Heartbreaker (22 page)

She turned and followed Nell into the kitchen. Life, she thought dreamily, was sweet.

Later, she spared a thought for that poor young woman who’d died so tragically years ago, and for Grange, who’d paid a high price for his illegal activities. She hoped Grange would find his own happiness one day. He’d gone to D.C., but was planning to come back and do something a little more adventurous than working for the Ballengers, but he didn’t mention what it was. He’d sent her a post-card telling her that, with his new address. J.B. had seen the card, and murmured that he hoped Tellie wasn’t planning any future contact with Grange. She assured him that she hadn’t any such plans, and kissed him so enthusiastically that very soon he forgot Grange altogether.

Marge and the girls were happy about the baby, and Marge was finally in the best of health on her new medicines. Tellie was relieved that she continued to improve.

That night, while J.B. slept, Tellie sat and watched his lean, hard face, wiped clean of expression, and thought how very lucky she was. He wasn’t perfect, but he was certainly Tellie’s dream of perfection.

She bent and very softly kissed his chiseled mouth.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

His dark eyes slid open and twinkled. “Don’t waste kisses, sweetheart,” he whispered, and reached up to draw her down into his warm, strong arms. “They’re precious.”

“Yours certainly are,” she whispered back, and she smiled contentedly against his mouth.

“Yours, too,” he murmured.

She closed her eyes and thought of a happy future, where they’d be surrounded by children and, later, grandchildren. They’d grow old together, safe in the cocoon of their love for each other, with a lifetime of memories to share. And this, Tellie thought with delight, was only the beginning of it all! Her arms tightened around J.B. Life was sweeter than her dreams had ever been. Sweeter than them all.

Coming in December 2006

From HQN Books

LACY

by Diana Palmer.

Turn the page for a preview of this compelling story, set during the aftermath of World War I, and featuring the Whitehall family—a clan you first met in COWBOY AND THE LADY,

Diana Palmer’s first Silhouette Desire!

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

THE PARTY WAS GETTING noisier by the minute.

Lacy Jarrett Whitehall watched it with an air of total withdrawal. All that wild jazz, the kicky dancing, the bathtub gin flowing like water as it was passed from sloshing glass to teacup. She wasn’t really as much a participant as she was an onlooker. It made her feel alive to watch other people enjoying themselves.

Lacy hadn’t felt alive in a long time.

Many of the neighbors were elderly people, and she suffered a pang of conscience at what, to them, must have seemed like licentious behavior. The Charleston was considered a vulgar dance by the older generation. Jazz, they said, was decadent. Ladies smoked in public and swore—and some actually wore their stockings rolled to just below the kneecap. They wore galoshes, unfastened, so that they flapped when they walked—hence the name given to the new generation: flappers. Shocking behavior to a society that had only since the war come out of the Victorian Age. The war had changed everything.

Even now, four years after the armistice, people were still recovering from the horror of it. Some had never recovered. Some never would.

In the other room, laughing couples were dancing merrily to “Yes, We Have No Bananas” blaring from Lacy’s new radio. It was like having an orchestra right in the room, and she marveled a little at the modern devices that were becoming so commonplace. Not that any of these gay souls were contemplating the scientific advances of the early twenties. They were too busy drinking Lacy’s stealthily obtained, prohibition-special gin and eating the catered food. Money could almost buy absolution, she mused. The only thing it couldn’t get her was the man she wanted most.

She fingered her teacup of gin with a long, slender finger, its pink nail perfectly rounded. The color matched the dropped-waist frock she was wearing with its skirt at her knees. It would have shocked Marion Whitehall and the local ladies around Spanish Flats, she thought. Like her friends, she wore her hair in the current bobbed fashion. It was thick and dark and straight, and it curved toward her delicate facial features like leaves lifting to the sun. Under impossibly thick lashes, her pale, bluish-gray eyes had a restlessness that was echoed in the soft, shifting movements of her tall, perfectly proportioned body. She was twenty-four, and looked twenty-one. Perhaps being away from Coleman had taken some of the age off her. She laughed bitterly as she coped with the thought. Her eyes closed on a wave of pain so sweeping that it counteracted the stiff taste of the gin. Coleman! Would she ever forget?

It had all been a joke, the whole thing. One of brother-in-law Ben’s practical jokes had compromised Lacy, after she’d been locked in a line cabin all night with Cole. Nothing had happened, except that Cole had given her hell, blaming her for it. But it was what people thought happened that counted. In big cities,
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

the new morals and wild living that had followed World War I was all the rage. But down in Spanish Flats, Texas, a two-hour drive from San Antonio, things were still very straitlaced. And the Whitehalls, while not wealthy, were well-known and much respected in the community. Marion Whitehall had been in hysterics about the potential disgrace, so Cole had spared his mother’s tender feelings by marrying Lacy. But not willingly.

Lacy had been taken in by Marion Whitehall eight years ago, after Lacy’s own parents died on the Lusitania when it was torpedoed by the Germans. Lacy’s mother and Cole’s had been best friends.

Lacy’s one remaining relative, a wealthy great-aunt, had declared herself too elderly and set in her ways to take on a teenager. The Whitehalls’ invitation had been a godsend. Lacy had agreed, but mostly because it allowed her to be near Cole. She’d worshipped him since her wealthy family had moved to Spanish Flats from Georgia when Lacy had been just thirteen to be near her great-aunt Lucy and great-uncle Horace Jacobsen, who had retired from business after making a fortune in the railroad industry. Great-uncle Horace had, in fact, founded the town of Spanish Flats and named it for the Whitehall ranch, which had sheltered him in a time of desperate need. He and Lacy’s great-aunt had been a social force in San Antonio in those days, but it was Spanish Flats Ranch, not Great-uncle Horace’s towering Victorian mansion that had fascinated Lacy from the beginning—as did the tall cattleman on the ranch property. It had been love on first impact, even though Cole’s first words to her had been scathing when she’d ridden too close to one of his prize bulls and had almost gotten gored.

