Heartbreaker by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

popped the bullets out on the floor. I screamed…”

    “You thought he’d hit me,” she agreed, smiling. “But I knew better. J.B. would never hit a woman, not even if he was stinking drunk. Which he was, of course.”

    “You led him off to bed and stayed with him all night. The next morning he carried you into the living room where I was, and laid you out on the sofa under an Afghan. He looked very funny. When I asked him why, he said it was the first time in his life that he’d ever had a woman take care of him. Our mother wasn’t domestic,” she added quietly. “She was never very nurturing. She was a research chemist and her life was her work. Housekeepers raised J.B. and me. It was almost a relief for Dad, and us, when she died. I did admire her,” she added. “She did a socially beneficial job. A dangerous one, too. She was working with a terrible virus strain, looking for a cure. One day in the lab, she stuck a needle, accidentally, into her hand through her rubber glove and died. I was sorry, and I went to the funeral. J.B.
    wouldn’t go and neither would Dad. They said she deserted all of us for her job.”

    “That sounds like him,” Tellie agreed.

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    “J.B. never stopped fussing about the way you took care of him,” she recalled on a laugh. “But then he’d lose his temper when you weren’t around to do it. He was furious when you spent your summer vacations with those friends at Yellowstone National Park.”

    “I had a good time. I miss Melody. She and I were wonderful friends, but her parents moved overseas and she had to go with them.”

    “I don’t think I have one friend left in Jacobsville, from my school days,” Marge recalled.

    “What about Barbara?”

    “Oh. Yes. Barbara.” She chuckled. “She and that café. When we were girls, it was what she wanted most of all, to own a restaurant.”

    “It’s a good one.” Tellie hesitated. “Now, don’t get angry, but she’s worried about you,” she added.

    “Me? Why?”

    “She said you had a dizzy spell.”

    Marge frowned. “Yes, I did. I remember. I’ve had two or three lately. Odd, isn’t it? But then, I’m prone to migraine headaches,” she added carelessly. “You get all sorts of side effects from them. In fact, I see fireworks and go blind in one eye just before I get one. The doctor calls them vascular headaches.”

    Tellie frowned. “Why? Does blood pressure cause them?”

    Marge laughed. “Not in my case, honey. I have the lowest blood pressure in two counties. No, migraine runs in my family. My mother had them, and so did her mother.”

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    “I’ll bet J.B. doesn’t have them,” Tellie mused.

    “That’s a fact,” came the laughing reply. “No, he doesn’t get headaches, but he certainly gives them.”

    “Amen.”

    Marge went back to her piecing. “Maybe it’s just as well that you know all about J.B. now, Tellie,” she said after a minute. “Maybe it will save you any further heartache.”

    “Yes,” the younger woman agreed sadly. “Maybe so.”

    Grange didn’t ask her out again, but he did stop by her desk from time to time, just to see how she was.
    It was as if he knew how badly he’d hurt her with the information about J.B.’s past, and wanted to make amends.

    “Listen,” she said one day when he gave her a worried look, “I’m not stupid. I knew there was something in J.B.’s past that, well, that caused him to be the way he is. He never cared about me, except as a sort of adopted relative.” She smiled. “I’ve got three years of college to go, you know. No place for a love life.”

    He studied her quietly. “Don’t end up like him,” he said suddenly. “Or like me. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to trust another human being.”

    Her eyes were sympathetic. He was blaming himself for his sister’s