Free Heartbreaker by Laurie Paige Page B

endless now that she didn’t have practices and performances to gear up for.
    Clean and dry, her hair curling under at her shoulders, she stood in front of the full-length mirrors on her closet doors, dressed only in underwear. Her hand on a chair back, she bent her knees in a plié, a grand plié, then executed a small jump, a jeté.
    Her heart also leaped.
    Grimly, her eyes on the bedside clock, she took her pulse. Slightly over a hundred with just one jeté, and that not even a big one.
    Slumping into a chair, she sat there for a long time, waiting for her pulse to slow to its usual eighty to ninety beats per minute, her mind curiously blank as she watched the activity on the sprawling acres visible from the window.
    Alfalfa was being cut in one field. In another, it was being rolled into huge round bales of hay. Ranch hands were loading some cattle heading for the market.
    Hector Martinez, the gardener, was spraying a bed of roses. His little girl, Maria, held a pair of pruning shears for him. Esperanza, Hector’s wife, came outside and talked to them. Maria, under her father’s direction, cut a dozen roses and gave them to her mother. Esperanza carried them into the house. They would appear on the table at lunch.
    Life as usual on the Wainwright ranch.
    But not for her. She wasn’t to ride alone, she couldn’t drive a car… “Speak of the devil,” she muttered.
    A light-blue sports car parked in front of the house. Michael climbed out. Her mother had wasted no time in calling the arrogant surgeon, it appeared.
    Glancing at the clock, she saw it was time to go down. Quickly slipping into beige slacks, a striped blouse and espadrilles, she headed for the patio.
    It occurred to her that her mother was often at the main house of late. Since the ignominious collapse onstage, in fact. Divorced for many years, her parents seemed to have formed an alliance against her.
    On further reflection, she realized that Kate, although keeping a condo in Houston, had mostly lived at the ranch for the past couple of years—since returning to Mission Creek to oversee her own mother’s move into the senior care facility in town.
    Her father had insisted on remodeling a cottage on the place and having Kate stay there “to be near your mother and closer to the children,” he’d said when Kate had at first refused.
    Since Justin was sheriff and had his own place and Rose was now married to a Carson and lived at Matt’s home, that left only Susan as the child at home. Permanently at home?
    No, she refused to feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t a coward, no matter what Michael thought of her. Life was what it was. She’d figure out a way to live with no problem. Or die trying. On this sardonic note, she went outside.
    â€œHello,” she called, brightly cheerful as shebreezed over to the table to join the others. “Michael, how nice that you could join us.” There, that put him firmly in the friends-of-the-family category and not that of her doctor.
    After taking her place, she glanced at her father. His face had the closed look he got when he was upset. Her mother’s was in its determined mode.
    â€œYou and your mother favor each other,” Michael murmured to her while her parents were distracted by Esperanza’s appearance with a lovely vase of pink roses.
    â€œYes, we have the same stubborn look, I’ve been told,” she said coolly, with just the right tinge of humor.
    â€œTrue.”
    She suppressed the jab of irritation with his easy agreement. She’d be calm if it killed her!
    Her father deferred to his former wife when the housekeeper asked where the flowers were to go. After suggesting a side table, Kate turned back to the group. “Dr. O’Day, can you give us a report on Susan?”
    â€œPlease, call me Michael,” he requested.
    He took in the scene with his quick intelligence, Susan noted. Had she not been the topic