Heartbreaker

by Diana Palmer

  “Uncle J.B. isn’t conventional,” Dawn reminded her mother. “He had that football team cheerleader staying at his house for almost a month. And his new girlfriend was a runner-up Miss Texas, and she spends weekends with him…”

  Tellie’s hands were shaking. Dawn grimaced and looked at her mother helplessly.

  Dawn got up and hugged Tellie from behind. “I’m sorry, Tellie,” she said with obvious remorse.

  Tellie patted the hands around her waist. “Just because I’m a hopeless case, doesn’t mean you have to walk on eggshells around me,” she assured the younger woman. “We all know that J.B. isn’t ever going to get married. And even if he did, it would be some beautiful, sophisticated—”

  “You hush,” Marge broke in. “You’re pretty. Besides, it’s what’s inside that counts. Beauty doesn’t last. Character does.”

  “Her stock phrase,” Brandi said with a grin. “But she’s right, Tellie. I think you’re beautiful.”

  “Thanks, guys,” Tellie murmured.

  She went back to her task, and the conversation became general.

  The next day Grange came right up to Tellie’s desk and stood staring down at her, wordlessly, until she was forced to look up at him.

  “They say that you live with J. B. Hammock’s sister, Marge,” he said.

  She was totally confounded by the question. She stared at him blankly. “Excuse me?”

  He shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “I didn’t come to Jacobsville by accident,” he said, glancing around as Justin came out of his office and gave him a faint glower. “Have lunch with me,” he added. “It’s not a pass. I just want to talk to you.”

  If it was a line, it was a good one. “Okay,” she said.

  “I’ll pick you up at noon.” He tipped his wide-brimmed hat, nodded toward Justin, and went back out to the feedlot.

  Justin went straight to Tellie. “Trouble?” he asked.

  “Well, no,” she said. “He wants to talk to me about Marge, apparently.”

  His eyebrows arched. “That’s a new one.”

  “He was serious. He wants me to have lunch with him.” She grinned. “He can’t do much to me over a hamburger in town.”

  “Good point. Okay, but watch your step. Like I said,” he added, “he’s an unknown quantity.”

  “I’ll do that,” she promised.

  Barbara’s Café in town was the local hot spot for lunch. Just about everybody ate there when they wanted something home cooked. There were other places, such as the Chinese and Mexican restaurants, and the pizza place. But Barbara’s had a sort of Texas atmosphere that appealed even to tourists.

  Today it was crowded. Grange got them a table and ordered steak and potatoes for himself, leaving Tellie to get what she wanted. They’d already agreed they were going Dutch. So he must have meant it, about it not being a date.

  “My people were all dead, and Marge and J.B. took me in,” Tellie said when they’d given their orders to the waitress. She didn’t add why. “I’ve known the Hammocks since I was a child, but I was fourteen when I went to live with Marge and her girls. She was widowed by then.”

  “Are you and J.B. close?” he queried, placing his hat in an empty chair.

  “No,” she said flatly. She didn’t elaborate. She started to get the feeling that it was not Marge he wanted information on.

  His dark eyes narrowed as he studied her. “What do you know about his past?” he asked.

  Her heart jumped. “You mean, generally?”

  “I mean,” he added with flaming eyes, “do you know anything about the woman he tried to marry when he was twenty-one?”

  She felt suddenly cold, and didn’t know why. “What woman?” she asked, her voice sounded hoarse and choked.

  He looked around them to make sure they weren’t being overheard. He lifted his coffee cup and held it in his big, lean hands. “His father threatened to cut him off without a cent if he went through with the wedding. He was determined to do it. He withdrew his savings from the bank—he was of legal age, so he could—and he picked her up at her house and they took off to Louisiana. He was going to marry her there. He thought nobody could find them. But his father did.”

  This was fascinating stuff. Nobody had said anything to her about it, certainly not J.B. “Did they get married?”

