Cara Colter - What A Woman Should Know

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, 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.

Her decisions had to be cool and pragmatic, based on fact, not impulse. So, despite her initial reaction, tomorrow she would interview J. D. Turner’s friends and neighbors. She prayed she would find out J.D. was a beer-swilling swine with three ex-wives and a criminal record. And then she could go home and happily marry Herbert, her conscience clear.

Though, she wished, suddenly, wearily, she could put the lid back on that box she had opened, and never find that photo with the name Jed Turner written in her sister’s hand on the back of it.

J.D., lying flat on his back underneath a car, gave a mighty heave, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and the rusted bolt finally came loose. He took it off with much more vengeance than was strictly required, and tossed it aside. Then the phone rang and he bumped his head on the oil pan.

Not a good day, so far, he thought, sliding out from under the car. He glanced at the clock. And he was a full five minutes into it.

“J.D.’s,” he answered abruptly, cradling the phone in his ear while he wiped the grease off his hands.

“Stan here.”

Where were you last night when I needed it to be you standing at the door instead of her?

“What do you want?”

“Geez. Nice greeting.”

“I’m having a bad day.”

“It’s five after eight!”

“I know.”

“Well, this should cheer you up. There was this stranger in the Chalet this morning having breakfast. Female. Kind of cute in the librarian sort of way. You know the kind where a guy thinks about pulling the pins from her hair—”

“And this news would cheer me up for what reason?” J.D. cut off his friend before he went too far down the pulling-pins-from-her-hair road. He knew full well that was a path of thought that could make a man spend the whole night wide awake and staring at his ceiling.

Pins from her hair, lace under a sheer damp blouse, eyes an unreal color of indigo, these were all thoughts that ultimately led to heads banged on oil pans first thing in the morning.

“Because,” Stan said with glee, obviously saving the best for last, “Guess who the librarian slash goddess was asking about?”

“Fred Basil?” J.D. asked hopefully. Fred was another town bachelor. He was sixty-two, built like a beach ball and changed his overalls once a year whether he needed to or not. He had politely declined joining the A.G.M.N.W.N.C., saying he would like to get married if the right gal came along.

“Guess again, good buddy,” Stan said, his good cheer bordering on the obnoxious.

J.D.’s head started to hurt. He hoped it was a delayed reaction to hitting it on the oil pan, but he knew it wasn’t. He prided himself on leading a nice quiet life. Simple. Devoid of intrigues and mysteries. A man such as himself did not probe this kind of gossip. He rose above it. Performing at his best, J.D. would have said a firm goodbye and hung up the phone. Maybe he could blame the oil pan for the regrettable fact that he was not performing at his best, and he did not hang up the phone. But he suspected it was more pins and lace and indigo eyes.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Stan said sagely to J.D.’s silence. “You might have to think of relinquishing your membership in the A.G.M.N.W.N. Club.”

J.D. said three words in a row that would have made a sailor blush. Those three words were followed by a terse sentence. “What the hell kind of questions is she asking?” Five minutes later he hung up the phone, fury burning like coal chunks in his stomach. She had crossed the line. It wasn’t enough that she had caught him at a bad moment yesterday, singing his fool head off, wrapped in a towel.

Oh, no, now she had to publicly connect herself with him, provide all sorts of gossip to the eager mongers of the village. She was embarrassing him. She was invading his privacy. Enough was enough. He had no choice.

The sane thing, of course, would be to ignore her, to rise above.

The insane thing would be to track her down and tell her, like a sheriff in a bad Western, that this was his town and there wasn’t room for the both of them. Of course, he did the insane thing, stoking his fury all the way to town.

Of all the nerve! Asking sneaky questions about him to his friends and neighbors.

The Nissan was not parked at the Palmtree and was no longer in front of the Chalet. J.D. felt a moment’s hope that Tally Smith had gone away, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep well until he knew that for sure. Even after he’d confirmed her departure it occurred to him the pins-out-of-her-hair thoughts might plague him for awhile.

He began a slow patrol of Dancer’s eight blocks of residential streets.

Sure enough, there was her little gray Nissan parked in front of Mrs. Saddlechild’s house. He was willing to bet it was no coincidence it was parked there because he had made the mistake of uttering Mrs. Saddlechild’s name when he spoke to her on the phone last night, while that spy had been ensconced in his camp, with his frozen peas on her head.

He went up to her door and knocked hard on it.

Mrs. Saddlechild looked as ancient as the lawn mower he had repaired for her. Today, she was dressed in a flowered housedress, her hair newly blue, her smudged glasses sliding off the end of her nose.

“Just in the garden shed, J.D., thanks,” she said briskly, through a crack in the door. And then she closed her door in his face.

She thought he was delivering her lawn mower!

He frowned. He could go and wait in his truck for Ms. Tally Smith to come out. He could pull all the wires out from under the dash of her car so that she couldn’t escape without answering a few questions, without hearing that he was running her out of town.

He could do all that, but it would be too close to playing her silly little game of cloak-and-dagger.

Plus, there was no telling what Mrs. Saddlechild was telling the insatiably curious Tally Smith. Mrs. Saddle-child had seen him naked, for God’s sake, and it was possible she was old enough and addled enough to forget the all-important detail that he’d been three years old at the time.

The front door had three little panes of frosted glass in it. He glanced up and down the block, and then peered in one of them.

The house seemed very dark in comparison to the bright sunshine outside. Still, after a moment, he could see through to the kitchen, where windows were letting light in.

There was a huge platter of cookies on the kitchen table. Mrs. Saddlechild always had cookies for him when he delivered the mower. As he watched, a slender hand reached out and took one. He was sure he caught the briefest glimpse of bright blond hair before it moved back out of range of his vision.

Just as he’d suspected, Tally Smith was in there! Eating his cookies. Talking to a woman who’d known him since he was a baby, a woman who had personal information about him that could be both embarrassing and damaging.

What the hell did Tally Smith want? He banged on the door again.

Mrs. Saddlechild came, opened her door that same cautious crack, and peered at him, annoyed. “You’re still here, J.D.?”

“Apparently,” he said.

“Oh, your money!”

Yeah, like he’d been standing out here on her porch waiting for ten dollars

“This is not about your lawn mower,” he said with poorly disguised impatience. “I want to speak to your guest.”

Mrs. Saddlechild eyed him warily, and closed the door without inviting him in. It seemed like an awfully long time before she returned.

“It’s not convenient right now,” she said.

“It damn well better become convenient,” J.D. said. “You tell her—”

“J. D. Turner! When she told me you had not behaved like a gentleman toward her, I barely believed it. But here you are on my step, cursing.” She shook her head and made a little sucking sound with her lips.

He could see his future unfolding dismally before his eyes. All the senior citizens in Dancer would be looking at him sideways now. He’d have to do free lawn mower tune-ups for a year to remove this smudge from his character.

That woman in there was ruining his life without half-trying.

“Kindly tell her I’ll be waiting,” he said tautly.

Mrs. Saddlechild sniffed regally and snapped her door shut. He figured he’d be cooling his heels for a good hour, and so he was relieved when Tally appeared a few moments later.

“Yes?” she said, stepping out onto the porch.

His relief was short-lived. Her hair was in the same crisp bun of the pulling-the-pins-from-it fantasy. She was wearing a crisp white shirt that was not silk, and pressed navy blue shorts that ended at the dimple in her knee. It reminded him of the kind of outfit lady golfers or off-duty nuns wore.