Heart of the Hawk (3 page)

Chapter 2

KATE BARELY MANAGED to keep from putting her hand up to her throat in the helpless kind of gesture she had so hated in her mother. Then self-disgust filled her as she remembered she had no right to hate anyone, for anything. But she’d had a lot of practice at hiding her feelings, and she needed every bit of it now, with the infamous man known as The Hawk standing here staring at her.

“I . . . don’t know what you mean,” she managed to get out.

Lord, he was tall, she thought. Even taller than Arly, who had been big enough. But where Arly had been burly, brawny, this man was lean and rangy, although she wasn’t sure he lacked any of Arly’s breadth in the shoulders. Shoulders she barely came up to, for all that she was a relatively tall woman. Tall enough to have borne years of teasing from male and female alike. Tall, plain, strange-eyed Kathleen Dayton. Who had become tall, plain, strange-eyed Kathleen Dixon.

“Truly, I don’t know what you mean,” she repeated when he just stood there, looking at her with those bright blue eyes that had mesmerized her into immobility the morning she’d first seen him.

She’d thought in that first moment that she’d never seen eyes so haunted, so shadowed, despite the vividness of their color. She’d been stunned when she’d learned who he was; she’d never pictured The Hawk like this—a tall, handsome man with eyes like that, and longish dark hair that brushed his solid shoulders. A man whose low, husky voice had seemed almost kind when he’d spoken to her so briefly that day when he’d picked up the dropped package of Arly’s new, custom-made shirts just in from St. Louis.

She wiped her hands on the skirt of her worn black Linsey dress; her palms weren’t really sweating, but she felt as though they were.

“You don’t need to be afraid of me, Mrs. Dixon. After all, I would hardly harm the woman who saved me from the noose, now would I?”

“You’re The Hawk,” she said simply. “Who knows what you would do?”

An odd expression came over his face, a combination of regret and resignation that made her feel something very strange, something that seemed almost like sympathy. She told herself she was being worse than foolish; The Hawk was a cold-blooded killer. What would he have to regret, and what would he want with her sympathy?

“Reputation,” he muttered, “is a double-edged sword.”

She blinked. His bitter tone matched her silly thoughts, and that startled her. “What?”

He hesitated, then shrugged as if it meant little. “Reputation,” he repeated. “It keeps the more disagreeable folks out of your way, but it also makes decent people too nervous to be in the same room with you.”

There were some, she knew, who would say he had no right to be in the same room with those decent people. And from his expression, she wasn’t sure he wasn’t one of those who thought that way. How very unexpected, she thought. Who would have ever thought a man like The Hawk would ever feel the loss of polite society? Or that he would look at himself with such feelings as doubt and distaste?

Her brow furrowed at her own thoughts. One had, she supposed, to have been used to some kind of polite society in order to miss it. Arly had cared little what the “decent people” in town thought of him. He had never held with “putting on airs,” as he called any semblance of refinement or genteel behavior. His language and his manners had been as rough as he was. A far cry from the unexpectedly articulate and mannerly man before her.

“You needn’t frown. I don’t make a habit of intimidating or hurting women.”

She looked at him for the long moment, then drew herself up with an effort. She searched inwardly for her lost nerve; no matter how refined he might seem compared to Arly or some of the local cowboys, he was still The Hawk, and it wouldn’t do for him to know she was afraid.

If indeed that was true. She wasn’t positive that she was afraid, which worried her. Surely she wasn’t foolish enough to believe a good-looking facade couldn’t hide an evil heart? And you didn’t become a famous gunslinger like The Hawk without possessing the evilest of hearts, she was sure of that.

“Not intentionally, perhaps,” she said.

He lifted a brow at her in apparent surprise, and one corner of his mouth lifted in what was almost an amused grin. She felt as if the breath had been knocked out of her; perhaps she
was
that foolish, she thought ruefully. But then again, perhaps not—that grin didn’t reach his eyes; they were as shadowed as they had been that first time she’d seen him.

