“All right, we won’t talk about that.” A teasing glint came into her eyes. “So, what is it like, having the famous Hawk sweeping your floors and fixing your roof?”
If this change of subject was supposed to restore her serenity, it failed miserably. Kate’s hand shook, rattling her cup in its saucer. She steadied it and sipped at her tea again, wondering how she was supposed to answer that.
What was it like? Disconcerting, upsetting, nerve-wracking, unsettling . . . which word should she use? How could she explain what happened when she looked at him? That she seemed to lose track of her thoughts, and often caught herself just watching the way he moved, the way his powerful muscles flexed, the way he had of shoving his hair back with one hand, the way he did everything with an economy of motion that spoke volumes about his strength? Arly had been a big man, and exceptionally strong, but the only thing she had ever watched was which way he was going so she could stay out of his way.
How could she explain the funny feeling she got in her stomach when Josh looked at her, that odd combination of hot and cold that seemed to radiate out and make her tremble in a way she’d never known before? Arly had made her shake, but it had been very, very different, a reaction born from fear, not . . . whatever this was.
And dear Lord, how could she ever explain what had happened when he’d kissed her?
She ducked her head, terrified that the fact that she had let a man kiss her like that, right there in the store, must be plain on her face.
“Kate?”
She had to get hold of herself. It was bad enough that she wasted so much time drifting off, lost in some foolish reverie about a man she by all rights should despise, or at least be terrified of, but to let him kiss her? A killer. A cold-blooded killer who took money for his killing.
And if she was having trouble fitting that knowledge to the man who’d been under her roof for days now, it was her own silly fault. Pretty soon she’d be thinking of him only as Josh, and forgetting he was The Hawk, a man paid for his skill with a Colt. Thinking of him as the man with the quick grin that didn’t quite reach his haunted eyes, the man who spent time with a boy no one else but Mr. Rankin would bother with, the man who worked harder around the store than Arly ever had. And not the cold, heartless killer she knew he was. The cold, heartless killer he simply had to be, or she would be faced with a guilt she didn’t think she could bear.
“It’s . . . strange,” she said at last, a little surprised she could speak at all. “He’s not what I expected him to be.”
“What did you expect him to be?”
Kate fiddled with the handle of her cup, a delicate piece of bone china painted with a lovely rose pattern. She’d once asked Deborah where the cups had come from. “Another life,” the woman had answered, such pain shadowing her eyes that Kate had never asked again.
“Cold,” Kate answered at last. “Heartless. Mean, like Arly, I suppose.”
“But he’s not.”
It wasn’t a question, so Kate knew Deborah had already decided about Joshua Hawk. She herself wasn’t at all certain what her own conclusions were. She only knew that if she’d been wrong about The Hawk, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself.
“No, he’s not.” A cynicism cruelly taught to her by her husband twisted her lips. “Or he hides it well.”
“Why should he bother to do that? Everyone knows who he is, what he is. He has nothing to hide.”
She liked that about Deborah—she was always so logical, so reasonable; she was always seeing different sides of things. And she understood people, understood them in a way Kate despaired of ever learning.
“But how can it be? How does a man who seems so . . . reasonable, so right-minded, who can act so . . . kindly, become a killer? And for money?”
“Is that what he is?”
Kate looked startled. “What do you mean?”
“Is he a paid killer? Or is he paid to do a job which sometimes comes to involve killing?”
Kate’s startled look faded into thoughtfulness. “I . . . never thought of it in that way.”
“This is . . . violent country, Kate. It isn’t like back in the States where there are laws, and plenty of men to enforce them. We can hope it’s coming, but it’s not here, not yet. So men resort to violence to resolve their disputes. And to men like The Hawk.” Deborah shrugged. “Perhaps he kills when the situation demands it, and he’s in the situation because no one else would do it.”
“I . . . perhaps. I don’t know. It seems so awful, but when you put it that way . . .”
Deborah smiled. “Life would be easier if everything were plain and clear, wouldn’t it?”
“It would certainly be simpler,” Kate said with a heartfelt sigh.
“For myself,” Deborah said, stirring her tea, “I believe I prefer The Hawk’s methods to Arly’s. At least you know what you’re dealing with, and he doesn’t try to disguise himself as a pillar of the community while he drinks, gambles, and mistreats anyone weaker or smaller than he. There’s a certain honesty in that.”
Kate couldn’t deny that, so she didn’t even try. “I expected Reverend Babcock to rain fire and brimstone down on me in his sermon today.” As he would have, she added silently, had he known what she’d done. “But he didn’t say a word.”
Deborah laughed. “Honey, he wouldn’t dare. After what you told me happened when he came into the mercantile Friday, ready to sermonize all over you? He’s been busy telling the whole town The Hawk is only doing the gentlemanly thing, unlikely as that might be.”
“I think he was a gentleman, once,” Kate said. “At the least, very well brought up.”
Deborah shrugged. “No one is born a gunfighter.”
“Josh certainly wasn’t. He has good manners, and he’s very well spoken; he’s been educated, and he’s polite—”
“Josh?” Deborah asked softly.
