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“And let’s not forget the final question. Does J. D. Turner like children? Good God, that coupled with me tracking you down here will have Mrs. Saddlechild posting the wedding bans in the Dancer Daily News!”
He saw, suddenly, and with grave irritation, she had not lowered her eyes from his out of guilt alone. Her shoulders were shaking suspiciously.
“Are you laughing?”
She glanced up at him, and shook her head, vehemently, no. But it was too late. He had seen the line of her mouth curve up, the mischievous sparkle it brought to her eyes.
“I fail to see the humor in this,” he said sternly. Thankfully, she quit smiling. That smile would make it way too easy to forget she was an uptight menace, and that his mission was to run her out of town.
She looked at him squarely, drew back her shoulders. “You don’t strike me as a man who gives two hoots about what the people of this town have to say about you.”
“Just because you’ve been digging up dirt, don’t assume you know one single thing about me, Tally Smith.”
“As a matter of fact,” she said, and he did not miss her reluctance, “there is no dirt. You appear to be a highly respected member of this community.”
“Your tone implies I have somehow managed to pull the wool over the eyes of an entire town.”
“Apparently most of whom have been spared the sight of you in a towel. And also,” she continued, “as a charter member of the Ain’t Gettin’ Married, No Way, Never Club, it strikes me as bizarre that you would kiss a complete stranger on your front porch.”
Stan had a big mouth. The club was secret!
“Kissing has nothing to do with marriage, unless you read a certain kind of novel, which I am almost certain you do.” He had scored, because he saw indignant red splotches bloom in her cheeks. “Plus, for as fascinating as all this is, you haven’t answered my original question. Why the curiosity in the first place?”
She looked at the toe of her shoe again. So did he. The whiteness of those runners really bugged him. Didn’t she have anything better to do with her time?
Didn’t she have a fellow chasing her around trying to get the pins out of her hair?
He reminded himself firmly, that only one question about her was any of his business. The question that pertained to him. Everything else entered distinctly murky territory.
“Cat got your tongue?” he asked silkily. “I want an answer. I want to know why you’ve been asking questions about me all over town.”
“All right,” she said. “My sister left you a small inheritance. I wanted to see if you deserved it. I’ll mail it to you.”
He watched with extreme interest as the tip of her nose turned red, and then her earlobes, and then her neck.
He was willing to bet she had never told a lie before in her life.
“Try again,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, and giving her the mean look that always made Stan flub his pool shot.
She took a deep breath and looked everywhere but at him. She touched the button at her throat to make sure it was done up tight, not an ounce of her exposed to him.
“I found your picture in my sister’s things,” she said finally, her tone clipped and uneasy.
“And?”
“And I was intrigued. I wanted to know more.” Her glowing red nose and earlobes changed to a shade of beet.
“Don’t even try to appeal to my male ego,” he said. “It won’t work. There is no way you drove all this way because you looked at a picture and found me irresistibly attractive. You could have any guy you blinked your big eyes at back home, wherever that is. You wouldn’t have to drive halfway across the country looking for one.”
“I wasn’t trying to appeal to your male ego,” she said indignantly. “I have a man at home. I most likely will marry him before the year is out.”
Her enthusiasm for her upcoming nuptials was under-whelming. She sounded like a Victorian maiden, in one of those books he was positive she read, who’d been promised against her will. So much for a guy chasing after her trying to get her to let her hair down.
Not that J. D. Turner wanted the details of her excruciatingly boring love life. Not that he wanted to even think why the flatness of her statement made him feel an unwanted stab of sympathy coupled with a desire to kiss her all over again.
“I want the truth. A hard concept for you and your sister, I know, but I’m not settling for anything less.”
“Please don’t say anything bad about my sister.”
The sudden ache in her voice, the tenderness nearly undid him more than her emotionless announcement of her upcoming marriage.
“Elana was sick,” she said quietly.
Ah, the truth, finally. “Well, you said she died. I assumed she was sick first.”
“No. She died in a car accident. She was sick all her life. She had a mental disorder.”
