Wild Hawk (4 page)

Kendall didn’t doubt that was true, either. Alice Hawk was a power in the county, and despite the supposed fairness of the American judicial system, she’d seen it go wrong too many times not to believe that the woman’s influence couldn’t do exactly as she said it would.

“You don’t even know this man, but you’d send him to jail?” Kendall asked, shaking her head incredulously.

“He should never have been born!”

It had been a foolish question anyway, Kendall realized. If Alice had no qualms about falsely accusing her, after ten years of utter and complete loyalty to Hawk Industries, of aiding in a fraud, she would hardly hesitate to do the same to Jason West, a man Alice felt she had every right to hate.

She turned, ready at last to make her escape, knowing there was nothing further she could do. She took three steps toward the door, then stopped as an image of Jason from the funeral this morning, his eyes as fierce as his father’s, his jaw as stubborn, his expression as forbidding, came to her. Perhaps Aaron had underestimated his wife. But Kendall couldn’t help thinking that, just perhaps, Alice was also underestimating Aaron’s son.

She looked back at Whitewood. “Just how do you plan to prove that Aaron’s son could even put his hands on that kind of cash?”

Whitewood shrugged, and Kendall wondered how much that nonchalance in the face of extortion was costing Alice per hour.

“I have contacts,” Whitewood said smugly. “Including someone who will testify he loaned him the money with the expectation of a large return out of what he would gain from this . . . crime.”

Kendall shook her head in wonder. “You’ve covered it all, haven’t you? You knew you couldn’t deny he’s Aaron’s son. Even if there wasn’t the resemblance, it’s easy to prove with blood and DNA tests. So you set up this frame. Very slick.”

“Thank you.” Whitewood’s tone was just short of smug.

“And if we have to,” Alice said coldly, “we’ll prove Aaron was of diminished capacity. With all that spouting off he used to do, telling those crazy stories about wizards and magic, it wouldn’t be hard to do. To hear him tell it you’d think the Hawks had descended straight from Merlin.”

Kendall turned her gaze on Alice, suppressing a shiver. All those lovely, wonderful stories Aaron had told her in those last months, Kendall thought. Those magical tales that made her long for the family she’d never had. Tales that had made her feel like she had as a child, when she’d read a particularly moving story that she wished with all her heart would be true. And this woman would use them to destroy Aaron’s dream.

“You were right. Aaron did underestimate you.”

“He
always
underestimated me.” The woman gave her a baleful look. “Don’t you make the same mistake.”

Kendall stood quietly for a moment. She felt oddly detached, as if the shock of this afternoon’s revelations had numbed her somehow. It enabled her to ask, with the appearance of only mild curiosity, “Do you really believe I was sleeping with Aaron? A man old enough to be my grandfather?”

“I knew my husband,” Alice said icily. “He was a man of . . . carnal appetites. He could no more resist a pretty young face at sixty than he could at twenty-five.”

“And of course it was impossible that a woman could ever resist him,” Kendall retorted with some acidity.

For an instant, the barest fraction of time, surprise flashed in Alice Hawk’s eyes. Surprise Kendall knew instinctively was at the mere suggestion that a woman, any woman, could have resisted Aaron Hawk. And Kendall realized, with some shock, that Alice had loved Aaron. As much as she was capable of loving anyone other than herself, the woman had loved Aaron.

And he had despised her.

Unbidden and unwelcome, a pang of sympathy stirred in her. Sympathy for Alice Hawk, who had been married to a man she loved for forty-two years, and he’d never loved her back. And within a year of their marriage, he’d begun an affair that had lasted seven years. An affair, he had told Kendall, with the only woman he’d ever really loved.

And suddenly Alice Hawk’s venom was pitiable.

Or would be, she thought, if it weren’t for the fact that it could very well ruin two innocent lives: her own, and that of Aaron’s son. Again that image flashed in her mind, of a face younger than Aaron Hawk’s, yet with eyes no less fierce with intelligence, no less hard with implacability.

“And what if Aaron’s son decides on his own to sue for a piece of Aaron’s estate?”

Whitewood looked uncomfortable. Kendall watched as his gaze flicked to Alice, then away. He shifted in his chair and shot his cuffs yet again. Then it came to her. She looked at Alice.

“You didn’t expect him, did you?” she said. “You were as surprised as anyone else when he showed up at the funeral.”

“Who would have thought he would have the gall to show his face back in Sunridge?” Alice snapped.

