Heartbreaker (7 page)

He glared at her. “My love life is none of your business.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she retorted. “It’s everybody’s business. You were in a tabloid story just last week, something about you and the living fashion doll being involved in some sleazy love triangle in Hollywood…”

“Lies,” he shot back, “and I’m suing!”

“Good luck,” she said. “My point is, I date a nice man who hasn’t hurt anybody…”

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He let out a vicious curse, interrupting her, and moved closer, towering over her. “He was Special Forces in Iraq,” he told her coldly, “and he was brought up on charges for excessive force during an incursion! He actually slugged his commanding officer and stuffed him in the trunk of a civilian car!”

Her eyes widened. “Did he, really?” she mused, fascinated.

“It isn’t funny,” he snapped. “The man is a walking time bomb, waiting for the spark to set him off. I don’t want him around you when it happens. He was forced out of the army, Tellie, he didn’t go willingly!

He had the choice of a court-martial or an honorable discharge.”

She wondered how he knew so much about the other man, but she didn’t pursue it. “It was an honorable discharge, then?” she emphasized.

He took off his white Stetson and ran an irritated hand through his black hair. “I can’t make you see it, can I? The man’s dangerous.”

“He’s in good company in Jacobsville, then, isn’t he?” she replied. “I mean, we’re like a resort for ex-mercs and ex-military, not to mention the number of ex-federal law enforcement people…”

“Grange has enemies,” he interrupted.

“So do you, J.B.,” she pointed out. “Remember that guy who broke into your house with a .45

automatic and tried to shoot you over a horse deal?”

“He was a lunatic.”

“If the bullet hadn’t been a dud, you’d be dead,” she reminded him.

“Ancient history,” he said. “You’re avoiding the subject.”

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“I am not likely to be shot by one of Grange’s mythical old enemies while watching a science-fiction film at the local theater!” Her small hands balled at her hips. “The only thing you’re mad about is that you can’t make me do what you want me to do anymore,” she challenged.

A deep, dark sensuality came into his green eyes and one corner of his chiseled mouth turned up. “Can’t I, now?” he drawled, moving forward.

She backed up. “Oh, no, you don’t,” she warded him off. “Go home and thrill your beauty queen, J.B., I’m not on the market.”

He lifted an eyebrow at her flush and the faint rustle of her heartbeat against her tank top. “Aren’t you?”

She backed up one more step, just in case. “What happened to you was…was tragic, but it was a long time ago, J.B., and Grange wasn’t responsible for it,” she argued. “He was surely as much a victim as you were, especially when he found out the truth. Can’t you imagine how he must have felt, when he knew that his own actions cost him his sister’s life?”

He seemed to tauten all over. “He told you all of it?”

She hadn’t meant to let that slip. He made her nervous when he came close like this. She couldn’t think.

“You’d never have told me. Neither would Marge. Okay, it’s not my business,” she added when he looked threatening, “but I can have an opinion.”

“Grange was responsible,” he returned coldly. “His own delinquency made it impossible for her to get past my father.”

“That’s not true,” Tellie said, her voice quiet and firm. “If I wanted to marry someone, and his father tried to blackmail me, I’d have gone like a shot to the man and told him…!”

The effect the remark had on him was scary. He seemed to grow taller, and his eyes were terrible. His deep, harsh voice interrupted her. “Stop it.”

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She did. She didn’t have the maturity, or the confidence, to argue the point with him. But she wouldn’t have killed herself, she was sure of it. She’d have embarrassed J.B.’s father, shamed him, defied him.

She wasn’t the sort of person to take blackmail lying down.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, his eyes furious. “You’d never sacrifice another human being’s life or freedom to save yourself.”

“Maybe not,” she conceded. “But I wouldn’t kill myself, either.” She was going to add that it was a cowardly thing to do, but the way J.B. was looking at her kept her quiet.