Kate flushed. “Well, that’s his name. Joshua. And he asked me to call him Josh.”
“I see.”
Something in her friend’s tone made Kate’s color deepen. “He’s working for me. I could hardly call him The Hawk or Mr. Hawk all the time, could I?”
“Kate,” Deborah said quietly, “I’m your friend. You can call him anything you like, as far as I’m concerned.”
Chagrined, Kate set down her cup and reached to clasp her friend’s hand. “I know. I’m sorry. It’s just so . . . disturbing to have him around.”
Deborah smiled widely. “I imagine it is. He’s quite a handsome man.”
Joshua Hawk’s good looks were something she didn’t care to dwell on. And if she didn’t stop thinking about that kiss, she’d go utterly mad. As a diversion, she returned to something Deborah had said before.
“You were right, you know. He wasn’t born a gunfighter. In fact, his family was quite wealthy. They had a very large farm in Missouri.”
“Really? Well, I suppose the best of families have their black sheep.”
“I don’t think it was like that. His family . . . they all died during the war, except for his grandfather.”
Deborah went very still. “All?”
Kate nodded. “Even the women.” She hesitated, thinking she shouldn’t do this; it was almost like betraying a confidence she hadn’t been meant to have in the first place. But she would stake her life—and already had, on occasion—on Deborah’s ability to keep her own counsel, and she desperately needed someone to help her make sense of the enigma that was Joshua Hawk.
So she overcame her hesitation and related the horribly grim story she’d read in the Hawk book, feeling herself shiver as if she’d been there when she spoke of the raiders who had raped and murdered their way through the Hawk family.
“I will never understand war,” Deborah said quietly when Kate had finished, “but I unders
tand even less the kind of man who uses war as an excuse for his own evil ways.”
Kate knew Deborah had seen much of the war, too much, as she’d aided her doctor father in the Northern hospitals. It was why they’d come west, because her father had seen far too much of death, had far too much of being unable to save young lives. But even her grim experience had been once removed; Deborah had dealt with the aftermath, but she’d been safely spared the actual terror. Josh had had to deal with it face-to-face, at an age when he should have been dealing with nothing more than simply growing up.
“He blamed himself,” Kate said, “for not saving them.”
“But he was just a boy!” Deborah exclaimed.
“Yes.”
Deborah looked at her for a long, silent moment. “He . . . told you all this?”
Guiltily, Kate shook her head. “No.” She explained about the book, the Hawk history. “That’s why you can’t ever tell a soul. I should never have looked at it.”
“Sounds fascinating. I’ve seen family trees before, but never one like that, with stories.”
“It is unusual. Luke said every time the family tree got down to just one name, there was a story.”
“A story about what?”
“That last Hawk, I think. Luke wasn’t clear. And Josh . . . didn’t like him talking about it.”
“I imagine that shut the boy up in a hurry. He’s developed quite a case of hero worship for your Hawk.”
“He’s not ‘my Hawk,’ ” Kate said emphatically.
Deborah lifted a brow at her. “It was merely a figure of speech, Kate, dear.”
Embarrassed, Kate sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m a little edgy today. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
She got to her feet before Deborah could ask why; she was in no mood to explain that she’d spent half the night listening for sounds from downstairs, and the other half trying not to think about the man who was making them.
“I have to get back to the mercantile and start supper.” Then, not wanting Deborah to think her haste had anything to do with Josh, she added, “And I have to take advantage of being closed today to count some stock.”
Deborah also rose, smiling, and if she was thinking there was anything untoward about Kate’s answer, she didn’t say a word. “Don’t you let Reverend Babcock catch you working on the Sabbath.”
Kate’s mouth quirked in amusement. “He’d have to stay sober to do that.”
Deborah laughed; the reverend’s claim that preaching a Sunday sermon dried up a man’s throat was chuckled at by everyone in town. “You’re right. I think you’re safe enough.”
DEBORAH WATCHED her friend go, gave her a final wave, shut the door to her parlor, and slowly turned around. She leaned against the door, still smiling; it was wonderful to see Kate able to laugh, with things to look forward to. She’d watched Arly Dixon try to crush the girl’s spirit for four years, and had every day feared that he would kill her in the effort. But Kate had never given in. She’d learned to survive, although she’d often worn bruises from Arly’s batterings that made Deborah cringe. And then there were the other attacks, the brutal, ruthless assaults that would have been rape had Kate not been married to him.
Deborah winced at the memories; her father had told her that the physical act of union between a man and woman could be a beautiful thing, but she doubted Kate would believe that. More than once, despite her own terror, she’d sheltered the girl, denying to Arly’s face that Kate was there, knowing that if he got hold of her on those particularly vicious nights, Kate would be dead by morning.
Deborah knew most men were not like Arly Dixon, that some were gentle, good men; she’d nursed many of them, men who begged her to get word to their beloved wives. She’d been fifteen when she’d begun helping her widowed father in his overloaded Union hospital, and before her sixteenth birthday she’d lost track of how many men had died in her arms, calling her by the names of the women and children they would never see again, never hold again. Women and children who would be left with only memories and the pitifully small collection of possessions Deborah always sent home to them.
