Arizona Heat

“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.

She could get hurt if he misjudged what she was capable of.

She could get into serious trouble unless he had a measure of what she could handle—and what she couldn’t.

All Pax wanted was some simple, clean-cut answers. In a dozen years, though—in a hundred years—he never planned on kissing her.

Three

Kansas didn’t move when he took a step toward her. And she saw his arm reach up, felt the knuckles of his hand brush her cheek. But Pax didn’t seem to even be thinking about her. There was a dark wedge of a frown grooved in his brow, as if some weighty problem was consuming his attention.

Even when he ducked his head, it just never occurred to her that he planned to kiss her. There’d been no come-on. No man-woman exchange of looks or body-language signals. If anything, Kansas sensed that Pax saw her as a pesky little sister—humorous and a little annoying, but as safe as a sibling to be with.

His lips touched hers, in a whispery-soft kiss. A safe kiss. A kiss swifter than the feather stroke of a spring wind.

Her heartbeat picked up a sudden, strange rhythm, but she still didn’t move. Even if the kiss was a surprise, no threat of danger crossed her mind. Heaven knew what motivated Pax to kiss her at all, but she had no fear of where it was going. Every man she’d ever known had treated her like breakable china. It wasn’t their fault; positively her delicate appearance provoked that attitude, but her looks were nothing she could change. Still, she was so experienced at handling careful, cautious, gentle kisses that she never anticipated any other kind.

His hands sieved into her hair and he tilted her face up. His black eyes burned on her face for all of a second, before his mouth dipped down again.

Holy kamoly. For damn sure he wasn’t kissing his sister this time.

Fire shot through her veins before she’d even smelled sulphur. The shock alone curled her toes. Pax wasn’t trapping her—except for his big hands framing her face, he wasn’t holding her at all. The only connection was his smooth, warm lips tasting hers, then taking hers, with a pressure that made her blood spin.

Reflexively her hands shot up. Her fingers closed around his wrists, not necessarily to stop him. Just to hold on. She sure as patooties needed something to hold onto, because an innocuously pale moonlit night had abruptly exploded with color.

He was supposed to treat her like a fragile cookie. Everyone else did. Every other man had always kissed her...respectfully. Pax kissed her like someone had accidentally opened the cage doors on a big, hungry bear—a bear who’d been contained and deprived of sustenance for just too long. She couldn’t catch her breath. He seemed to have the same problem.

His shadow covered her more completely than a sheet on a bed. She couldn’t see his face, but she could feel the harsh, beating pulse in his wrists, hear the raw, rough sound that came out of his throat. It was a lonely sound. Lonely and wild. And he sealed her mouth under his with the pressure of a brand. His brand.

He was a relative stranger, her mind recognized, and Kansas hadn’t survived to the vast age of twenty-nine without knowing the girls’ rule book. When a stranger came on to a woman with the intimidating force of a steamroller, she wasn’t supposed to melt faster than ice cream in the tropics. She was supposed to sock him. She was supposed to make him behave. And if those options weren’t clear-cut easy, she was supposed to have the good sense to run faster than the wind.

But she didn’t run. And when his tongue found hers, an unprincipled kiss that was already pushing the boundaries of trouble suddenly dived straight off that cliff. He tasted dark and wicked. He tasted exotic and forbidden. He tasted like the most dangerous flavor she’d ever tried...yet her fingers loosened on his wrists, hovered for a second in midair, and then slowly wrapped tightly around his waist.

Her response wasn’t something she could justify, not in rational terms. Yet her never-too-logical heart seemed to think she’d known Pax forever. Maybe one tough, strong cookie recognized another. Maybe it took someone who’d never belonged to anything or anyone, to recognize how fierce and desperate that longing could be in someone else.

There were no maybes on her mind at that instant, just emotions taking her under with gale force. She kissed him back, as she’d never dared kiss anyone. She took him in, as if a pipsqueak-size woman could actually shelter a tall, strong man in the circle of her arms. Some need in Pax touched her heart. And damnation, no one had ever touched her heart, not like this.

