her veins.

  But that’s how she’d felt when she’d first met Brett, too—the all-American college quarterback and youngest son of the oil-rich Tulsa Cresswell family.

  The man who’d raised a hand to her on their wedding day before she’d left him to eat her dust.

  She put the package on the counter, but Jared merely stared at it.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “It won’t bite.”

  Still, he glanced at her as if it might do just that. “What is it?”

  “A brand-new car. I was in a giving mood when I bought it.”

  That got a chuckle out of him.

  Out of patience, Annette unwound the material from around the box, then opened it. She unwrapped more oilcloth from the contents and presented him with the final product.

  He looked at the journal, with its hard-crusted covers sandwiching the yellowed, swollen pages.

  Annette put it on the counter again. “I like to do some gardening. It’s a calming thing, but...well, that’s not what you want to hear, is it? What matters is that I was digging deep to loosen the soil in a part of the yard I hadn’t been using when I hit something in the dirt.”

  “This,” he said.

  “A journal. And I peeked inside, just to see what it was, but when I got a load of Tony Amati’s name written on the front page...”

  “It’s...Tony’s?”

  The question was infused with a quality she’d never heard from this man before—almost a hopeful vulnerability.

  Had she and the rest of the townsfolk been wrong about him? Did he have more than a passing interest in Tony Amati?

  She lowered her voice, even though Declan the cook was busy in the kitchen, judging from the faint noise of pots and pans. “I rent one of the condominiums they built on Tony’s old ranch property, and I suppose he buried this journal at some point. Who knows why? It could give a reason in that journal, but I didn’t have time to read it before work to find out. I’m curious like you wouldn’t believe, but I thought maybe you should have the honor of looking at it first—”

  Jared gra
sped the book in his big hands and opened it, just as if he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life.

  * * *

  The first thing Jared saw was a fine scrawl of semi-blurred ink on the front page.

  Amati.

  And that’s all it said. That’s all it had to say in this town because everyone knew who Tony Amati was, even though no one seemed to have known him well.

  He’d been a former Texas Ranger who’d struck oil in the late 1920s, founded St. Valentine and acted as a patron to those who needed jobs. A man who’d lived alone, shut away on his ranch. A taciturn guy who’d died without much more fanfare than a dutiful obituary in the local paper.

  Ever since Jared’s initial glimpse of Tony Amati’s picture in the Queen of Hearts Saloon months ago, he’d known that he’d finally found what he’d been looking for all these years—roots, a possible identity.

  Maybe even family?

  But Jared had no proof of that, just a suspicion, based on the similarity of his and Tony’s faces. After he’d left the rodeo circuit (too old and broken to be busting broncs after he’d tweaked his back during a tumble) and after he’d drifted from ranch to ranch and job to job for three years afterward (too ornery to be content in one place), he hadn’t known where he was going or why. Yet, for once, Tony had given him a reason to linger.

  He rested his fingertips on the first page, right by Tony’s last name. He smiled.

  Annette’s soft voice floated to him. It was a sound that never failed to stir Jared, whether that was a good thing or not.

  “Are you going to read it right now?” she asked.

  “I could.”

  He looked up at her, and she grinned at him, her deep blue eyes sending those same swirls of heat from his chest to his belly. God, she was a sight, even in a pink waitress uniform and white apron. It was as if she didn’t belong in a diner—she seemed too well-bred for it for some reason he couldn’t put his finger on. She had a way of carrying herself that made him think more of champagne parties and diamond rings than coffee and flatware.