“I’m sorry if I’ve intimidated you,” he said, that husky rumble even more evident as he spoke softly. It made her feel wary, like at the quiet before the storm. A second later she knew her instincts had been accurate. “But I still want the answer to my question. Why did you lie for me, Mrs. Dixon? After I killed your husband?”

She was steadier now, prepared, and answered evenly, “I didn’t lie for you, Mr. Hawk.”

He shook his head. “They looked all over that alley that night. The marshal, and that little bald man who came out of the saloon, the one Pike called ‘Reverend.’ That one even looked right behind that barrel where that boy says he found that old six-shooter.”

“Reverend Babcock? Then I’m not surprised he didn’t see it. His eyes aren’t what they used to be, and he’s always misplacing his spectacles. He’s been known to tipple more than a bit, too.”

He studied her for a moment, intently. She made herself hold his gaze. Then, slowly, he said, “That boy . . .”

She drew herself up even straighter. “Luke doesn’t lie, Mr. Hawk. He may be an orphan, and a little wild, but he’s a good boy. If he says he found it behind that barrel, then he did.”

For some reason, either her defensive words or their vehemence, he smiled. She wasn’t sure if he was pleased or was mocking her, and it didn’t really matter which it was, not when he was having such an odd effect on her. Perhaps he’d been right, and she really was nervous just being in the same room with the notorious Hawk.

“Besides,” she said quickly, filling a silence that was rapidly making her very uncomfortable, “what you said at your trial was right. A man would have to be a fool to come after you without a weapon.”

“Was your husband a fool, Mrs. Dixon?”

The soft—almost too soft—query warned her that she wasn’t acting precisely as a bereaved widow should act. But she found it difficult; if she felt anything at Arly’s death it was relief. Relief, and some uncertainty about her future. And she doubted that would come as a great surprise to most residents of Gambler’s Notch. She searched for an answer that would satisfy him, but not tell him any more than he already knew. She settled on the truth, if not the truth he was after.

“Arly was just fool enough to try and sneak up on The Hawk in the dark.”

He looked at her again, steadily, those bright blue eyes fixed on her with such intensity that she wondered what he could possibly be seeing.

“Odd way to speak of your late husband.” His tone was mild, but Kate didn’t miss the note of curiosity.

“I’ll not lie about it, Mr. Hawk. My husband was not . . . the kindest of men.”

She saw his gaze flick to her bruised cheek, and resisted the urge to cover it with her hand. Instead she held her head up, as if daring him to comment. She realized the foolishness of daring a man such as The Hawk as soon as she did it.

“He did that to you?”

“That is my concern, not yours.”

“It’s mine if he did it because I spoke to you. That’s about two weeks old, judging by the color.”

She felt heat flood her face as she realized how ugly she must look. On her best days she was nothing to buy a mirror for, as her father had been wont to say; with this unsightly mark on her face, she must be truly uncomely.

“It’s none of your affair, Mr. Hawk,” she reiterated.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but it makes me feel less guilty about killing a man I had no quarrel with, to know he was the kind of brute who would strike a woman.”

Guilty? He felt guilty? The thought that The Hawk could feel such a thing astonished her. But she didn’t dare linger on the revelation. Warning bells were clanging in her mind. She had to put a halt to this; he was treading too close to dangerous ground. She walked around the foot of the ladder, only stopping to turn and face him again when the solid bulk of the counter was between them.

“I don’t care to speak any more of my husband, if you don’t mind. Was there something else?” she asked in her politest merchant’s tone.

He didn’t answer for a moment, and Kate held her breath, wondering if he was going to accept her obvious change of subject. And her explanation. It would be very ill-mannered of him to call her a liar. Other than Arly, she’d become used to being treated with at least some amount of respect by the decent men of Gambler’s Notch. But she wouldn’t have expected the same of the man known as The Hawk. A killer for hire hardly fell into the category she would label decent men.

At last he spoke, and Kate gave an inward sigh of relief at his words.

