The Big Scoop. Sandra Kelly

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.”