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.