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“Yes, I did come a long way” she said stiffly, and despite the stiffness, he saw the weariness in her. The dog padded after her as if she was his best friend. She gave Beauford a look of distaste, and the teaspoon of sympathy he’d been feeling for her evaporated. What kind of cold-hearted person could dislike Beauford with his beautiful, soulful eyes and slowly wagging stub of a tail?
J.D. followed her out the door, holding the dog back on the top of the steps. She negotiated them without incident this time. He glanced beyond her, and saw a little gray Nissan. It looked like an older model. Those cars went forever. He made note of the Canadian plate.
“You should have used the phone,” he said, unsympathetically.
People did not come a long way to tell you bad news without a reason. He’d tangled his life briefly with a Smith girl five years ago. And he felt he’d been lucky to get out alive. He wasn’t tangling with another one. It didn’t matter if she was temperamentally Elana’s polar opposite. Whatever she’d come here for, she wasn’t getting it.
She hesitated at the gate, stopped and looked back at him. He could see the struggle on her face. She wanted to tell him something.
And he knew whatever it was, he didn’t want to hear it.
“Nice of you to drop by,” he said, pointedly. “Don’t let the gate hit you in the backside on the way out.”
She got the hint. But rather than seeming perturbed by his rudeness, did she look relieved? As if she wanted him to be rude and rough and rotten?
He frowned at her.
Her shoulders set proudly, she walked down the pathway to her car. She was no Elana, but even so, he was irritated that everything that was male in him noticed the easy grace of her walk, the casual unconscious sensuality in the way she moved. While her back was to him, he wiped the last tantalizing traces of her from his lips.
She got in the car and sat there for a moment looking at him. He looked right back. She blinked first, started the car and backed up.
He stood on his porch in his towel, his arms folded across his chest, watching until her car was well out of sight. J.D. hoped that was the last he was ever going to see of a Smith girl, but he had an ugly feeling that he was being wishful.
He realized, that despite the swipe with his arm, he could still taste the cool sweetness of her lips on his mouth. He wiped ferociously before he went back in to finish his shower.
Annabel the cow had lost her appeal entirely. He showered in smoldering silence.
“You should be relieved,” Tally Smith told herself on the short drive back to the town of Dancer. “He is not the right man for the job. Not even close.”
Despite the firmness with which she made that statement, she felt woozy and she hoped the bump on the head was all that was to blame.
But she knew it wasn’t.
It was the fury of that kiss. The pure, unbridled passion of it.
“Ugh,” she told herself, but she felt like she was a bad actress reading a required line in a play. J. D. Turner’s mouth on hers had been appallingly delicious. If she hadn’t come to her senses in time to hit him with her purse, she was not sure what the outcome might have been.
She had the awful feeling that something wild in her might have risen up to meet his fury, and his passion.
“Ugh,” she said, again, with even less conviction than the last time.
His arms around her had taken her captive, held her tight to his hard masculine body like bands of steel. She had been forced to feel his slippery wet skin, the rock hardness of pure muscle under that skin. The effect, in combination with the unrestrained sensuality of his lips, had been rather dizzying. Really, any self-respecting woman in this day and age should not have reacted with fervor to such a primitive display of strength and aggression.
But she had a feeling that might have been fervor she felt—that heat and trembling at her core—right before smacking the man with her purse.
“He is not the man for the job,” she repeated out loud, as if she was trying to convince her weaker self. Her weaker self that might have actually liked that kiss. A little bit.
She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, lifted one up. “One,” she said. “He came to the door dressed in a towel.”
Rather than seeing that as a fault, her weaker self insisted on recalling that picture in all its lewd detail.
J. D. Turner had looked like some ancient and ferocious warrior. With a faint shudder, that she tried unsuccessfully to convince herself was revulsion, she recalled his thick dark hair wet and curling, his dark eyes smoldering, the firm unforgiving line of his mouth. His naked skin was bronzed and unblemished, his shoulders massive, his chest carved. He was flat-bellied and long-legged. In other words, he was totally intimidating, fiercely masculine, and gloriously strong.
