by Diana Palmer
“Why can’t you be honest with me?” she demanded. “I’m not a kid anymore. You don’t have to protect me from the truth.”
“You don’t know the truth,” he said curtly.
“Sure I do. I’m a liability you assumed because I had no family and you felt sorry for me,” she replied.
“I felt sorry for you,” he conceded. “But I’ve always included you in family activities, haven’t I?”
“Oh, yes,” she agreed. “I get to have Christmas and summer vacation and all the other holidays with Marge and the girls, I even get to go on overseas trips with them. I’ve never doubted that I was part of Marge’s family,” she said meaningfully.
He frowned. “Marge is part of my family.”
“You’re not part of mine, J.B.,” she replied. Her heart was breaking. “I’m in the same class as your big-boobed blondes, disposable and unimportant. We don’t even rate a handpicked present. You just send out the secretary to buy it, and to lie for you when you avoid events you’d rather not be forced to attend.”
He glared at her. “You’ve got the whole thing upside down.” He cursed under his breath. “Damn Grange! If he hadn’t barged in…!”
Something was fishy here. “You know him!”
His lips made a thin line. “I know him,” he admitted reluctantly. “I went to see him at the feedlot when I realized who he was. But I barely had time to say anything to him before Justin showed up. I didn’t go back.”
“Who is he, J.B.?” she asked, but she was sure that she already knew the answer.
“He’s her brother,” he said finally. “He’s the brother of the woman my father kept me from marrying.”
Three
The look in J.B.’s eyes was painful to Tellie, who loved him with all her heart, despite the knowledge that he was never going to be able to love her back. She could almost feel the pain that rippled through him with the words. The woman, the only woman, he’d ever loved had killed herself, because of him. It was a pain he could never escape. And now the woman’s brother had shown up in his own town.
“Why is he here, do you think?” she asked.
J.B. sipped coffee. “Revenge, perhaps,” he said tautly, “at first.”
“Revenge for what?” she asked, because she knew the answer, but she didn’t want him to realize how much Grange had told her.
He glanced at her appraisingly. “It’s a story that doesn’t concern you, Tellie,” he said quietly. “It’s ancient history.”
She finished her own coffee. “Whatever you say, J.B.,” she replied. “I have to get back to work.”
She stood up. So did he. “How are you going to get back to the feedlot?” he asked abruptly. “Didn’t you ride in with Grange?”
She shook her head. “It was Dutch treat.”
“Are you coming to the barbecue Saturday?” he added.
It was the end of roundup, one that he gave for the ranch hands. Marge and the girls, and Tellie, were always invited. It was a comfortable routine.
Tellie had never felt less like a routine. “No, I don’t think so,” she said abruptly, and was pleased to see his eyelids flicker. “I have other plans.”
“What other plans?” he demanded, as if he had the right to know every step she took.
She smiled carelessly. “That’s not your business, J.B. See you.”
She went to the counter and paid Barbara. When she left, J.B. was sitting there, brooding, his face like steel.
It wasn’t until that night Tellie finally had time to digest what she’d learned. She waited until the girls went to bed and then cornered Marge at the kitchen table where she was piecing a quilt.
“Do you know a family named Grange?” she asked Marge.
The older woman blinked, surprised. “Grange? Why?”
That wasn’t an innocent look Marge was giving her. Tellie folded her hands on the table. “There’s a man named Grange who came to work at the feedlot,” she said. “He’s tall and dark-eyed and dark-haired. J.B. was going to marry his sister a long time ago…”
“Him! Here! Dear God!” Marge exclaimed. She put her hands to her mouth. “No!”
“It’s all right, Marge,” she said at once. “He came looking for your father, not J.B.”
Marge’s eyes were wide, frightened. “You know?” she asked huskily.
She sighed heavily. “Yes. Grange told me everything. J.B. doesn’t know that,” she added quickly. “I said that Grange only mentioned that there was a romance gone bad in the past.”
