Wild Hawk (16 page)

“If that’s all it would take to change your mind, then perhaps I was hasty in saying Hawks breed true,” she said. “I doubt if there’s ever been one who was controlled by his libido.”

“Well,” he said, his voice silky soft, “if you want to talk about control . . .”

He leaned over to her, not suddenly but so unexpectedly she didn’t have time to react. And the moment he touched her, his fingers sliding around to the back of her neck, she wasn’t sure she could have. For an instant, one terrifying instant as she looked up into his eyes, she wondered if she’d been wrong—lethally wrong—about his potential for violence. But then his thumbs came up under her chin to tilt her head back, and she realized the storm she’d seen in the blue depths had an entirely different source.

His mouth came down on hers, hard and fierce. She put her hands up to push against his chest, but after the first effort suppressed the attempt to struggle. He was so much bigger, so much stronger than she, that she knew it was useless. The best she could do was give him no reaction at all.

She managed it, until suddenly his lips gentled on hers, until he turned from aggression to urging, from fierceness to suggestiveness, from overpowering to invitation. She didn’t know why he’d changed, knew only that she was responding before she could help herself, that her resistance turned to surprise, then shock as heat rippled through her as he moved his mouth coaxingly on hers. Her eyes closed seemingly of their own will, as if her body wanted to concentrate solely on the new, amazing things it was feeling. He was kissing her like the man she’d had glimpses of just now, the man who had laughed genuinely, the man who had gently prompted her to continue her story.

His fingers threaded through her hair, tugging it free from the scarf. She felt the faint brush of his tongue over her lips, tempting, luring. Through the odd haze that seemed to be enveloping her, she knew she should pull away, but instead she found herself parting her lips for him, accepting the stroking caress. Welcoming it. And, with a bit of boldness that astounded her even as she did it, returning the caress, meeting his tongue with her own, craving the contact in a way that she’d never craved anything before.

She heard a sound from him, a low groan that held a note of protest, as if he were fighting some battle of his own. It sent a shiver through her, one she couldn’t suppress, and she heard him make the sound again. Again she shivered, this time in reaction to the thrill that raced through her, especially when he pulled her closer with a jerky motion she sensed was rife with that same inner protest. Gone was the feeling of being overwhelmed, her sense of the sheer power inherent in his size and strength. Left behind was the echo of that low sound, that protest she had wrenched from him, as if it were she who had the power, and it could bring him to his knees.

He wrenched his mouth away. Kendall heard a tiny sound, and realized it had come from her, that bereft little moan of loss. When she opened her eyes to look up at him, there was an instant when she thought she saw confusion in his face. But it was quickly gone, and she focused on his eyes in time to see the heat that had burned there fading, in time to see the satisfied glint that replaced it, and she knew that whatever sense of power she’d had had been an illusion. A fanciful delusion she should have known better than to succumb to.

He released her and sat back, appearing completely calm and at ease, in stark contrast to her own heart-hammering dishevelment.

“Care to discuss control some more?” he drawled.

She grabbed her keys, her purse, and the scarf that had slid down to the now tangled ends of her hair. It took every bit of self-command she had learned at Aaron’s side, but she managed to give him a level look.

“You don’t
discuss
anything. You assume, you arbitrarily decide, and you ignore the truth when it’s in front of you.” She shoved open the car door, then looked back at him. He looked insufferably smug as he sat there, arms crossed, leaning against the other door nonchalantly. “And,” she added, “apparently you enjoy kissing unwilling women.”

“Unwilling?” he asked softly.

She couldn’t stop the blush this time. And she could think of nothing to say. They both knew that however it had started, she had become an enthusiastic participant before the kiss had ended. She got out of the car, slamming the door shut with a fierceness that betrayed her agitation. She heard the passenger door open, and knew he was getting out as well. She didn’t look at him, even when she heard the other door close, much more gently than her own.

“Kendall?”

She stopped, knowing he was going to make it worse, knowing he was going to taunt her with her own response to his unexpected kiss. She couldn’t look at him.

“What?” she muttered, her fingers tightening around her keys until they dug into her flesh.

“Don’t start anything.”

Astonishment flooded her, and her head snapped around. She stared at him across the roof of the car. “Start anything? Me? You’re the one who swooped down on me like your feathered namesake, Jason
Hawk
.”

His eyes widened, as if she had surprised him. Then his mouth quirked, and she sensed he was suppressing an amused smile.

