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...”