Heart of the Hawk (26 page)

“You’re
not
old,” Kate said firmly.

“I’m older than Alex. Too much older.”

“Five years isn’t that much,” Kate said, although she knew it was. “Why, if he were five years older—”

“But he’s not. It is the way it is. Just as . . . Josh is who and what he is. We’ve both come to . . . care for impossible men, haven’t we?”

Kate’s breath caught. She knew what word Deborah was avoiding, and it made her head reel. She felt an odd trembling begin, and hastily set her teacup down in its saucer. Was that what she’d done? Had she really—and oh, so foolishly—fallen in love with Josh? With The Hawk?

The absurdity of it, of quiet, plain Kathleen in love with a man like Joshua Hawk, nearly made her laugh out loud. But she bit it back, knowing it would be a painful, whimpering laugh, and would reveal more than she wanted even to her dearest friend.

“No,” she whispered. “I don’t . . . I can’t . . .”

“Kate,” Deborah said quietly, “the whole town knows how late the lanterns burn in your store. And how late you’re going upstairs.”

“We’ve been reading! I told you that.”

“Yes. And I believe you.”

“But they don’t, is that it? Don’t people have anything else to do than . . . than—”

“Talk about The Hawk being tamed by the sparrow?”

Kate stared at Deborah. “Is that . . . what they’re saying?”

Deborah nodded. “They seem . . . rather proud of it, in a strange kind of way.”

Kate shook her head, bewildered. “I don’t understand. I haven’t . . . tamed him. How could they think that
I
could?”

“Perhaps not everyone sees yourself as you do,” Deborah suggested.

“But they can’t really believe that we . . . that I . . . I mean, Arly’s barely cold, and—”

“Arly Dixon,” Deborah said sharply, “doesn’t deserve a minute of mourning from you.”

Kate’s mouth tightened, and she bit her lip as she looked at her friend. Deborah sighed a third time.

“I’ve seen a lot of ugliness in life, Kate. I’ve seen a lot of good men die far too soon. Some were hardly more than boys, boys who had never really lived. It teaches you a different way of looking at things. Save your mourning for those who deserve it.”

“And your love?” Kate asked softly. “Who do you save that for?”

“I don’t know,” Deborah whispered. “With all the regrets about wasted love, and love never experienced, that I’ve heard with dying breaths, I’ve begun to wonder . . . perhaps we’re the biggest fools for saving it at all. Perhaps it’s meant to be gambled, not hoarded, awaiting another chance that may never come.”

Deborah lowered her gaze, and Kate suddenly knew that, however wise she might be, Deborah no more had an answer for this confusion than she herself did.

“We’re in a fine fix, aren’t we?” Kate whispered.

SHE WAS THINKING that an understatement as she walked slowly back to the mercantile in the long shadows of late afternoon. Surely she wasn’t that witless, to have fallen in love with a man she hardly knew, when she’d just barely survived a husband she’d just buried less than a month ago? A man with a reputation like The Hawk’s?

But she was fairly certain now that that reputation was blacker than the truth, that while he may have killed, he didn’t do it in cold blood or from ambush, as Arly had tried, or Robards. So perhaps she was merely witless and naive enough to become infatuated with the first man to stand up for her, the first man to go out of his way to help her. . . . The first man ever to kiss her with tenderness.

She had to stop thinking about those kisses. She had to stop wondering about whether he would kiss her again tonight. She had to stop her even more wicked thoughts about what it would be like to go beyond kissing.

She tried to crush those extraordinary wonderings with the memories of the loathsome, ugly nights spent with Arly, but the logical part of her brain refused to cooperate; it simply kept telling her Josh was not Arly, that he was nothing like Arly, and that she had the mere fact that he was still here, let alone the sweetness of his kisses, to prove it. And now she had more, the proof of longing letters written to beloved husbands by loving wives.

Perhaps it’s
meant to be gambled, not hoarded . . .

And perhaps Deborah was right. Perhaps you only got one chance. Perhaps if you didn’t take that chance when it came—

She thudded into a large but oddly yielding body and smothered a gasp.

