His voice reminded her of the nap side of velvet: soft, gentle, soothing. He probably calmed dozens of wounded critters with that sexy baritone, but it scraped against her feminine nerves like squeaky chalk. How was she ever going to get through to Pax if he persisted in being so logical?
“Maybe if I show you the bedroom,” she said in frustration, and then stopped so quickly in the middle of the hall that Pax almost ran into her. “No. Forget the bedroom.”
“Why?”
Because she had lingerie and clothes and her brand of “girl stuff” wildly strewn all through her brother’s bedroom. Because she was oddly edgy around Pax without exposing an intimately unmade, rumpled bed to his dark eyes. “Because,” she said, “there are just more important things to show you in the living room.”
“Okay,” he said, as gently as if he were talking to a skittery mouse.
She felt skittery. It wasn’t just this increasingly strange feeling she had around Pax, but the attack of anxiety raising again about her brother. Something had happened to Case. She knew it. And walking into the living room intensified that restless feeling of worry and panic tenfold.
She gestured toward the pots of dead plants on the tile floor by the sliding glass doors. “You can see those plants wilted and died from lack of water...which, again, made me think that Case had never expected to be gone for so long. But those plants are so weird, besides...I mean, they look like ugly weeds, hardly some charming little philodendron or standard houseplant. And I can’t imagine my brother taking the time to fuss with any plants—he never had a homemaker bone in his whole body. So that really struck me wrong, and then there was the letter—”
“What letter?”
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