Heartbreaker Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.”

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    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?”

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    “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