Heart of the Hawk

by Justine Davis, Justine Dare

  “I mean,” she said quietly, “that he feels indebted to her. She did save him from the hangman, when she could have just as easily let him die.” Alex apparently had not yet heard about Arly’s gun, so she explained what Kate had done.

  Alex didn’t look any happier, but he nodded. “She couldn’t let them just hang him,” he agreed. “It isn’t in her.”

  “No. And from what she told me, she did everything she could to get The Hawk to simply leave.”

  “He wouldn’t?”

  She shrugged. “He’s still here.”

  Alex’s mouth twisted. “Yes. As I found when I made a fool of myself yesterday.”

  “Alex—”

  “I don’t know what I was thinking, challenging The Hawk like that. I was worse than a fool.”

  “No one thinks you made a fool of yourself, Alex.” Guessing at his most pressing concern, she added, “Especially Kate.”

  For a moment he looked hopeful, then sheepish again. “I don’t know why he didn’t kill me.”

  Deborah raised a brow. “Kate seems to think it was Luke who stopped him.”

  Alex looked doubtful, but said, “He was in the way. I suppose even The Hawk might think twice about killing a child.”

  “I believe you might be surprised at what The Hawk thinks,” Deborah said.

  Alex’s eyes widened. “You sound almost as if you . . . like him.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps I just think it’s not always wise to believe everything you hear.”

  His expression became thoughtful. “You mean about his reputation?”

  “My father used to say that reputations had a way of growing on their own, like a snowball rolling down a mountain.”

  “Are you saying his isn’t deserved? That he hasn’t killed all those men?”

  “I might question the number.”

  Alex leaned forward, looking at her intently. “Does that really matter, if he is paid to kill them?”

  Deborah set down her cup. She delighted in these discussions with Alex, and the way he took her observations as seriously as if she were another man, never telling her not to worry her little head about things that were too troublesome for a woman. Remembering her talk with Kate, she leaned forward in turn.

  “Is he, really? Or does he simply take jobs that no one else will do, because the chances are good it will come to killing?”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “No one seems to know of anyone he was actually paid to kill. Only men aligned against those he worked for.”

  Alex looked thoughtful. Yet another thing she liked about him; he was always open to a new way of looking at things, and wasn’t too stubborn to change his mind. She settled back in her chair, watching with pleasure as he considered what she’d said.

  “Well,” Alex said at last, “whether he deserves the reputation or not, trouble follows The Hawk, and I don’t like the idea of him being so close to Kate.”

  Deborah smothered a sigh; she knew exactly why Alex didn’t like the idea. “I think that’s up to Kate, Alex.”

  “But she’s alone now, with no one to look out for her—”

  “Look out for her as Arly did?” Deborah interjected quietly. “Work her half to death, clothe her in rags . . . and beat her if someone is so much as polite to her?”

  Alex looked aghast. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know, Alex,” she said soothingly. “But really, can you say she isn’t better off alone than with that . . . beast? She has the store, and she can—Alex, what is it?”

  He had turned as pale as the bone china cup he held. His warm hazel eyes were wide with distress. “Oh, no,” he whispered.

  “Alex?” Deborah set her cup down hastily. Instinctively, she moved, doing what she never would have dared had he not looked so disturbed; she went to sit beside him, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Alex, what is it?”

  “Deborah,” he said, then swallowed tightly and began again. “Deborah, I’ve done something awful.”

  “Awful? You? No, Alex, I won’t believe it.”

  “But I have. And Kate . . . she’ll never forgive me.”

  “Kate? What does she have to do with it?”

  “Everything,” Alex said, his voice full of remorse. “Oh, God, Deborah, I . . . she’ll be devastated, and it’s my fault.”

  A chill swept through Deborah. “I think you’d better tell me what it is you think you’ve done.”

  He shivered as if he’d felt her chill. It was a long moment, silent and strained, before he began to talk.

  HE HADN’T EATEN this well in years, Josh thought. First chicken, now a real Sunday dinner, with all the fixings. Beef tended to get monotonous in this country where it was the main staple, but Kate had managed to make it taste different with the addition of onions, and something else—spices, he supposed. With potatoes and early spring carrots, followed by an apple pie unlike any he’d ever tasted before, he was sure his stomach was more content than it had been in months.

  His head, on the other hand, was a muddled mess. She’d not said a word about what had happened between them yesterday. In fact, she seemed determined to pretend it hadn’t happened at all. He supposed he should be grateful for that, but he’d be more grateful if the memories would stop flitting around in his mind. Who would have thought kissing the plain little widow would leave a man weak in the knees?

  He attacked the last of his meal, determined to act as she was acting, as if nothing at all had happened.

  “A meal like that could hold a man for a week,” he said when he’d finished.

  “Not the way you work,” Kate answered. “You’ve done more around here in these past few days than . . .”

