Men Made in America Mega-Bundle

by Gayle Wilson, Marie Ferrarella, Jennifer Greene, Annette Broadrick, Judith Arnold, Rita Herron, Anne Stuart, Diana Palmer, Elizabeth Bevarly, Patricia Rosemoor, Emilie Richards

  Well, she’d find out tomorrow.

  “Dammit!” The morning was serenely quiet and peaceful—until Pax slammed the Explorer’s door loud enough to make the truck shake. “You’re not going, Kansas!”

  “Now, no reason to get your liver in an uproar. You don’t have to take me with you. I can either follow you or just do the trip on my own. Do you want a doughnut? I have some fresh glazed ones in the kitchen—”

  “No, I don’t want any damn doughnut!”

  “Well, come on inside, anyway. A nice, tall glass of ice tea will calm you down.”

  “I am calm!” Pax had never lost his temper with a woman. Even if a woman was driving him to drink, losing his temper would have been unconscionable. Inconceivable. Nothing he would ever let happen. “I am completely calm,” he repeated. “You’re the one who isn’t thinking calmly and clearly.”

  “Actually I’m thinking quite clearly,” she said amiably, and darted ahead of him toward the kitchen. By the time he’d followed, she’d taken a chunk out of a glazed doughnut and was plopping ice cubes into two glasses. She retrieved a pitcher of golden tea from the fridge and thunked the door closed with her hip. “We both guessed how the visit with the sheriff was going to go, didn’t we? Not that he wasn’t real patient and sweet. Speaking of which—do you want sugar in your tea?”

  “No.”

  “Why did I bother asking,” she murmured, “I should have known you wouldn’t go in for an indulgence like sugar…but back to Simons—I honestly understand why he’s unwilling to do anything. He just doesn’t see why I’m worried. My brother is of age, living independently and Case had no obligation to check in with family before taking off for a while. He’d done it before. Simons was more than willing to run his name through the system, check the hospitals and all that, but he just doesn’t have the resources or manpower to search the mountains without some reason to believe Case is in danger. The sheriff is just dead positive I’m being an overprotective sister. But even so…”

  Her voice faded when she disappeared around the corner, apparently expecting Pax to follow her into the living room. He stomped after her. She set the glasses down, flopped on the couch and fluffed the pillow with a gesture for him to sit next to her. Pax didn’t want to sit. He wanted to throttle her. In between bites of the glazed doughnut, she was still chattering on like a cheerful magpie.

  “Even so, at least he listened about the datura. He’d heard about the kids camping out and the religion thing before, Pax. You could see it in his face. But he hadn’t heard about any drugs being involved. I think he’d take action quickly if we came across real evidence that those kids were messing with hallucinogens. Of course, that’s of no immediate help to my brother—”

  “Kansas, there’s no reason for you to rehash the whole visit. I heard everything he said. I was right there. And I told you I’d go into the mountains and find your brother. Alone. We agreed—”

  “I never agreed that I wasn’t going with you,” she said gently.

  “Don’t give me that bullcracky. It was under stood that I would go alone.”

  “You may have understood that, love. But I’m just not the type to sit home and knit socks while my guy goes off to war. This isn’t even your war. It’s my brother’s and my problem.”

  Pax sucked in a lungful of patience and tried again. “The blood relationship has nothing to do with it. Kansas—listen to me. I know the general country we’re talking about. Nothing is easy. Even my Jeep will only get us so far, and there are places too steep for horses—so we’re talking about hiking. We’re talking about walking over hilly, rugged terrain for hours in the hot sun. We’re talking about camping overnight in the rough. We’re talking your worst nightmare, Red.”

  “It sure sounds like it,” she agreed. “Honestly, though, you don’t have to yell. I can hear you just fine.”

  He was not yelling. If his voice was projecting at the volume of a thundering boom, it was because nothing less seemed to penetrate his redhead’s bullheaded skull. “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Actually I am.”

