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