by Cara Colter
She held it at the corner eyeing the dog saliva.
J.D. took it back and wiped it on his shirt, then handed it back to her. “He’s soft with his mouth,” he said, “like a bird dog. He didn’t hurt it. There isn’t even a tooth mark on it.”
“It is still an unforgivable way to treat a book. That’s not the type of lesson I want Jed learning.”
“That’s okay,” J.D. said, but she could see the tightness around his own mouth. “I have many other things to teach him.”
“Wite name,” Jed informed her.
“You wrote your name?” she asked, confused and pleased, nonetheless. All those hours on the floor with the alphabet blocks finally paying off. It was a disappointment that it had happened with J.D., instead of with her, but still he was four. It was an accomplishment to be proud of, nothing at all like tearing down a dirt road in a truck.
It occurred to her she had not packed the alphabet blocks.
“With pee-pee,” Jed chortled.
“That’s one of the many other things you have to teach him?” she inquired of J.D. through lips so tight they hardly moved.
“Handy once it snows,” J.D. said without an ounce of contrition. “How about if you handle the book stuff, and I handle the boy stuff?”
“Well, I never,” she said.
“Lady, that is written all over you in sky-high letters.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know darn well what I mean.”
“I don’t.”
“Okay let me spell it out to you. It’s obvious that you have never. And it’s obvious why.”
He was stepping way over the line! Unless she was mistaken, and she knew she was not, he was referring to her most intimate secrets—or lack thereof.
How could he know she hadn’t ever? That wasn’t possible! Unless he had felt her hunger when her leg was pressed against his in the too-small cab of that truck. She tried to think back. Had she trembled with desire? Given herself away in some way? What a mortifying thought!
“How would you know what I have never done?” she said, her voice like ice, but her heart beating wildly in her chest.
“I could taste it on your lips,” he said.
“You are being far too familiar!” she said.
“Oh, well.”
She should have left it at that, really. “And what is your theory about why I have never?” she said, injecting as much scorn into her voice as she could.
“Because you are an uptight prig that no man in his right mind would ever try to get close to. Gee, getting close to you would be like snuggling up to a porcupine. Prickle, prickle, prickle.”
“You are wrong,” she said, “Dead wrong.” Though of course he wasn’t. It felt like the prickle, prickle, prickle was happening behind her eyes!
“Yeah, well,” he said, “prove it.”
She stared at him. Oh, how she would have loved to throw herself at him, take those smug lips with her own, curl her tongue around his, make him beg her to do that thing she had never done with him.
“Ooh,” he said cruelly, “the little lady is thinking of playing with fire. Remember what your momma told you. Or was it your grade five teacher? You’ll get burned.”
It was infuriating that he was right. She had too little experience to think she was going to get the upper hand with him by kissing him. She would just end up with a life more out of control than ever.
Burned, as he had so kindly put it.
“I think we need to get to Dancer as soon as possible.”
“No kidding,” he muttered, “you probably need to sharpen your quills.”
Always the tease, always making light at her expense.
“So I can get a motel and slam the door in your face,” she said.
“Happy to be able to give you a thrill,” he said amiably.
They drove back to the highway in simmering silence.
“J-e-d,” Jed sang happily, oblivious to the mood in the cab of the truck, “wite it in pee.”
J.D. snuck a little look at the woman sitting beside him. Her spine was straight and stiff. She was pushed over against that child’s car seat as far as she could get. Somehow, her leg was not touching his, though the space between them was about the thickness of a sheet of paper, close enough that he could still feel the soft heat radiating from her.
She was going through that beach book with a fine-tooth comb looking for some hint of damage by Beauford. So she could sue him.
He sighed. He knew exactly what had gone wrong. Exactly. He’d given her too much too soon.
When she’d actually laughed about going fast he had mistakenly thought she was ready for bigger and better things.
It was like giving a glass of champagne to a ten-year-old. A sip or two they could handle. More than that, they couldn’t.
She was mad as a wet hen. And not that she’d nearly had an accident either. That he had actually talked her into having fun. That’s what she was mad about. Of course, after Elana, fun and disaster were probably linked fairly closely in her mind.
Something he was going to have to keep in mind next time.
And next time could not be too soon. If she managed to cement herself into this sour position, he might not be able to break through her armor again.
Still, opportunity did not present itself. She read to Jed out of storybooks, and studiously ignored every one of J.D.’s efforts to make her laugh, or even speak.
They stopped, once, for hamburgers.
Jed tried to practice his new name-writing skill in the parking lot of the restaurant, which earned J.D. the silent treatment all through lunch and the rest of the way to Dancer.
Honestly, he should have been so glad to check her into the Palmtree, to be rid of her for the day. But instead he was aware of the ticking of the clock, the amount of time he had to complete this mission.
He went home and laid awake plotting new ways to make her cut loose, and laugh.
And thinking about the tinge that had changed the color of her cheeks when he had suggested she never had.
