Dangerous blazes with the same lusty savagery as the courtship of fireflies in summer; all single-minded flash and glow, mating to the death during twilight. The latest in romance novelist Diana Palmer’s “Long, Tall Texans” series of Western bodice rippers, Dangerous is narrated by Phil Gigante, who coolly ripples from shrinking violet Winnie Sinclair’s wistful Lone Star twang to FBI agent McKuen Kilraven’s urgent, glowering commands. The effect thaws the audiobook’s icy murder plots somewhat, like hot tub vapors in the snow.

In the grand tradition of escapist fiction, Dangerous circles around a mismatched couple bound by sorrow and animal attraction both. Our heroine is doe-eyed Winnie Sinclair, a virginal 22-year-old heiress who works as a 911 dispatcher, despising the second sight inherited from her abandoning mother. FBI Agent Kilraven is the sphinxlike, haunted man Winnie craves. He’s monkish and mercurial, still grieving the murders of his wife and daughter seven years before. And when a dead body washes up in the local river, two cold cases surface along with the corpse. Kilraven is convinced the same killer blasted away his own family. He proposes a “temporary marriage” to Winnie, to get access to her estate in the Bahamas, where he suspects the homicidal monster is hiding. As Kilraven and Winnie investigate, they plunge into a relationship as perilous as the crimes they’re flaming out.

Gigante’s textured rendering of Winnie’s hometown of Jacobsville, Texas, is a peppery broth of lazy cadences and dawdling, drop-off sentences. In an observant touch, Gigante resists broadening dialect for cheap laughs. His only misstep is ascribing a flattened, Canadian-sounding accent to Jon Blackhawk, Kilraven’s Native American half-brother. Odd, but certainly not damning. Truly, the most dangerous thing about this audiobook is resisting the impulse to pause on the make-out scenes. Nita Rao