Maggie's Dad by Diana Palmer Read Free Book Online Page A

Rutherford Bighorn Ranch had been his favorite. He’d escaped a lot of the censure and spared Antonia some of it, especially when he exiled himself to France. But Antonia and her father and mother got the whole measure of local outrage. Denial did no good, because how could she defend herself against knowing glances and haughty treatment? The gossip had hurt her mother most, leaving her virtually isolated from most of the people who knew her. She’d had a mild heart attack from the treatment of her only child as a social outcast. Ironically that had seemed to bring some people to their senses, and the pressure had been eased a bit. But Antonia had left town very quickly, to spare her mother any more torment, taking her broken heart with her.
    Perhaps if Powell had thought it through, if the wedding hadn’t been so near, the ending might have been different. He’d always been quick-tempered and impulsive. He hated being talked about. Antonia knew that at least three people had talked to him about the rumors, and one of them was the very minister who was to marry them. Later, Antonia had discovered that they were all friends of Sally and her family.
    To be fair to Powell, he’d had more than his share of public scandal. His father had been a hopeless gambler who lost everything his mother slaved at housekeeping jobs to provide. In the end he’d killed himself when he incurred a debt he knew he’d never be able to repay. Powell had watched his mother be torn apart by the gossip, and eventually her heart wore out and she simply didn’t wake up one morning.
    Antonia had comforted Powell. She’d gone to the funeral home with him and held his hand all through the ordeal of giving up the mother he’d loved. Perhaps grief had challenged his reason, because although he’d hidden it well, the loss had destroyed something in him. He’d never quite recovered from it, and Sally had been behind the scenes, offering even more comfort when Antonia wasn’t around. Susceptible to her soft voice, perhaps he’d listened when he shouldn’t have. But in the end, he’d believed Sally, and he’d married her. He’d never said he loved Antonia, and it had been just after they’d become engaged that Powell had managed several loans, on the strength of her father’s excellent references, to get the property he’d inherited out of hock. He was just beginning to make it pay when he’d called off the wedding.
    The pain was like a knife. She’d loved Powell more than her own life. She’d been devastated by his defection. The only consolation she’d had was that she’d put him off physically until after the wedding. Perhaps that had hurt him most, thinking that she wassleeping with poor old George when she wouldn’t go to bed with him. Who knew? She couldn’t go back and do things differently. She could only go forward. But the future looked much more bleak than the past.
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    She went back to work in the new year, apparently rested and unworried. But the doctor’s appointment was still looming at the end of her first week after she started teaching.
    She didn’t expect them to find anything. She was run-down and tired all the time, and she’d lost a lot of weight. Probably she needed vitamins or iron tablets or something. When the doctor ordered a blood test, a complete blood count, she went along to the lab and sat patiently while they worked her in and took blood for testing. Then she went home with no particular intuition about what was about to happen.
    It was early Monday morning when she had a call at work from the doctor’s office. They asked her to come in immediately.
    She was too frightened to ask why. She left her class to the sympathetic vice principal and went right over to Dr. Claridge’s office.
    They didn’t make her wait, either. She was hustled right in, no appointment, no nothing.
    He got up when she