Arizona Heat

“Pax,” she agreed, and stuck out her hand. “My name is Kansas McClellan. And every which way I’ve turned since arriving in Sierra Vista, your name keeps cropping up as the only person who can help me.”

“Sounds doubtful. Somebody’s either giving me compliments or insults that I probably don’t deserve.” His smile was slow, his gaze shrewd and assessing as he clasped her hand for a millisecond and let it go. “What’s the problem? Sick animal?”

“No. A missing brother.” She saw the swift judgment mirrored in his eyes. It took no special perception to guess what he thought. She knew the image she projected—a bitsy, frail looking redhead, likely a sissy and definitely a wimp. Most men looked at her and immediately assumed she was a lightweight who needed protecting. Correcting that misconception required so much patience, time and aggravation that Kansas had finally thrown in the towel. It had been a lot easier on her heart to just give up men altogether.

Just then, though, Kansas had no time for pride. The irony prickled her sense of humor—for the first time in her life, she wanted a man to judge her solely by her appearance. If Pax saw her as frail, fragile and delicate, he might be more inclined to help her, and pulling off a “wimp” image took no acting. She was wilting miserably in the heat, and she noticed his gaze zipped immediately above her neck, earning him major brownie points as a gentleman. God knew, she had no figure to fret over, but her shorts and top were damply clinging and sticking in embarrassing places.

She forged ahead to explain. “My brother’s name is Case. Case Walker. We don’t have the same last name—different dads—but we were always as close as glue. I’m scared. Which is why I flew down here from home. Home is Minnesota. Anyway, Case is nineteen, doesn’t look like me, blue eyes, brown hair, a good looker and a little hefty—around 200 pounds—”

“I know him.” Pax interrupted her.

Some of the tension sagged out of her shoulders. “Good. I thought you did, because he’d mentioned your name in some of his letters. And that’s what other people told me, too—that you were kind to Case and helped him out when he first moved down here—”

“Why are you scared?”

“Because I haven’t heard from him in several weeks now. Neither has anyone in the family. Actually no one likely would have, but me. Case hasn’t exactly been winning prizes for maturity and responsibility with the family for the past couple of years. He’s having a little trouble finding his way, but he’s basically wonderful, a heart as big as the sky—”

Possibly Pax noticed her teensy tendency to ramble, because he interrupted again. “He was running away when he came here.”

“He’s just not quite ready to settle down,” Kansas instantly defended him.

“Whatever. If he disappeared from sight, could be he just got itchy feet again. Do you have some specific reason to worry?”

All these precise questions. Kansas pushed a hand through her snarled mass of curls. Precise questions weren’t exactly her forte. “He always wrote me, once a week. Occasionally we talked on the phone, too, but he was as regular as a clock with those letters. He just seemed more comfortable spilling out what was on his mind in written form. And I haven’t had a letter now in three weeks.”

Pax nodded. “Still not necessarily reason to worry. He could have gone off with some friends, taken a vacation.”

“He’s in trouble,” Kansas said.

“You know that for sure?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I love him,” she said irritably, and smacked at a bug hovering around her chest. She smacked so hard her chest stung, but Dr. Moore was starting to rattle her. Clearly he was one of those rational men who thought things through logically. How were they ever going to communicate? “I know my brother better than anyone on earth. Maybe it sounds crazy, but I’ve always had an intuition about when Case was in trouble. I don’t know if he’s hurt. I just know that something is wrong, really wrong, and somehow I have to get someone to believe me—”

“Now just take it easy,” Pax said, more slowly, more gently. His gaze drifted over her face again. “I never said that I didn’t believe you. I was just trying to get some straight answers. And I still don’t know what you want from me.”

“I was hoping you knew where Case is. Or that you could help me find him.”

“I don’t know where he is. And yeah, I noticed he wasn’t around for the past few weeks. But as you said, your brother doesn’t exactly ace the course in dependability—or predictability.”

“This is different,” she said firmly.

“Pretty clear that you believe it is.”

“I only arrived in town last night. Without knowing anything about the area or his friends, the best I could think of to do was knock on his neighbors’ doors. But no one knows anything. No one’s seen him. The only lead I ever picked up from his letters was you. And his neighbors said you’d know if anyone would, and also that you did some tracking—like finding people, campers or whatever, if they got lost in the canyons around here...damn, how can anyone think in this blasted heat!”

Well, who would have guessed that an exasperated complaint would finally coax a smile from him? And not that stingy ghost of a smile like before, Kansas noted, but a full-fledged charmer of a grin. So...he wasn’t stone. His expression revealed so little of what he was thinking that she’d started to worry that he was one of those emotionally constipated types—no one she could conceivably relate to.

“I’m getting the feeling you’re not too fond of our desert country.” Without asking, he unhooked the canvas-wrapped canteen from his belt loop and handed it to her.

