Read Burned in Broken Hearts Junction: A Cozy Matchmaker Mystery (Cozy Matchmaker Mystery Series) for Free Online

thundering in my chest when I heard his voice.
    Jacob, why’d you have to leave?
    I hung up before leaving a message.
    I placed the phone back on the coffee table and instead of baring my feelings to his voicemail box, I took a big swig of whiskey.
    My eyes drifted around the room, at the walls cluttered with photo frames. Inevitably, I found the one of Jacob and me, taken about five years earlier. The one of us laughing while sitting on a picnic table outside of a barbecue joint in Austin. My favorite one of us.
    I felt a tug of pain at my heart, realizing I couldn’t remember the last time I saw him smile like that.
    I couldn’t remember the last time I smiled like that either.
    I forced my eyes away from the photo, studying all of the other ones on the wall. All the happy couples I’d helped bring together through my matchmaking visions. Reminders of the good that I was able to do in the world. Of the people I was able to help.
    There were dozens of photos, dating back almost two decades. As far as I knew, each and every couple on that wall was still together.
    Every couple but one.
    What good was a matchmaker who couldn’t keep her true love?
    I wondered.
    I placed the whiskey glass down on the table and got up to go take the picture of Jacob and me down. The way I had tried to do at least a dozen times in the last three years.
    But just like the other times, I couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Taking it down would mean admitting defeat. It would mean admitting that it was over.
    And that was something I just didn’t have the heart for tonight.
    I sighed, glanced back at Hank, who was watching me with those big sad dog eyes.
    Sometimes this cabin was just about all I could take.
    I grabbed the old wool Pendleton blanket off the sofa, wrapped it tightly around my body, and went into my bedroom, grabbing the cheap paperback romance book from the edge of my nightstand.
    I went outside onto the porch, Hank following close behind. I sat in the rocking chair, listening to the rain splatter against the porch railing. A train started rumbling in the distance, filling the night with its lonesome howls.
    I sat, wondering how I ever got to this point in my life.
    I didn’t have an answer.
    I opened the romance novel and started where I had left off, reading about Lady Elizabeth Reynolds and her rogue southern suitor, Remy Martin.
    I tried to laugh at the fumbling foreplay, written so cheesily, but I had trouble laughing tonight.
    Reading it didn’t take away my sadness, the way it usually did.
    I wasn’t but a few pages into the book when the headache started settling in at my temples.
    And I knew a vision wouldn’t be far behind.
    I held my head and groaned.
    I wished that they would just stop .

Chapter 9
     
    The stocky lawyer type with the frizzy black hair and the coke bottle glasses is tired.
    Exhausted. A deep-rooted exhaustion that makes him feel nearly dead to the world.
    It’d been a long day of running around town, having doors slammed in his face. Getting no answers.  
    Not a single friendly, familiar face in any of it.
    What he could really use is a well-done steak, a heap of mashed potatoes and a nice domestic beer. But instead of going to the back of the store where they kept the meat, he heads for his old friend: the frozen food aisle.
    He doesn’t have it in him to do much more than open and close a microwave tonight.
    He thinks about Penny’s steaks. How she always made them rare. He’d always ask for well-done but she never listened to him, throwing the bloody steak down on the plate like she was doing him some sort of favor.
    He closes his eyes for a second.
    It’d been nearly five years, but he still spent much of his evenings thinking about her.
    If he’d just paid a little more attention to her. If he hadn’t let the job swallow him the way it did. If he hadn’t forgotten their last anniversary.
    Then maybe she’d still be with him instead of getting married to another man next