  His face tautened. “His father waited until J.B. went out to see about the marriage license. He went in and talked to the woman. He told her that if she married J.B., he’d turn in her brother, who was fourteen and had gotten mixed up with a gang that dealt in distribution of crack cocaine. There had been a death involved in a drug deal gone bad. The boy hadn’t participated, but he could be implicated as an accessory. J.B.’s father had a private detective document everything. He told the woman her brother would go to prison for twenty years.”

  She grimaced. “Did J.B. know?”

  “I don’t know,” he said uncomfortably. “I came here to find out.”

  “But what did she do?”

  “What could she do?” he asked curtly. “She loved her brother. He was the only family she had. She loved Hammock. She really loved him.”

  “But she loved her brother more?”

  He nodded. His whole face clenched. “She didn’t tell Hammock what his father had done. She did tell her father.”

  “Did he do anything?”

  “He couldn’t. They were poor. There was nothing he could do. Well, he did get her brother to leave the gang when she killed herself. It was all that saved him from prison.”

  She was hanging on his every word. “What about the woman?”

  “She was already clinically depressed,” he said in an odd monotone, toying with his fork, not looking at her. He seemed to be far away, in time. “She knew that she could never be with Hammock, that his father would make sure of it. She couldn’t see any future without him.” His fingers tightened on the fork. “She found the pistol her brother had hidden in his room. She shot herself. She died instantly.”

  The iced tea went all over the tablecloth. Tellie quickly up-righted the glass and grabbed at napkins to mop up the flow. Barbara, seeing the accident, came forward with a tea cloth.

  “There, there, we all spill things,” she told Tellie with a smile. “Right as rain,” she added when she’d mopped the oilcloth-covered table. “I’ll bring you a new glass. Unsweetened?”

  Tellie nodded, still reeling from what Grange had told her. “Yes. Thanks.”

  “No problem,” Barbara said, smiling at them both as she left.

  “You really didn’t know, did you?” Grange asked quietly. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. It’s not your fault.”

  She swallowed, hard. It all made sense. Why J.B. never got serious about a woman. Why he refused to think of marriage. He’d had that death on his conscience all his life, when it wasn’t even his fault, not really. It was his father’s.

  “His father must have been a horror,” she said unsteadily.

  Grange stared at her. “Have been?” he queried.

  She nodded. “He died in a nursing home the year I moved in with Marge,” she said. “He’d had a stroke and he never fully recovered from it. It left him in a vegetative state. J.B. paid to keep him in the facility.”

  “And the old man’s wife?”

  “She died long before I lived with Marge. I don’t know how.”

  He looked odd. “I see.”

  “How do you know all this?” she wondered.

  “Her brother is a friend of mine,” he told her. “He was curious about the old man. I needed a job, and this one at the feedlot came available. I like Texas. It was close enough that I could find out about old man Hammock for him.”

  “Well, now you know,” she said, trying not to let the trauma show in her face.

  He frowned. His hard face went even harder. He stared down into his coffee cup. “I didn’t realize it would have such an impact on you.”

  “J.B. is like an older brother to me,” she told him,
lying through her teeth. “But nobody ever told me why he plays the field like he does, why he won’t consider ever getting married. I thought he just liked being a bachelor. I guess he blames himself for what happened, don’t you think?” she added, surprising an odd look on Grange’s face. “Even though it was his father who did the real damage, J.B. surely realized that if he’d never gotten mixed up with the poor woman, she’d still be alive.”

  He winced. “You don’t pull your punches, do you?”

  “It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she added thoughtfully.

  “So he doesn’t want to get married,” he said after a minute.

  She nodded. “He has lots of girlfriends. The new one was a runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant.”

  He didn’t even seem to be listening. He finished his steak and sat back to sip cold coffee.

  Barbara came around with Tellie’s new glass of tea and the coffeepot. She warmed Grange’s in his cup.

  “Thanks,” he said absently.

  She grinned at him. “No problem. You’re new here, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” he confessed. “I work for Justin and Calhoun, at the feedlot.”

