Hawk: (14 page)

As Hawk parked his bike next to Caleb’s squad car
, he caught sight of Tildy standing with Abby and Sarah. She was shivering, despite the heat. It was Sarah who had her arm around Tildy’s shoulders. Hawk appreciated it, but he wanted to be the one to comfort her.

Caleb walked straight past them to Tildy’s car and picked up Tildy’s panties.

Abby scowled. “Shouldn’t you bag it?”

Caleb sighed and shook his head at her. “It’s Rapid City, Abby,” he told her. “Not Vegas. You want DNA? Great. It’ll be about 5 years.”

As Hawk stepped closer to Tildy, she started to back away. “You shouldn’t be here,” she insisted. “You have to go.”

Hawk strode to her and took her into his arms. “Screw that,” he said quietly into her ear. Tildy collapsed against him. He ran his hands through her hair. “You know I didn’t hurt you, right
, Angel?” he whispered.

To his immense relief she nodded.

He leaned back and cradled her face in his hands. His thumb swept over her bruised lip where the small cut there was healing. He brushed her hair back to uncover the larger one above her eyebrow. “Tildy, do you know who did this? Was it the guy from the bar?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t see. I don’t know for sure.”

Caleb glowered at her. She shrank back into Hawk’s larger frame. “You should have talked to me, Tildy,” Caleb admonished.

“I- I didn’t want anyone to know.”

Hawk knew by ‘anyone’ she meant her folks. “I told you to call me if you needed me,” he reminded her.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt!”

“Tildy, I can look out for myself. For both of us. But you’ve got to trust me. Have you noticed anyone following you? Driving past your house?”

Tildy shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. And I’ve been checking. I don’t know how he found me.”

“Well, there’s a lot of trucks in Rapid City,” Caleb pointed out. “If you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it’d be easy to miss.” He continued scanning the parking lot as well as the on-street parking. “He’s not here now.” He grasped the torn underwear in his hand. “This is a message, Tildy.”

Hawk glowered as Tildy
pressed her lips together instead of responding.

“You lied to Rawlins,” Caleb continued. “Right in front of me. What’s going on here? What are you not saying?”

Hawk was beginning to get frustrated as he watched her shake her head.

“
He
said something, didn’t he?” Hawk pressed. “Something that made you want to stay away from me.”

She frowned up at him. “He said he’d hurt you. Both of us.”

“What exactly did he say, Tildy?” Caleb asked.

She shifted uncomfortably. “He- he said if I...”

“What?” Caleb prompted.

She grimaced. “He said if I fucked that Indian again, he’d scalp us both.”

“So, it was that redneck,” Hawk concluded.

Tildy ran her tongue over her damaged lip. “I think so. But the thunder was loud and he was whispering. I didn’t recognize his voice. He’s watching me,” she said. “He must be. He found me today.”

“And you don’t know anyone who would do this?” Caleb asked.

She shook her head.

“Tate?”

Her eyes widened. “No! He doesn’t know about Hawk. And
he doesn’t drive a truck. He wouldn’t care, anyway.”

“Maria said the redneck paid cash at
the bar,” Caleb declared. “She’d never seen him before.”

“He said he was with the rodeo,” she replied.

“Alright. I’ll check it out.”

“I’m going to follow you home,” Hawk told her.

Tildy looked up at him, frowning.

“Don’t argue with me, Tildy. I’m following you home.”

“I’m not arguing,” she replied.

“Then what?”

She bit her cut lip, making Hawk want to touch it again, wipe away the damage. “Do... do I have to go home? Right now?”

Hawk suppressed the urge to bite his own lip. He should say yes. He should put her in her car and follow her home
, end of story. But with her looking up at him, so scared and needing him, he knew he’d only regret it later if he just saw her home. He pulled her close and ran his hands through her hair again. “No. We don’t have to,” he told her.

Hawk pulled in
to his driveway and killed his Harley’s engine. Tildy gripped his shoulder and swung her leg off first. She took a few steps back to give him room to dismount. As he led her to the front door he said, “Well, it’s not the north side.”

Tildy laughed. “The north side isn’t the north side, either.”

“Oh, yeah?”

She nodded
, as he held his front door open for her. “Half my mother’s pictures fall off the walls.”

Hawk grunted. “Cheap sheetrock.”

Tildy nodded. “And the kitchen floor tile is slightly off-center.”

He grinned, “Guess you don’t always get what you pay for.

Tildy grinned back. “Guess not.”

Hawk’s house was nice
, Tildy observed as she stepped inside. The kitchen was directly ahead and was large enough for a table and four chairs. To the left, the large living room had a black leather couch and a TV nearly as large hanging on one wall with a shelf of DVD’s below it. Everything was neat and orderly, nothing out of place. The walls were at odds with the leather though. They were simply beige. Tildy frowned.

