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.