Heartbreaker Read Online Free PDF Page A

encompassing the circle of girls. “With them. We’re going to explore the woods. Jess says it’s perfectly safe as long as we make lots of noise, so the bears or whatever hear us coming. And as long as we don’t go too far.”
    “Bears?” Lynn asked, forcing a smile. I meant go for a walk with me , she thought just us two, alone, and you know it . But Rory’s eyes were bright with defiance, and it was clear that she had no intention of changing her plans to accommodate her mother.
    Lynn wasn’t going to insist. To do so, she felt, would be counterproductive. But it hurt that Rory preferred the company of her friends to that of her mother.
    “They’re out there, Mrs. Nelson. They’re probably watching us right now. That’s why we have to be careful to put the food up at night,” Melody said earnestly.
    “Have a good time, then. Be careful,” Lynn said, smoothing a hand over Rory’s hair. It was an automatic gesture, one she had been making for years. Rory jerked her head away, casting an impatient look at her mother.
    “Sorry,” Lynn mouthed, knowing how much Rory hated being made to look like a baby in front of her friends. Lynn had learned the hard way that any affectionate gesture from a mother had that effect.
    “Leave,” Rory hissed with a brief flash of white teeth (whose straightening had cost the earth) that was apparently supposed to pass for a smile. Before Lynn could respond, Rory was already turning back to her friends.
    A reprimand for rudeness sprang to Lynn’s lips, but she swallowed it. Whatever was going on with Rory—whether it was the teenage thing, as Lynn’s mother put it, or something more serious—staging a battle in front of her friends was not going to help.
    Lynn accepted her dismissal with a wry quirk of her lips. It was ironic, in a way: in every other aspect of her life she was, by every inner and outward measure, herself a success. How could she be such a failure as a mother?
    Knowing that Rory would not appreciate her hovering, Lynn moved away. She saw that Debbie Stapleton was talking to ruddy-faced, stocky Irene Holtman, one of the teachers. Lucy Johnson, the other teacher, a sixtyish woman with stylishly short silver hair, was heading for the tents with a ponytailed brunette in tow. The teenager looked on the verge of tears, and Lynn guessed she’d been stricken by homesickness. Last night, the first of their trip, two other girls had been similarly afflicted. Since the night had been spent at the barrackslike dorm on the Feldmans’ ranch, the entire group had overheard the girls’ misery.
    Rory wouldn’t have suffered from homesickness had her mother not come with her, Lynn felt sure. Lately, Rory seemed most pleased to be wherever home wasn’t.
    A quartet of girls assigned to KP for the night was washing dishes in a pair of rubber dishpans. Pat Greer was tidying up the campsite, picking up trash, rescuing a forgotten sweatshirt from a tree limb, helping the outfitters Bob and Ernst who’d been in charge of supper pack uneaten food into the back of the Jeep. Pat’s daughter, Katie, stayed close by her mother’s side, helping her—cheerfully. Of course, since Pat was the perfect mother, she would have no problems with her daughter.
    Lynn glanced at Rory again and felt now-familiar twinges of helplessness and inadequacy. She loved her child desperately and had tried her best to be a good mother, but somehow their relationship had gone awry. She had hoped this trip would help put things right between them. But far from improving, their relationship just seemed to be going from bad to worse.
    What she craved was a cigarette, a vice that Rory deplored and that Lynn was quite unable to give up. A habit of twenty-some years’ duration was not easily kicked, Lynn had found. Besides, smoking helped her stay slim.
    Every time she thought about the twenty pounds she would almost certainly gain if she succeeded in quitting, she lit another cigarette. In her line of work