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,