Heart of the Hawk (10 page)

“Mesquite,” Josh said, and Kate flushed at the reminder of their other conversation.

Silence reigned for a while before Luke asked, hopefully eyeing the pot on the stove, “Is there more chicken?”

“You haven’t eaten your vegetable yet,” Kate said, then laughed when Luke wrinkled his nose.

“My ma used to say that,” Luke said.

Kate went very still. The boy had said it simply, with no sign of grief or pain, but the words still tore at her.

“Mine, too,” Josh said quietly.

“Really?” Luke looked at Josh, then at his plate which was empty of the serving of turnips that remained on his own plate. “Is that why you ate ’em?”

Josh nodded. “Since she’s not here to remind me anymore, it seems like the right thing to do.”

“Oh.”

With a resigned sigh, Luke picked up his fork and dug into the cooked turnips. Kate quickly picked up Josh’s plate and turned away, fighting the tears that threatened. How could it be that this man she’d always heard of as a cold-blooded killer could be so understanding with a young boy, that he could find exactly the right words to guide him?

She took her time scooping up another serving for him, leaving a small piece for Luke as a reward for eating the dreaded turnips. She had herself under control by the time she turned back. Or she thought she did; Josh still looked at her rather intently when she set the plate back down in front of him. But all he said, after taking another bite, was “Thank Miss Taylor for me.”

“Me, too,” Luke chimed in, holding out his now empty plate. Kate laughed as she served up the last piece of chicken and last dumpling for the boy, and watched indulgently as he attacked the food as if he hadn’t just finished a plateful.

This must be what women wanted, what some of them even had, this quiet peace with a man and a child at your table, hungry after a hard day’s work. She’d always looked at cooking as something she’d had to do, as something women just did, a part of the payment for the protection of a man in a harsh world. But watching Josh and Luke eat with such relish gave her an odd sense of satisfaction she’d never known before.

Perhaps, she mused idly as Josh and Luke talked, some chores weren’t such drudgery, if they were done like this, for people who appreciated what you’d done. Perhaps this is what other women thought of when they thought of marrying and having children—

Kate quickly lowered her gaze to her own cup of coffee, praying that her silly, foolish thoughts hadn’t shown in her face. She supposed there could be something more foolish than a woman who sat looking at a half-wild orphan boy and The Hawk, and thinking about marriage and children of her own, but she doubted you’d find it in Wyoming Territory. She felt so half-witted she was thankful when they’d finished eating and she could turn her attention to cleaning up.

When Luke had thanked her, and scampered off to check on Buck as the weary Josh had asked him, Kate hastily got to her feet. She set out the pan she used for washing the dishes, then turned to go for the water she’d set to heating before they’d begun to eat. She gave a little start when she saw Josh there before her, reaching to lift the heavy kettle for her. She stared at him while he poured the water into the pan; Arly would no more have thought to help her than he would have thought to thank her for the meal. Especially if he’d been as tired as Josh, not that he’d ever worked as hard as Josh had today.

“I . . . thank you,” she stammered out.

Josh merely nodded as he set the kettle down, as if he thought nothing of helping with woman’s work. He stood there beside her for a long moment. She looked up at him, noticing the rough stubble of his unshaven jaw, the reddened weariness in his eyes . . . and something else in those eyes, something that made them bright and intense despite his exhaustion. Something that made her very nervous, and reminded her painfully of the moment when, in her joy and relief, she’d embraced him so disgracefully.

“I . . . you should get some sleep,” she said, desperate to distract him—and, to be honest, herself—from such thoughts.

For what seemed like an endless moment, he still stood there, looking down at her, so close she could feel the heat of him, could almost sense the solidness of him by the way the bare two inches of space between them felt, compressed somehow. She felt oddly as if the room were beginning to spin, and realized she’d forgotten to breathe. She drew in a gulp of air, only to find it didn’t ease the swirling sensation in her head.

And then, suddenly it was over. Josh backed up, gave an almost sharp nod of his head, and said a rather brusque good night. And then he was gone, through the narrow doorway that led to the storeroom, closing it with silent care behind him.

Kate let out the gulp of air she’d taken, and fought the puzzling weakness in her limbs that made her tremble. And stood there wondering why she felt nearly as exhausted as Josh had looked.