  “I’ve done this kind of thing a hundred times alone. There’s just no reason for you to be involved—”

  “There could be. If we find this group—and my brother—he might not want to leave.” If Kansas hadn’t voiced the fear before, the haunted look in her eyes illustrated how deeply the problem had weighed on her mind. “I don’t know how much influence this group has had on him, or if drug use could have affected his personality. But you’d be going into the situation cold, Pax, a total stranger to him. I know Case. If he’ll listen to anyone, he’ll listen to me.”

  Pax paced the length of the room—for the third time. A fleeting, disturbing image flashed through his mind of what being married to her would be like—and her using that blue velvet voice every time she wanted to win an argument. It was an unreasonable female tactic. And utterly distracting. “I recognize that’s a potential problem, but I’ll find a way to handle your brother. That’s not the issue. The issue is that you don’t have the stamina to handle a trip in the desert. And I’m not about to take you into a situation where you could be hurt.”

  “You think I’ll hold you back and slow you down,” she announced. “Well, that’s certainly true. I understand that I’d be a royal pain in the fanny to take along—and it’s okay. We don’t have to pair up even-steven. I’ll just follow behind you.”

  Hell, the thought of her wandering around the mountains alone almost blew the volcano top off his blood pressure. “No. I’m through arguing. You’re not going. Period.”

  “Yeah,” she said gently, “I am.”

  She’d just taken a quick sip of that iced tea when she deliberately put it down again. He was standing by the sliding doors when she uncoiled from the couch and lurched to her feet. Barefoot, she ambled toward him with a slow, easy gait as if she were strolling in a park. She wasn’t smiling, but the look in her eyes was confoundingly…warm. “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “This is the first time you’ve been mad at me. I mean, really mad. It’s okay, did you notice? I was beginning to wonder if you’d ever trust me enough to take off your manners and express something you were really feeling. You don’t have to be in control every second. Not with me.”

  “Kansas, I have a real low tolerance for psycho-babble and I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, so if you’re trying to distract me—”

  “I am. I definitely am. But I’m also trying to tell you that I’m proud of you.”

  Proud of him for losing his temper and bellowing at the top of his lungs at her? Pax thought understanding Kansas was like trying to understand a powder puff.

  And then the powder puff lifted her arms, reached up behind his head and—totally bewildering him—undid the leather thong that held back his hair. “What are you doing?”

  “Expressing what I feel. For you.” She tossed the leather string behind her. Then lifted on tiptoe, and burrowed her slim white fingers into his hair. “It would just get in your way if it wasn’t pulled back, wouldn’t it? But I wondered what it would feel like loose. It’s so thick. Like ink against my skin. Coarse, not soft—”

  “I know what you’re doing—you’re trying to drive me crazy. You think if you start talking like this, I’ll completely forget about your brother—”

  “The issue about my brother was settled five minutes ago, Pax. The feelings between us haven’t been settled at all, and I’m afraid this just won’t wait any longer.” She immediately tempered that warning. “Of course, you can always stop me.”

  She tugged his head down to kiss him. She tasted like sweet, sugary doughnut crumbs. She tasted like every woman he’d ever wanted, every fantasy lover he’d ever dreamed of. Her tongue was soft and wet and wanton, and suddenly he couldn’t catch his breath.

  It was so like his hummingbird to do nothing by the rule book. She knew he was furious with her. And it was midmorning. And they were in th
e middle of her brother’s living room, with sun beaming through the glass doors. The place and time were so contrary to any ambience of desire that naturally he was thrown off balance. He couldn’t possibly have anticipated that Kansas was going to choose this instant to cause him trouble.

  That didn’t quite explain, though, how the scent of her went straight to his head. It didn’t explain the sudden drumming in his ears, as if he’d just taken a dive under dark, dark waters. It didn’t explain why his mouth latched onto hers, finding her tongue, meeting it, taking it, as if kissing her back made more sense than anything he’d ever done.

  Her fingers pulled at his T-shirt, yanking it free from his jeans. Soft, pampered palms stole over his bare skin, skimming over ribs and sides and winding around his back. Her hands were hot and damp from nerves. She was badly nervous, as nervous as he’d ever seen her, but that didn’t inhibit her from taking him apart at the seams, one inch of skin at a time, strewing a path of firelit hormones in her wake.

