Damn, what Jared would give to slip that pencil out of her hair and watch it tumble down, allowing him to bury his fingers in it. She was like a Nordic princess to him, her rosy cheeks hinting at her obvious youth and telling him that she couldn’t be older than her early twenties. She was tall and slender. Her cheekbones were high, her lips full, her jaw sculpted enough to make him want to trace it.
Yeah. As if that was ever going to happen. Jared had made a career out of keeping a distance, and it’d have to stay that way, especially because he could’ve sworn that he’d noticed an extra curve to her today.
Her belly.
Maybe he was making too much of it, but the bump on Annette had reminded Jared of a series of painful times, like when he’d been awakened late at night by his uncle Stuart, who’d taken him back to his ranch after his parents had died in a freak train wreck.... Like when Jared had, years later, accidently come across a letter in Uncle Stuart’s office from the man he’d thought to be his birth father—a letter mentioning that Jared had been adopted... Like how he’d felt a void after that, leaving the ranch just as soon as he could to travel the rodeo circuit, where he’d found a new family who seemed to understand that sometimes a man liked to keep a distance...
Like how he’d foolishly and quickly gotten married soon afterward. He’d been much too young, much too desperate to fill the emptiness that had spread inside him after he’d found out that he wasn’t who he thought he was.
Most of all, there was the day his ex-wife had told him, You’re going to be a daddy. And in the next breath, It’s too dangerous for a father to be in the rodeo, busting those broncs, Jared....
But he’d loved the rush of those eight seconds on the back of a bucking horse too damned much—it was really the only time he felt full and alive—and he’d argued with her. His attitude had been enough to push Joelle away, into another man’s arms—a good man, just like Tony Amati had been and just like Jared hadn’t.
His selfishness had been enough to let him know that he wouldn’t have made a good dad anyway, so he had let his ex-wife and daughter be because his ex had asked him to do just that.
A man of habit, he’d clung to the rodeo, staying on for a while longer, until he’d been thrown from that last bronc. It was a young man’s sport, and thirty was too old to be competitive. So there he’d been—without a wife, without a child, without the rodeo that had given him some definition. And all he had was the memory of his adopted father’s letter to haunt him.
But when Uncle Stuart had passed on and given Jared the ranch—a property that Jared had sold off—he had succumbed to a curiosity that had nagged him, even as he’d tried to stow it away, and hired a P.I. to find his birth parents.
It’d probably been the second-worst choice of his life.
You shouldn’t have come here.... I don’t even know who your dad is.... I gave you up so I wouldn’t have to see you....
As with most everything else, Jared had stashed the memory of his birth mother far down, to a dark area that he shut nice and tight. Yet something had recently nudged it open a crack—the thought that, if he was related to Tony Amati, the saint of St. Valentine, his mother wouldn’t matter.
He could really start to have something in St. Valentine. To have someone, and with Tony, it would be in the distant way he preferred.
In Tony’s photos, Jared could see the better version of himself, and that’s why he’d stayed in this town—to find out who he was.
Now, from across the counter, Annette glanced behind her. The cook wasn’t at the service window, and when she turned back around, she had a conspiratorial expression on her beautiful face, nodding at the journal.
“Just read it now, would you?” she said.
He didn’t need any more urging, and he turned to the first full page, scanning it eagerly.
Some men keep ledgers of their assets. Some men draw maps of their properties. Some write of their confessions so they might weigh less heavily in the inevitable end.
Though I should probably lift the burden of all my terrible sins from my shoulders within these pages, I...
Jared stopped cold, tripping over three words he hadn’t been expecting.
My terrible sins...
He closed the journal just as Declan appeared in the service window with a plate of food, ringing the bell to signal that Jared’s ham on rye with fries was up.
Annette thanked the cook, then grabbed the plate as he left, sliding it onto the counter as Jared placed the book on his lap, where the counter hid it.
It was obvious that she understood his gesture—she thought that he didn’t want anyone else, like Declan, to see the journal and start asking questions about it. And that’s why he liked Annette—because they didn’t have to talk too much to get each other.
Annette’s gaze shined. “Anything good so far?”
My terrible sins...
Jared shrugged. “I only got halfway down the first page.” And, even now, he wasn’t sure he was going to like what he saw in the rest of the journal. But there was an unidentifiable urge building in him to continue, just like the one that had pushed him to hire the P.I. to find his birth parents.
What did Tony mean by “terrible sins”?
And what if the town reporters, Violet and Davis Jackson, who were so bent on reporting every blamed thing about Tony Amati, found out about all the details before Jared could?
He imagined his ex-wife’s rounded belly before she’d left him, imagined what his daughter might look like today, eleven years old, all knees and elbows and sugar and spice, and he tightened his fingers on the journal. Jared knew what it was like to be utterly devastated by a parent. His birth mom had made him wish he’d never found her. If his own daughter heard about her birth dad and his real family’s “terrible sins,” would she be just as dismayed?
Or worse, would she hardly care?
Letting go of the journal, he told himself it didn’t matter. He’d left well enough alone with his daughter, Melissa, merely sending money to her mom each month. Even if he tried to get in touch with her—as he’d seriously thought of doing out of pure guilt, just after that P.I. had found his birth mother and Jared had hired him to find a few other loose ends—she would be old enough to refuse his phone calls. Old enough to hate him.
Annette cocked her head, reading him. “You look lost, cowboy.”
Why did it sound as if she knew just how lost a person could be?
“Not lost,” he said. Maybe it was time to leave now.
But he didn’t. He stayed planted in his seat, with a slow, wistful Nat King Cole song playing on the sound system, with him longing to tell someone like Annette everything because he’d been holding it all in for so long.
It felt as if they were the only two people in the world, much less the diner.
Still, he couldn’t bring himself to say a word. Why would she give a damn anyway about someone like him—a drifter? A wild card no one really knew?
Annette came out from behind the counter, going to the table where her customers had left their bill and cash and then moving to the register to ring up the sale. “You had a look in your eyes, like you were thinking extra hard. Like you were thinking about disappearing out of here, just like you do most days in your truck, in the opposite direction of your job on the Harrison ranch.”
It was the first time she’d ever gotten remotely into his business, and he found that he didn’t mind it so much.
“Does everyone send out a special bulletin when I even sneeze?”
She