Chapter 7

JENNA HAWK, JOSH thought, had been one hell of a woman. And Kane had been man enough for her, which was saying a great deal.

At
least she’d been able to
save her people.

At the relentless thought, he slammed the book shut, barely managing to stop himself from hurling it across the room. He’d have room to do it, now that he’d had to move his bedroll into the store itself, in front of the cast-iron heating stove, because the storeroom was so full of the supplies for which there hadn’t been room on the mercantile shelves. He wasn’t really sure what stopped him from tossing the book. He still couldn’t explain it, and he still hated things he couldn’t explain.

At least Jenna had been able to save her people.

That realization—that this woman, this ancestor of his, had been able to do what he hadn’t—had been nagging at him ever since he’d given up on going back to sleep and read her story by the light of the kerosene lamp Kate had provided for him. It was just more proof to him that after all those years of Hawks breeding true, it had come down to the one who hadn’t. Him.

He didn’t understand this at all. He was exhausted, more tired than he’d ever been, except maybe the time he’d been riding for Frank Kerrigan’s Rocking K. He had gotten pinned down in a line shack during a little disagreement over a small herd of cattle wearing what had once been the Rocking K brand, altered with a running iron to a lopsided Circle R. He’d been awake for three days straight, holding the rustlers off until they’d gotten impatient, and ignoring their orders, had rushed him. He’d taken out three of them and gotten back to the ranch with most of the stock.

But even then he hadn’t felt as tired as he did now. He should have slept straight through until tomorrow night, but instead he’d awakened after merely a few hours and been unable to go back to sleep. And the feel of the book in the saddlebags beneath his head was of no help at all in easing a mind that he couldn’t seem to slow down.

He’d finally decided either Kate or Luke had to have put the book into the saddlebag before he’d left, and he simply hadn’t noticed. He pushed the thought to the back of his mind that there seemed to be an awful lot he wasn’t noticing lately.

Luke was the most likely culprit, he thought now. The boy had been fascinated with the damned book. The night he’d first seen it, the boy had spent what seemed like hours trying to follow every branch of the family tree that began with Jenna and Kane, reading every name out loud until Josh was ready to gag the boy with his bandanna.

But then he had decided that listening to that endless list of names was better than hearing that crazy story the boy had read aloud, the one his grandfather had told him so often, about how Jenna had saved the life of a mysterious man of the forest who had made her a promise that in return, her own blood would live on forever. The fact that the bloodline had done exactly that, continued unbroken since that day, didn’t make the story any easier to believe, just harder to dismiss.

He wondered now why he hadn’t just thrown the boy out. He usually didn’t pay much mind to kids except when they got in his way. They were a nuisance then, following him around, spreading stories that had him doing so many things in so many places he should by rights be a hundred years old instead of twenty-five.

Usually a stern look sent them scurrying away. But Luke was different. Josh couldn’t quite bring himself to shoo the boy away. Perhaps because when he looked at him, he saw a bit of himself as he’d been not so long ago: proud, stubborn, and trying to make it alone in a world that seemed to have no place for him.

“Getting soft, Hawk.” He drummed his fingers on the book.

He looked down at the leather cover, remembering Luke’s stumbling reading of the incredible story. Josh had been unwillingly fascinated, drawn to Jenna’s story in a way he didn’t understand. So drawn that he’d read the story himself tonight. And had found the pull becoming stronger, even as he scoffed at the foolishness of the parts about magic and wizardry.

At least she’d been able to save her people.

The bitter words rose in his mind yet again. From the time he’d been nine years old, he’d been given a rifle and taught to shoot. Although his mother had been told it was to hunt, to help supplement their war-shortened food supply, his grandfather had explained to him that the war was very close, and while the fact that they, like many Missourians, had family in both blue and gray, might be of some help should they be visited by troops, they must be ready to defend their home and their women.

Josh, frustrated at being too young to follow his father into battle, had taken to the lessons eagerly, practicing until Gramps had laughingly told him they had to save some ammunition for the real thing.

