LITMIR.BIZ

      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

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