And wrestling with the question whether he owed it to his son to save Tally Smith from a passionless marriage.
Of course, the only way he could think of to do that, would be to introduce her to passion himself.
With anyone else it might have been an interesting exercise. But, oh, Ms. Smith was more complicated than the average woman.
And he suspected, under that bristly exterior, far more easily hurt. Sensitive.
You couldn’t seduce a woman like her and walk away from it with a clean conscience, no matter how noble your motives. Of that, he was fairly certain.
Exhausted and confused, a soldier no longer so certain about the perimeters of his mission, he finally got up and made coffee.
It occurred to him he needed to define his mission, so he went to the kitchen, turned on the radio and got a pad of paper. He sat at the kitchen table and scowled at the blank piece of paper for a long time before he wrote across the top: What A Woman Should Know.
He thought again, hard, before he finally wrote.
One, a woman should know better than to settle in life for stainless steel appliances instead of wild nights of endless passion.
J.D. eyed what he had written and decided he wasn’t quite ready to tackle number one yet.
Two, he wrote, a woman should know that too many rules were damaging to a small boy’s spirit. Actually, to anyone’s spirit. He put a small check mark beside that one because he could not help but feel, a trifle proudly, he was making a bit of headway in the rules department.
Three, he wrote, germs are rarely deadly. Dog kisses are one of life’s delights. He actually knew the perfect place to take someone with a germ phobia, and he wrote mud bog in brackets behind number three.
Four could be tackled at the same time as three because it dealt with the fact that small boys—and big ones—need to get dirty.
Five, life needs to hold surprises.
He rerea
d his list, and thought that was quite enough for any man to try and accomplish in two weeks.
And yet he could not still the pen. Almost of its own volition, it moved across the page and wrote: Six, Women who get married for security end up like dried old prunes, who don’t laugh enough and are prone to depression in their middle years.
Well, a woman did need to know that! He could not shirk his duty by not confronting her with the fact that if she married a man who did not recognize the significance of a black dress there was no telling what kind of woman she would become.
It sickened J.D. thinking about it, though only, he told himself, because of the eventual effect it would have on Jed.
Yes, he, J. D. Turner, had the obligation to stop it right now. Six little things that he had to teach her, two weeks to do it in.
There wasn’t much time. He should start right now. He looked at his clock. Midnight.
There was not a thing he could do at this time of night.
And then the radio announcer said, “And just a reminder that here in North Dakota we will have an amazing view of the meteor shower, predicted for 1:00 a.m.”
A meteor shower! Divine intervention! She might not think stargazing at one in the morning was appropriate, but it was her rules that needed to be broken. It said so right here on his list. In fact, it was number two.
Whistling, J.D. put on water and made a carafe of hot chocolate. He grabbed his jacket and headed for the door.
A few minutes later he was at the Palmtree, knocking on her door. She opened it and regarded him warily.
He noticed she was wearing the same getup as before—high-collared, long-sleeved nightdress. But her hair was free, and it was beautiful, long and flowing. It made him want to run his fingers through it, to beg her to wear it like this all the time.
“What?” she asked. “What is it about you and nocturnal visits? Have you had another revelation?”
He sure had—that he had a lot of work to do on her, and not enough time to do it. He noticed she did not look like she had been sleeping, any more than he had. Perhaps a little more shaken up than she wanted to let on.
“Hi,” he said cheerfully.
She glowered at him.
“I just heard on the radio there’s going to be a meteor shower shortly. I didn’t think Jed should miss it.”
“Jed is four years old,” she sputtered. “He is in bed sleeping at this outrageous hour, not up gallivanting.”
“Gallivanting? Are you serious?” He could see she was, and though he would have loved to have given her some lessons in gallivanting, that would probably have to wait for another night. “I thought we could just wrap him up in a blanket. I’ll hold him on my lap. Some things are too good to sleep through. Do you remember that movie where the kid sees the Russian rocket go over his house, and it changes his life forever?”
“So, tonight is going to change Jed’s life forever?” Her words were skeptical, but he saw the softening in her eyes. He guessed she’d liked that movie. Probably showed it to all her grade fivers to get them excited about the science fair.
“It could,” he said, thinking if I can change you, I can change his life forever.
“I don’t know.”
“I brought hot chocolate,” he said, when he saw her wavering.
“I guess just once wouldn’t hurt. Like Christmas Eve.”
“Exactly,” he said, careful not to push his advantage too hard. “I’ll arrange the chairs, if you want to pour the hot chocolate.”
He turned from her before she could rethink it. He’d learned something important. Her defenses were down slightly in the middle of the night.
The Palmtree had plastic lawn furniture in front of each cabin, and he found two chairs and positioned them in the middle of the parking lot.
He went and tapped lightly on the door and went in. She had a little kitchen unit this time, and she was at the counter watering down Jed’s hot chocolate with milk. She had pulled a bulky sweater over her nightdress, and on anyone else it would have looked like a nightmare.
But on her somehow it didn’t.