Kendall glanced at Whitewood with a new kind of twisted respect. “You pulled all this together in one afternoon? Perhaps you’re smarter than Aaron thought.”

He called her a name under his breath, a crudity she decided to ignore.

“So you haven’t had time to work that out yet?” she asked. “What you’ll do if Jason decides to take you on himself?”

“Jason?” Alice sneered. “You’re on a first-name basis already? Perhaps you’ve already decided to throw your lot in with him. If you have, I warn you, you’ve made a serious mistake.”

Kendall’s lips curved slightly, into what Aaron had always called her “decision” smile, because, he’d told her, it usually meant she’d made up her mind and the devil take the hindmost.

And Aaron’s words were in her mind when she said softly, “In this case, I think it’s better the devil I don’t know than the ones I’ve just met here.”

She turned her back on them and started toward the door.

“I won’t have it,” Alice called out after her angrily. “He will never see a penny of Hawk money. I’m warning you. If you value your miserable life, stay out of this.”

Kendall stopped then. She turned slowly back, giving Alice a level look. “Are you threatening my life, my health, or merely my freedom, Mrs. Hawk?”

“Just be warned. I’m not as gullible as my husband was. I know what you want. You got more than you should have, and if you’re smart, you’ll settle for that and get out.”

“Mrs. Hawk,” Kendall said softly, “you don’t know the first thing about what I want.”

And it wasn’t until she was out of the room that she realized she had virtually echoed Jason West.

Chapter Four

ALICE HAWK SAT in silence for several minutes after Kendall walked out. She took a few deep breaths, knowing she must control her anger. Her heart was pounding in her chest, and she felt the heat of rage flushing her face. Her doctor’s warnings rang in her mind, and she made an effort to slow her racing pulse.

“She could be a problem,” Darren Whitewood said.

She glanced at the attorney. He was a preening, conceited fop, she thought, with his silk suit and ostentatious gold jewelry, and could be trusted only to look out for himself, but he had one great advantage over Charles Wellford. He could be bought.

“She always has been,” Alice said.

An understatement, she thought as she gathered up the papers from the table. Her feelings about Kendall Chase had always been somewhat confused. When she’d first come to work for Hawk Industries, Alice had recognized a keen intelligence, akin to her own. Kendall’s seeming innocence and apparent naiveté had made Alice consider the possibility of using her herself, as a conduit to Aaron, who had, infuriatingly, closed himself off to her more and more over the years. But the girl’s loyalty to the man who had hired her for a position far above her qualifications was unswerving, and Alice’s early attempts at subverting her had only turned the annoyingly honest young woman against her.

So Alice had been relegated to watching Aaron lavish time and attention on the girl, teaching her, training her, treating her as if she were nothing less than his heir apparent. As if she were the child Alice had never been able to give him.

An old, familiar pain jabbed at her. It was, she supposed, the true source of her ambivalence about Kendall Chase. She had seen the gradual softening in Aaron, seen the gentleness with which he had treated the girl, a tender regard she herself had never known from her husband. It had enraged her, and no matter how many times she told herself she was a fool to be jealous of a mere child, she knew she was.

She had never really believed Kendall and Aaron had been involved sexually, but it was easier to believe in a replay of that kind of betrayal than in the idea that Aaron was capable of simply loving the girl for herself. That was an emotion she didn’t want to believe him capable of, because it made the knowledge that he had never loved her even harder to accept. And made the relationship between Aaron and Elizabeth West too painful to even contemplate.

She knew Aaron had married her for money. Forty-three years ago Hawk Manufacturing, the foundation company that had grown into the conglomerate known now as Hawk Industries, had been in severe financial trouble. It was her father who, with the unerring eye that had rarely failed him, had picked twenty-five-year-old Aaron Hawk as a minnow that would one day become a shark.

But it was then that Alice Caruthers had done the one unforgivably stupid thing she had ever done in her life; at age thirty she had, with all the intensity of an infatuated teenager, fallen in love with the dynamic, darkly handsome, young Aaron Hawk. She had picked him as the only man she wanted, and had set her powerful father to the task of doing whatever it took to get him for her.

Once he’d gotten over his surprise that she was interested at all in a man, Harold Caruthers had energetically set about doing as she wanted, pleased in a manner that was hardly flattering that his plain, sometimes unpleasant daughter might be taken off his hands long after he’d given up hope of her ever marrying. Alice knew this; she’d heard him say it often enough, but she was so blindly enamored of Aaron Hawk that she hadn’t cared. Nor had she cared what it took to get him.