  “Lucky you,” she said. “They’re good people.”

  He nodded.

  She glanced at Tellie. “How’s Marge?”

  There was something in the question that made Tellie stare at her. “She’s fine. Why?”

  Barbara grimaced. “It’s nothing, really.”

  “Tell me,” Tellie persisted. It was her day for learning things about people she thought she knew.

  “Well, she had a dizzy spell the last time she ate lunch here. She fell into one of the tables.” She sighed. “I wondered if she ever had a checkup. Just to make sure. I never knew Marge to have dizzy spells.”

  “Me, either,” Tellie said, frowning. “But I’ll find out,” she promised.

  “Don’t tell her I told you,” Barbara said firmly. “She can light fires when she’s mad, just like J.B.”

  “I’ll ask her gently, I promise,” Tellie said, smiling. “She won’t get mad.”

  “If you do, you’ll eat burned hamburgers forever,” Barbara told her.

  “That’s just mean,” she told the older woman, who grinned and went back to the kitchen.

  “Well, it’s your day for revelations, apparently,” Grange observed.

  “I don’t think I know anybody anymore,” she agreed.

  “Listen, don’t tell Hammock’s sister about any of this,” he said suddenly. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just wanted to find out what became of the old man.” His eyes darkened. “I suppose J.B. knew what his father did?”

  “I have no way of knowing,” she said uneasily.

  He put cream into his hot coffee. He drew in a long breath. “I’m sorry if I shattered any illusions.”

  He had. He’d just put the final nail in the coffin of her dreams. But that wasn’t his fault. Tellie always felt that people came into your life for a reason. She forced a smile. “I don’t have illusions about J.B.,” she told him. “I’ve seen all his bad character traits firsthand.”

  He searched her green eyes. “One of the boys said you’re in college.”

  She nodded. “I start master’s work in the fall.”

  “What’s your subject?”

  “History. My field is Native American studies. I hope to teach at the college level when I finally get my master’s degree.”

  “Why not teach grammar school or middle or high school?” he wondered.

  “Because little kids walk all over me,” she said flatly. “Marge’s girls had me on my ear the first six months I lived with them, because I couldn’t say no. I’d make a lousy elementary school teacher.”

  He smiled faintly. “I’ll bet the girls loved you.”

  She nodded, smiling back. “They’re very special.”

  He finished his coffee. “We’ll have to do this again sometime,” he began, just as the café door opened and J.B. walked in.

  J.B.’s eyes slithered over the patrons until he spotted Tellie. He walked to the table where Tellie and Grange were sitting and stared down at Grange with pure venom. His eyes were blistering hot.

  “What are you doing here in Jacobsville?” he asked Grange.

  The other man studied him coolly. “Working. Tellie and I are having lunch together.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” J.B. replied, and he’d never sounded more menacing.

  Grange sipped coffee with maddening calm. “So the old man did finally tell you what happened, did he?” he asked with a sudden, piercing glance. “He told you what he said to my sister?”

  J.B.’s big fists clenched at his side. He aged in seconds. “Not while he was alive. He left a letter with his will.”

  “At least you had time to get used to the idea, didn’t you?” Grange asked icily. “I found out three weeks ago!” He forced his deep voice back into calmer channels and took a deep breath. “Care to guess how I felt when my father finally told me, on his death bed?”

  J.B. seemed to calm down himself. “You didn’t know?” he asked.

  “No,” Grange said harshly. “No, I didn’t know! If I had…!”

  J.B. seemed suddenly aware of Tellie’s rapt interest and he seemed to go pale under his tan. He saw her new knowledge of him in her paleness, in her suddenly averted face. He looked at Grange. “You told her, didn’t you?” he demanded.

  The other man stood up. He and J.B. were the same height, although Grange seemed huskier, more muscular. J.B. had a range rider’s lean physique.

  “Secrets are dangerous, Hammock,” Grange said, and he didn’t back down an inch. “There were things I wanted to know that I’d never have heard from you.”