“She loved me. She was going to have to give me up, and she couldn’t bear to go on living that way. In her own mind, she didn’t have a choice,” he said harshly. He searched her quiet face. “You can’t comprehend an emotion that powerful, can you, Tellie? After all, what the hell would you know about love? You’re still wrapped up in dreams of happily ever after, cotton-candy kisses and hand-holding!

You don’t know what it is to want someone so badly that it’s physically painful to be separated from them. You don’t understand the violence of desire.” He laughed coldly. “Maybe that’s just as well. You couldn’t handle an affair!”

“Good, because I don’t want one!” she replied angrily. He made her feel small, inadequate. It hurt. “I’m not going to pass myself around like a cigarette to any man who wants me, just to prove how liberated I am! And when I marry, I won’t want some oversexed libertine who jumps into bed with any woman who wants him!”

He went very still and quiet. His face was like a drawn cord, his eyes green flames as he glared down at her.

“Sorry,” she said uneasily. “That didn’t come out the way I meant it. I just don’t think that a man, or a woman, who lives that permissively can ever settle down and be faithful. I want a stable marriage that children will fit into, not an endless round of new partners.”

“Children,” he scoffed.

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“Yes, children.” Her eyes softened as she thought of them. “A whole house full of them, one day, when I’m through school.”

“With Grange as their father?”

She gaped at him. “I just went to a movie with him, J.B.!”

“If you get involved with him, I’ll never forgive you,” he said in a voice as cold as the grave.

“Well, golly gee whiz, that would be a tragedy, wouldn’t it? Just think, I’d never get another present that you sent Jarrett to buy for me!”

His breath was coming quickly through his nose. His lips were flattened. He didn’t have a comeback.

That seemed to make him angrier. He took another step toward her.

She backed up a step. “You should be happy to have me out of your life,” she pointed out uneasily. “I was never more than an afterthought anyway, J.B. Just a pest. All I did was get in your way.”

He stopped just in front of her. He looked oddly frustrated. “You’re still getting in my way,” he said enigmatically. “I know that no matter what Marge may have said, she and the girls were disappointed that you missed the barbecue. It’s the first time in seven years that you’ve done that, and for a man who represents as much hurt to Marge herself as he does to me.”

She frowned. “But why? She never knew Grange!”

“You told her what my father did,” he said deliberately.

She grimaced. “I didn’t mean to!” she confessed. “I didn’t want to. But she said it wouldn’t matter.”

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“And you don’t know her any better than that, after so long in her house? She was devastated.”

She felt worse than ever. “I guess it was rough on you, too, when you found out what he’d done,” she said unexpectedly.

His expression was odd. Reserved. Uneasy. “I’ve never hated a human being so much in all my life,” he said huskily. “And he was dead. There was nothing I could do to him, no way I could pay him back for ruining my life and taking hers. You can’t imagine how I felt.”

“I’m sure he was sorry about it,” she said, having gleaned that from what Marge had said about the way he’d treated J.B. “You know he’d have taken it back if he could have. He must have loved you, very much. Marge said that he would have been afraid of losing you if he’d told the truth. You were his only son.”

“Forgiveness comes hard to me,” he said.

She knew that. He’d never held any grudges against her, but she knew people in town who’d crossed him years ago, and he still went out of his way to snub them. He didn’t forgive, and he never forgot.

“Are you so perfect that you never make mistakes?” she wondered out loud.

“None to date,” he replied, and he didn’t smile.

“Your day is coming.”

His eyes narrowed as he stared down at her. “You won’t leave Grange alone. Is that final?”

She swallowed. “Yes. It’s final.”

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He gave her a look as cold as death. His head jerked. “Your choice.”

He turned on his heel and stalked out of the room. She watched him go with nervous curiosity. What in the world did he mean?

Marge was very quiet at breakfast the next day. Dawn and Brandi kept giving Tellie odd looks, too.

They went off to church with friends. Marge wasn’t feeling well, so she stayed home and Tellie stayed with her. Something was going on. She wondered what it was.