That had been the simple part, the packing and shipping of the belongings. It had been the letters that had been difficult, the letters telling of a loved one’s last hours, of his last thoughts of home and family. Each one had been draining, the writing a painful task, but she’d felt compelled to do it. She felt she owed it to each of them, each soldier who died holding on to her, using her as a poor substitute in his final moments.
She wiped at her eyes, amazed that after more than ten years, the memories still had the power to make her weep. Others had become hardened to the bloodshed, but she never had. Nor had her father. They’d sold their home and everything in it, and come west the year after the transcontinental railroad had been finished, Doctor Franklin Taylor swearing he would never again amputate another limb without enough morphine, never again stand ankle deep in blood.
Her own memories were horrible enough; she couldn’t imagine living with the kind of memories The Hawk carried. But she could imagine how the boy who blamed himself for his family’s destruction had become the man whose job was the destruction of others.
The knock on her front door was a welcome interruption of ugly thoughts she seldom allowed herself to dwell on. She shook her head sharply to clear away the last vestiges of the hideous images, and went to open the door.
“Alex!” she said in surprise. She wondered if he’d waited outside until Kate had gone, too embarrassed to face her. Judging by his sheepish expression, it seemed likely.
The young lawyer nodded at her. “Hello, Deborah. May I come in?”
“Of course.”
She stepped back to let him pass. Despite his neat, dark blue wool suit, clean white shirt and collar, and freshly combed hair, details she noted with some interest, he looked a little red-eyed. She presumed he’d been welcomed home in style at the saloon last night. She didn’t hold with too much drinking, but since Alex overindulged so rarely, she thought she could forgive him.
You’d forgive him for worse than that, she thought to herself ruefully. She knew she had a foolish fondness for the young lawyer, and knew as well that it would never do to let it show, not when she was a woman of thirty and he five years her junior. Besides, Alex had a fondness of his own for Kate, and Lord knew the girl could use a good man like Alex. Solid, steady, goodhearted, even handsome, if you liked men who ran to a wiry thinness, with sandy brown hair that tended to fall forward over the brow.
Deborah liked that hair. She liked his warm, kind eyes. And she liked Alex’s somewhat shy ways. But she also liked the way he could be roused to high vigor for something he believed in. He was a good man, and he would be good to Kate. They would be happy together.
And she should be happy that Kate would have someone to really take care of her. If Deborah felt a twinge at the idea, it was simply unworthy envy, she told herself sternly. She was far past thinking of that kind of thing for herself. There had never been time when she’d been helping her father, and it had taken her far too long to get over the horror, and then to grow used to the rough, unpolished ways of the men of the West. By the time she had realized those rough ways often masked good, decent men, it was too late. She was firmly on the shelf, and there she would stay.
“I have coffee on,” she said, knowing Alex preferred it to tea, and glad her father had instilled in her the habit of keeping a pot going for the occasional patient needing the stimulation, or the more frequent restless loved one. “Would you like some?”
“Thank you,” he said.
He took his usual seat on the medallion-back sofa, one of the few pieces her father had had shipped from the States, as Deborah retreated to the kitchen. Alex often visited her, and Deborah didn’t try to fool herself as to why; she was Kate’s best friend, and thus th
e best source of information about her.
She came back with a cup fixed exactly as he liked it, then sat in her chair and refilled her cup of tea.
“How was your trip?” she asked.
“Wasted, I’m afraid. My client seems to have gotten himself killed before I got there.”
“Killed? Oh, dear. Over that land claim?”
“No,” Alex said drolly, “over a game of poker.”
“Oh.” Deborah didn’t quite know what else to say.
“He didn’t even have the winning hand.”
He said it with a shrug, and she could tell by his tone that that wasn’t what he wanted to talk about. She sighed inwardly, haying a fairly good idea what he did want to talk about. Alex stared down at his cup of coffee. Deborah waited, knowing he would get to it in his own time. Alex rarely rushed his words, but what he did say he stood by; it was another thing she liked about him.
“I suppose you heard,” he finally said.
Deborah had too much respect for him to pretend not to understand. “Yes.”
He glanced at her, and she saw relief that he wasn’t going to have to explain clear in his expression.
“What is he really doing there?”
It burst from him as if he’d tried to hold it back. Deborah hesitated, considering her answer carefully. She had her own ideas about what was going on between Kate and her new help, but doubted Alex would want to hear them.
“As far as I know,” she said at last, “exactly what you’ve probably already heard.”
Alex stared at her. “Surely you don’t believe that? That The Hawk feels guilty about killing Arly?”
Deborah gave him a thoughtful look. “I think it’s Kate he is concerned with.”
Alex stiffened. “You don’t mean he has . . . intentions toward her?”
So his feelings toward Kate hadn’t changed. Deborah didn’t know if she was glad or not.
Heart of the Hawk Page 14