Arizona Heat

Two

Kansas peered out the front window of her brother’s place for the dozenth time: 6:50. Too early to worry that Pax wasn’t going to show, yet her heart was still thudding with anxiety and nerves.

If Pax couldn’t help find her brother, the world would not suddenly end. Kansas would find another way. She always had. But damn, right now she really didn’t have a clue where else to turn.

Too antsy to sit still, she hustled into the bathroom to check her appearance. The mirror didn’t reveal any noticeable difference since she checked five minutes ago. Her fresh-washed hair had been coaxed to look wilder with a judicious application of spritz. Exuberantly impractical bangles dangled from her wrists and ears. A filmy blouse covered a tank top, both tucked into her shorts with a jeweled belt. The blouse was emerald green and bright, but the fabric was as insubstantial as wind.

She looked—she hoped—like a helpless city slicker, inept, vulnerable, flighty, impractical...and momentarily she felt a qualm of conscience. It wasn’t exactly nice to try to manipulate a man with her appearance. She’d only caught one weakness in Pax—a sense of honor as extinct as dinosaurs in most men. He had both a reputation and job that labeled him a rescuer. Never mind ethics. Her brother mattered more than any darn fool ethics, and if she looked like a woman who needed rescuing, it might up the odds of Pax being willing to help her.

Kansas slugged her hands into her shorts pockets, musing that the situation was downright humorous. She had a real bug about men who treated her like a helpless cookie. On the surface, it seemed the height of irony to be inviting the same response from Pax that drove her bananas. But life was more complicated than surface appearances, as Kansas had learned the hard, painful way.

Her mind inevitably spun back to the car accident. She’d been fourteen at the time, green-young, with a heart full of confident dreams about becoming a strong, athletic Amazon when she grew up. During those long months of recovery, it bit like a bullet to be a helpless invalid, hurt even more to be a dependent burden on those who loved her. En route, though, she’d discovered the difference between real pride and false pride.

She was never going to be a physically strong Amazon in this lifetime, but that measurement of strength had never been worth poppycock. Real strength—the kind of grit and guts that mattered—came from accepting whoever, or whatever you were. Just because a woman was stuck looking like a physical weakling never meant she couldn’t be tougher than steel on the inside.

When Kansas heard the knock on the front door, her hand flew to her stomach. A woman of steel, she told herself firmly, should not be having a problem with jittery butterflies.

She sprinted for the door. When Pax walked in, she abruptly remembered where all those butterflies came from. Him. The toughest woman on earth could hardly fail to notice that he was one hormone-arousing hombre.

He’d cleaned up before coming over, and was dressed casually enough in jeans and a chambray shirt, but two of her could tuck in his shadow. His jet black hair was still damp from a recent shower, yanked back in a ponytail with a leather thong. Her pulse suddenly galloped around an electric racetrack. It wasn’t something she could help. Personally she thought a man with eyes that dark, that deep should come with a warning about high voltage.

“Come on in. I appreciate your coming,” she said cheerfully.

“I told you I would.” He strode in, his posture as rigid as an oak trunk, but his gaze traveled the length of her. It didn’t take him twenty seconds to make the journey from her city-slicker outfit to her wild baubles to her carrot-top artsy craftsy hairstyle. He noticeably relaxed, with an amused smile for her sunburned nose. “You look like you recovered from the heat this afternoon.”

“Thankfully it cools down around here at night.” She told herself she wasn’t irked. An easy, relaxed smile was exactly what she wanted from Pax. Flash and sparkle were clearly not his personal cuppa, which was absolutely fine with her. She’d never dressed and fussed to have him notice her as a woman—she’d put on a version of the dog to win his sympathy for her brother’s cause.

And Case, of course, was the only thing on her mind. She suddenly wrapped her arms tightly around her chest. “I’ve got some wine and crackers in the living room, but to be honest, I’d like to show you around first. I haven’t had time to really clean the place up, so almost everything is just like I found it when I got here yesterday. I think I can show you why I’m so worried about my brother.”

“I don’t know that I can help you with your brother, Kansas.”