“Excuse me, Mrs.—Er, Miss Kate.”

“Marshal Pike,” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

He nodded at her. “You looked a mite preoccupied.”

“I’m sorry for bumping into you,” she repeated.

“Didn’t hurt none,” Pike assured her. He seemed to hesitate a moment before going on. “I heard about your trouble, Miss Kate. I’m sorry to hear that Arly’s as mean dyin’ as he was livin’.”

Did everyone in town know this, too? Kate wondered. Had she always been the subject of so much talk, and had just never known it before, because she never spoke to anyone unless it was under Arly’s watchful eye?

“I thank you for your sympathy, Marshal,” she said, a little stiffly.

He nodded slightly, touching the brim of his hat as if he was about to move on. Kate stepped to one side to let him pass, but he hesitated again.

“I’d best get over to Markum’s place,” he said.

Kate looked at him, puzzled; why was he telling her?

“Fella named Carter rode in this evening. Heard it might be Jackson Carter.”

Kate was even more puzzled; the name meant nothing to her.

“Just gonna make sure he intends to move on. Reckon one gunfighter in town is enough.”

Kate’s eyes widened then, and as if her reaction was the sign he’d been waiting for, Pike touched the brim of his hat again and moved on.

Another gunfighter? Surely not another one looking for Josh, like that awful Robards man. But the marshal must suspect that he was, or why would he have told her?

Why indeed? she wondered as she began to walk again. Why had he told her? Had he done so knowing she would tell Josh? Was that what Pike had wanted? For her to warn Josh? It seemed an unusual act for a town marshal, to warn one gunfighter of the arrival of another.

But perhaps not. Gambler’s Notch did seem to have taken a shine to their temporary resident. Once they’d been sure he wasn’t going to let lead fly every time he turned around, they’d become fascinated. Men and women alike—although she doubted it was for the same reasons—came into the mercantile more often than ever before, seemingly attracted by the novelty of seeing The Hawk in such unexpected surroundings, doing such mundane tasks as stocking shelves and selling papers of pins to women who were half frightened, half thrilled by his presence, and more than a little enraptured by his easy charm.

One gunfighter in town is enough.

She stopped dead. She’d been so busy pondering the puzzle of why Pike had apparently sent a warning, that she’d nearly forgotten the warning itself. And what it could mean.

May 1878—Gunfighter Joshua Hawk buried in Gambler’s Notch, Wyoming Territory.

It wasn’t May. Not for another two weeks. But that didn’t necessarily mean Josh was safe. It could mean only that he wouldn’t die until then. Deborah had told her stories, awful stories of wounded men who lingered in agony for days on end before the blissful darkness of death had finally claimed them.

Not Josh. Surely not Josh. She couldn’t bear the thought of him lying in agony, couldn’t imagine him dead, not Josh. Luke was right, no one would ever best The Hawk.

But what if someone did? What if this Carter was the man who would bring an end to the Hawk dynasty? Especially since Josh didn’t seem at all disposed to stop it from happening?

She began to move again, to walk, then to run. She ran as if it had somehow already happened, as if she would reach him too late, as if somehow he’d already been vanquished, as if she would never again know the sweet, gentle touch of his lips on hers.

As if she would never know the answers to all her wild imaginings, to all the questions, all the needs his touch had aroused in her. Would never know what came next, after the luscious flow of warmth that flowed through her when he touched her, after the tiny licks of flame that leapt along her nerves when he kissed her.

“Josh,” she whispered as she ran; it came out as an urgent plea, and she knew Deborah had been right. For better or worse, and there was little question as to which it was, she had fallen in love with The Hawk.

The front doors of the mercantile were still closed, the shades still down; no one, it seemed, had needed anything on this Sunday afternoon. Hardly surprising; everyone in town, it seemed, had been in several times this week, stocking up on things they’d never seemed to need before—what Art Rankin was going to do with that piece of lace was beyond her.

She hurried around to the back of the building and pulled open the kitchen door, holding her breath despite the fact that she’d run so far.

He was there.