“I’ll never complain about another Minnesota blizzard again.” Gratefully she took the canteen, twisted the cap and mainlined several gulps thirstily. The water was warm, but she didn’t care. It was wet. Throat-drenching, sweet, soft, wet. Nectar couldn’t taste any better. “Thanks. You saved my life.”

“I think you’d probably have survived a few minutes more,” he said wryly. When she returned it, he recapped the canteen and clipped it back to his belt. “You might want to remember, though, if you’re traveling much around here, it’s wise to carry some water on you.”

“If it were a vacation choice, I’d be in Alaska. The last time I remember being this miserable, I was laid up with the flu. This is supposed to be a healthy climate, huh? How many times have I read that you don’t feel the heat because it’s dry heat? What a total lie. Even my fingernails feel roasted from the inside out.”

Damned if she didn’t win another irresistibly male grin. “If you just got here, you’re bound to have a little trouble adjusting to the climate.”

She shook her head. “Adjusting is not an option. Obviously you’ve never been a redhead or you’d understand—the sun hates me. It was never anything I had a vote about. I don’t suppose there’s a way to air-condition the outdoors?”

“I don’t believe so,” he said dryly.

“Well, then, it’s hopeless. Write me off as a city sissy, but I just don’t think southern Arizona and I were ever meant to get along.” Kansas mentally shook her head when he let out a deep, throaty chuckle. She’d never planned on running on so long, but darned if it wasn’t working. All she’d had to do was honestly admit how miserable she was and make a little fun of herself. The starch left his shoulders; the formal reserve disappeared from his expression. If humor and honesty softened him up, she mused, they might just conceivably get along. She’d never have been able to find common ground with anyone who didn’t have a sense of humor.

“You don’t have to be here long,” he consoled her.

“You’ve got that right. I’ll only be here long enough to find my brother. But I can’t...” She lost the thought, diverted by the sudden flash and sparkle of something moving in the corner of her vision. Although ornithology had never been her hobby, she still knew enough to recognize a hummingbird. She’d just never seen one like this.

All kinds of trees and scraggly bushes bordered the trail, but unlike the emeralds and deep greens of woods in Minnesota, everything here was a sun-bleached and dusty dull green—which was probably why the bird riveted her attention. It was so startlingly bright and gaudy. Although it couldn’t be bigger than the cup of her hand, the dizzy bird dove like a whirling dervish, swooping and spinning as if the whole sky were its playground. Its head and beak were dark, but the hummingbird’s neck appeared to be wearing a collar of iridescent spangles in a glittering scarlet red that caught and reflected the sun.

Pax turned his head to find what she was looking at. “It’s Anna’s,” he said.

“You mean the bird belongs to someone named Anna?”

“No, I mean that’s the name of the species. Anna’s Hummingbird. Calypte Anna. More than a dozen different species migrate to the canyon around this time of year, peaking around the month of May. They’ve got a name for the hummingbirds around here—jewels of the sky.”

“That’s exactly how that one looks, as if it were covered in jewels.” She shielded her eyes with a cupped hand. “Do they all fly like that? Like drunk kamikaze pilots?”

He chuckled. “I strongly suspect there’s a girl somewhere in the trees that he’s trying to impress.”

“Ah. Hormones. The great equalizer in life. The one thing guaranteed to make fools out of every species in the kingdom, isn’t it?” She couldn’t take her eyes off the beauty. “I’m afraid the daredevil’s gonna crash land and kill himself.”

“If any other bird tried that, he probably would.” Pax hunkered down to gather his first aid and vet supplies. Instead of a traditional doctor’s black bag, he carried a hiker’s backpack. “Critters are my business, but there’s no explaining anything hummingbirds do. They break every natural law in the books.”

“No kidding? Like what?”

“Well...for one thing, the aerodynamic experts claim that the hummer’s wing and body structure should make it impossible to fly—but they’re outstanding flyers. They’re also the squirts of the bird kingdom, the tiniest in body size yet with the biggest wing span—breaking another universal physics law about weight and body proportion. And any biologist can tell you they’re not anatomically built to hover, much less hover over flowers for long periods of time—yet they’re excellent at that, too. Hummingbirds may look tiny and fragile, but they have a long history of doing the impossible. They just do it their way, and to hell with everybody else’s rules.”

Kansas didn’t look away until the hummingbird had disappeared from sight. Abruptly she discovered that Pax was standing beside her. He had packed up the supplies he’d used on the raccoon, and the knapsack was strapped to his back, as if he were ready to leave. But not at that exact instant. At that exact instant, his eyes were focused on her face with a look of such concentrated speculation that—if it hadn’t been broiling hot—she might have shivered.

“What?” she asked him.

“Nothing. It just crossed my mind how often appearances are misleading. Something tells me you’re not real fond of doing anything by anyone else’s rule book, either.”

Her cinnamon eyebrows feathered up. “Hoboy, you couldn’t be more wrong. I’m not only big on rules, but what you see is what you get. I thought you already figured it out—I’m a city wimp. Gutless. Weak. Helpless anywhere away from my air-conditioning.”