Marge drew her hands over her mouth. “It was much worse than that, Tellie. It was a nightmare,” she said heavily. “I’ve never seen J.B. like that. He went crazy after she died. For three months, he went away and nobody even knew where he was. We couldn’t find him. Dad cried…” She took a steadying breath. “I never understood what happened, why she did it. J.B. thought it was because they’d had an argument about her giving up her house to live with us. They parted in anger, and he didn’t know what had happened until her best friend called him and gave him the news. He blamed himself. He lived with the guilt, but it ate him alive. Dad was so kind to him afterward,” she added. “They’d had problems, like some fathers and sons do. They were both strong willed and domineering.” She sighed. “But Dad went out of his way after that to win J.B.’s affection. I think he finally succeeded, before he had the stroke.” She looked up. “Did Grange have any idea why she did such a desperate thing?”
Now things were getting sticky. Tellie hesitated. She didn’t want to destroy Marge’s illusions about her father. And obviously, J.B. hadn’t told his sister about his father’s interference that had caused the tragedy.
Marge realized that. She smiled sadly. “Tellie, my father never cared one way or the other about me. I was a girl, so I was a disappointment to him. You don’t need to spare my feelings. I would like to know what Grange told you.”
Tellie took a deep breath. “All right. He said that J.B.’s father came to see the girl and told her that if she married J.B., he had enough evidence to put her fourteen-year-old brother in prison for the rest of his life. The boy was involved in drugs and part of a gang.”
She gasped. “So that was it! Did he tell J.B.?”
“Yes,” she said. “He did. Apparently Grange only just found out himself. His father only told him when he was dying. I’m sure he was trying to spare Grange. He’ll go through his own pain, realizing that he provided your father with the reason to threaten his sister.”
“So many secrets,” Marge said, her voice thready. “Pain and more pain. It will bring it all back, too. J.B. will relive it.”
That was painful. But it wasn’t all Grange’s fault. “Grange just wanted to know the truth.” Tellie defended the stranger. “He thought J.B. put his father up to talking to the woman.”
“My brother doesn’t have any problem telling people unpleasant things,” she replied musingly. “He does his own dirty work.”
“He does,” Tellie agreed.
She frowned at the younger woman’s expression. “What are you not telling me?”
She shrugged. “Jarrett let something slip.”
“J.B.’s secretary? Did she? What?” she asked with a lazy smile.
“J.B. wasn’t at the graduation exercises, Marge,” Tellie said sadly. “He was in a meeting with a businessman and his attractive daughter. He made Jarrett cover up for him. She was really upset about what he said to her. She was more upset when she found out that the present he wanted her to buy was for me, for my graduation.”
“Wait a minute,” Marge replied, frowning. “He lied about being at the stadium? He actually did that?”
Tellie grimaced. “Yes.”
“I’ll strangle him!” the older woman said forcefully.
“To what end, Marge?” Tellie asked. She felt old, tired, worn-out. “Can you make him love me? Because that isn’t ever going to happen. I thought he was just a carefree playboy who liked variety in his women. But it’s not that at all
, is it?” She sat back in her chair, her face drawn and sad. “He blames himself because the woman he loved died. He won’t risk feeling that way about another woman, setting himself up for another loss. He thinks he doesn’t deserve to be happy because she killed herself.”
“And all along, it was our father who did the dirty work.” Marge’s eyes were thoughtful. “I noticed that he seemed haunted sometimes, absolutely haunted. And I’d ask him if anything was wrong. He’d just say that people had to pay for their sins, and he hoped his punishment wouldn’t be as bad as he deserved. I didn’t know what he was talking about, until today. I suppose he was afraid to tell the truth, because he knew he’d lose J.B. forever.”
“You couldn’t have blamed him. Whatever he thought of the woman, it was J.B.’s life, and his decision. The old man couldn’t live his life for him.”
“You didn’t know him, honey. He was just like J.B. There’s the wrong way, and there’s J.B.’s way. That was Dad, too.”