“I meant about the will.”

It was her turn to be surprised. And chagrined. She should have known that the kiss that had shaken her to her soul had had little effect on him.

“Oh,” she said, feeling more awkward—and foolish—than she could ever remember. Then, suspiciously, “Why? You don’t even believe me about it.”

He shrugged. “Let’s just say I like to keep my options open, at least for the moment. That’s hard to do from a jail cell.”

“Fine.” The word was short, clipped. She didn’t care.

“I’ll see you later. I think I’ll . . . take a walk.”

“Fine,” she repeated. She started toward the heavy wooden front doors of the bank, then turned back once more. “Jason?”

He lifted a brow in query.

“Make it a hike,” she said.

She closed the bank door on his laughter. And tried to ignore the strange feeling she had, a prickling at the back of her neck, as if she was being watched.

She mocked herself as the sensation lingered as she kept going. Jason might be intimidating, he might be full of surprises, he might have rattled her more with that unexpected—and unexpectedly arousing—kiss than she’d ever been rattled in her life, but he couldn’t be watching her.

Even Hawks couldn’t see through walls.

Chapter Twelve

JASON LAUGHED inwardly at the irony of it, him, in the Aaron Hawk wing of the Sunridge library, searching out information to prove Aaron Hawk was crazy.

Not that it was going to take much. It was obvious that the old man hadn’t just been interested in his family history, he’d been obsessed by it; the size of the collection of donated books here, taking up nearly an entire set of four-foot-wide shelves, was proof of that. The presence of the Hawks in Sunridge was chronicled continuously, going back nearly a hundred years. If there was even the slightest mention of a Hawk anywhere, the document was here.

It had been a long time since he’d been in a library. Odd, he supposed, considering he had practically lived in them as a kid. For years he’d almost daily spent the hours between the end of school and his mother’s arrival home from work amid bookshelves very much like these. He’d started going there because it seemed safe, there were people around, and he’d liked it better than the lonely, echoing apartments they had lived in. But soon he’d become fascinated by what he discovered there, other places, other people, other worlds.

At first he had just read magazines, about boats, cars, fishing, whatever caught his eye. But he’d soon worked through all those, and begun on the books. And later, he’d had another cause, a reason to track down everything he could find on a particular subject. By the time he was fifteen he’d read more than he could keep track of.

A good thing, he thought as he picked up one more book to add to his stack, since by the time he was sixteen he’d been on the run, with no time for reading or anything else except staying alive and one step ahead of the authorities who were determined to slap him in a house with strangers who got paid by the state to take care of him.

They’re not always so bad.

Kendall’s words came back to him, but he quashed them determinedly. He wasn’t going to let an obviously practiced ploy for sympathy get to him. He wasn’t going to let her get to him. No matter how good she was at pulling strings he’d never even known he had.

He set the pile of books on a table and pulled back the nearest chair.

I lived in seven different foster homes from the time I was eight years old. I shared a room with three other kids, five cats, an incontinent dog, and the occasional cockroach. I’ve slept in an attic, a laundry room, and a garage.

Was it true? Had that really been her life? And had she come out of that with enough determination to get herself through college, on her own? So much drive that she had landed herself in the hospital?

No,
he told himself
. It’s all part of the game, part of the con, you know that.

So for once in your life, why don’t you just shut up about things you know nothing about?

Damn that woman! Why did everything she’d ever said to him keep running through his mind like an endless loop? And what the hell had happened today? He’d meant to show her how wrong she was. That he wasn’t some idiot adolescent at the mercy of his hormones. He wasn’t controlled by whoever made his body come to attention.

And she’d certainly done that.

Heat shot through him at the memory of how swiftly he’d reacted to her. Something low and deep inside him tightened again, with an erotic fierceness. He nearly groaned aloud at the strength of it. He didn’t know what had happened to him when he’d kissed her, what had made him lose track of his intentions. It wasn’t her expertise; if anything, she’d been tentative, unpracticed. She hadn’t even seemed to realize the effect she’d had on him. All she would have had to do was glance down and she would have known his nonchalance was nothing but a very shaky pretense; he’d been hard as an Elliott Bay fireboat hose at full pressure.

But she hadn’t looked. She hadn’t been able to even look at his face, let alone anything else.

But her seemingly natural response had set him on fire. And the memory of it now threatened to send him racing back to her like the kind of boy he’d just sworn he wasn’t. Racing back to take up where he’d left off, with another hot, searing kiss, and go from there. Go a long way from there, for a very long time, until they were both exhausted.