“I know. I understand that. But I’m really coming into this area cold—I don’t know anything. If nothing else, I’m hoping you could give me some leads or ideas.”

“I’ll try.” His forehead suddenly creased in a frown. “For starters, was the house locked when you got here? How did you get in?”

Kansas could have told him that she’d climbed on two suitcases and broken in by jimmying a window latch with a crowbar. But somehow she didn’t think Pax would be too quick to aid a helplessly impractical city slicker if she confessed such resourcefulness—or her willingness to commit breaking and entering without a single ethical qualm. “The house was locked, which reassured me at first. I mean, it seemed to indicate that Case planned to be away. But then I got inside...”

She ushered him around, trying to show him the house as it had first appeared from her own eyes. Her brother had barely had two cents to rub together. The place he’d rented was a long way from deluxe—just four rooms, all simply done in adobe and tile.

The red-tiled kitchen was no bigger than a walk-in closet, with aging appliances and a jutting counter that functioned as an eating table. “I had to clean up here. Case had left dirty dishes piled in the sink—which wasn’t untypical of him—but the food was just crusted on. When I opened the refrigerator, there was spoiled milk, lunch meat that had turned prehistoric...” She shook her head. “Maybe he’d planned on going somewhere, but not for this long. Not for three weeks.”

“Case wasn’t famous for planning ahead,” Pax said pointedly.

“I know he’s a little...impulsive. But he left so many other things just hanging.” She jogged ahead. Just off the kitchen was a utility room, where an aging washing machine and dryer were located. She showed Pax how clothes had been left in the washer, dried out but never transferred to the dryer. And then she zoomed past him toward the only bathroom in the place, where basic men’s toiletries were still strewn around the sink—toothpaste, shaving cream, razor, deodorant. “Everything he left is daily-life-necessity stuff—nothing he’d take for an evening, but positively things he would have packed if he’d planned on being gone for three weeks.”

“I think you’re right—the clues add up to a trip he didn’t plan. But that still doesn’t mean that Case disappeared in some frightening or scary sense, Kansas. He’s just a kid, and few kids that age excel at responsible choices. He could easily have made a spur-of-the-moment decision to take off.”

His voice reminded her of the nap side of velvet: soft, gentle, soothing. He probably calmed dozens of wounded critters with that sexy baritone, but it scraped against her feminine nerves like squeaky chalk. How was she ever going to get through to Pax if he persisted in being so logical?

“Maybe if I show you the bedroom,” she said in frustration, and then stopped so quickly in the middle of the hall that Pax almost ran into her. “No. Forget the bedroom.”

“Why?”

Because she had lingerie and clothes and her brand of “girl stuff” wildly strewn all through her brother’s bedroom. Because she was oddly edgy around Pax without exposing an intimately unmade, rumpled bed to his dark eyes. “Because,” she said, “there are just more important things to show you in the living room.”

“Okay,” he said, as gently as if he were talking to a skittery mouse.

She felt skittery. It wasn’t just this increasingly strange feeling she had around Pax, but the attack of anxiety raising again about her brother. Something had happened to Case. She knew it. And walking into the living room intensified that restless feeling of worry and panic tenfold.

She gestured toward the pots of dead plants on the tile floor by the sliding glass doors. “You can see those plants wilted and died from lack of water...which, again, made me think that Case had never expected to be gone for so long. But those plants are so weird, besides...I mean, they look like ugly weeds, hardly some charming little philodendron or standard houseplant. And I can’t imagine my brother taking the time to fuss with any plants—he never had a homemaker bone in his whole body. So that really struck me wrong, and then there was the letter—”

“What letter?”

She whisked around the worn tan couch and old, scarred bookcase. The living room was furnished with typical rental property decor—bland beiges and browns—so ordinary that she had no way to explain to Pax why the room first scared her. He couldn’t know her brother. Not the way she did.