“Elana?” he said incredulously.
“Sometimes she hurt the people who loved her. She didn’t mean to.”
“Elana?” he said, again.
Tally nodded. “You probably met her in an upswing. Lots of energy? Incredible enthusiasm? Unbelievable zest for life?”
He was staring at her, openmouthed.
“Everybody loved her when she was like that,” Tally said, almost gently.
“I never said I loved her,” he said fiercely.
“I think you did, though.” No glow to her ears and nose, no color blooming at the base of her slender throat now, when he most needed it!
“That’s ridiculous. Why would you think that?”
“Because of the picture I found.” She faltered. “And because of the way you kissed me when you thought it was her.”
If he’d been a really smart man, he would have hung his Gone Fishin’ sign on the shop door after Stan’s phone call this morning and taken off for a week or two. All this would have blown over by the time he got back.
But he had not done that, and now he bulldozed on, determined to get to the truth, more determined than ever to see Tally Smith riding off into the sunset.
“You still seem to be dodging around the question. Let me put this very simply. What is Tally Smith doing in Dancer, North Dakota?”
“I wanted to find out some things about the man my sister loved.”
He snorted. “She didn’t love me.”
“I think she did. That’s probably why she left you. She started to go down. Loved you enough that she didn’t want you to see it.”
He looked at her closely. Little tears were shining behind her eyes. He wasn’t the only one Elana Smith had caused pain to. Tally had said everyone loved her sister when she was up. He suspected very few people had loved her when she was down.
The last thing he wanted to do was see Tally in a sympathetic light because it blurred his resolve. On the other hand, her man wasn’t chasing her trying to get her hair down, and she had coped with a sick sister.
“I’m sorry she was sick,” he heard himself saying. “I really am, Tally.”
She blinked rapidly, and then said, way too brightly, “Anyway, I’ve found out all I wanted to know. You’ll be happy to know I’m leaving first thing tomorrow morning. No more questions.”
“I am happy to know that,” he said, but he didn’t feel completely happy or completely convinced, either.
“Goodbye, J.D.,” she said. She stuck out her hand.
He made the mistake of taking it. He felt a little shiver of desire for her, the smallest regret it was over before it ever started.
He yanked his hand away and went back down Mrs. Saddlechild’s walk more troubled than when he had gone up it. Something was wrong here.
But he’d gotten what he wanted, an assurance she was leaving. He went home and went back to work. He ate supper and showered, no singing. Unease niggled at the back of his mind, as if he had missed a piece of the puzzle, as if he should know something that he didn’t. He felt as if she had never given him the real answer to why she was here, but that if he just thought hard enough, he would figure it out.
When no answer came, he ordered himself over and over to forget it. But as soon as he let down his guard, the unanswered question filled his mind again.
He went to sleep nursing it.
J.D. woke deep in the night, moonlight painting a wide stripe across his bedroom floor, the cry of a coyote still echoing in the air, lonesome and haunting. He lay still, aware of the deep rise and fall of his own chest, feeling momentarily content.
But then the question he had gone to sleep pondering swept back into his mind, and the contentment was gone, like dust before a broom.
Why was Tally Smith really here? Beyond driving him crazy? And beyond getting the citizenry of Dancer worked up into a nice gossiping frenzy, the likes of which had not been seen since Mary Elizabeth Goodwin, prom queen, had gotten pregnant without the benefit of marriage almost a half-dozen summers ago.
All this nonsense about Tally wanting to see who her sister had loved, about being intrigued by a photograph, just did not add up. Elana might have been compulsive, but her little sister looked cautious, organized, responsible.
The person least likely to act on an impulse.
For some reason Tally Smith was lying, or at the very best, not telling him the full truth. He could see it in her eyes—and in her ears and nose and throat, come to that. In the darkness of his room, he allowed himself the luxury he had not allowed himself during the day. J.D. contemplated the color of her eyes.
They were astounding, shifting from indigo to violet, sending out beacons when she felt guilty and troubled. He thought of that one moment when she had smiled, and a brief light had chased the somberness from her eyes.