“You’ve got a vicious tongue, Alice,” her father had told her more than once during the delicate negotiations. “Curb it, or this will all be for nothing.”

And she had. She’d become what she despised: a simpering, awestruck female. She even went out of her way to try to appear attractive, something she’d never cared about before. She had masked her true nature and become quiet and submissive, to convince Aaron that the money he needed would not come with a price tag too high.

And she had won. She suspected her father had done some underhanded manipulating beyond the open money negotiations, even, perhaps, managed to make Aaron’s financial problems more urgent, but she didn’t care. All that had mattered then was that Aaron was hers. It had never occurred to her that the price she would pay might be too high.

She had thought Aaron could learn to care for her, if not love her, and that it would be enough. But then she had learned of his affair with Elizabeth West, and knew it wouldn’t happen. She thought then that if she could give him a child, it would be enough. But after years of trying, of going through every kind of painful procedure developed, she had failed. Then she had learned Aaron’s mistress had borne him a son, and she had known that nothing would ever be enough.

And Kendall Chase had driven the truth of her failure home to Alice every day of the last ten years. The girl’s presence, and Aaron’s response to her, proved to Alice that had she been able to produce a child, her own position would have changed. That as the mother of a child Aaron loved, she, too, would have received some of that love. Love that had been given instead to the slut who had become his mistress. And then to the girl who had become his surrogate child. But never, ever, to Alice.

The only thing that could have been worse would have been the presence of Elizabeth West’s bastard. Aaron’s son. The blood child she had never been able to give him. The son who was a living, breathing symbol of Aaron’s unfaithfulness. The personification of his hatred for the woman he’d married and his love for the woman he’d taken as his mistress. The son Alice Hawk hated with a passion that sometimes threatened to overwhelm all else in her life.

The son who was here now.

“You’ll never see a dime of my money,” she muttered fiercely.

“Ma’am?”

Darren Whitewood’s voice had taken on that lubricated tone that he used when he was trying to calm her down. She hated it; it reminded her too much of her father’s condescension. But it was her father, she reminded herself, who had enabled her to keep Aaron under control all these years, by legally tangling up the money he’d funneled into Aaron’s business so completely that while it might be in Aaron’s name, the reins were in Alice’s hands.

“I said that bastard will never see a dime of my money,” she repeated, in a voice so savage Whitewood looked at her warily. “I’ll see him dead first.”

JASON PICKED UP his leather carry-on bag from the motel room floor, then yawned yet again as he put the bag down on the edge of the bed. He’d only gotten four hours of sleep last night, between the late-night flight from Seattle and the funeral, and he probably shouldn’t be driving even the few miles from here to the small airport. But he didn’t want to stay one more night in this town, either.

Then why the hell did you spend all afternoon driving around in it?

The question had rung in his mind with annoying frequency ever since he’d pulled into the parking lot of the motel shortly after dark. And that frequency had increased while, fighting off yawns, he pondered whether or not to throw the few things he’d brought into his bag and get out of this place right now.

He yawned again. He didn’t understand it. He’d gone longer than this without sleep, had done it often, and hadn’t felt this tired. And he hadn’t changed time zones, so that wasn’t the reason. Yet there was no denying the fact that he felt enervated, utterly drained. And he’d never experienced such an odd heaviness in his legs and arms, as if there were some unseen force pressing down on him. As if he were moving underwater. Dazed. Almost drugged.

He glanced up at the vent for the room’s heating and air conditioning, idly wondering if there’d been some malfunction that was slowly poisoning him with some invisible, deadly combination of gases. He’d heard about such things often enough. But there was no rush of air from the unit, no sign that the heat was even turned on, despite the unusual chill outside. He yawned again. Then he turned around and sat on the edge of the bed beside his bag, even knowing it was a mistake, that he’d probably fall asleep sitting up. Resting his elbows on his knees, he lifted his hands to rub at his weary eyes, then let his head rest against his palms as he yawned yet again.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there when at last he lifted his head again. And immediately saw something he hadn’t noticed before, something he couldn’t remember even unpacking. The book that lay on the dresser. He stood up and took a step forward. And stopped dead.

He hadn’t brought a book with him.

And he was certain it hadn’t been there when he’d come into the room.

His gaze shot back to the vent he’d been studying. It was as unhelpful as before.