“Only my thanks, Mrs. Dixon. Not many men would have done what you did. And most women would have let me hang and been glad to see it done.”

“One death was enough. I had no wish to see more.”

He didn’t say what she suspected he was thinking, that it was indeed very strange that she didn’t wish to see the killer of her husband punished, regardless of the circumstances. Instead he glanced around the store.

“What will you do now?”

That, she thought, was the very question she’d been tussling with since Arly’s death.

“I will run the store,” she stated firmly, as if saying the words for the first time out loud could make them true.

“By yourself? A woman?”

She quivered inside, then ordered herself sternly to stop. She would have to become used to such reactions. She knew that the idea of a woman alone running a business like this would cause consternation. At least until people got used to the idea.

“Of course,” she said, proud that she sounded, to her ears at least, confident and composed. “I’ve done so often, when Arly was gone.”

And frequently when he was here, she added to herself, remembering all the times when he’d been too unwell from a long night of drinking to open up the mercantile in the morning. All the times when she had borne the brunt of his drunken ill humor, and worn the marks of it for days afterward. Just as she was wearing one now.

But no more. Never again. This was the last bruise she would ever watch people stare at, the last time she would count the days until the last of the mottled colors faded away, before the ache subsided so that she could move freely again. Never again would she have to cower in fear, wondering if this was one of the times when the blows would be followed by something even worse.

And all because of this man.

An emotion that she could not deny was joy welled up inside her, but she knew she didn’t dare let it show. She tamped it down, and said the words again, just to hear them.

“I will run the store.”

Something flickered in his eyes, something Kate thought for one silly moment might have been admiration.

“I believe perhaps you will,” he said. He put his hat back on and touched the brim in what was nothing less than a salute. “My thanks again, Mrs. Dixon.”

She didn’t know what to say to that, so she merely nodded. And watched intently as he turned and strode out of the store, moving with a lithe grace that brought home to her what a ponderous man Arly had been. She stepped out from behind the counter into the center of the store, her gaze still fastened on that tall, black-clad figure as he crossed the street, headed for the livery stable.

This must be what that book about Shakespeare’s plays had called irony, she thought. She’d spent a long time studying that book, trying to work out the difficult words and more difficult meanings, hoping someday to be able to read the plays themselves. She’d had to sneak it at night, when Arly was snoring noisily; he hated her wasting time reading, especially about silly things written by a man long dead in a foreign country.

But this had to be it, that irony she’d tried so hard to understand. Irony, that a man like Arly, a man most would call a decent, law-abiding, solid citizen, had been a lumbering, clumsy oaf who ran to fat and jowliness; while a man most people feared, a man considered a heartless killer, a man who stayed in one place no longer than it took to kill whatever hapless soul was his target, looked like an angel come down straight from heaven.

More likely cast out from heaven, Kate amended silently. Lucifer, the fallen angel, perhaps, shunned by the righteous and fit only to reside in hell.

She nearly laughed aloud. A fallen angel with the grace and manners of a gentleman. She wondered if she’d perhaps gone a little touched in the head after Arly’s death, thinking such fanciful thoughts.

Or perhaps it was simply the realization that for the first time in her life, she was free. There was no one to tell her what to do, no one to answer to, no meaty fists to dodge, no ugly, evil nights to dread. She was free.

She twirled around, her arms outstretched. A tiny giggle threatened to escape her. She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop it. Then she remembered she didn’t have to, and let it out. It became a laugh, and she spun faster, feeling every uneven spot in the crude wood floor through her worn kid slippers, but not caring.

She was free.

She was free, and nothing could mar this joyous feeling. Nothing.

Except the memory of a man’s eyes, and the words he’d so unexpectedly spoken.
It
makes me feel less guilty about killing a man I had no quarrel with.

She stopped spinning, swaying a little as she came to a halt. “Who would have thought it?” she whispered to herself. The Hawk feeling guilty. How was it possible? He’d killed so many. A dozen, if Luke’s excited, nearly worshipful stories were to be believed.