  She didn’t finish, but the implication that Arly hadn’t been much for the small chores was clear. Josh supposed the man had left them all for Kate to do. He watched her as she rose from the rather battered table and crossed to the big cast-iron cookstove for the coffeepot. The kitchen was large, running the entire width of the back of the building, and he knew it had been added on in a lean-to fashion after the original building had been completed. “Arly had it built once he had a woman to work in it for him,” Kate had told him. “He liked his meals at home, so he only had to leave to drink.”

  She came back to refill his cup, and when she’d finished, he asked mildly, “So a killer is capable of honest work?”

  She had the grace to blush. “I’m sorry I said that.”

  His mouth twisted. “I suppose it’s a natural assumption.”

  She refilled her own cup and resumed her seat at the rickety table. He’d do some work on this thing as soon as he had a moment, he thought.

  “Deborah seems to think you’re not really . . . a killer. Not like they say you are.”

  He went very still. “Oh?”

  “She thinks you just take jobs no one else wants, and they end up involving killing.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s not the same as simply killing somebody for money.”

  “You and Miss Taylor have been talking a lot, haven’t you?” His tone was deceptively light.

  “Deborah is my friend. She is also a very wise woman. And she helped me—”

  She broke off, looking away quickly, and Josh could just imagine the circumstances under which Deborah had helped Kate. He drew in a deep breath. He couldn’t have her believing in some make-believe image of him. It was one thing when Luke looked at him like he was some kind of hero—that was the kind of thing boys did. Kate was another matter altogether.

  “For that,” he said slowly, “and other things, she deserves respect. And she may indeed be wise. But she’s deluding herself, and you, if she thinks I’m anything other than what I am.” He stood up. “I get paid, and men die, Kate.
It’s that simple.”

  “But if you’re doing a job—”

  “That changes nothing. It’s understood, if you hire The Hawk, you expect there to be killing.”

  “Yes, but it’s not like they pay you to just go out and kill someone cold-bloodedly—”

  “It’s true, I’ve never backshot or ambushed anyone, or killed anybody who wasn’t trying to kill me.” He leaned over, bracing himself with a hand on the table as he looked at her. “But do you really believe that makes a difference? Yes, I take jobs no one else will take. They won’t take them, because they know they’ll be called upon to kill or be killed. And most men don’t find that easy, so they walk away.”

  “And you do? You find it easy?”

  Josh steeled himself to lie to her. “Yes.”

  For a long, silent moment she looked at him, and it took more nerve than he ever would have expected to keep looking at those golden eyes.

  “Which part is easy, Josh?” she finally said, her voice soft, barely above a whisper and sending a shiver down his spine.

  “What?” he finally managed to ask.

  “Which part is easy for you? The killing? Or the chance of being killed?”

  He straightened up, his brows lowering.

  “Will that be payment enough for your family, Josh? When you finally get yourself killed?”

  He went rigid, staring at her. He wanted to shout at her, tell her she was wrong, so very wrong. He wanted to tell her she had no idea what she was talking about. He wanted to tell her to stop talking about him at all, to stop thinking about him, and most of all to stop making him think about her.

  He turned on his heel and walked out without a word.

  Chapter 11

  MAYBE HE’D HEAD on over to the livery stable and sleep there tonight, Josh thought. He was sure Luke wouldn’t mind sharing his space in the hayloft. Maybe he’d finally be able to get some sleep.

  The more he thought about it, the better the idea sounded. He stepped over his outspread bedroll and picked up the saddlebags that served him as a pillow. Not that they’d been too comfortable of late, not when all he could seem to think of—when he wasn’t thinking so damned much about Kate—was that cursed book they held.

  Between the two of them, the woman who’d been taking up far too much of his thoughts, and the book that haunted him every moment he wasn’t thinking of her, he hadn’t had much sleep, and less peace in the last three days.

  He’d found himself locked in a kind of absurd tug-of-war—when she took over his mind, when he was thinking too much about the striking color of her eyes, or the way she blushed, when he was reminding himself too often that she was the plain, unremarkable woman he’d made a widow, he would purposely turn his wayward thoughts to the book, that impossible, preposterous book that couldn’t exist but did.

  But then he would think of how it had changed, how the damned thing seemed to be writing itself, how there were things in it that no one could know, and he found himself shying away from it like Buck shied from a rattler. But the only thing powerful enough to take his mind off the impossibility of the book was the woman, and he was caught in the circle again.

  He stared at the bags in his hand for a long time. He didn’t want to do this, didn’t want to look at the book again, afraid of what he might find.

  It was that that finally decided him; he’d be damned if he’d let himself be buffaloed by a book. He opened the bullet-scarred flap and yanked the now too-familiar volume out. He barely noticed the odd sensation this time; his anger overcame it. He dropped the bags as the book fell open in his hands, this time to a story he’d only glanced at before, of the first of his ancestors to come to America, and the only Hawk to survive the trip.

