Arizona Heat

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. Which was how I was hoping to convince you that I seriously, honestly need help finding my brother. I just have no possible way to cope alone.”

* * *

Pax checked in at the preserve office, then gave Kansas a lift in his dusty Explorer to the inconceivably long distance she’d parked her rental car.

“Thanks,” she said fervently. When she hopped out, though, she didn’t immediately leave, but crossed her arms in the open truck window on the passenger side. “Seven o’clock tonight, right? And you know where my brother’s place is?”

The lady, Pax thought, was relentless. She could wear down a monk’s resolve if she put her mind to it. “I know where it is. Are you going to be able to find your way back to town okay?”

“Probably not.” She grinned. “But don’t worry. No matter how lost I get, I’ll be there and waiting for you at seven. And I really appreciate your being willing to help me. Thanks again.”

She flew toward the shiny red Civic before Pax could correct her—he had not, precisely, agreed to help her. He’d only agreed to talk a little further about her brother. And when push came to shove, he couldn’t exactly remember even agreeing to that.

His gaze roamed the length of her—it didn’t take long, not for a shrimp like her. Cute legs, but short. The color of her outfit was loud enough to wake a man from a sound sleep, and had some kind of sparkly appliqués on the front. The shorts and top hid nothing about her figure—no fanny to speak of, even though there was a hell of a swish in her walk, and not much on the upper deck, either. Her hair was the color of fire, and the blaze of curls tangled every which way around her face, no order, no control. With that vanilla-cream skin, he guessed her nose would be beet red by nightfall. And why the Sam Hill she’d be wearing long dangling earrings in the desert was beyond him.

There was no conceivable, justifiable, understandable reason why she had his blood pumping.

Pax had always liked women, and by thirty-two, he’d had the chance to know his share. Tall, leggy women were his preference, but he set no special stock in physical appearance. Temperament was more important. He sought out the women who liked the outdoors as much as he did, who were easygoing, natural to be with, restful.

Kansas McClellan was as restful as a rattlesnake.

He waited until she’d turned the rental car around before starting the Explorer’s engine. He had a call to make after this—Juan Gonzalez’s place—so he couldn’t follow her all the way to town, but he could at least make sure she was steered toward the right road in the right county.

Pax grew up with some outmoded, archaic values about men protecting women. Whether or not he had a tolerance for ditsy, scatterbrained redheads was irrelevant. That particular redhead looked as frail and fragile as one of the rare, delicate blooms on a cactus, and everyone in the area knew that Pax had a long history of volunteering to help people in trouble. His motivation had never been largess, but more making up for the rough beginnings he’d had himself.

Without hearing more of the story, he wasn’t sure he would—or could—help with the problem of finding her brother. But he’d suspicioned for some time that Case was dipping toward serious trouble. And he doubted that squirt of a lady could conceivably handle the kind of crowd her younger brother had gotten involved with—not without finding herself in some real danger.

She waved at him from the rearview mirror when she turned off at Hill Road. He watched her bump and bounce down the gravel road, driving way faster than was wise. Somehow he could have guessed she had a reckless lead foot. And for some reason he was again reminded of the hummingbirds who migrated to the canyons at this time of year; so tiny, so flashy and restless. But not at all as helpless as they appeared.

Abruptly he realized that his pulse was pumping adrenaline, as if some premonitory instinct were warning him to be careful about Kansas.

With a chuckle, he reached over to switch on the truck’s radio. The lady was certainly interesting, but by no stretch of the imagination was she the kind of woman that he had ever been attracted to or involved with. Kansas was no danger to him. The thought was so humorous that he had to laugh.

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?”