Case had always been more into playing than deep thinking—yet there were books about mysticism and religions and heavyweight philosophy stashed all over the bookshelves and tables. A stained-glass pentagram hung from one window; a Tibetan prayer wheel was stuck on a shelf. Maybe the previous renter had left them, because Kansas couldn’t believe Case even knew what those symbols meant. The prints and posters tacked on the walls were all surreal unearthly scenes, wild and dark, and absolutely nothing like her brother’s taste. At least the brother she knew.

But the most disturbing thing for Kansas was the letter. At the far corner of the living room was a battered pine desk, where she’d found the letter yesterday—a half-finished missive, to her, in Case’s blunt scrawl and dated three weeks before. She picked up the white notebook paper, feeling such a huge well of anxiety that she could hardly swallow. “Case would never have left a half-finished letter. And it’s to me. He mentions a girl, Serena—actually, he brought up her name before—but I have no idea what her last name is. And most of the letter is about how he finally found a way to turn his life around, something he was serious about and committed to...but that’s when it ends. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

She spun around to hand Pax the letter, expecting him to be right behind her—but he hadn’t followed her across the room. Instead he was hunkered down by the sliding doors, sniffing and then fingering the leaves of those long-dead plants.

“Do you know what those plants are?” she asked him.

“Yeah. I think so. It’s a plant called datura. Common enough in the desert. Some call it jimsonweed.”

“Why on earth would he grow a weed?” Kansas asked bewilderedly, and then sucked in a breath. “Don’t tell me it’s something like marijuana. I’d never believe you. My brother has faults—he can be wild and irresponsible and he doesn’t always think things through—but at heart, he couldn’t be more clean-cut. He was never the type to mess around with recreational drugs—”

“It’s not an illegal substance, Kansas. Nor is it a recreational drug.”

Since that was exactly what she wanted—and expected—to hear, Kansas should have felt reassured. Yet her heart suddenly seemed to be thudding louder than a base drum. Pax straightened, and then walked straight toward her and picked up the letter.

While he studied the letter, she studied him. Although Pax clearly wasn’t a man to reveal emotion in his expressions, she sensed something had changed. Likely he had only made this visit because she’d played out the role of a lady in distress, not because he really believed her brother was in trouble.

But there was something dead quiet about the way he read that letter. And when he finished, he glanced back at the plants.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You know something.”

He hesitated. “I don’t know anything, I told you. When Case first dropped in town, I ran into him in a restaurant. He had no place to bunk down, no money in his pockets. It was no hardship for me to give him a hand. He stayed with me for a short stretch, and I gave him part-time work in my surgery until he had some cash ahead. Then he found this place, got a job at a store in town. He stopped by to talk sometimes, shoot the bull. That’s all, Kansas. I wasn’t really in his confidence—”

“You know something,” she repeated, her gaze on his face. “What? Something about those plants?”

When he hesitated again, her instincts set off mental smoke alarms.

“Pax, for cripe’s sake, you’re scaring me half to death. If you have some idea where he is, what happened to him—”

“Like I said, I don’t know anything...look, why don’t we just sit down for a minute. I didn’t mean to shake you up. I’ll explain what I know. We’ll just talk about this real calm, real quiet.”

“Okay,” Kansas said. And on the catch of a breath, screamed at the top of her lungs.

* * *

Pax already had a few clues that Kansas was no more predictable than a loaded gun, but her sudden earsplitting scream came from absolutely nowhere. For such a sprite, she had a prize-winning set of lungs. And if the scream wasn’t enough to stun him speechless, she suddenly threw herself straight into his arms.

He grabbed her. It wasn’t a choice or thought, but just a basic, masculine physical response. The scream still ringing in his ears sounded petrified, and his instinctive reaction was to protect her. He’d have done the same thing for any other small, vulnerable creature—woman, child, animal, would have made no difference.

But in the spin of those seconds, Pax recognized a telling difference. Heat suddenly charged through his veins. Whatever scent she was wearing hit his nostrils with muscle-tightening awareness—no sweet, safe, flowery perfumes for Kansas, but something just like her: spicy and sensual and disturbingly unignorable.

