1

"I'm willing to pay you for your services."

"Let me see if I understand you correctly," Murphy said, eyeing the prim and oh-so-proper postmistress who held his mail hostage. "You want me to accompany you to Zarcero?"

The woman was nuts, Murphy decided. There were no two ways about it. Letty Madden, postmistress of Boothill, Texas, was a prime candidate for the loony bin.

She looked up at him from behind her scarred oak desk in her private office, her brown eyes as dark as bittersweet chocolate. This female-in-distress performance might weaken another man's defenses, but not Murphy's. He had no intention of interrupting a well-deserved rest for some woman with an itch up her butt, seeking adventure.

His opinion of the opposite sex had never been high, and since his friends Cain and Mallory had both married, his attitude was even worse. It'd take more than the fluttering of this postmistress's eyelashes for him to traipse through some jungle on a wild-goose chase.

"You don't understand," she insisted.

Murphy understood all right; he just didn't happen to be interested in the job. Besides, the postmistress wouldn't earn enough money in two lifetimes to afford him or the services of Deliverance Company.

"It's my brother," she continued, and bit into her trembling lower lip.

A nice touch, Murphy mused skeptically, but it wouldn't change his mind.

"He's a missionary."

She actually managed to look as though she were on the verge of weeping. She was good, Murphy gave her that much. Sincerity all but oozed from her pores.

"Since the Zarceran government collapsed, no one in the State Department or CIA can tell me what's happened to him. The phone lines are down, and now the United States has severed diplomatic relations. The people in the State Department won't even talk to me anymore. But I refuse to forget my brother."

"I can't help you." He didn't mean to be rude, or heartless, but he simply wasn't interested. He'd already told her as much three times, but she'd apparently opted not to believe him.

This was the first of several errors on her part. Murphy was a man who meant what he said. If her brother was stupid enough to plant himself in a country on the verge of political collapse, then he deserved what he got.

"Please," she added with a soft, breathless quality to her voice, "won't you reconsider?"

Murphy heaved an impatient sigh. The last thing he'd expected when he stopped off to retrieve his mail was to be cornered by one of Boothill's most virtuous citizens.

"You can help me," she insisted, her voice elevating with entreaty. "It's just that you won't. It isn't as if I'm asking you to do this out of the kindness of your heart!"

Good thing, because Murphy's nature didn't lean toward the charitable.

"I said I'd pay you, and I meant it. I realize a man of your expertise doesn't come cheap, and—"

"My expertise?" No one in Boothill knew what he did for a living, and that was the way he wanted it.

Copyright © 1996 by Debbie Macomber.