She swung out slender feet in turquoise sandals followed by long, golden legs stretching at least a mile from khaki shorts that should have been mundane and ordinary but somehow on this woman were incredibly sexy. She wore some kind of silky, turquoise blouse that draped oh so nicely over her rounded breasts.
He made himself lift his gaze to her face.
Standing in front of him, almost even with his height of six feet, due to the upward slope of the wing where she stood, she smiled tentatively, her lush, generous lips outlining white, perfect teeth.
Lush, generous lips? Where the hell had that come from?
Okay, maybe they were lush and generous, but he didn’t need to be thinking that about some woman who’d ambushed him from his own plane...some engaged woman.
She extended a slim hand, and he accepted automatically, too stunned to do otherwise, his fingers closing over the smooth skin.
“In your fax,” she said, “you mentioned that you thought you had a solid lead on Abbie Prather. Did you find her today? Is she in jail already?”
Maybe one of those ranchers had slipped something into that iced tea after all. This whole scene didn’t bear much resemblance to reality. He rubbed the back of his neck where those tension knots were gathering again. “What are you doing here? How did you get into my plane?”
“I got your fax last night,” she explained, speaking more slowly, as if she thought he might have difficulty comprehending. She was right about that! “Then I called your office this morning and told your secretary that I planned to meet you here, but I guess you didn’t get my message.”
“No, I didn’t get your message. I haven’t talked to my office today.” Nick looked around the deserted airport. “How did you get here?”
“I drove to Tyler this morning and rented a plane—we don’t have an airport in Briar Creek—and when I got here, you weren’t here, but that man inside told me this was your plane and you’d be back since you’d borrowed his truck because there weren’t any rental cars, so I, um, sort of waited. In your plane. So I wouldn’t miss you.”
She was once again talking even faster than he remembered from their phone conversations. But the wires and circuits of the phone lines hadn’t done justice to that voice. Even in fast forward it called up images of cool lemonade sipped under the shade of a big cottonwood tree in the heat of a Texas summer, of warm breezes sifting through the smooth leaves of a magnolia tree.
He cleared his throat and tried to do the same with his mind. “I still don’t understand what you’re doing here.”
For a brief moment confusion creased her smooth forehead. She looked around as if a little surprised to find herself in the middle of nowhere. Then her gaze returned to him and her smile re-formed. “Why, to be there when you find the woman who framed my fiancé’s father, of course.”
He folded his arms across his chest “Why?”
“Why?” Again she looked a little uncertain. “Well, I should think that would be obvious.”
“It’s not, so why don’t you enlighten me? What possible reason could you have for traveling a thousand miles just to see some woman arrested?”
She bit her lower lip, and Nick found himself unconsciously imitating her action, chewing on his own lip as if he could taste hers by proxy. This woman was dangerous.
She twisted around, bent over and reached into the plane. He tried not to look at her rounded rear in those mundane khaki shorts. Tried and failed.
She straightened and hauled out a satchel that was either a very large purse or a small suitcase. From the bag, after some searching, she produced a camera. “I could take a picture,” she said. “As I already explained, hiring you to find that woman is a wedding present for Lucas. That’s my fiancé. But I haven’t told him yet since it’s a surprise, so I could take a picture as sort of physical evidence. Something to put under the tree, so to speak. Not that we’re having a tree at our wedding. But you know what I mean.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t know what you mean. You just now made that up about taking the picture. You still haven’t told me why you’re here.”
She plunked the camera back into her bag, slung it over her shoulder, lifted her chin defiantly and met his gaze head-on. “I need to be here.”
Her eyes were decidedly green, even in the deepening dusk. Not blue-green like the ocean or gray-green like moss, but green like the treetops in full summer when he flew above them. An urge swept over him to dive into their depths, to assure her it didn’t matter why she’d come to him, that he was glad she was there.
He gave himself a mental shake. It wasn’t like him to let his hormones take over so completely. He was upset she was there, not glad.
“Abbie Prather’s not here,” he growled, irritated with himself as much as with her. “She moved in 1976.”
“Oh, no! You mean we’ve lost her? What are we going to do now?”
She looked so forlorn, he had to fight a totally irrational desire to reassure her, to try to make things right...to take care of her.
Been there, done that, he reminded himself grimly.
He was a private investigator, his services for hire. Gather information, get the facts. That was what he did, and all he did. No involvement with anybody’s problems.
“We—I haven’t lost her. I’ve got a new address for her in Nebraska. I’m flying there tonight just as soon as you get back in your chartered plane and return to Briar Creek.”
“Ah, well, you see,” she began, looking over his left shoulder, refusing to meet his gaze, “that’s not exactly possible. My pilot had to turn around and fly back because today’s his son’s sixth birthday, and they’re having a party for him right about now, so I’ll just go on to Nebraska with you and then maybe I’ll be there when you find Abbie after all.”
“You can’t do that!” Nick protested, a jumbled panic prickling him from all sides. He needed his downtime, his time alone. He did not need a ditzy client hanging around...especially not a ditzy client with golden legs nine miles long and lush lips.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Look, Ms. Brewster—”
“Analise. We should certainly be on a first name basis if we’re going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty plane.”
“We’re not going to Nebraska together in that itty-bitty... in my plane. Or anybody’s plane.” Nick plowed his fingers through his hair and shook his head. “Abbie Prather is no amateur. She stole twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank where she worked, manipulated bank records to frame your fiancé’s father then obtained documentation to change her identity to June Martin. These are the actions of somebody who knows how to play the game. Now you figure she ran to South Dakota, lived there a couple of years and moved to Wyoming, lived here a couple of years and moved to Nebraska. What makes you think she stayed in Nebraska more than a couple of years? She probably moved another six or seven times. I told you when I took this case that it was going to be tough because it’s so old.”
Analise folded her arms, right under her rounded breasts, pushing them up, thrusting them forward, pulling the smooth turquoise silk taut over them, emphasizing every curve. He’d thought the summer evening was cooling off, but that was before Analise folded her arms under her breasts.
“There’s no motel or car-rental place closer than Casper,” she said firmly. “The man inside told me that. There used to be a motel in Thunder Bluffs, but it burned to the ground when lightning struck it four years ago, or maybe it was five, depending on whether you believe him or the cowboy who