She’d slammed into him with the force of a catapult—an awkward, miniature catapult. Her weight didn’t throw him off-balance, but she did. Never mind her size. That small trembling body was still a woman’s body, with a heart heaving like thunder and breasts layered so explicitly against him that every masculine hormone came stinging, singing awake. She had her arms cuffed so tightly around his waist that he couldn’t breathe. For that millisecond, he didn’t want to.

He wasn’t expecting the jolt of chemistry. Not to her. Not with her. Even accounting for a stretch of abstinence, he’d never been remotely attracted to dynamite or trouble, and from his first glimpse, he’d sensed Kansas was both. Understanding his incomprehensible response to her would have to come later, though.

Her hair was stiff with mousse and tickled his chin; her dang fool shoulder-length earrings tangled with his collar—but over the top of her head, he abruptly spotted the reason for her scream. An extremely hairy orange and black tarantula was scooching slowly across the floor.

His heartbeat immediately simmered down and he almost laughed. Not at her fear, but at her response to the “avicularia.” Kansas had already struck him as emotional and impulsive and pure female. Somehow he could have guessed that she’d never waste time on a halfway gasp when a full-body sissy scream would do.

“Kansas,” he said gently, “it’s just a spider.”

“You call that a spider? I call it a monster—big enough to kill us both! How do you live in this horrible country? I’ll never sleep for a week!”

“If you let me loose, I’ll take care of it,” he said soothingly.

“If you think I’m letting go of you, you’re out of your mind!” But having made that completely irrational statement, she reared back her head and shrieked again when she saw the tarantula.

By tomorrow, maybe, his ears might stop ringing. “I’m not saying you want to be bitten by one, but it’s not going to attack you. If you just calm down for two seconds—”

“Calm down? I hate spiders and crawly things! Oh, God, oh, God. I’m gonna have nightmares about this for a year!”

Pax opened his mouth to try to reassure her again—and abruptly and completely closed his mouth.

Kansas, still ranting, tore loose from his arms. Still raving about how petrified she was, she raced across the room and grabbed a folded newspaper. Still claiming to be an ace-pro wuss who couldn’t handle, just couldn’t handle, creepy-crawly critters, she scooped the tarantula onto the paper, whisked across the room to open the sliding doors and let the critter outside.

When she slammed the glass door closed, she leaned against it with a dramatic hand on her chest. “I think I’m gonna have a heart attack.”

Pax scratched his chin. He’d thought she was going to have a heart attack, too. He would have quickly educated her about how painful a tarantula bite could be—if she’d given him the chance. He would also have taken care of the critter for her—if she hadn’t moved at the speed of light and done it herself.

For someone who made big noises about being a self-proclaimed coward and a gutless wimp, Kansas wasn’t quite living up to her image.

Or maybe she just wasn’t what she seemed.

Kansas suddenly peered up at him. “You probably think I’m a scatterbrained ditz.”

That thought had crossed his mind. “Actually it’s a pretty good idea to be scared of tarantulas...and the same goes for a few other desert critters who live around here. Most have a far more exaggerated reputation than they deserve, but a tarantula bite can hurt real good. Best to stay away from them.”

“I’ll be happy to.” She clawed a hand through her hair, which made a cowlick stick up in a spike. “I’m gonna have the willies all night unless I check every corner of the house for any more of those things.”

Pax could have offered. It wasn’t a lack of chivalry that kept him silent, but just plain dark humor. Kansas kept saying how terrified she was, but she certainly didn’t seem to be counting on anyone to rescue her. A man might even come to the confounded conclusion that the lady was damn used to rescuing herself. He glanced again at the ethereal blouse, the fragile bones, the sky-soft blue eyes, the impractical baubly jewelry dangling and tangling all over the place...

“Pax—do you want some wine or something? Before that tarantula scared the wits out of me, I thought you were going to tell me something about my brother.”

“I’m not much on wine.” He glanced at his watch. “And it’s getting pretty late. I’ve got a call on a rancher at six in the morning.”

Immediately she looked guilty. “I didn’t mean to take so much of your time.”