“I told you it wasn’t much.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “It’s your walls.”

Now
he
frowned. “I hung that sheetrock myself.”

She laughed. “But they’re beige.”

Hawk looked from Tildy to the walls and back again. “Goes with everything,” he grunted.

Tildy arched a brow at him. “Not with you.”

“Is that right?”

Tildy nodded. “I don’t know what you are, Hawk Red Cloud, but you’re not beige.”

Hawk crossed his arms in front of his chest. “What color’s your room? Pink?”

Tildy rolled her eyes. “I’m not allowed to change it,” she informed him.

Hawk considered this. “What color would-?”

“Yellow,” she answered immediately.

“Yellow, huh?”

She nodded. “My house will be yellow. Bright yellow, like the sun. I don’t think you can be unhappy in a house with yellow walls. It’s impossible.”

“My mom’s house had yellow walls,” he told her. “At least in the kitchen.”

“Were you happy?”

Hawk hesitated.

“I’m sorry,” Tildy said quickly. “That’s none of my business.”

“It’s alright,” he told her. “Were we happy? Yes and no. My father walked out when I was six and Raina was ten.”

Tildy frowned sympathetically.

“He wasn’t all that into being married.” Hawk cleared his throat awkwardly. “He... wasn’t around a lot. And then one day he just wasn’t around at all. I heard he moved down south. Don’t know where. We never heard from him again.”

Tildy chewed her lower lip. “What did your mother do?”

Hawk shrugged. “Worked two jobs. Did her best. She was always home for a little bit, though, right when we’d get off from school. She’d have something for us, fry bread or cookies, something like that. Then she’d have to get ready for the night shift at the supermarket. Stocking shelves. But, yeah, in the kitchen after school, that was nice. She’d drop us off at Garrett’s house before she went to work. He and I started to get into trouble as we got older, but we were pretty happy.”

A long silence hung between them.

“My dad’s... gone a lot,” she confided.

Hawk scowled.

“It started right after they got married. Maybe even before. That’s why she had me. To see if I could keep him home.”

“But it didn’t work,” he concluded.

Tildy shook her head.

Hawk sighed. “So
, she took it out on the only person in the house she
could
control.”

Tildy shrugged but nodded. “I guess,” she said quietly.

Breaking the tension, Hawk said, “I’m going to take a quick shower.”

He left the living room
, leaving Tildy standing awkwardly in the center of the room. Along the wall, a shelf caught her eye, and she wandered over. There were several framed photos on it. Hawk and what looked to be his sister and her kids. Hawk and, presumably, his mother, as well as photo of him with a large group of men wearing matching uniforms. She picked out Shooter, Easy, Doc, and Tex easily. The others she didn’t recognize.

It was so unlike her own home
, which had expensive art on the walls, but no photos anywhere. Tildy couldn’t remember any photos ever being taken, except for the professional photographer that came in every Christmas to take the annual family photo. That only made it onto Christmas cards sent out to other people.

Hawk’s house wasn’t precisely
cozy
in the way she imagined her own home would be one day, but it definitely looked a little more lived-in and therefore more inviting. There was actually a TV, one that wasn’t hidden inside a large cabinet, and a couch that looked infinitely more comfortable than the one her mother had in the living room.

She’d be willing to bet that Hawk d
idn’t have a small double bed, especially not with a frilly, pink comforter. She blushed furiously; she should not be thinking about Hawk’s bed, especially not when he was in the shower. That only had her blushing even more. Several minutes later, he emerged from the bathroom, and she couldn’t tell whether she was relieved or disappointed that he was dressed in clean clothes. She didn’t have much time to consider it though, because he
had
come out in a way she hadn’t seen before. All his black hair was loose, wet, and hanging around his shoulders. It shined brightly. He rubbed it with a towel and watched her examining his photographs.

Tearing her gaze away from him, she nodded at the photo in her hand. “Who are the rest of these men?”

Hawk stopped next to her and took the frame from her. His face was solemn, and Tildy got the feeling she shouldn’t have asked. She was about to apologize, when he said, “The rest of our unit. We ran over an IED on a convoy to the next town.”

Tildy’s mouth dropped open. She knew Hawk had been in the
Army, but it seemed so vague. Just ‘
in the Army
.’ She hadn’t spent any time thinking about the fact that it meant ‘
gone to war.
’

“Chris and Jimmy were in the lead vehicle with some others. It got hit the worst. Chris took a lot of shrapnel. Jimmy actually lost his leg. The others didn’t make it.”

Tildy gasped and felt the blood drain from her face. “
Jimmy’s missing a leg?
”

Hawk nodded. “The lower half of his right leg. Gone at the knee.”

Tildy sat down on the couch, dazed.