Had he actually dozed off while he’d sat there with his head down? Without realizing it? Long enough and soundly enough for someone to come in and leave the book on the dresser without him knowing it?

“Not likely,” he muttered under his breath. He slept lightly, a legacy from years of sleeping with one ear open, in places where menace was the norm, not the exception.

Only then did he realize the odd lethargy was gone; vanquished by a surge of adrenaline at the thought that somebody had been in here without him being aware of it. It was impossible, yes, but that hadn’t stopped his body from preparing for the threat in a rush, throwing off that overpowering sleepiness and kicking sluggish muscles back to life.

But how had the book gotten here?

He turned on his heel and strode swiftly toward the door, yanking it open to stare out into the chill night. There was no one in sight, no doors just closing, no cars just now pulling out of the lot. No sign that anyone had just been here and was leaving in a hurry.

The snow hadn’t lasted, there were only traces of it left in the cold night shadows of the trees and buildings, and on the occasional car coming down from a higher elevation with a thin layer of snow still coating its roof. And not a soul was outside moving on this chilly night. Out on the main road cars whirred by, but within his immediate field of vision, nothing moved.

The cold air from outside washed over his face, chasing away, for the moment, even the natural weariness of lack of sleep. His mouth quirked. Maybe he was just so tired he was hallucinating. He glanced back over his shoulder.

The book was still there.

He backed up into the room and examined the door’s lock. Both it and the dead bolt looked intact and undamaged. He shut the door against the cold, and with a wry expression locked it. Again. He turned and walked back to stand before the dresser.

There was nothing uncommon about it, it was the same as thousands of other pieces of furniture in thousands of hotel and motel rooms around the world. Bland and unremarkable. Except for the fact that between the television and the tray that held an empty ice bucket and two glasses was a book that couldn’t possibly be there.

He had to have blacked out. It was the only explanation. He would have thought perhaps he had in fact been drugged, except for the fact that he hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the rather minuscule breakfast on the plane. Maybe that was it, he thought. Maybe he’d been too out of it from lack of both sleep and food.

Maybe.

But he couldn’t deny what he was looking at. And if he was a little hesitant to add the evidence of touch, it was only because he was being cautious. This was obviously meant as some kind of a message, and the fact that it had appeared here, now, under circumstances he couldn’t explain, was more of a coincidence than he was willing to accept. He didn’t like things he couldn’t explain.

He stood staring at it for a long time. From all sides. It appeared to be an ordinary book, although it looked very old. It was, in fact, rather beautiful. It was bound with what looked like real leather, deep, rich, and dark blue. The pages looked thick and heavy, and were gilt-edged in a way he thought was rarely done anymore. And, oddly, there was no sign of a title, or an author, on the cover or the spine.

But most importantly, he thought wryly, there was no sign of any wires or other devices to indicate the thing might be more than just a simple book. Lethally more. He reached out and nudged the book a fraction of an inch. Nothing happened. And it wasn’t any heavier than he would have guessed.

God, you’re a suspicious son of a bitch, aren’t you?

He laughed silently at himself.
Stir up a few old memories, and you’re looking for trouble behind every door. Bombs in every book.

You’re not on the street, dodging stray gunfire or the cops anymore, West. Give it a rest.

But he wasn’t a fool, either. True, he just might have dozed off—even sitting up—long enough for someone to sneak this book in here. But how had they gotten in in the first place? He knew he’d locked the door when he closed it; he always did. It was a habit learned long ago. There were no signs of damage to the door, and the window to the outside was still tightly shut and wedged with the burglar bar.

A key. It had to have been somebody with a key. Perhaps it had been a helpful motel employee; perhaps someone had left the book at his door and they’d moved it inside.

That made sense, he thought. A helpful employee with a key. His tension eased slightly. It was hard for him to believe he’d slipped that quickly—and sitting upright, yet—into a heavy enough sleep not to hear the turning of a key in a lock. Hard for him to believe he hadn’t sensed the presence of a person in the room, or that person leaving. Hard to believe it had all been done without saying a word to him.

But it was impossible for him to believe any of the alternatives.

He’d analyzed it enough, he decided abruptly. At this point it didn’t matter how it had gotten here. What mattered was whatever message was being sent. Maybe it wasn’t even directed at him. Maybe the whole thing was a mistake. His mouth quirked at the idea of whoever had gone to all this trouble to stealthily deliver it getting it in the wrong room. He reached out and picked up the book.