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 grasped 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.
Sometimes she wore her long, wavy, light blond hair down, the ends brushing the middle of her back. But not today. She’d put her hair in a bun with a pencil stuck out of it.
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...
