Heart of the Hawk (15 page)

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 the 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.

“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.”