But when the real thing had come, in the summer of ’63, he’d been worse than useless. Despite his grandfather’s instructions to stay close while he went into Springfield in search of the latest casualty lists, Josh had been off hunting rabbits when it happened. He’d smelled the smoke first, and started home at a run. He’d heard the faint screams when he’d burst out of the woods, all caution forgotten.

He’d found his mother in the front yard, lying in the middle of her trampled garden. His two oldest sisters were on the front porch, their clothes torn open. His aunt was in the parlor of the big house, her husband’s old Sharps rifle beneath her. All were sprawled lifelessly, in grotesque and obscene postures he hadn’t completely understood until years later, when he realized what had been done to them. Numb with shock, he’d straightened their bodies, covered them up, and sat down to wait for his grandfather.

It was then that he’d found his youngest sister, twelve-year-old Ruthie, under the high front porch, on her knees, rocking back and forth, staring glassy eyed, muttering “Foxes, Foxes” over and over.

Josh knew what it meant; he’d heard about the local guerrilla band of raiders. “They call them Foxes because of the fox tails they tie on their hats,” Gramps had told him once. “And they’re no better than Quantrill and his gang, for all that they were supposedly formed up to fight them.”

By the time Gramps had returned, Ruthie was in the same state Josh had found her in; he hadn’t been able to get another word out of her, or even get her to acknowledge he was there. He was crying by then, beyond caring about pride or manhood. But when his grandfather arrived, taking in the grim scene with horrified eyes, Josh had wiped his eyes and stood up to meet him, knowing what he had to do.

“It’s my fault, Gramps,” he’d said. “I wanted to surprise Mama with a rabbit for supper. The Foxes came. I wasn’t here to save them. It’s all my fault.”

He shivered now, amazed that the old memories still had the power to shake him so. He’d eventually realized that, even had he been there, there was little a ten-year-old boy could have done to stop what had happened.

“You would have died with them, Joshua,” Gramps had said that bloody afternoon, “and then where would I be?”

And only much later had he broken the news that Uncle Charles was dead, killed in the fighting at Vicksburg. Josh had known better than to ask about his father; there had been no word for months.

His grandfather had been an incredible man, Josh thought. Comforting his guilt-ridden grandson despite his own pain, and trying futilely to soothe a granddaughter who had retreated so far inside herself she couldn’t be found anymore.

He tossed the book down beside him on the floor, resenting that it was stirring up painful memories he’d managed to dodge for years. Remembering the man his grandfather had been only made him more aware of what he himself was not.

Of course, if he quit thinking about that, that left only another uncomfortable subject to dwell on. He hadn’t spent so much time in one town since Gramps had taken sick. And he’d come too damned close to dying here to like the place much. So why was he here, on the floor of a place that belonged to the woman he’d made a widow? Why had he pushed himself to near exhaustion chasing down that wagonload of supplies? Why was he still in Gambler’s Notch at all?

And most of all, why did every creak of the boards over his head make him wonder what she was doing? And why, when the creaking finally stopped, did the images in his head take such an intimate turn? She wasn’t the kind of woman who made men stop in their tracks. She’d said that herself. He thought she was a bit hard on herself to call herself plain—those eyes made that a lie—but she was hardly what you’d call a beauty.

So why was he lying here, wide-awake, wondering if she took her hair down at night, how long it was, and if her nightclothes were as ill fitting as her dresses seemed to be, or if they perhaps revealed more of that lovely curve of hip he’d noticed that first day?

And why the hell had he turned down the chance to ease this damned ache with that girl in Granite Bluff? She’d been a good-enough-looking woman. And she’d been willing—more than willing—and he could have walked away after without a backward glance. Instead, he’d just walked away.

And it made him more than a little angry that the ache that had vanished in Granite Bluff had come back with a vengeance the instant he’d returned to Gambler’s Notch. And it was about to drive him crazy with its fierceness. If he was so damned eager, then why the hell hadn’t he been the least bit interested in that saloon girl?

It must have been something about her, he told himself firmly. Perhaps it had been her eagerness to bed The Hawk, without knowing a thing about the man behind the name. That had never bothered him before, but maybe this time . . .

With a smothered groan, he reached over and picked up the book. Anything would be better than these kinds of thoughts; he’d been far too long without a woman if he was intrigued by one who had nothing in particular to recommend her except a pair of interesting eyes and a certain way of moving.

