What A Woman Should Know

“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 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.