He was there, leaning back in a chair, his feet up on the newly repaired and steady kitchen table, obviously quite alive and relatively well. She let out her breath in a rush.

For a long moment neither of them moved. She stared at him from the doorway; he held her gaze from his seat. She was so relieved that her imagination had been so wrong that for a moment she couldn’t speak.

And then she saw what he’d been doing. Saw what was in his hands, looking just as it always had, rich and elegant—and utterly undamaged.

The book he’d thrown in the water trough.

Chapter 18

IF HE HADN’T thought it futile, he would shove the damned book right back into the stove again, Josh thought as he stoked the fire against the oncoming evening chill. Spring was waging its usual confusing battle with summer here at the foot of the mountains, with the occasional day like today where both combatants seemed worn out and left the field for a last gasp of winter before summer set in.

“Has it . . . changed again?” Kate asked from the storeroom doorway.

“You mean besides showing up on the counter in front of me, dry as the Sonora desert, and without a single blurred letter?” he asked tiredly. “No.”

“Oh.”

She sounded almost disappointed, he thought. “Were you hoping it had?”

She came in quietly, pulling the storeroom door closed behind her. “I was hoping perhaps that last entry had been . . . a mistake.”

Josh chuckled almost bitterly. He tossed the book down on top of his bedroll. “If you’re going to believe in the thing at all, I’d say mistakes aren’t likely.”

As if stung by his attitude, Kate’s chin came up. “Then perhaps I should warn the reverend he’ll need to be ready for a funeral service.”

He wanted to smile at her sass; she’d come a long way from the quiet, frightened woman she’d been a mere two weeks ago. But he knew she wouldn’t appreciate the sentiment, so he restrained himself.

“If the book is right,” he pointed out, “what makes you think anything I do can change it?”

“But if you’re not here . . .”

He shrugged. “So I get killed somewhere else, and dragged back here to be buried.”

She stared at him, shaking her head slowly. “How can you be so . . . calm about it? Don’t you care at all that you could die? That all the people who’ve come to . . . to like you, will have to watch them bury you?”

Had she been about to say something else? Was it not really the people of Gambler’s Notch, who had inexplicably seemed to have shifted from being wary of him to being proud, that she was concerned for?

“Is that what you’re worried about, Kate? That you’re going to have another funeral to go to?”

“What makes you think I’d go?” she snapped.

Abruptly, she spun away from him, but before she turned her back, Josh was certain he’d seen the sheen of tears in her eyes. Slowly, and as quietly as he could, afraid she might bolt, he moved toward her.

“I’d like to think maybe you’d miss me, just a little.”

She whirled back on him. “Miss you? You talk about dying as if it were nothing more than taking a walk; you insist on staying here after a warning like that”—she gestured angrily at the book—“and then you expect me to miss you?”

Josh stood there, looking at her, at the wire-drawn tension of her slender body, at the glitter of those honey-gold eyes, and wondered that he could ever have thought her plain. Had it been that this woman who was facing him down now, as if she hadn’t an ounce of fear in her, had merely been buried by her husband’s relentless presence? Had this ardent spirit always been there, just hidden by the timid demeanor she’d had to adopt to survive, much as a less well-armed animal had to blend into its surroundings to survive amid bigger, stronger predators?

“No,” he said at last, “I don’t expect you to miss me. I don’t expect anyone to miss me.”

He said it in such an offhand, careless tone that the words lacked the self-pity they might otherwise have held.

“Josh . . .”

“I knew a long time ago,” he said with a shrug when her voice trailed away, “that I’d end up being nothing more than some other gun’s stepping-stone to a reputation someday.”

He heard a slight sound, as if her breath had caught in her throat.

“Someone like . . . Jackson Carter?”

Josh went very still. “And just where did you hear that name?”

“Marshal Pike. He said he’d heard that he rode into town this afternoon.”

“Well, well. Jackson Carter.” His lips pursed thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose the marshal mentioned if he rode in alone?”

Kate shook her head. “No. But he only mentioned Carter.”

Josh rubbed a hand over his chin. “Carter always rides with company. Wonder where they are?”

“Who is he, Josh?”