  Eventually she eased free from that kiss, but she stayed close, so close that her sough of a sigh whispered right next to his mouth. “I’m awfully tired of trying to kiss you standing up, big guy. You’re really annoyingly tall,” she murmured.

  He knew what she was suggesting. He said, “No.”

  “If you’re worried about protection, I bought some. Days ago. Right after we got wrapped up in a clinch the last time. Right when I realized I was way, way over my head. But I’m afraid the package is all the way in the bedroom—”

  He repeated, “No.”

  She echoed her earlier offer. “You can, of course, stop me. I’ve never seduced anyone before, never even wanted to. I’ll probably do it wrong. You already know I’m a wimp and a wuss, and I’m scared of just about everything—especially of taking big, terrifying risks like this one. So if you want me to behave myself, you can call this off real easily. Just say you don’t want me.”

  Maybe if the blood hadn’t been slamming so hard in his veins, he could have pulled off that lie. Maybe lying would have been the best thing, for her, for him. But he couldn’t look in those vulnerable blue eyes and deny what he felt for her.

  He took her mouth, aching hard and completely, because he couldn’t believe the bewildering woman could conceivably feel insecure about how much he wanted her. She seemed to catch that message just fine, because she responded like smoke for his personal fire. Her arms wound around his neck and he felt himself lifting her. Her legs wrapped around his waist and she closed her eyes.

  The bedroom was at the end of the far hall. He was lucky to get her there without injuring them both. Her hands framed his scalp and her lips clung to his with abandon, with trust he’d never earned, with more emotion pouring from her than he could believe was meant for him. His hip crashed against a wall. He pushed off one leather sandal in the hall, jettisoned the other in the bedroom doorway, grazed a shoulder against the doorjamb. Still, he kissed her. Not one, but a frenzy of kisses so deep, so rich, that they should have appeased even a starving man’s hunger. Instead they aroused a blaze of hunger and a thirst for her that no mere kisses could begin to quench.

  Sunlight streamed on an unmade double bed with chocolate brown sheets. They smelled like her perfume. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a bare, bald bedroom with sparse furnishings and a rented room’s coldness. She’d still made it hers. There were wisps of lace and color on the straight chair. Bangles and baubles cluttering the dresser top. Blankets tangled and dragging the floor—no way Kansas would sleep neat and tame, not when nothing else was tame about her.

  Her eyes never opened when he dropped her onto the bed, but her fingers wrestled with his belt buckle when he followed her down. Her green T-shirt peeled off easier than the skin on a peach. The white shorts and slinky panties stripped off just as fast. It took thirty seconds—an eternity—for him to shed his own clothes, and another eternity to get a coherent word from her about the location of the protection. Once he took care of that, he applied every ounce of concentration he could beg, muster or steal, on taking care of her.

  Her eyes were blurry and dazed, her lips softer than silk. He’d known from the moment he met her that she was precious. More fragile than sunlight, more crushable and hurtable than anyone he knew. He found skin more translucent than ivory. He found freckles. He found jagged webs of pale scars from the accident she’d been through, badges of pain she’d endured, reminders of how physically frail she could be. He found small, exquisitely sensitive breasts with dark rose tips that tightened and shone under the wash of his tongue.

  He meant to show her how beautiful he saw her. He meant to treat her with infinite patience and care. Control had always come so easily to him, and he had every intention of putting his own needs at bay, but Kansas…

  Her fingers sieved in his hair, and between kisses, between slippery, wild caresses, she whispered to him. Her voice was husky and low, a siren calling her mate, a woman on fire cajoling for more fuel, a lady complaining about frustration that she was most unreasonably blaming him for. She wanted speed. She wanted the rush of a luge. She touched him with need, as if he were the only man in the entire universe, and he couldn’t catch a breath, couldn’t catch a grip, couldn’t remember a moment in his life when she hadn’t meant everything to him.