“I see.”
Marge reached across the table and held her hand. “I’m sorry you had to find it out like this. I told J.B. we should tell you, but he said—” She stopped suddenly. “Anyway, he wouldn’t hear of it.”
Tellie knew what Marge had avoided saying, that it was none of Tellie’s business because she wasn’t family. She smiled. “Don’t pull your punches. I’m getting tougher by the day since I graduated.”
“J.B.’s helped, hasn’t he?” she said with a scowl.
“He can’t change the way he feels,” she said wearily. “If he was going to fall head over heels in love with me, it wouldn’t have taken him seven years, Marge. Even now, I’m just a stray that he took in. Well, that you took in,” she corrected. “J.B. decided that both of you would take care of me, but you’d do the daily work.” She laughed. “And it’s just like him.”
“It is,” Marge had to admit. She squeezed Tellie’s hand and then let go. “Maybe it isn’t a bad thing that you know the truth. It helps explain the way he is, and why there was never much hope for you in the first place.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” Tellie agreed. “But you mustn’t ever let J.B. know. Promise me.”
“I’ll never tell him what you know, Tellie,” Marge agreed. She hesitated. “What is Grange like?”
“Mysterious,” she replied. “Dangerous. Nobody knows much about him. They say he was in Special Forces.”
“Not in the Mafia?” Marge replied dryly, and she wasn’t totally kidding.
“He said that his sister’s death took him right out of drug use and gang participation, although he told me at first that it was a friend and not himself,” she replied. “The tragedy saved him, in fact. He felt guilty, I’m sure, when he realized that she died partially because J.B.’s father threatened to put him in prison. The awful thing is that he didn’t know that until three weeks ago. I expect he’s hurting as much as J.B. did when he read the letter his father left him.”
“That was another bad month, when J.B. got that letter attached to Dad’s will,” Marge said. “He got extremely drunk.” She frowned. “That was the year before you graduated from high school, in fact. You came over and took a gun away from him,” she added, shocked at the memory. “I yelled at you, and you wouldn’t listen. You went right into his den, poured the bottle of whiskey down the sink with him yelling curses at you, and then you took away the pistol and popped the bullets out on the floor. I screamed…”
“You thought he’d hit me,” she agreed, smiling. “But I knew better. J.B. would never hit a woman, not even if he was stinking drunk. Which he was, of course.”
“You led him off to bed and stayed with him all night. The next morning he carried you into the living room where I was, and laid you out on the sofa under an Afghan. He looked very funny. When I asked him why, he said it was the first time in his life that he’d ever had a woman take care of him. Our mother wasn’t domestic,” she added quietly. “She was never very nurturing. She was a research chemist and her life was her work. Housekeepers raised J.B. and me. It was almost a relief for Dad, and us, when she died. I did admire her,” she added. “She did a socially beneficial job. A dangerous one, too. She was working with a terrible virus strain, looking for a cure. One day in the lab, she stuck a needle, accidentally, into her hand through her rubber glove and died. I was sorry, and I went to the funeral. J.B wouldn’t go and neither would Dad. They said she deserted all of us for her job.”
“That sounds like him,” Tellie agreed.
“J.B. never stopped fussing about the way you took care of him,” she recalled on a laugh. “But then he’d lose his temper when you weren’t around to do it. He was furious when you spent your summer vacations with those friends at Yellowstone National Park.”
“I had a good time. I miss Melody. She and I were wonderful friends, but her parents moved overseas and she had to go with them.”
“I don’t think I have one friend left in Jacobsville, from my school days,” Marge recalled.
“What about Barbara?”
“Oh. Yes. Barbara.” She chuckled. “She and that café. When we were girls, it was what she wanted most of all, to own a restaurant.”
“It’s a good one.” Tellie hesitated. “Now, don’t get angry, but she’s worried about you,” she added.
“Me? Why?”
“She said you had a dizzy spell.”