Nothing about the worn photo she had found among Elana’s things, when she had finally found the energy to begin sorting through stuff, had prepared her for the reality of the man.
Oh, in the picture J. D. Turner had been handsome, but his vitality, his essence had not been captured. He’d been dressed in faded jeans, and a white shirt, open at the throat. He’d had his backside braced against the hood of a car, one leg bent at the knee resting on the bumper, his arms folded across his chest. That shock of dark brown hair had been falling carelessly over his forehead, and his eyes had engaged the camera unself-consciously, deep and dark, laughter-filled. His grin had seemed boyish and open, faintly devil-may-care.
When she had heard the song, robust and raspy, bursting out the windows of that tiny house, she had thought she had found the man in the photograph.
But there had been nothing boyish or open about the angry man who had appeared at the door in a towel, and that she had just left, near-naked, and perturbingly unself-conscious about it, on his porch. No laughter in the dark brown of his eyes, no suggestion of a grin around the firmness of those lips.
She shivered thinking of the water beading on the sleek perfect muscles of his chest, of the way his flat belly slid into that towel, of the strength in those naked legs. When he had crossed his arms across his chest, the biceps had bulged, and the muscles of his forearm had rippled with a masculine strength and ease that had made Tally go weak at the knees. No wonder she had stumbled off his porch.
And no wonder Elana had succumbed to him, not that Tally wanted to start thinking about that.
“Stop it,” she ordered herself. “He will not do. Answering the door in a towel was bad enough. But his kitchen was a disaster, and his dog was poorly behaved and stinky. J. D. Turner was rude, disrespectful and nasty! He won’t do. Won’t. Won’t. Won’t.”
Taking a deep steadying breath, doing her best to clear the residue of J. D. Turner from her mind, Tally drove slowly and deliberately the one mile back into Dancer, North Dakota.
Even though the town was like an oasis of green in the prairie gold that surrounded it, Tally could not really imagine a town less likely to be called Dancer.
“Sleeper would be more like it,” she muttered, passing the tiny boxlike houses slumbering under the only gigantic trees for miles. The only sign of life was an ancient dog who lifted his head, mildly interested, when she drove by. She was willing to bet he stank, too.
Finally, she pulled into the motel. For some reason it was called Palmtree Court, even though there was no court, and the nearest palm tree was probably several hundred miles south. Well, if a sleepy town could be called Dancer, why not stretch the truth a little further?
The Palmtree Court was a collection of humble little cabins, and it was the only commercial accommodation available in Dancer. Tally had woken up the clerk, an old man snoozing in a rocker behind the desk, earlier. Once awake, he had shown an inordinate interest in prying her life story from her, but she had closed her cabin door with most of her secrets still intact.
She had been relieved to see that despite the modest exterior, her cabin was clean and cozy. The quilt on the bed, on closer inspection proved to be handmade.
She went in now, and sank down on the bed. Ridiculously, she was still in possession of J.D.’s peas, and she put them over the bump on her head.
“I should call Herbert this moment,” she said, but she did not pick up the phone.
Herbert Henley was, after all, the front-running candidate for the job. On her birthday, three months ago, he had put a tasteful diamond ring—nothing ostentatious—on her finger. But that had been before Tally had had the god-awful luck to find that photo of a laughing J. D. Turner.
Herbert owned Henley’s Hardware store. He never dressed in towels. He owned a neat-as-a-pin home in the historic district of Dogwood Hollow, Saskatchewan. Even in the comfort of his home he always wore a nice shirt and that adorable bow tie that had made her notice him in the first place. And he would never in a million years have taken an engine to pieces on his kitchen counter. He took great pride in his kitchen, especially his stainless steel appliances. He shared her dislike for dogs, and owned a prize-winning Persian cat named Bitsy-Mitsy.
That was quite a different picture than J.D.’s Engine Repair, where the little white house was nearly lost among overgrown lilacs. The house needed a coat of paint and was overshadowed by a large gray tin shop. The grass was too long around the several open sheds that contained monster machinery that she thought might have been combines.