  “Such as?” J.B. asked in a curt tone.

  Grange looked at him openly, aware that other diners were watching them. His shoulders moved in a curious jerk. “I came here with another whole idea in mind, but your young friend here shot me in the foot. I didn’t realize that you were as much a victim as I was. I thought you put your father up to it,” he added tautly.

  Tellie didn’t know what he meant.

  J.B. did. “Things would have ended differently if I’d known,” he said in a harsh tone.

  “If I’d known, too.” Grange studied him. “Hell of a shame that we can’t go back and do things right, isn’t it?”

  J.B. nodded.

  “I like working at the feedlot, but it’s only for a few months,” he said. “If it helps, I’m no gossip. I only wanted the truth. Now I’ve got it.” He turned to Tellie. “I shouldn’t have involved you. But I enjoyed lunch,” he added quietly, and he smiled. It changed his dark eyes, made them deep and hypnotic.

  “Me, too,” she said, flushing a little. He really was good-looking.

  Grange shrugged. “Maybe we can do it again.”

  She did smile then. “I’d like that.”

  He nodded at J.B. and left them to go to the counter and pay for his meal. J.B. sat down in the chair Grange had vacated and looked at Tellie with mingled anger and concern.

  “Don’t worry, J.B., he didn’t spill any state secrets,” she lied as she sipped tea. “He only said your father had done something to foil a romance years ago, and he wanted to know how to get in touch with the elder Mr. Hammock. He said he wanted to know for a friend of his.” She hoped he believed her. She’d die if he realized she knew the whole terrible secret in his past. She felt sick at her stomach, imagining how he must feel.

  He didn’t answer her. He glanced at Grange as the younger man left the café, and then caught Barbara’s eye and ordered coffee and apple pie.

  Tellie was trying not to react at the surprise of having coffee with J.B., who’d never shared a table in a restaurant with her before. Her heart was beating double-time at just the nearness of him. She had to force herself not to stare at him with overt and visible delight.

  Barbara brought coffee. He grinned at her and she grinned back. “Dating in shifts t
hese days, huh, Tellie?” she teased.

  Tellie didn’t answer. She managed a faint smile, embarrassed.

  J.B. sipped his coffee. He never added cream or sugar. Her eyes went to his lean, darkly tanned hands. There was a gold cat’s-eye ring on his left ring finger, thick and masculine, and a thin expensive watch above it on his wrist. He was wearing a lightweight gray suit with a cream Stetson. He looked expensive and arrogant, and seductive.

  “I don’t like the idea of your going out with that man,” J.B. told her curtly.

  “It wasn’t a date, J.B., it was just lunch,” she said.

  “It was an interrogation,” he corrected. “What else did he want to know?”

  She knew she’d never get away with lying. “He wanted to know about your father,” she said.

  “What about him?”

  “If he was still alive. I told him he wasn’t. That was all.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Not much,” she returned. She searched his green eyes. They were troubled and stormy. “Just that a friend had asked him to find out about your father, over some romance of yours that went bad years ago. He didn’t say anything specific,” she added without looking at him. He usually could tell when she was lying.

  His face tautened as he looked at her. “I never meant anyone to know about what happened except Marge and me,” he said tightly.

  “Yes, I know, J.B.,” she replied, her voice weary and resigned. “You don’t share things with outsiders.”

  He frowned. “You’re not an outsider. You’re family.”

  That, somehow, made things even worse. She met his eyes evenly. “You sent Jarrett out to get my graduation present. You’d never do that to Marge or the girls. And you lied about being at the graduation exercises. You were in the office with some businessman and his daughter. I gather that she was a real looker and you couldn’t tear yourself away,” she added with more bitterness than she realized.

  His eyes almost glowed with anger. “Who told you that?”

  “I took classes in ESP in college,” she drawled facetiously, and with a bite in her voice. “What does it matter how I know? You lied to me!”

  His indrawn breath was audible. “Damn it, Tellie!”