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like Cash once before. A man who was all charm and smiles. A man she trusted. A man she thought she knew.
    A man who—
    “Just
stop it
.” She slapped her hand against the steering wheel. Cash wasn’t that guy and, logically, she knew it.
    He didn’t
scare
her, for pity’s sake.
    He just . . .
bothered
her.
    The man was a menace.
    A menace who was, at the moment, holding her little brother hostage. “And that has to be a new high in low for the tricky bastard.” Her fists tightened on the wheel and her temper spiked until she was nearly blinded by the red haze coloring her vision. “Imagine using a kid to get to me.” She shook her head and her ponytail whipped from side to side. “Must be losing his touch. Can’t get a woman through charm, so then try kidnapping.”
    But even as she thought it, she was already half dismissingthe notion. Just wasn’t Cash Hunter’s style. And while she steered her car through the Amazon jungle of his property, she thought back to his brief phone call.
    “Before you get all snarly,” he’d said quickly, “I’m just calling to let you know Jack’s here. At my house. You can come and get him anytime.”
    Snarly.
    She’d show him snarly.
    Then the tricky bastard had hung up before she could tell him what she thought of him. What she thought of driving out to his house. Or even ask him why the hell Jack was
there
in the first place. She and her little brother were going to have to have a long talk. And she wasn’t looking forward to it.
    How was she supposed to know how to deal with a little boy?
She’d
never been a boy. She didn’t know how they thought, or what they wanted or needed. She’d never been around kids much, except for her sisters, and even then,
she’d
mostly been a kid herself.
    Oh, she so wasn’t cut out for the “mother” thing.
    She’d known all along that taking care of Jack while Papa was gone was going to be trouble. She’d just had no idea how
much
trouble was headed her way.
    “And speaking of trouble . . .” The truck lurched out of the woods and into the bright, late-afternoon sun, and for a second or two her eyes were dazzled by the brightness. Which was probably why Cash Hunter looked so damn good to her as he took long, lazy strides toward the truck.
    There couldn’t be any other reason, because frankly, Jo refused to be one of the thundering herd of women who were constantly coming and going fromthe man’s life. She didn’t really like being one of a crowd. And besides, any man who’d been around the block as many times as
he
had, was bound to be bad news.
    Still, he was really easy on the eyes.
    His black hair was just long enough to be sexy and the sharp planes and angles of his face were softened when he smiled. Which he was doing at the moment. Damn it.
    He wore a black T-shirt tucked into faded jeans and worn, beat-up cowboy boots that fed into every woman’s fantasy of a “tall, dark stranger.” Well, Jo told herself firmly, despite the fact that her pulse skipped a little unsteadily, not
every
woman’s fantasy.
    He walked up to the truck, leaned on the open driver’s side window and looked in at her. Jo could have sworn she felt heat radiating from the man and wondered if he’d somehow found out how to do that purposely. She wouldn’t have put it past him.
    “Heard your truck,” he said with a shrug. “Came out to meet you.”
    “Where’s Jack?” she asked tightly.
    “Good to see you, too, Josefina.” He smiled and she refused to notice how good it looked on him.
    She gritted her teeth and folded her lips back to give him a grimace. “The name’s Jo.”
    “Doesn’t suit you.”
    “Gee, thanks very much. Back off.” When he did, slowly enough to make her hum in frustration, she opened the truck door, hopped down, and slammed it shut after her. She didn’t much like having to look up at him. Tall herself, she was used to meeting men more or less eyeball to eyeball. Cash, though, wouldn’t youknow it, was a