Read Online Heartbreaker by Diana Palmer - Free Book Online

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