“You take Jed,” she whispered, “and I’ll take the cocoa.”
He went and looked down into his son’s sleeping face. A feeling so strong it could have knocked him off his feet came over him. A feeling of love, of wanting to protect, of wanting to change the whole world so that it would never give this little one heartache, or hurt.
She came and stood beside him. “He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she said with such soft reverence.
He glanced at her, and was amazed to feel the very same feeling in his chest when he looked at her as he had felt when he looked at his son: a sensation of wanting to protect, of wanting to change the whole world to prevent her heartaches and hurts.
The feeling stunned him.
She was prickly! Porcupinelike! Controlling! Totally lacking a sense of humor.
But looking at her in the soft light of the motel room, gazing at her nephew, J.D. glimpsed her truth just as surely as he had glimpsed it when she wore a black dress, and when she stole his truck, and when she laughed out loud.
Prickly was her pretense, and her defense. What she really was, was something else entirely.
And for the first time since he had committed to this mission he wasn’t at all sure that once he unleashed the real Tally Smith he was going to be able to handle it, control what happened next.
Because even now he wanted to do something stupid, lean toward her, touch the tip of her nose with his lips, tell her everything in her world would be okay.
Instead, he tucked the blankets close around Jed and scooped him up in his arms. The boy was painfully light. How could something so light, a weight so insignificant, change a man’s whole world, change the way he thought and felt about everything?
Even his own future.
The boy stirred against him, and he tucked him tight to his chest, and strode outside. He got settled in a chair, the child in the crook of one arm, the hot chocolate in the other. She came and sat beside him, and gazed upward.
“Oh,” she said, “it is so utterly beautiful.”
And it was, even though the main event had not even started. That moment, sitting in the Palmtree parking lot in a plastic chair with a child on his lap and a beautiful woman beside him, and the stars winking gloriously in a black velvet night sky felt like it put every other beautiful moment of his whole life to shame.
Even the ones he had spent with Elana, singing her a love song.
Jed stirred against him, and his eyes fluttered open. “J.D.,” he said, and his voice held a welcoming joy that made J.D. wonder how he had survived thus far in his lonely life.
“Hey, little buddy, we’re going to look at some stars.”
“Doggie here?”
“No. I left him at home.”
Jed turned his face toward the sky, put his thumb in his mouth and contemplated it. “Vewy pwettee,” he said around his thumb. He snuggled deep into J.D.’s chest.
From somewhere deep inside him, the song came. Softly, J.D. sang a love song to his son. “Annabel was a cow of unusual bovine beauty,” he crooned.
His son smiled at him, settled deeper into his chest, and he sang on.
“Happy,” Jed said when J.D. had finished the song. Tally was smiling.
“There’s going to be a meteor shower,” Tally said, when the silence of the night had enveloped them. She launched into a scientific explanation.
This obviously went right over Jed’s head, but J.D. felt himself tingle oddly. What she was really saying, it seemed, was that now and then people got to be in the presence of miracles.
And that’s how it felt to him, sitting in this parking lot, with his son on his lap, and that beautiful enigmatic woman beside him.
As if somehow, though he was completely unworthy of it, life had decided to give him a miracle.
What if his mission was not to change her, after all?
What if it was to change
the thing in himself that had kept him from having moments like this all his life? That had kept him from saying yes to the greatest miracle of all?
It was the soft silkiness of the night air, the lateness of the hour, too many nights with not enough sleep that was filling his head with such foolishness.
“Do you know any of the constellations?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” he said, relieved to talk about something concrete, scientific. “The easy ones. The Big Dipper. The Little Dipper. Orion.”
“I wish we had a telescope,” she said dreamily. She took a sip of her hot chocolate and he noticed it left a little moustache. She tickled it off with her tongue, and he felt a burst of heat go through him that would put something like a meteor shower to shame.
They took turns finding constellations and trying to point them out to Jed, but he did not appear interested in giving things names. He seemed so attuned to the magic in the air.
And then the meteor shower began.
Jed’s eyes went very wide. He cooed reverently as the scattered pieces of light danced and fell and raced through the brilliant sky. In a world of special effects and fireworks it should have seemed like a small thing, but somehow it didn’t.
When it was over, they sat very still.
J.D. felt Jed relax against him, and then his breathing formed little warm clouds against J.D.’s chest.
“He’s sleeping,” he said.
“I think he’ll never forget this, ever,” she said, “Thank you.”
Somehow J.D. had the feeling he was not going to forget this, ever, either, and that was not part of his plan.
He could make that all worse right now, if he leaned toward her, if he took advantage of the sudden tenderness in her eyes, the slackening of her guard.
But the idea had never been to change his life forever. He liked his life just fine, thank you. The idea had been to change her life.
And he knew if he stayed here one more minute nothing was going to go according to his plan.
So he stood up, shoved the sleeping child into her arms, ignored the astounded expression on her face, and said, “Well, that was fun. See you tomorrow. Sleep in.”