The coyote howled again, and the sound shivered in the night, and that shiver went up and down J.D.’s spine, and stopped at the base of his neck. It tickled there, a premonition that his life was about to change in ways he could have never imagined.
Why was she asking people if he liked children?
Had there been the tiniest bit of truth threaded through her statement that Elana had left him an inheritance?
And then he knew. With that clarity that comes in the night sometimes, in those moments partway between sleep and waking, he knew.
He sat up, his heart racing crazily.
He tried to tell himself it couldn’t be, that it was not even possible, but he failed utterly to convince himself. A sense of urgency overcame him, and he tossed back the tangle of sheets and blankets and put his feet on the floor. He hoped the cold would slam him back into reality, but the sense of urgency did not abate.
Cursing, he pulled his jeans from a heap on the floor and yanked them on. He shoved his arms in the sleeves of his shirt as he ran for the truck, not stopping for shoes, barely aware of the rocks digging into his bare feet.
What if she hadn’t waited until morning? What if she was gone already? He didn’t know one single thing about her, except that she was Elana’s sister and that she was from north of the border. How many Smiths would there be?
It wouldn’t matter. If he’d missed her, if she had folded up her tent and slunk away in the night, he would track down every last Smith in Canada, until he had confirmed the truth that had unfolded in his heart and his head a few minutes ago.
He didn’t bother to button the shirt, just started the truck and barreled toward town. Not much law enforcement out this way at the best of times. None at—he glanced at his watch—three-thirty in the morning. He pressed down the accelerator, and watched with satisfaction when the needle jumped over ninety.
J. D. Turner knew how to rebuild a truck engine. If he was as good at other things, it might not have taken him so long to figure out why she was here.
The roar of the engine split the quiet of the prairie night. He squealed his tires at the one stop sign on Main Street. If he wasn’t more careful, if all of Dancer wasn’t speculating about him and Tally Smith by now, they certainly would be soon.
He felt almost weak with relief when he raced into the parking lot of the Palmtree and saw the little gray Nissan parked in front of a darkened cabin. It was the only car at the Palmtree. Good. He didn’t have to wake up everybody in the whole place banging on doors until he found her.
He got out of his truck and hammered on the door closest to her car, waited, hammered again.
After a long moment, he saw movement at the cabin window. The curtain flicked open ever so slightly and then flicked back into place, swiftly. Silence. Not a hint of movement outside, or inside either. He could picture her standing with her back against the wall, palms flat against it, holding her breath.
“Tally Smith, I know you’re awake.” It was a challenge to find the right voice volume—one she would hear, but not the rest of the town.
Silence.
“Open this door right now or I’m breaking it down.” This a little louder.
More silence. After all her research, she should really know better than to try calling his bluff.
“I’m counting to three.” He was just a little short of the decibel level that made walls shake and blew out windows.
Did he hear a little scuffling noise on the other side of the door?
“One.” He lowered his voice, marginally.
He heard the bolt move.
“Two.”
The handle twisted.
“Thr—”
The door opened a crack, and she put one eye to it, and regarded him with grave annoyance.
“What are you doing?” she whispered. “You’ll wake up everyone in town.”
Her hair was spilling down around her shoulders in an untamed wave that gave complete lie to the long-sleeved, high-collared nightgown, straight off Little House on the Prairie.
“Let me in,” he demanded.
“No. It’s the middle of the night. Are you drunk?”
Drunk? “No, I am not drunk,” he told her dangerously. “Isn’t that somewhere in your notes? That J. D. Turner doesn’t get drunk?”
She sniffed. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“You know, come to think of it, if I was going to get drunk, you would be a pretty good excuse.”
“I’m not going to stand here in the middle of the night and be insulted by you.” She tried to shut the door, but he slipped his foot in.
“We need to talk,” he told her.
“It will have to wait until morning.”
She was so bossy. This took on new and significant meaning now that he knew his life was going to be tangled with hers, one way or another, forever. “It’s morning actually.”