He took one look at her expression, wide-eyed and fearful, and knew he shouldn’t have said anything.

“Just somebody to watch out for,” he said.

And that was like calling a hurricane a slight breeze, Josh thought. If there was any man out there he thought might be able to take him, it was Jackson Carter. They’d met before, but never when either of them had a reason to go after the other. But now . . . now there was the small matter of Carter having been riding with that bunch of rustlers he’d had the run-in with back on the Rocking K. It had been Carter’s orders the rustlers had disobeyed when they’d rushed the line shack he’d been holed up in, and three of them had died for their mistake. But Carter had always been the kind to take such things personally.

He hastened to distract Kate before she could ask more questions he didn’t want to answer.

“Aren’t we supposed to be reading? What’s next?”

They’d finished the whale hunting tale last night, and Kate had been so excited, her eyes had shone so, that he’d been hard pressed to leave their good night at a kiss.

But then, stopping at a kiss had somehow become the greatest effort of his life. Every night he swore he wouldn’t kiss her at all, because it was too damned hard to stop. And every night the simple joy that glowed in her face was a lure he found irresistible.

He knew what the town was thinking, knew what they assumed was going on in the mercantile after dark, when the lamps burned late. And he’d been surprised at their reaction when he’d taken care to let the truth be known for Kate’s sake; they had seemed almost disappointed at such a tame explanation as reading. And knowing people’s penchant for gossip, he was sure many of them had chosen to continue to believe in what they’d already decided rather than the much less interesting truth.

What had surprised him was that they didn’t seem to hold this belief that he and Kate were carrying on against him. Or even Kate, who was in a much more precarious position than he. People expected no better from a man like The Hawk.

People, Josh thought, were very unpredictable.

“I don’t feel like reading tonight,” Kate said suddenly.

Speaking of unpredictable, Josh thought. He looked at her curiously; he would have sworn she looked forward eagerly to their sessions. Her reading had improved dramatically even in such a short time. She’d only needed a little guidance. And very soon he was sure she’d be as adept at reading as she was at numbers.

“I thought you wanted to read
Little Women.
”

“No. I’d rather . . . ask you something.”

Damn, Josh thought. She was going to start in on him again, about not heeding the warning in the book.

“Ask me what?” he said warily, although he was sure he knew what was coming.

“Why do you kiss me at night?”

Josh gaped at her, unable to believe he’d heard right. “What?”

“Why do you kiss me at night?” she repeated.

“I . . . It . . .” He wet lips that were suddenly dry and tried again. “What kind of a question is that?”

“One I’d like answered. Is it pity?”

“Pity?” Josh exclaimed. “Of course not. Why would you think that?”

She shrugged negligently. “I’ve heard some men have . . . ideas about widows.”

Josh’s mouth quirked. “Usually widows who have been widows for longer than a month.” And certainly not widows who were married to men like Arly, he added silently.

“Then is it because you feel . . . obligated?”

“I’ve never kissed a woman in my life because I felt
obligated,
”
Josh snapped.

“Then why?”

Exasperation seized him. “Did it ever occur to you that I might just kiss you because I
want
to?”

To his chagrin, Kate just looked at him thoughtfully. “I suppose that could be. Arly used to say any woman would do, if a man was in enough need.”

“I would greatly appreciate it,” Josh grated out, “if you would
never
compare me to Arly Dixon again.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to compare you,” Kate said quickly, in a reassuring tone that somehow did little to reassure him. “You’re nothing like Arly. Why, I even
like
your kisses.”

His anger drained away, disappearing like spilled water on desert sand. How could he be upset at a woman who looked at him so earnestly and told him she liked his kisses? Especially when all he wanted to do was grab her and kiss her right now, kiss her until she sagged against him again, until she made that tiny sound in the back of her throat that had nearly driven him mad every night this week.

“Kate,” he said, a warning tone creeping into his voice as she began to tread very, very close to dangerous ground; he’d had to rein in his urges far too many times already to welcome another go-round.

“Does a man only kiss a woman nicely, like you do, if he doesn’t . . . ?”

“Doesn’t what?”

