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 prizewinning 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 peopl
e 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’ rulebook. 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 pas time 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.”
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