  He glanced at the picture of a dark-haired man and the petite but determined-looking woman who stood beside him. Matthew Hawk, the entry said, in the same elegant script used throughout the book. And the woman he’d found, according to the story, a woman who’d brought back his will to live, to survive; Celia Hawk had stood beside her man through the fires of the American Revolution, and after they’d fought to free their country, they’d fought to rebuild the Hawk dynasty. And they’d done it. With the same unflinching courage as the first Hawks.

  Drawn by a need he didn’t understand but couldn’t resist, he went back to the beginning. Back to the very first story, back to the drawing of Jenna Hawk. He looked at her again, this woman with the eyes like his own, this woman of legend, who had lived in a time so old even the date of her birth was unknown, this woman who had found a miracle for her people in the man who stood beside her.

  Josh shook his head, trying to fight off the compelling urge that seemed to be overtaking him as he read. The urge to believe in this nonsense, to believe that the Hawk legends he’d been raised on were real, not just a rather fanciful family tradition. The urge to believe in the utter impossibility of this book. The urge to read every story chronicled here, to study every branch of the intricate family tree, to know of each Hawk who had come before him, so he would know his own place in this incredible history.

  Hawks always breed true.

  He bit back a bitter laugh. He knew what his place in this history was. He was to be the end, the ignominious end of a proud line that had endured for centuries. He wondered what his story would be, how it would look amid all these stories of brave, dauntless Hawks, this story of the last one gone bad, of the one who ended it all.

  God, he was believing this. He was standing here thinking about all this as if it were true, when it had to be the biggest blazer he’d ever seen. He didn’t know how, or why, but the thing had to be a trick of some kind. It had to be. Because if it wasn’t . . .

  With tight-jawed determination, he grabbed a thick sheaf of pages and turned them over. He wound up on exactly the page he’d been aiming for, the last of the family tree. He wasn’t surprised; he’d expected nothing less, not the way things happened with this book.

  He stood there for a long time, as the light from the small window began to fade, staring at the single line, the last fragile thread of the Hawk family, the final branch, that bore his name. Finally, with the same determination that had made him turn those pages, he turned one more.

  A shiver rippled through him. He’d half expected it, but it still jarred him like one of Buck’s wild bucking sprees when he was feeling ornery.

  The first page was still empty, as if left open for some mysterious purpose only the book knew. On the next page, the original list of dates had been replaced, gone as if the wind had blown over tracks in the sand and left the surface clean to be written on anew. In their place were the details of those dates, the markers of death along the trail of a misspent life; his father’s death, his grandfather’s, the first man he’d ever killed. . . . There were brighter times, dates not connected with death, but they were few, and grew less frequent as the grim story progressed. It was an ugly saga, harsh and ruthless, with little to indicate there was a single worthwhile facet to this last Hawk.

  It was the truth. And if it looked all the uglier spelled out, he had no one to blame but himself. He’d chosen this road, and there was—

  At a sound from his left he dropped the book, his hand streaking for his Colt as he crouched and spun.

  “Oh!”

  Kate cried out and jumped back. She dropped the books she’d been holding and stood in the kitchen doorway, staring at him. Josh exhaled audibly. He slid the Colt back in its holster. He stood there, looking at her, cursing himself for being so wrapped up in his own misery that he hadn’t realized it was her, hadn’t even heard the door open, and cursing her for coming up on him like that anyway. He figured after the way he’d talked to her, she would have gone out the back and up the outside stairs to her rooms, to avoid him.

  “I-I’m sorry,” Kate stammered. “I didn’t know you were in
here.”

  “Never mind,” he said with a shake of his head. “I’m . . . a little edgy.”

  He walked to the doorway and knelt down to pick up the books she’d dropped. He looked up at her questioningly.

  “You keep books in the kitchen?”

  “I . . . had to hide them from Arly. The kitchen was the best place. He never went in there unless it was to eat.”

  He straightened up with the small stack of books in his hands. “Why didn’t he like you to read?”

  “He said it was foolish, and a waste of time. And it wasn’t for women, anyway.”

  Josh snorted. “More likely he didn’t want you finding out you were smarter than he was.”

  Kate blinked. “That’s what Deborah said.”

  “You said she was a very wise woman.”

  Color stained her cheeks, and he knew she was remembering how that conversation had ended. Hastily, she took the books from him, glanced around, then stepped quickly across the small room and bent to the floor and picked up the book he’d dropped when she’d come in.

  “How did this one end up all the way—Oh. I’m sorry, it’s yours.”

  She straightened and held it out to him. He didn’t take it. For a long moment he just stood there, looking at her, at the book she was holding, fighting the ridiculous idea that had come to him. He’d be crazy to do it. She’d think he was crazy if he did. So why was he even thinking about it?

  She was looking at him doubtfully, clearly wondering why he didn’t take the book from her.

  “I didn’t look at it again,” she said, as if she was afraid she’d somehow angered him by touching it.

  “Look at it,” he said, before he could stop the words.

  Her eyes widened. “What?”

  “Look at it. At the story you read before.”

  “But—”

  “Just do it, Kate.” She backed up a step, and he realized how he had sounded. “Please,” he amended, in a gentler tone. “Just the last story.”