He battled it, trying to summon up that image of Kendall with his father that had turned him so cold before. But somehow he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t picture it, couldn’t quite believe it anymore. He’d been wrong about that. What that meant in relation to everything else she’d told him, he didn’t know. And didn’t want to think about, not now.

With an effort he resented even as he made it, he shoved her out of his mind. He had work to do, and there was every chance it would resolve the problem of Kendall Chase as well as the book he couldn’t seem to rid himself of.

He grabbed the first Hawk reference book on the stack and flipped it open. He was startled for a moment; he’d known Hawks had been in Sunridge forever, but he hadn’t known they’d actually founded the town itself. Maybe Aaron really had owned the town, literally. He began to scan the pages.

Hours later he sat there, stunned, a huge stack of books beside him, and an impossibility in front of him in the notes that filled several pages of the notepad he’d bought at the convenience store across from the motel.

Everything matched.

He’d checked every recorded date, every event that had been listed in that damned book that seemed to be haunting him. He’d checked the microfilm copies of the local newspaper back to the turn of the last century, and found independent verification of the historical occurrences. He’d found records of births and deaths that exactly matched the intricate family tree. He’d used every resource the surprisingly well-equipped little library had, and hadn’t been able to find one variation except a disparity of two days on the recording of the deed that had begun the town of Sunridge.

He’d verified that most of the material had been compiled by separate researchers and scholars, only a few of whom had been commissioned by the Hawks themselves, and only one by Aaron. He’d even checked the data against other outside sources, encyclopedias, other history books, old magazines, anything he could find here.

Of course, he told himself. They would use this material to put the book together in the first place. No wonder it matched. This wasn’t some slipshod plan; they would be very careful. He hadn’t gained anything by this, except to fall further behind back home. He usually worked on Saturdays, catching up on all he hadn’t been able to get to during the week. Now he’d have that to do, plus Friday’s work, when he got back.

Irritated at himself, he began to put the books back on the shelves. A slim volume with gold lettering on the spine fell over as he replaced the last book, and he reached to set it back.
Hawks at War
,
it read. He picked it up, intrigued by the rather militant title.

It was just what the title suggested, a compendium of Hawks who had fought or served in various wars throughout documented history. Compiled by a history professor Jason suspected had been bankrolled with Hawk money, it began with a foreword that suggested they’d been fighters and warriors long before documented history as well. The picture of Jenna Hawk and her warrior, Kane, flashed into his mind. Now there was a pair you could be proud to claim as ancestors, he thought. Tough as they had to be, yet still able to look as if the world began and ended with each other.

His mouth twisted at the fanciful thought. But they were a striking pair, he had to admit that. They stood out. Like Joshua Hawk and his Kathleen. At that thought, he flipped the pages, wondering. Stopping at the section on the Civil War, his eyes widened at the number of names, at the Hawks who had died, on both sides. Fathers, sons, brothers, cousins. And at the end was a footnote, indicating that the only Hawk survivors, Edgar and his very young grandson Joshua, headed west after the war, as many others had.

Jason glanced over his shoulder at the baffling volume that still sat on the table. If it were to be believed, Joshua Hawk had become the man known simply as The Hawk, a notorious figure in his time, a gun for hire who had lived the kind of life legends were made of.

And who had, of course, Jason thought cynically, been changed by the love of a good woman.

He slapped the book shut and shoved it back on the shelf with a rather fierce motion. The Hawks, he muttered inwardly, spent far too much energy on love. The most vastly overrated emotion on earth. Love made you weak. It made you soft. His mother had been living proof of that; she’d been a strong, determined woman, a woman to be admired for what she’d done against very difficult odds. But she’d had that weak spot. That one vulnerability. She loved a Hawk.

Two of them, he supposed. For he couldn’t deny any longer who he was.

And only now did he think of what it must have done to his mother to look at him and see the image of the man who had fathered him. Every day she had had to confront the evidence of what her folly had cost her. Yet never had her love for him wavered; never had he been made to feel culpable for their situation.

He felt his throat tighten. She had been so strong, but her weakness had been Aaron Hawk. Just as Aaron had been Kendall Chase’s weakness, her blind spot. What the hell was it about that old man that had made two strong, bright, beautiful women look past his arrogance and see . . . what? What had they found beneath the surface that had made them stay? That had made them both insist there was so much more to the man than the imperious front he presented to the world?

