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  “Sit,” he ordered, sternly and then did some quick adjustments to the towel.

  She gave him a defiant look, took one wobbly step toward the door, and then sank reluctantly back down in the chair. Her eyes darted around his kitchen, which was not in the running for a Better Homes and Gardens feature.

  The room was plainly furnished—Formica table, steel-framed chairs with burgundy vinyl padding. His dishes—three or four days worth—were piled in the sink. Her gaze came to rest, with faint disapproval, on the engine he had taken apart on his countertop.

  J.D. thought that was just like a woman to be noticing the decorating—or lack thereof—at the very same time she was entertaining the idea she was in mortal danger.

  His dog, Beauford, a nice mix between a coonhound and a basset, had been sleeping under the table. He chose that moment to rise on stubby legs, stretch his solid black, white and brown body, and then plop his huge head on her lap. He sniffed impolitely, blinked appealingly with his sad brown eyes, and began to drool.

  She squealed, dropping her arms from their defense position across her chest, and pushed the dog’s head out of her lap.

  “Filthy beast,” she said, staring at the new wet spot on her pants.

  Okay. J.D. could tolerate a lot, and he knew Beauford had a tendency to have bad breath, and he drooled, but that did not a filthy beast make. This was about as much of the home invasion as he could tolerate.

  He held up his fingers. He would pronounce her medically sound, and then it was out of here for Miss Priss. Filthy beast, indeed. “How many?”

  “Three,” she said, once again folding her arms over the wet spot on her blouse and glaring at him.

  “What day is it?”

  “June 28.”

  “What day were you born?”

  “How would you know if I had that right?”

  Good point. And the fact that she could make it probably meant her brain wasn’t too badly addled. Time to send her on her way.

  But she looked like just the type who would sue if she ended up with a concussion or something so he reluctantly turned from her and got a pack of frozen peas out of the freezer compartment of his fridge. He placed it on the bump on her head, and held it. She closed her eyes, briefly, and then struggled to get up again.

  “Just relax,” he said, holding her down with one finger on her shoulder. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Then why did you do that?” she asked. Her bosom was heaving sweetly under the thin, wet blouse.

  For a moment he thought she was accusing him of knocking her down the stairs. “What exactly did I do?” he snapped.

  “You kissed me!”

  “Oh, that.” He shrugged, as if it meant nothing, when in actual fact the taste of her lips was lingering sweetly on his mouth. “I thought you were someone else.”

  She pondered that, and understanding dawned in the violet depths of her eyes. It was clear she now understood the passionate nature of his relationship with her look-alike.

  “You are Jed Turner, aren’t you?”

  He tried not to flinch when she said that. Only Elana had ever called him Jed. Everyone else called him J.D.

  “John,” he corrected her. “Or J.D. J. D. Turner.”

  “I’m Tally Smith. I believe you knew my older sister, Elana,” she said, finding her voice, sticking her chin out at him as if to prove she wasn’t afraid, when she was trembling like a leaf on a silver aspen.

  He waited, holding the bag on her forehead, not having any intention of making anything any easier for her.

  “I knew her briefly.” He kept his voice curt, devoid of emotion, not a hint in that cold tone of a man who had once sung a love song.

  She took a deep breath, contemplated, and then plunged. “She died.”

  Two words. He registered them slowly. And realized that for him, Elana had died a long time ago.

  He didn’t know what to say. That he was sorry? He was not sure that he was. He was glad when the phone rang, giving him a chance to think. He took Tally Smith’s hand—which was small, and soft and warm—and put it over the frozen bag of peas, then turned to the phone.

  “Mrs. Saddlechild? Yeah. It’s ready. Ten bucks. I’ll bring it over tomorrow. My pleasure.” He hung up the phone, wishing it had been a longer call, maybe Clyde phoning to consult about the Mustang, something, anything, that required more of him.

  And then he turned back to her. Tally Smith, Elana’s kid sister. Tally looked to be in her mid-twenties. Elana had been his own age, which was thirty now.

  She was out of the chair, easing her way, shakily, toward the door. The peas were still pressed obediently against her forehead.

  “When did she die?” he asked, reluctantly.

  Her eyes were cloudy with pain, and he didn’t think it had all that much to do with the bump on her head.

  “Nearly a year ago.”

  “And why are you telling me? And why now?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  He could hear something in her voice. It had been in Elana’s voice, too. Mysterious, faintly seductive. But in her voice he could hear smokey mountains, dark green hills, deep, clear water.

  Or maybe that was a John Denver song. Elana had come from a prairie town, not very different from this one, across the Canadian border.

  “Are you from Saskatchewan?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “You came a long way to tell me.” He could explain to her that he hadn’t seen her sister for years. And that he had known her only briefly. But it seemed to him this stranger in his kitchen was not entitled to know any of the details surrounding his heartbreak.

  She looked at him, hard, and he knew, sinkingly, she did know why she had come. She just wasn’t saying.

  “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 bec
ause 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.