Arizona Heat

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.