“Hey, I volunteered.” More to the point, Pax just wasn’t sure what to say about her brother. Long before Kansas arrived, he’d had some suspicions clawing in his mind about what Case might have gotten himself involved with. The things she’d showed him around the place had worried him more.

But suspicions weren’t fact. And even if his worries were true, Pax still wasn’t sure what or how to tell Kansas anything. No question, she had a lioness’s fierce loyalty to her brother. That was a sweet quality, a damn fine quality that Pax only wished someone had felt toward him in his own life. But to let an emotional, impulsive sissy of a city baby loose in a situation way out of her ken—hell, Kansas could land herself in a heap of trouble, if not downright danger.

She walked him to the front door with her arms wrapped around her chest and her mouth zipped in a firm line. No talking. She respected that it was late and he had to leave. Her gaze kept shooting to his face, though, and Pax had the uneasy feeling that she’d rope and hog-tie him if he dared try leaving without saying something else about Case.

When he pushed open the back door, she was as faithful as a dog on his heels. It had turned dark. The lights of Sierra Vista were a soft glow in the sky to the north, but this far out of town, there were no lights, no traffic, no people noise. The night came alive here. The air was impossibly clear and pure, the silence soothing on a man’s soul. So typically, the Arizona spring night was seeped in desert smells and sounds and a huge, ghost white full moon—his favorite kind.

Kansas’s gaze was still glued tightly on his face. Pax doubted she noticed the moon or the night—at that precise moment, he doubted she’d notice an earthquake—and mentally sighed. Yeah, he’d been thinking about the problem of her brother.

“My work schedule is pretty weird,” he told her. “I’m not an ‘office hours’ kind of vet. About the only thing I do in the office is surgery—most of my work is out in the field, and I use a cellular phone for people trying to track me down. My hours are always crazy, and like I said, I really don’t know where your brother is, Kansas. The best I could do—if you don’t mind working around my hit-or-miss schedule—is take you around, show you some places where Case used to go, that kind of thing.”

“That kind of thing would be wonderful,“ she said fervently, and smiled like he’d just turned on the switch for the sun. “That was all I was asking for—some help. I know it’s an imposition, and I really appreciate the offer. In fact I would be glad to pay you—”

“Around here, we haven’t caught up with big city values yet. A neighbor still helps a neighbor. Money has nothing to do with it.” Pax dug the truck key out of his jeans pocket. He doubted the wisdom of getting involved, but there was no help for it. Letting Kansas poke and pry on her own just wouldn’t sit on his conscience. “I won’t be free tomorrow until after three in the afternoon.”

“That’d be great.”

Pax wasn’t sure it’d be great. He wasn’t sure of anything except that he felt a whomp upside the head every time he looked at her.

Kansas moved aside so he could open the driver’s door to the Explorer. He opened the door, but he didn’t immediately climb in.

It had been a long time since anyone or anything confused him. His real name, Paxton, had been shortened to Pax because the Latin base for the nickname had always pegged his personality. He liked peace. He’d had enough turmoil in his childhood to last forever. Most things that mattered in life reduced to simple terms, if a man was determined to lead a simple life.

Nothing seemed simple about Kansas. Right then, she was standing in a shower of moonlight, her eyes softer than the big black sky. The filmy blouse she wore was no thicker than a veil, and never mind that it was sexier than a man’s midnight fantasies. The fabric was ethereal and fragile, and everything she wore, every damn thing she did, shouted loudly that she was a wimp and a wuss and a crushably vulnerable woman.

Yet she’d taken off cross-country without a qualm “to save” her brother. And he’d watched the confounded shrimp tackle the tarantula, when she had a rescuer right at her fingertips who could have handled it. It didn’t make sense. She didn’t make sense.

Kansas cocked her head. “I’m in no rush if you want to stand here all night,” she murmured humorously. “But you’re looking at me like there’s a bug on my nose.”

“There’s no bug on your nose.”

“Maybe you were thinking of something else having to do with my brother? Because if there’s anything else you could tell me about Case—”

“I wasn’t thinking about your brother.” Pax just kept thinking that somehow, someway, he had to figure out what kind of woman Kansas really was.