Though she didn’t necessarily believe that neatness pertained to character, the fact that he’d also answered the door in a towel and then kissed a perfect stranger were adding up to a pretty complete picture.
Then there was the fact that J.D. had not been wearing a wedding ring.
“That doesn’t pertain to character, either,” she told herself, adjusting the peas, which were starting to defrost. Did her noticing the lack of a wedding ring mean she was still considering him as a possibility?
How could she be so foolish? She had always considered herself the person least likely to be foolish.
And foolishness was what she could least afford now that she was embarked on this task of such monumental importance.
“This is the most important thing I’ve ever done,” she reminded herself sternly. In all fairness to J. D. Turner, perhaps she could not cross him off her list because she had caught him at a bad moment.
Okay, he’d accosted a complete stranger with his lips, but he had mistaken her for her sister. And he had come to the door wearing only a towel, but he’d probably thought she was one of his buddies. Dancer didn’t look like the type of place where too many strangers showed up on doorsteps.
He’d had an engine on the counter, but maybe that wasn’t a fatal flaw. And the dog was horrible, but at least it was friendly, which was more than she could say about Bitsy-Mitsy.
She’d come all this way. She could not let emotion cloud her reason now. The man was her nephew’s biological father, and her all-important task, her life mission, had become to find Jed a father.
She had known who J. D. Turner was from the instant she had found his picture among her sister’s things. He was the father of Elana’s son, Jed.
And now, since Elana’s death, Tally was Jed’s legal guardian. Her life now was about doing what was right by that child. Her child. She had begun researching how to raise a happy and well-adjusted child as soon as he came to her. She’d been dismayed to learn happy, well-adjusted children came largely from happy, well-adjusted families, with two parents. She had been further dismayed to learn that the same-sex parent had a particularly important role in a child’s development.
Since then, she’d been conducting an informal father search all over Dogwood Hollow and beyond. Her plan was simple—she would systematically find the right father for her nephew, marry him and create a perfect family. She saw it as a good thing that emotion was not clouding the issue. She’d seen what too much emotion could do in a life, namely Elana’s.
Herbert Henley, solid, practical, infinitely stable was her choice.
Until she had found that photograph. And then her sense of fair play had said that the man in the picture at least deserved a shot at being a father to the son he obviously had no idea he had sired.
So, she’d come here to Dancer to meet him. Well, he’d made a bad first impression, but what if that wasn’t the whole story? Someday, when her nephew Jed was older, she would be accountable for the decisions she was making right now.
Her decisions had to be cool and pragmatic, based on fact, not impulse. So, despite her initial reaction, tomorrow she would interview J. D. Turner’s friends and neighbors. She prayed she would find out J.D. was a beer-swilling swine with three ex-wives and a criminal record. And then she could go home and happily marry Herbert, her conscience clear.
Though, she wished, suddenly, wearily, she could put the lid back on that box she had opened, and never find that photo with the name Jed Turner written in her sister’s hand on the back of it.
Chapter Two
J.D., lying flat on his back underneath a car, gave a mighty heave, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and the rusted bolt finally came loose. He took it off with much more vengeance than was strictly required, and tossed it aside. Then the phone rang and he bumped his head on the oil pan.
Not a good day, so far, he thought, sliding out from under the car. He glanced at the clock. And he was a full five minutes into it.
“J.D.’s,” he answered abruptly, cradling the phone in his ear while he wiped the grease off his hands.
“Stan here.”
Where were you last night when I needed it to be you standing at the door instead of her?
“What do you want?”
“Geez. Nice greeting.”
“I’m having a bad day.”
“It’s five after eight!”
“I know.”
“Well, this should cheer you up. There was this stranger in the Chalet this morning having breakfast. Female. Kind of cute in the librarian sort of way. You know the kind where a guy thinks about pulling the pins from her hair—”
“And this news would cheer me up for what reason?” J.D. cut off his friend before he went too far down the pulling-pins-from-her-hair road. He knew full well that was a path of thought that could make a man spend the whole night wide awake and staring at his ceiling.