Her feet arched up on tiptoe. Her breasts tightened, arched, ached against his chest. His belt buckle grazed her abdomen. The angle of stark moonlight on his face, the warmth pouring off his skin, the tight flex of his thighs and the shiver-arousing feeling of his arousal growing, pressed intimately between them—if she had been more razor-sharp aware of a man, she didn’t know when. She could feel his whole body shudder with tension—sexual tension that had suddenly become as volatile as lightning.

Kansas kept telling herself she should be scared—maybe even scared out of her mind—but she’d never known this crazy kind of heat even existed. If this was madness and mayhem, she’d been waiting for it all her life. Damned if she’d be afraid of something this rich, this wondrous and powerful. And damned if there’d ever been a man who’d made her feel this way. Liquid from the inside out. Needed. Desired. As if nothing else existed but the two of them at that pure moment in time.

It didn’t last. On a harsh groan, he tore his mouth free and reared his head back. Firm hands grasped her by the shoulders and forced a separation. His lungs hauled in air like he’d been underwater for the last year or two.

If putting some physical distance between them was supposed to cool him down, or calm him down, it didn’t seem to be working. His eyes looked dazed drunk in the moonlight. He looked at her, and then hauled in another lungful of air. “Kansas...I didn’t mean that to happen. Hell. I don’t even know what happened.”

Her relationship with gravity was still a little shaky, and she was having the same tough time catching her breath as he was. Still, she definitely didn’t share his problem with figuring out what happened. He’d kissed the living socks off her. And she’d kissed him back the same way. “It’s all right,” she said gently.

“The hell it is. I’m sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for.”

“Yeah, there is. I don’t...I would never have...hell,” he said again, and clawed a hand at the back of his neck. “I apologize for jumping you. And I don’t want you afraid that it’ll happen again. It won’t.”

Kansas realized fleetingly that Pax was rattled. She rattled easily—didn’t take any more than a mouse running across the floor—but she suspicioned that Pax rarely let his control off the leash. He didn’t seem to know where to look, what to say, or what the Sam Hill he was supposed to do. And she was afraid it might go on forever—his swallowing hard and saying hell in between apologies—unless she took charge.

“Hey, there’s no problem here,” she said calmly. “Maybe I was surprised when you kissed me. Maybe we were both surprised. But people have been indulging in that particular pastime since the beginning of time...” Oops, she thought that might earn a smile, but no. “No one’s upset, right? No one’s mad. Everybody’s fine. And it’s late, like you said. Let’s just call it a night, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He leaped on that excuse to split, she noticed dryly, like a dog for a bone. Moments later, the Explorer’s headlights bounced out of her driveway.

She headed inside, intending to lock up, clean up and get ready for bed. She locked up, then completely forgot the rest of that game plan, and found herself standing in the front window, staring out at the empty driveway.

Her heart was beating like a revved up 747.

Thoughts were tumbling through her mind like dandelion fluff in a hurricane wind.

And every feminine hormone in her body was alive, awake and singing arias.

Inappropriate arias, Kansas mused. It was only a kiss. From a man who clearly wished he hadn’t indulged in the impulse, and in a place where she neither lived nor planned to stay long. As there was positively no chance to pursue a relationship, there was absolutely nothing to worry about.

And she wasn’t worried. She’d just never felt that fierce, instantaneous pull for anyone else. Before completely giving up men—which, as far as Kansas was concerned, was the most brilliant decision she ever made—she was no stranger to passion. Hal had been her last lover, and making love with him had been nice. Messy and time-consuming, but nice. Maybe she had an unusual pocketful of inhibitions, but she’d never been in a tearing hurry to get naked with a man, and Hal had been sweet, gentle, comfortable. Untenably, exasperatingly, as possessive as a bloodhound, but the intimate side of their relationship had been A-OK. She’d thought.

How startling, to discover at the vast age of twenty-nine, that a man could wipe all those previous preconceptions right off the map. If Pax had scared her, it was the most delicious scared she could remember. No man had ever kissed her like a lush slide straight into sensual oblivion, as if her whole world had been an arid desert until he touched her.

Kansas wasn’t about to mistake a molehill for a mountain—for both of them, it had probably just been a crazy, lost moment in time.