Marge frowned. “Yes, I did. I remember. I’ve had two or three lately. Odd, isn’t it? But then, I’m prone to migraine headaches,” she added carelessly. “You get all sorts of side effects from them. In fact, I see fireworks and go blind in one eye just before I get one. The doctor calls them vascular headaches.”
Tellie frowned. “Why? Does blood pressure cause them?”
Marge laughed. “Not in my case, honey. I have the lowest blood pressure in two counties. No, migraine runs in my family. My mother had them, and so did her mother.”
“I’ll bet J.B. doesn’t have them,” Tellie mused.
“That’s a fact,” came the laughing reply. “No, he doesn’t get headaches, but he certainly gives them.”
“Amen.”
Marge went back to her piecing. “Maybe it’s just as well that you know all about J.B. now, Tellie,” she said after a minute. “Maybe it will save you any further heartache.”
“Yes,” the younger woman agreed sadly. “Maybe so.”
Grange didn’t ask her out again, but he did stop by her desk from time to time, just to see how she was. It was as if he knew how badly he’d hurt her with the information about J.B.’s past, and wanted to make amends.
“Listen,” she said one day when he gave her a worried look, “I’m not stupid. I knew there was something in J.B.’s past that, well, that caused him to be the way he is. He never cared about me, except as a sort of adopted relative.” She smiled. “I’ve got three years of college to go, you know. No place for a love life.”
He studied her quietly. “Don’t end up like him,” he said suddenly. “Or like me. I don’t think I’ve got it in me to trust another human being.”
Her eyes were sympathetic. He was blaming himself for his sister’s death. She knew it. “You’ll grow old and bitter, all alone,” she said.
“I’m already old and bitter,” he said, and he didn’t smile.
“No gray hairs,” she observed.
“They’re all on the inside,” he shot back.
She grinned. Her whole face lit up.
He gave her an odd look and something in his expression softened, just a little.
“If you really want to look old, you should dye your hair,” she pointed out.
He chuckled. “My father still had black hair when he died. He was sixty.”
“Good genes,” she said.
He shrugged. “Beats me. He never knew who his father was.”
“Your mother?”
His face hardened. “I don’t talk about her.”
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to growl,”
he said hesitantly. “I’m not used to women.”
“Imagine a man ever admitting that!” she exclaimed with mock surprise.
He cocked an eyebrow. “You’re sassy.”
“Yes, I am. Nice of you to notice. Now would you mind leaving? Justin’s going to come back any minute. He won’t like having you flirt with me on his time.”
“I don’t flirt,” he shot back.
“Well, excuse me!”
He shifted. “Maybe I flirt a little. It isn’t intentional.”
“God forbid! Who’d want to marry you?” she asked curiously.
He scowled. “Look here, I’m not a bad person.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to marry you,” she persisted.
“Who asked you?” he asked curtly.
“Not you, for sure,” she returned. “And don’t bother,” she added when he started to speak. “I’m such a rare catch that I have men salivating in the yard, wherever I go.”
His dark eyes started to twinkle. “Why?”
“Because I can make French pastry,” she told him. “With real whipped cream and custard fillings.”
He pursed his lips. “Well!”
“See? I’m quite a catch. Too bad you’re not in the running.”
He frowned. “Even if I were interested, what would I do with a wife?”
“You don’t know?” She gave him such an expression of shock and horror that he burst out laughing.
She grinned at him. “See there? You’re improving all the time. I’m a good influence, I am!”
“You’re a pain in the neck,” he returned. “But not bad company.” He shrugged. “Like movies?”
“What sort?”
“Science fiction?”
She chuckled. “You bet.”
“I’ll check and see what’s playing at the theater Saturday, if you’re game.”
Saturday was the barbecue at J.B.’s that she was determined not to attend. Here was her excuse to miss it. She liked Grange. Besides, no way was she going to sit home and eat her heart out over J.B., especially when she’d already told him that she had other plans. “I’m game.”