Hawk watched Tildy process what he was telling her. It bothered
him to upset her so much, so he put the picture back on the shelf. He never spoke about what happened after, not to her or his brothers. They never brought up the fact that while Doc and Shooter were tending to Jimmy’s shredded leg, Hawk had been stranded on the other side of the road, pinned down by enemy fire.

Hawk d
idn’t have first aid supplies, not that it mattered because he didn’t have Doc’s medic experience to use them anyway. What could you do for a man who was actually on fire? There was only one thing you
could
do, so Hawk did it. Jimmy may have wanted a bullet after looking down and seeing most of his leg gone, but Jason had actually
gotten
one- from Hawk’s .44.

It bothered Hawk to get a medal pinned to his chest after surviving that day
, a reminder of killing his unit member. The details of Jason’s death had never made it into the report. There had been no mutual agreement among the surviving members not to tell anyone as far as Hawk knew, it had been just generally understood.

Hawk hadn’t
felt like much of a survivor, and he sure as fuck wasn’t a hero. So he accepted the medal quietly when it was awarded and then promptly threw it away after the ceremony. If any one of his brothers had kept theirs, they never displayed them.

“I’m sorry,” Tildy said, interrupting his thoughts.

“Just a thing that happened,” he replied.

He reached out and ran his thumb along her bottom lip. Maybe violence was a thing that he would never get away from. “Did he- did he hurt you, Tildy?”

Hawk wasn’t all that comfortable with fixing anything this way. Give him an enemy, a target to take out, and he could do it easily. But this? This felt rife with landmines, and his footsteps were more than a little uncertain. It’s how Chris must have felt, talking to Sarah about what had happened to her. You just wanted it to go away, to get better, or not to have happened at all.

Tildy shook her head, but he wasn’t at all sure she wasn’t just equating
‘hurt’ with ‘rape’.

“Did...
” He hesitated. “Did he put his fingers in you?” Fuck, he hated even asking that. It had happened to Sarah, and Hawk knew it was pretty much just as traumatic as an asshole shoving his cock in. Tildy shook her head, and he was immensely relieved. He had no idea how to make something like that better.

“No,” she told him. “He just wanted to scare me. He took off right after he told me to stay away from you.”

Hawk felt his gaze darken. “You shouldn’t have gotten out of the car.”

Tildy’s lower lip trembled. “I know. I was so stupid. It was my fault.”

“No,” Hawk argued immediately. “That’s not what I meant. It was not your fault, Tildy. I wasn’t blaming you.”

She lowered her gaze to the floor. “I just feel so stupid. I didn’t...
I don’t know,” she told him. “I guess, up until that moment, I really thought the only truly bad people in the world were my mom and dad.”

Hawk lifted her chin and looked down at her. “You
should never have to know that kind of evil.”

She smiled at him, but there was an edge of sadnes
s in her eyes. “Because I’m an angel?”

Hawk nodded and kissed her on the forehead, just above her other cut.

“I’m not an angel, Hawk,” she said quietly.

“You are,” he argued.

“What if I don’t want to be?”

Hawk leaned back and realized she had her fingers threaded through a lock of his wet ha
ir. Tildy must have realized it too, because she quickly dropped it. “I’m sorry,” she said as her cheeks flushed. “I couldn’t help it.”

He grinned at her. “Trust me, I can relate.”

He stepped away from her and turned toward the bathroom to hang up his towel. “We should go,” he told her. “So we’re not late.”

“Late for what?”

He turned off the bathroom light and shut the door. He grinned at her. “I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that you have no idea how to play poker.”

She made a face and shook her head. “No. Crazy Eights with Isabel is the closest I’ve come.”

Hawk laughed. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be able to convince a bunch of Rangers to play Go Fish.”

Tildy looked indignant. “Crazy Eights!” she repeated.

“Uh huh.”

“It requires
way
more skill than Go Fish.”

“Uh huh.”

“It’s a cut-throat game, Hawk.”

“I’m certain it is.”

“I would beat the pants off you!”

Hawk turned his gaze on her. “Angel, are you asking me to play a game of strip Crazy Eights?”

Her mouth dropped open and she turned red all the way up to her ears. Hawk didn’t think anyone would ever get tired of teasing her. He grabbed her by the hand and pulled. “Let’s go.”

“Are we taking your bike?”

“Well, we’re not walking.”

He turned to lock his front door and caught her smug grin.

He rolled his eyes at her.

“I get to ride
on your bike,” she declared. “
Again.
”

Hawk twisted the dead bolt and then le
aned in close to her. She froze, breath held in anticipation.

“You’re either going to ride my bike or my cock, Angel.”

She gasped. Her eyes were wide brown pools of shock.

“Bike it is,” he announced, taking her by the hand again and leading her to the Harley.