Pins from her hair, lace under a sheer damp blouse, eyes an unreal color of indigo, these were all thoughts that ultimately led to heads banged on oil pans first thing in the morning.
“Because,” Stan said with glee, obviously saving the best for last, “Guess who the librarian slash goddess was asking about?”
“Fred Basil?” J.D. asked hopefully. Fred was another town bachelor. He was sixty-two, built like a beach ball and changed his overalls once a year whether he needed to or not. He had politely declined joining the A.G.M.N.W.N.C., saying he would like to get married if the right gal came along.
“Guess again, good buddy,” Stan said, his good cheer bordering on the obnoxious.
J.D.’s head started to hurt. He hoped it was a delayed reaction to hitting it on the oil pan, but he knew it wasn’t. He prided himself on leading a nice quiet life. Simple. Devoid of intrigues and mysteries. A man such as himself did not probe this kind of gossip. He rose above it. Performing at his best, J.D. would have said a firm goodbye and hung up the phone. Maybe he could blame the oil pan for the regrettable fact that he was not performing at his best, and he did not hang up the phone. But he suspected it was more pins and lace and indigo eyes.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Stan said sagely to J.D.’s silence. “You might have to think of relinquishing your membership in the A.G.M.N.W.N. Club.”
J.D. said three words in a row that would have made a sailor blush. Those three words were followed by a terse sentence. “What the hell kind of questions is she asking?” Five minutes later he hung up the phone, fury burning like coal chunks in his stomach. She had crossed the line. It wasn’t enough that she had caught him at a bad moment yesterday, singing his fool head off, wrapped in a towel.
Oh, no, now she had to publicly connect herself with him, provide all sorts of gossip to the eager mongers of the village. She was embarrassing him. She was invading his privacy. Enough was enough. He had no choice.
The sane thing, of course, would be to ignore her, to rise above.
The insane thing would be to track her down and tell her, like a sheriff in a bad Western, that this was his town and there wasn’t room for the both of them. Of course, he did the insane thing, stoking his fury all the way to town.
Of all the nerve! Asking sneaky questions about him to his friends and neighbors.
The Nissan was not parked at the Palmtree and was no longer in front of the Chalet. J.D. felt a moment’s hope that Tally Smith had gone away, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep well until he knew that for sure. Even after he’d confirmed her departure it occurred to him the pins-out-of-her-hair thoughts might plague him for awhile.
He began a slow patrol of Dancer’s eight blocks of residential streets.
Sure enough, there was her little gray Nissan parked in front of Mrs. Saddlechild’s house. He was willing to bet it was no coincidence it was parked there because he had made the mistake of uttering Mrs. Saddlechild’s name when he spoke to her on the phone last night, while that spy had been ensconced in his camp, with his frozen peas on her head.
He went up to her door and knocked hard on it.
Mrs. Saddlechild looked as ancient as the lawn mower he had repaired for her. Today, she was dressed in a flowered housedress, her hair newly blue, her smudged glasses sliding off the end of her nose.
“Just in the garden shed, J.D., thanks,” she said briskly, through a crack in the door. And then she closed her door in his face.
She thought he was delivering her lawn mower!
He frowned. He could go and wait in his truck for Ms. Tally Smith to come out. He could pull all the wires out from under the dash of her car so that she couldn’t escape without answering a few questions, without hearing that he was running her out of town.
He could do all that, but it would be too close to playing her silly little game of cloak-and-dagger.
Plus, there was no telling what Mrs. Saddlechild was telling the insatiably curious Tally Smith. Mrs. Saddle-child had seen him naked, for God’s sake, and it was possible she was old enough and addled enough to forget the all-important detail that he’d been three years old at the time.
The front door had three little panes of frosted glass in it. He glanced up and down the block, and then peered in one of them.
The house seemed very dark in comparison to the bright sunshine outside. Still, after a moment, he could see through to the kitchen, where windows were letting light in.
There was a huge platter of cookies on the kitchen table. Mrs. Saddlechild always had cookies for him when he delivered the mower. As he watched, a slender hand reached out and took one. He was sure he caught the briefest glimpse of bright blond hair before it moved back out of range of his vision.