Wearily he sat back down in the chair. For a long time he just sat there, staring at the book with the gilded pages, thinking. He could understand his simple curiosity; he’d spent a lot of time growing up wondering about his history, about the family he’d never known. His mother had had no family except an older brother with whom she’d had no contact; Jason had been nearly fifteen before he’d discovered it was because of him, because the straight-laced uncle he’d never met had disowned his mother for having a child out of wedlock. So, not having had any real family other than his mother, a certain amount of curiosity was natural, he told himself.

What he couldn’t understand was this odd sense of connection he was feeling, this sense of a link between him and the Hawks who had gone before. They seemed to call to him, from Jenna Hawk and her warrior on down through time. And especially those who had been the last of the Hawks, those who, like him, had been blessed—or cursed, Joshua Hawk had observed wryly—with the appearance of the book.

Jason again felt that special affinity for Joshua. A tough man who’d had a hard, lonely life, he had, judging from the story Jason had read, fought believing in the magic of the book to the very end.

But in the end, it seemed, he had believed. Because of the woman he’d found. And it had changed his life. Forever.

“Listen to you,” Jason muttered under his breath. “You’re sounding like you believe in this farce.”

He resisted reaching for the book, resisted it until he realized what he was doing and why, that he was afraid to look at it. Because this time there would be no explanation for any changes, no time spent asleep, no time with the book out of his sight.

He was being sandbagged by a book. By a damned book.

His mouth twisted as the thought occurred to him that perhaps his adjective had been disturbingly accurate. Perhaps that was it, perhaps the devil had finally arrived to collect his due from the last of the Hawks. Perhaps it would be Jason who paid the price for Aaron’s princely little power structure here in Sunridge. Perhaps that was Aaron’s final bit of malice toward the son he’d never wanted.

Jason shook his head sharply. He was losing it. He’d never spent so much time wallowing in utter absurdity in his life. There must be something about the air in this town that gave rise to such idiocy.

And the biggest idiocy of all was this thing, he thought, grabbing the book and pulling it across the table toward him. Determinedly he opened it. There would be no addition this time, no further chapter in his own story, simply because there couldn’t be.

He reached to flip the pages. His hand jerked back when they seemed to turn on their own, coming to a halt at a left-hand page of the elegant lettering that faced a blank page. He stared at it, trying to deny what he knew was true, that it had changed yet again. That when he’d left the motel, the writing had ended at the bottom of the previous page. It had ended with yesterday’s date and the announcement that once again the last Hawk had met the woman he would marry, and with whom he would continue the Hawk bloodline.

Now it documented the very thing he’d done today. The hours he’d spent pouring over Hawk history, looking for anything that would prove what he knew, that this whole thing was impossible. It even called him a typical last Hawk, fiercely resisting the inevitable.

He barely had time to resent the characterization, because the next entry, also dated today, referred back to the woman he supposedly would marry. And ended with the statement that he would soon learn that that woman is in danger.

He slammed the book shut. She’d gone too far, this time. If there was anything he hated, it was being manipulated. He didn’t know how she was doing it, the mechanics of it, but that didn’t really matter now. What mattered was that she apparently thought he was a fool. That he could be controlled by the pushing of some insultingly simple emotional buttons.

He got up and shoved the chair back under the table. For a moment he stood there, staring at the book that had become a symbol of this whole absurd situation. Then, his jaw set with determination, he picked it up, walked back to the bookshelves, and shoved it with emphasis between the history of Sunridge and
Hawks at War.
Nodding with finality, he turned his back and walked away.

KENDALL GLANCED in the rearview mirror again, wondering where this idiot behind her thought she was supposed to go. There was no place for her to pull over and let the big brown sedan pass, and she was already uncomfortable with how fast she was going. This narrow, winding road, with its steep drop-offs, wasn’t anything to fool around with; every year it seemed at least one reckless teenager found that out the hard—and frequently fatal—way.

She probably shouldn’t have come out here anyway. She hadn’t accomplished much of anything except reddening her eyes. And Aaron certainly wouldn’t have appreciated her maudlin show of sentimentality, sitting beside his grave as she poured out the story of the snarl things seemed to be in. All she’d ever wanted to do was what Aaron had wanted, yet it seemed that she was being thwarted from all sides. Alice threatening her, Jason refusing to believe anything she said . . .