You had your
chance, last night,
he growled at himself inwardly. There was no reason—except his unexpected lack of interest—why he couldn’t have scratched this itch. A man had to take care of those needs, eventually. And the last time had been . . . Cheyenne? Lord, he couldn’t remember, except that she’d had red hair he’d discovered was dyed, and had been a bit too bony for his taste. But she’d been enthusiastic enough, although he suspected his reputation might have had something to do with that. Like Lily, she’d been one of those women who seemed to get a strange sort of enjoyment from that kind of thing.

He wondered if Gambler’s Notch ran to sporting women. He’d ask Markum tomorrow; although he hadn’t seen any girls in the place, most saloon owners found it worth their while to keep a soiled dove or two on or near the premises. That was all that was wrong with him; it had simply been too long. No other reason for him to be wondering what the Widow Dixon wore to bed.

That this conclusion did not give him an answer to his lack of response to the willing Lily was a fact he chose to overlook for the moment. And when that small voice in his head pointed out that he’d been doing a great deal of overlooking lately, he chose to ignore that as well.

Determinedly, he opened the book again. He began to look at the family tree, finding the names Luke had read out loud. It was an odd feeling, to see how the Hawks had grown, how the line had gone on and on, narrowing in times of hardship or disease, but never breaking. Decade after decade he read, Hawks and their offspring, and theirs, and theirs. On and on it went, each page he turned seeming to pound home to him that he was going to be the one to bring this to an end, that he was the one
who would topple the Hawk dynasty.

“Foolishness,” he said aloud. How did he even know any of these names were right, that any of these people were really his ancestors? This whole thing was unbelievable, the way the book had appeared, the crazy story of Jenna and her warrior, and the wizard. . . .

He nearly laughed out loud. There was no more truth in this than there was in the rest of Gramps’s fanciful legends, no matter how this book had come to be in his bag in the first place, or where it had come from. In fact, the whole thing was probably a trick rigged up by that writer he’d run into in Denver last year, who’d taken a notion to make The Hawk the next dime-novel hero.

A slow smile curved his mouth; he was very pleased with this idea. It was much easier to accept than the other crack-brained ideas he’d had. Yes, that writer was behind all this. He’d told the persistent fellow that if he ever saw a book with his name on it, he’d hunt him down and kill him, whether he’d written it or not. Josh had thought the man was convinced, but perhaps not. Perhaps this was the writer’s way of trying to convince him he should go along with the idea.

Yes, that was it, Josh thought with a smile. If he poked around hard enough tomorrow, he’d just bet that Mr. Bunting, or whatever his name had been, would come scurrying out from whatever rock he was hiding under. And he’d make him painfully sorry he’d ever pried into things that weren’t his business.

His smile faded. While someone might be able to track down his family tree, he supposed, and have it put into this fancy book, there was one thing his explanation didn’t account for, and that was how he’d known Jenna’s story. Hawks might tell the old legends repeatedly to each other, but they rarely told outsiders. Gramps had pounded that into him from childhood.

“When you find the right woman, you tell her,” he’d said, making, “because she’ll need to know. Otherwise, you keep this among Hawks.”

Well, he doubted such a woman existed, and he’d certainly never found her, so he’d never told the stories to anyone. And the rest of the Hawks had been dead for well over a decade. So how in hell had the writer come up with the story, down to the details of how Jenna had found her warrior and lured him out of the mountains to save her people, in a time and place not to be found in any history, or on any map?

With a weary sigh, he again tossed the book on the floor. He was tired of searching for answers to ridiculous questions. He leaned over to the kerosene lamp, lifting the glass chimney to blow out the flame. He hesitated when he saw the book had fallen open to the last page of the tree, the page with the grim record of deaths, and reached down to close it. His fingers missed the cover, although he wasn’t sure how, and turned a single page instead.

He stopped, staring at the pages after his branch on the family tree, pages that he could swear had been blank. And the first one was indeed blank, as if it had been skipped for some reason. But the next held one short entry at the top of the page. An entry in capital letters that he knew hadn’t been there before. He would have remembered if it had been.