A bell over the door to the office tinkled and Luke looked up to see Katie, dressed in a white-and-blue sundress, dash inside. “Bliss, I wondered—Oh.” For a moment the red-haired locomotive stopped dead in her tracks. “Hi,” she managed, recovering herself as she spied Luke and a rosy color invaded her cheeks as it had her half-sister’s a heartbeat earlier. Her eyes held his and in a second he remembered the kiss—the damned touching of lips that had kept him awake all last night. He’d thought of her, fantasized about her, then dreamed of making love to her. He’d woken up on fire and had taken the longest cold shower of his life.

“Get the car fixed?” he asked and she shook her head, fiery red curls brushing her nape in a movement he found ludicrously sensual.

“Nope. You were right, it’s dead.” She hooked her thumb to the window overlooking the parking lot. “I’m borrowing one of John’s rigs.”

“So you two know each other?” Bliss asked thoughtfully.

“Luke helped me out yesterday,” Katie explained, giving her half-sister the blow-by-blow of her evening.

Bliss’s forehead had wrinkled as Katie finished. “But Josh is okay—the ankle is all right?”

“He’ll be fine. For the moment he’s enjoying being king of the roost.”

“Good, good.” Folding her arms across her chest, Bliss asked, “Okay, so now that I know Josh will survive and the car won’t, why don’t you tell me what you think you were doing poking around Isaac Wells’s place? I thought it was off-limits to everybody but the police.”

Katie lifted a shoulder. “I know, but I was hoping to find something—some sort of clue, I guess, to what happened to him.”

“I thought that was the sheriff’s department’s job.”

“Yeah, but I was ... well, hoping to look at it with different eyes—a woman’s eyes, a reporter’s eyes—that I might see something everyone else had missed.” She was excited now, talking rapidly, and it gave Luke some insight into how much she loved her job. Katie Kinkaid, ace reporter.

“Isaac’s been gone for months,” Bliss reminded.

“I know, I know, but—” Katie hesitated, then looked as if she’d decided that confiding in her sister and Luke would be all right. Her cheeks flushed and a smile pulled at the corners of her full mouth. “I want the story. Period. I’m tired of writing about bridge-club meetings and covering the school-board agenda.”

“You want something with some mystery to it. Some adventure.” Bliss nodded, as if she’d heard it all before.

“At least.” Katie looked away and Luke noticed the column of her throat, the way it disappeared into the tangle of bones between her shoulders. She was sexy as hell and didn’t seem to know it.