She opened the door all the way, and glared at his foot until he put it back on the other side where it belonged. Her hair was all sleep-messed. It looked exactly the way he had known it would had he been given a chance to remove the pins from it—thick and rich and wild, tumbling over her shoulders and softening the lines of her face. She looked more approachable. Sexy, actually.
He knew he must be mad, because he had that urge to kiss her again. Mad, angry. Mad, crazy, too.
“So,” she said, tapping her foot, “talk.”
She had a watch on and she glanced at it pointedly, to let him know her middle-of-the-night time was doled out thriftily. The cascading hair had not changed her tone of voice, nor her snippy attitude.
He said, with deliberate slowness, enunciating each word, “You didn’t come here checking out your sister’s lost loves.” It was a statement, not a question, and she knew it.
Whatever sleepiness was left her in face was replaced by wariness. “And your theory is?” she asked tartly.
“She had a baby.” That wasn’t a question, either. “My baby.”
He saw the answer written in her face. The color drained from it so rapidly he thought she might faint. She stood frozen, her eyes huge and frightened.
In delayed reaction to his earlier decibel level, the light blinked on in the motel office. Some instinct for self-preservation made him take her shoulders. He guided her backward, inside the cabin. Then he closed the door and leaned on it.
“Boy or girl?” he asked, ice-cold.
“Boy,” she whispered.
“I want to see my son. Get dressed. Because we are leaving right now.”
Chapter Three
“We are not going anywhere,” Tally said, finding her voice, and trying desperately to insert a note of steel into it. If this man ever got the upper hand, there would be no going back.
Though it must have been a mark of the lateness of the night, and the shock of his springing his newfound knowledge on her, that she could not think of what was so attractive about her life that she would need to go back to it.
J.D. glared at her, his eyes dark and challenging in the dim light of her room. She could see the strength and resolve in those eyes, and it occurred to her that there would be no winning a battle of wills with this man.
When she lost the staring contest, she dropped her eyes. Unfortunately, his shirt was unbuttoned and hanging open, revealing the broad and magnificent landscape of his chest. It occurred to her that she had seen more of J.D.’s chest than Herbert’s, which was unseemly, given that she was planning an intimate lifelong relationship with Herbert. She shivered.
J.D. was a magnificent specimen of a man, and the anger that sizzled in the air around him did nothing to reduce his attraction. She could feel the power of him, vital and exciting, but that was exactly the type of thing that turned a woman’s head, clouded her thinking. Being drawn to the unknown mysteries of a man was precisely the type of impulse that had gotten Elana into trouble again and again and again.
“Get dressed,” he snapped, obviously mistaking her befuddlement for weakness. “And get packed.”
She folded her arms over her chest. She could feel how rapidly her heart was beating, as if her very survival was being threatened by him taking control of her. But she wasn’t going to let him know that she was thrilled and frightened in turn by this extraordinary twist in her plan.
“No,” she said, giving herself a mental pat on the back for her calm tone. “You will have to haul me out of here, kicking and screaming.” He seemed unmoved by that threat, and so she tacked on, “And won’t that make a fine front page for the Dancer Daily News.”
He leaned very close to her. She could feel his breath on her cheek, and it was warm and sensuous and dangerous. His eyes had a steely glint in them that did not bode well for her.
“I’ll take that as a challenge, if you like,” he said, his voice deceptively soft. “It wouldn’t bother me one little bit to toss you over my shoulder and carry you out of here. You don’t look like you’d weigh more than a sack of spuds. And I’m not worried about the Dancer Daily.”
“That is not what you said earlier,” she reminded him pertly.
“I was a different man then. My whole world has changed since then.”
It felt like her whole world was shifting dangerously, too. She had to hold on to reason! She was always the one who made the plans, who knew what to do, who took charge. Surrendering was not an option.
Still, she tried a less aggressive stance. She softened her tone, touched his arm. “Could we be reasonable adults, here? There is no reason this can’t wait until morning.”
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