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

said.
    “I’m sorry you had to get in the middle of it,” she said. “How’re you feeling this morning?”
    She peered at me. The horror in her eyes said it all about what I must have looked like.
    “I’ve been better.”
    She started rummaging through her purse.
    “You know, I’ve got my makeup kit in here somewhere. I could fix that up so no one would know that—”
    “I’m okay,” I said. 
    She stopped going through her bag and then nodded. She shivered again and then bobbled her head as she looked past me into the warm house.
    I sighed, knowing that I was being rude letting my best friend freeze out here on my porch and not inviting her inside.
    Though after last night, it seemed to me I might be in the market for a new best friend.
    “Don’t you have to be at the insurance office soon?” I said, knowing by the light in the sky that it must be nearing 9 o’clock, if not already past it.
    She shrugged.
    “Being a few minutes late never hurt anyone.”
    I may not have been the nicest person in the world. I may have been bitter and sometimes grumpy. But rude, I wasn’t.
    “Fine,” I said, opening the door. “You want some coffee?”
    “Do you have some of that hazelnut creamer I like?”
    I kept from letting out another sigh.
    You give them an inch, they take a mile.
    That’s how Beth Lynn was.
    “Yes, I’ve got that hazelnut creamer,” I said.
    “Hallelujah.”
    Hank growled unhappily, as if he knew somehow, on some psychic pooch level, that Beth Lynn had been the reason for me looking the way I did this morning.
     

 
    Chapter 11
     
    “I want to be up there on that wall with the rest of those happy people,” she said, taking a slurp from the steaming mug of coffee I’d set in front of her.
    “You’ve never listened to me in the past,” I said. “What’s gonna change now? You’ll be off the boat the second another barely legal good-looking guy glances your way. Or for that matter, some greasy brute like Kirby Carruthers.”
    I hadn’t told her about the second vision I’d had of her mystery man only a few hours earlier. Maybe I was hoping on some level that if I didn’t talk about them, then these visions would just go away.
    But I knew it didn’t work like that. These visions had a way of harassing me until I did something about them.
    I got up from the sofa and grabbed my make-up bag. I opened the compact mirror, tried not to drop my jaw in horror at the large rainbow-colored welt that was now the left side of my face, and started applying foundation feverishly.  
    “No, you see, that’s what I’m trying to change,” Beth Lynn said. “My therapist says that I’m keeping myself in a destructive pattern by the poor choices I make in men. She said I need to change the way I approach the subject. Not be so impulsive. Kind of like what you’ve been saying to me all along.”
    “I’m no shrink,” I said. “I don’t know anything about patterns. But what I do know is that I told you three months ago what your soulmate looks like, and as far as I can see, you’ve been running as far in the opposite direction from him as you possibly can.”
    She rested her head on the palm of her hand.
    “I know,” she said. “But I just… it’s just hard for me to believe that he really looks like that. I mean, I know that I’ve seen better days myself, but I still have standards.”
    “Beth Lynn,” I said, closing up the compact and placing it back in my bag. “Looks don’t mean a damn when you’ve found your soulmate. And until you’re willing to accept that, all you’re ever going to end up with are the Kirby Carruthers of the world.”
    She bit her lip and pouted a little bit, staring at her cup of coffee glumly.
    “That’s the long and short of it, Beth Lynn,” I said, glancing up at the photos on the wall. “You’re never going to be happy unless you open your mind a little bit.”
    After another long pause, she took a deep breath.
    “Okay,” she said, looking