“Is there something I’ve done that I need to apologize for?” she asked Marge while they were making lunch in the kitchen.

Marge drew in a slow breath. “No, of course not,” she denied gently. “It’s just J.B., wanting his own way and making everybody miserable because he can’t get it.”

“If you want me to stop dating Grange, just say so,” Tellie told her. “I won’t do it for J.B., but I will do it for you.”

Marge smiled at her gently. She reached over and patted Tellie’s hand. “You don’t have to make any such sacrifices. Let J.B. stew.”

“Maybe the man does bring back some terrible memories,” she murmured. “J.B. looked upset when he talked about it. He must…he must have loved her very much.”

“He was twenty-one,” Marge recalled. “Love is more intense at that age, I think. Certainly it was for me.

She was J.B.’s first real affair. He wasn’t himself the whole time he knew her. I thought she was too old for him, too, but he wouldn’t hear a word we said about her. He turned against me, against Dad, against the whole world. He ran off to get married and said he’d never come back. But she argued with him. We never knew exactly why, but when she took her own life, he blamed himself. And then when he learned the truth…well, he was never the same.”

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“I’m sorry it was like that for him,” she said, understanding how he would have felt. She felt like that about J.B. At least, she thought, she wasn’t losing him to death—just to legions of other women.

Marge put down the spoon she was using to stir beef stew and turned to Tellie. “I would have told you about her, eventually, even if Grange hadn’t shown up,” she said quietly. “I knew it would hurt, to know he felt like that about another woman. But at least you’d understand why you couldn’t get close to him.

You can’t fight a ghost, Tellie. She’s perfect in his mind, like a living, breathing photograph that never ages, never has faults, never creates problems. No living woman will ever top her in J.B.’s mind. Loving him, while he feels like that about a ghost, would kill your very soul.”

“Yes, I understand that now,” Tellie said heavily. She stared out the window, seeing nothing. “How little we really know people.”

“You can live with someone for years and not know them,” Marge agreed. “I just don’t want you to waste your life on my brother. You deserve better.”

Tellie winced, but she didn’t let Marge see. “I’ll get married one of these days and have six kids.”

“You will,” Marge agreed, smiling gently. “And I’ll spoil your kids the way you’ve spoiled mine.”

“The girls didn’t look too happy this morning,” Tellie remarked.

Marge grimaced. “J.B. had them in the kitchen helping prepare canapés,” she said. “They didn’t even get to dance.”

“But, why?”

“They’re just kids,” Marge said ruefully. “They aren’t old enough to notice eligible bachelors. To hear J.B. tell it, at least.”

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“But that’s outrageous! They’re sixteen and seventeen years old. They’re not kids!”

“To J.B., you all are, Tellie.”

She glowered. “Maybe Brandi and Dawn would like to go halves with me on a really mean singing telegram.”

“J.B. would slug the singer, and we’d get sued,” Marge said blithely. “Let it go, honey. I know things look dark at the moment, but they’ll get better. We have to look to the future.”

“I guess.”

“The girls should be home any minute. I’ll start dishing up while you set the table.”

Tellie went to do it, her heart around her ankles.

If she’d wondered what J.B. meant with his cryptic remark, it became crystal clear in the days that followed. He came to the house to see Marge and pretended that Tellie wasn’t there. If he passed her on the street at lunchtime, he didn’t see her. For all intents and purposes, she had become the invisible woman. He was paying her back for dating Grange.

Which made her more determined, of course, to go out with the man. She didn’t care if J.B. snubbed her forever; he wasn’t dictating her life!

Grange discovered J.B.’s new attitude the following Saturday, when he took Tellie to a local community theater presentation of Arsenic and Old Lace. J.B. came in with his gorgeous blonde and sat down in the row across from Tellie and Grange. He didn’t look their way all night, and when he passed them on the way out, he didn’t speak.

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“What the hell is wrong with him?” Grange asked her on the way home.

“He’s paying me back for dating you,” she said simply.