That hadn’t put her off, though. If anything, his cold, quiet, authoritative manner had attracted her, challenged her, long before she knew who he was.

Coleman Whitehall was an enigma in so many ways. A loner, like his old Comanche grandfather who’d taken him over in his youth and showed him a vanished way of life and thought. But he’d been kind to Lacy for all that, and there were times when she’d glimpsed a different man, watching him with the cowboys. The somber, serious Cole she thought she knew was missing in the lean rancher who got up very early one morning, caught a rattlesnake, defanged it, and put it in bed with a cowboy who’d played a nasty practical joke on him. The resulting pandemonium had left him almost collapsed with laughter, along with the other witnesses. It had shown her a side of Cole that she remembered now for its very elusiveness.

Despite his responsibilities at home, the lure of airplanes and battle had gotten to Cole. He’d learned to fly at a local barnstorming show, and had become fascinated with this new mode of transportation. The sinking of the Lusitania had brought his fighting blood up, and convinced him that America would inevitably be pulled into war. He’d kept up his practice at the airfield, even though his father’s death had stopped him from joining the group of pilots in the French Escadrille Americaine, which became the exclusive Lafayette Escadrille.

When war did break out in 1917, a neighboring rancher had taken responsibility for the ranch and womenfolk in his absence, keeping the land grabbers away with financial expertise. Meanwhile Lacy and Katy and Ben and Marion had watched the newspapers with mounting horror, reading the posted casualty lists with stopped breath, with sinking fear. But Coleman seemed invincible. It wasn’t until the year after the armistice, when he’d turned up back at the ranch after a few sparsely worded letters, an
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

old flying buddy in tow, that they’d learned he’d been shot down by the Germans. He’d only written that he’d been wounded, not how. But apparently it hadn’t done him any lasting damage. He was the same taciturn, hard man he’d been before he’d gone to France.

Well, not quite the same…

ISBN: 1-55254-596-2

HEARTBREAKER

Copyright © 2006 by Diana Palmer

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.

All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

® and TM are trademarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ®

are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.

Visit Silhouette Books at www.eHarlequin.com

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

About the Author

Diana Palmer is a former newspaper reporter with 16 years’ experience on both daily and weekly newspapers. She began selling romance novels in 1979 and currently writes for HQN Books (mainstream romances) and Silhouette Books (contemporary series romances).

Diana Palmer has over 40 million copies of her books in print, which have been translated and published around the world, and she has written over 100 books for Silhouette, MIRA and Harlequin Books.

Her awards include 10 Waldenbooks national sales awards, four B. Dalton national sales awards, two Bookrak national sales awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award for series storytelling from Romantic Times Magazine, several Affaire de Coeur awards, and two regional RWA awards.

In 1998, a Japanese Harlequin reader poll gave her Silhouette Desire novel The Patient Nurse its favorite-book-of-the-year award.

She is listed in numerous publications, including Contemporary Authors by the Gale Group, Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers by St. James Press, The Writers Directory by St.

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

James Press, the International Who’s Who of Authors and Writers by Melrose Press, Ltd., and Love’s Leading Ladies by Kathryn Falk.

She is a member of the Native American Rights Fund, the American Museum of Natural History, the National Cattlemen’s Association, the Archeological Institute of America, the Planetary Society, the Georgia Conservancy, the Georgia Sheriffs' Association, and numerous conservation and charitable organizations. Her hobbies include gardening, archeology, anthropology, iguanas, astronomy and music.

She has been married to her husband, James, since 1972.

Coming Next Month

If you enjoyed the eBook you just read, then you’ll love what we have for you next month!

ON SALE IN OCTOBER 2006

THE MIGHTY QUINNS: MARCUS by Kate Hoffman, Blaze

ASKING FOR TROUBLE by Leslie Kelly, Blaze

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv
erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

THE PLEASURE CHEST by Julie McBride, Blaze

JUST DARE ME… by Stephanie Bond, Blaze

THE MAVERICK by Rhonda Nelson, Blaze

A WHISPER OF WANTING by Jamie Sobrato, Blaze

MASTER OF PLEASURE by Penny Jordan, Presents

THE PLAYBOY BOSS’S CHOSEN BRIDE by Emma Darcy, Presents PURCHASED FOR REVENGE by Julia James, Presents

HOLLYWOOD HUSBAND, CONTRACT WIFE by Jane Porter, Presents THE RICH MAN’S ROYAL MISTRESS by Robyn Donald, Presents AT THE SHEIKH’S COMMAND by Kate Walker, Presents

THE MILLIONAIRE’S LOVE-CHILD by Elizabeth Power, Presents THE FRENCH COUNT’S PREGNANT BRIDE by Catherine Spencer, Presents BLACKHAWK’S BETRAYAL by Barbara McCauley, Desire

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html

THE PART-TIME WIFE by Maureen Child, Desire

THE MORNING AFTER PROPOSAL by Sheri WhiteFeather, Desire REVENGE OF THE SECOND SON by Sara Orwig, Desire

THE BOSS’S CHRISTMAS SEDUCTION by Yvonne Lindsay, Desire 24 HOURS BUNDLE by Jo Leigh, Kimberly Raye and Cara Summers, Blaze THE WRONG BED BUNDLE by Jennifer LaBrecque, Joanne Rock and Mara Fox, Blaze