Just as he’d suspected, Tally Smith was in there! Eating his cookies. Talking to a woman who’d known him since he was a baby, a woman who had personal information about him that could be both embarrassing and damaging.
What the hell did Tally Smith want? He banged on the door again.
Mrs. Saddlechild came, opened her door that same cautious crack, and peered at him, annoyed. “You’re still here, J.D.?”
“Apparently,” he said.
“Oh, your money!”
Yeah, like he’d been standing out here on her porch waiting for ten dollars
“This is not about your lawn mower,” he said with poorly disguised impatience. “I want to speak to your guest.”
Mrs. Saddlechild eyed him warily, and closed the door without inviting him in. It seemed like an awfully long time before she returned.
“It’s not convenient right now,” she said.
“It damn well better become convenient,” J.D. said. “You tell her—”
“J. D. Turner! When she told me you had not behaved like a gentleman toward her, I barely believed it. But here you are on my step, cursing.” She shook her head and made a little sucking sound with her lips.
He could see his future unfolding dismally before his eyes. All the senior citizens in Dancer would be looking at him sideways now. He’d have to do free lawn mower tune-ups for a year to remove this smudge from his character.
That woman in there was ruining his life without half-trying.
“Kindly tell her I’ll be waiting,” he said tautly.
Mrs. Saddlechild sniffed regally and snapped her door shut. He figured he’d be cooling his heels for a good hour, and so he was relieved when Tally appeared a few moments later.
“Yes?” she said, stepping out onto the porch.
His relief was short-lived. Her hair was in the same crisp bun of the pulling-the-pins-from-it fantasy. She was wearing a crisp white shirt that was not silk, and pressed navy blue shorts that ended at the dimple in her knee. It reminded him of the kind of outfit lady golfers or off-duty nuns wore.
If you did not know there was a lacy bra underneath it, it was the kind of outfit designed to inspire trust and nothing else.
“Don’t ‘yes?’ me in that innocent tone of voice,” he warned her. He looked at her eyes, thinking last night’s fading light must have lent illusion to the color. But no, they were more purple than blue. Amazing.
The cool light in them made him want to pull all the pins from her hair.
“Leona said she’d call the police if you didn’t mind your manners.”
Leona. Great. This was just great. Was that actually a twinkle of amusement warming her eyes? How dare she be amused at his expense?
“I want to know what the hell you think you are doing,” he said, his tone low. He could see Mrs. Saddlechild peering out from behind her front curtain. He smiled for her benefit, but the smile felt stretched and taut, like a wolf baring its teeth.
“I’m having tea,” Tally said, unforthcoming. “And ginger snaps.”
He wanted to grab her and shake her until the pins flew free. Or kiss her again. He tried to remember the last time he had felt this passionate—this uncomfortably out-of-control—but the answer evaded him. “Why are you doing this? Why are you asking questions about me? Why are you so hell-bent on creating problems in my life?”
Her eyes were very expressive, and she looked guilty, a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, but she said, her tone dignified, “I don’t see how asking a few innocent questions could create problems in your life.”
“Really? Well let me tell you something. When a stranger shows up in Dancer and starts asking if J. D. Turner pays his bills on time, by the next day it’s the talk of the coffee shop that he probably gambled away his life savings in Las Vegas.”
The guilty look darkened her eyes, so he pressed onward, “And if somebody asks if he has an ex-wife or two stashed away somewhere, then the talk in the barbershop and the hairdresser’s for the next three weeks will be about the possibility that he might have a secret wife or two. People will begin to ‘remember’ little incidents that back up this theory. There will be sightings in nearby towns.”
“Surely you exaggerate,” she said uncertainly, and looked guiltier than ever.
“And does J. D. Turner get drunk on Friday night? Or Monday? Or Tuesday? I guarantee you, there will be lookouts outside the New Life Church where AA meets twice a week for the next year trying to catch me making an entrance.” He was enjoying her guilt, immensely, the fact that she had dropped her gaze from him and was now studying the toe of a sneaker so absurdly white she must have polished it.