  It was insanity. He recognized that, but only vaguely, on some distant intellectual plane that had nothing to do with that sun-dusted bed and her slim white body beneath him. Emotions engulfed him, nameless, unrecognized, no feelings he’d met up with before. They had her name on them. That was all he knew.

  Her body was slick and damp when he took her, those slim legs noosed around his waist, his manhood sheathed so deeply inside her that there was no difference between her body and his. He was no stranger to intimacy, no stranger to the response of a woman’s body or anything about natural, physical sexual feelings. But nothing was the same with her. Nothing was what he’d known.

  She was so free, in a way he’d never understood or felt freedom, her heart naked in her eyes and both desire and need given to him like open, vulnerable gifts. Her fierce responsiveness spurred his own, spurred speed and a blinding burst of urgency. Some crazy instinct surged from nowhere, a fleeting fear that she could disappear if he wasn’t careful, that he’d lose something unbearable if he lost her. His heartbeat was suddenly hammering, hammering…but then the foolish, fleeting thought was gone.

  She called his name again, and he came to her. His redhead wasn’t about to disappear on him. She was right there, greedy and wild and making no secret of what she wanted. They rode the fire, teasing the flames to rise and engulf them both. He lost his head. He lost his heart. And then the lap of flame and desire spun them both into oblivion.

  Nine

  Kansas’s eyes fluttered open. Spanking bright sunlight poured through the window, revealing a scene of appalling decadence. Clothes were strewn all over the place. Sheets and pillows lay heaped and abandoned on the floor. And her bare naked body—in the middle of the day!—was in timately, brazenly tangled with Pax’s bare naked body.

  Drowsily she tested her conscience for guilt or shame, and found none. Not even a shred.

  When she turned her head and looked at Pax, a velvet glove squeezed around her heart. He was napping. Short, thick eyelashes shadowed his cheeks, and his dark hair was hopelessly disheveled. He looked like a man recovering from a train wreck, and Kansas knew intimately well why he needed rest.

  They hadn’t had sex. They’d made love. And though she’d realized she was in love with him long before this, finding the wonder and richness of a man who truly touched her soul was brand-new. And her brave, strong man who never lost control had been like a stallion freed from a captive stall, wild, vulnerable, emotion exploding from him as if he’d never discovered freedom before. He’d bared his need—for her, with her. And he’d been as helpless as she.

  Kansas knew how unalike they were. She knew, as soon as they found her brother, that she would lose any excuse to sta
y in Arizona. She knew all the reasons why making love with him should have been a mistake, yet there were no regrets in her heart or her head. Pax had been as lonely and closed up as a tomb when she met him. If he never loved her—if he never felt an ounce of the heart-soft painfully vulnerable feelings she had for him—she could never have walked away. Not without giving a gift that was within her to give. Not without touching a man who so fiercely, badly needed touching.

  His short, stubby lashes swept up. In those few seconds when he seemed disoriented and still drugged-sleepy, she took advantage. She climbed on top of his chest and pinned him with a sun-warmed, whisper-soft kiss. So easily, so naturally, his mouth yielded under hers that she was tempted to spoil him with a dozen more.

  But she could feel his muscles suddenly tighten with tension. And her lover might happen to arouse faster than a firecracker, but Pax came awake and aware of reality all too quickly. Intense, grave lines showed up on his forehead. Guilt darkened his eyes, eyes that searched her face as if he half believed she were a fantasy and their making love was the shock of a dream.

  She told herself that was precisely the reaction she expected from him. One act of making love was hardly going to change a man who’d spent a lifetime shuttering away his emotions. Pax was never going to forgive himself easily for doing anything so disgustingly human as needing someone else. And if loving him meant anything, it meant freeing him from any association of guilt—at least with her.

  “So,” she murmured, “how was your day?”

  He looked startled, but then he chuckled. His big callused hand swept slowly down her back in a languid, tender caress, but she wasn’t fooled that he was really relaxed. “I don’t know. Did we just get hit with an earthquake?”

  “I certainly did. And you’re certainly looking destroyed. There seems evidence all over the place that something powerful happened around here.” She propped an elbow by his shoulder. “I meant to ask you ahead of time how you felt about skinny.”