“I mean, I know no man could truly . . . want, Arly’s leavings—”

“You’re not Arly’s leavings,” Josh snapped.

“I only meant that I know I’m not the sort of woman men like to look at anyway, and that’s the kind men want to kiss, but you’ve kissed me, and—”

“Stop talking like that—”

“—I just wanted to know if that’s why you kissed me so nicely, because you didn’t . . . you know.”

“No, I don’t know. A man should always kiss a woman nicely,” Josh said, starting to feel a little beset.

Kate looked puzzled. “Then how does a woman know what to expect?”

“What to expect?”

“How does a woman know if a man is just kissing her because he wants to kiss her, or because he wants to . . .”

When she trailed off yet again, Josh let out an exasperated breath. “Kate, what in blazes are you talking about?”

“I don’t want to say what Arly always said,” she explained patiently, as if to a child. “It was so crude and ugly, but Deborah said it didn’t always have to be that way, and I hope she’s right, but I don’t know. . . .”

She finally ran out of steam. And Josh finally realized what she meant. “Kate,” he said carefully, “are you talking about sex?”

She gave him a grateful look. “Yes. I know that when the need is on a man, any woman will do. But if kisses are always supposed to be nice, how does a woman tell if it’s that, or just . . . a kiss, like yours?”

Josh stared at her for a long, silent moment.
Damn you, Arly Dixon
, he swore inwardly.
How could you not see the beauty hidden in those eyes; how could you not see the treasure of that dauntless spirit? Or did you, and is that why you tried so damned hard to break her?

“Is that what you think, Kate?” he asked softly. “That when I kiss you good night, it’s
just
a kiss? Maybe no more than a handshake?”

Color flared up in her cheeks. “Isn’t it? I mean, I know . . .” She lowered her gaze, and he saw her swallow tightly before she stumbled on. “You get . . . like Arly did, but you don’t . . . you never . . .”

He assumed she meant she’d known he was aroused when they kissed—it would be hard for her not to know, when it made him harder than he could remember being in his life, but what had she expected him to do about it? Grab her and throw her down while he had his way with her?

A cold tightness knotted up his stomach. No doubt that was exactly what she’d expected.

“You mean I never forced you?” he asked softly.

Head still lowered, she nodded.

“Only a coward forces a woman.” He reached out and lifted her chin with a gentle finger. “No matter who she is to him,” he added, anticipating the answer he saw in her eyes. “Even . . . no, especially, his wife.”

Kate looked at him with an expression of wonderment.

“I kiss you because I want to, Kate. And if . . . things were different, if I wasn’t who I was, I’d want everything you would give me.”

“Give . . . ?” She sounded as she had looked, full of wonder at a new idea.

“I may not know much about it myself,” Josh said, “but I remember my parents, Kate. They loved each other. My father would have cut off his arm before he would have hurt my mother.”

Kate stared at him for a long, silent moment. Then, “Did you mean that? That you . . . wanted more? From me?” She sounded astonished.

“I meant it,” he said gruffly. “But I also meant it when I said I’d never do anything you didn’t want me to.”

“I heard . . . Someone told me that . . . it can be . . . pleasant. What happens . . . between a man and woman.”

Josh nearly groaned; her wonder coupled with the innocent sensuality of her words sent the need he’d been battling for days surging through him in a wave that nearly staggered him.

“It can, Kate,” he said fervently. “Oh, it can.”

She swallowed again. Josh thought with a lurch in his belly that she wore an expression like a gambler who’d decided there was little left to lose. And when she spoke, she nearly brought him to his knees.

“Show me,” she said.

“Kate,” he said, or tried to; it came out as more of a croak.

“I know I’m being . . . awfully bold. Forward. But I’m not the kind of woman men . . . offer for. Any kind of offer. And now I don’t even have the mercantile to recommend me. I don’t know what else to do.”

“Stop—” His protest at her belittlement of herself wouldn’t come out past the tightness in his throat; he could only guess at what courage it had taken for her to offer herself like this, when she thought herself so undesirable. He swallowed and tried again. “You don’t . . . mean it.”