Wild Hawk (11 page)

His hands clenched around the book, so tightly she could hear the faint sound of his fingers moving on the leather. His booted feet came off the bed and hit the floor. He stood up. With a wild movement, he flung it across the room. It bounced off the wall with a heavy thud, barely missing the mirror over the dresser. It dropped to the polished surface of the dresser, then slid across it to fall with a more muffled thud to the floor.

“There’s another option,” he muttered. “I’m losing my mind.”

“No, Jason. You’re not going crazy.” She paused, then added softly, “Don’t try and resolve everything now. Right now you need to concentrate on Alice.”

He grimaced. “Ah, yes. The charming widow.”

“There’s no excuse for what she’s trying to do.” Kendall took a deep breath. “But I think I . . . understand her a little better now. She’s very bitter. As bitter as you are. And for the same reasons, I think.”

Jason turned on his heel to glare are her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Aaron never loved her. She was married to him for over forty years, she loved him as much as she could ever love anyone, and he never loved her back.”

Jason’s mouth twisted. “Is that what you think this is about? That my father never
loved
me?” He nearly spat out the word. “Grow up, Kendall. Only a fool twists himself up into knots over what passes for love in this world.”

“Then why are you so angry?”

“I’m angry,” he bit out, “because I don’t like being played for a fool. I’m angry because whatever crazy game you’re up to, you think I’m going to buy it. I’m angry because whoever did this”—he kicked at the book, lying on the floor near his feet—“has been prying into things that are no one’s business but mine. You told me whoever Aaron hired hadn’t found me yet. If I’m supposed to believe that, then explain to me how things no one else knows got into that book.”

“The same way the book got here in the first place.”

“Are we back to that? Magic?” He shook his head scornfully. “You really believe it, don’t you? How did you last as long as you did with that bastard? From everything I’ve read, he was the most hard-nosed, skeptical son of a bitch in the world.”

“He was,” Kendall agreed. “And that part of him fought with the Hawk heritage every day. I think that’s what drove him to tell me the stories. He wanted someone else to find them as absurd as he wanted to.”

“He wanted to find them absurd?”

She nodded slowly. “I think so. He couldn’t deal with that part of it. Any more than you can.”

His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “But you can? You didn’t find them . . . absurd?”

She sighed, knowing there was no way to explain without telling this man things she didn’t want to tell him. If she could explain even then; she wasn’t sure she understood herself. But she also sensed that if she didn’t, his willingness to listen would evaporate. If it took baring her soul to a man who would no doubt laugh to get the job done, then she would do it. She would just be prepared for the ridicule when it came, she told herself.

“Maybe I didn’t want to find them absurd,” she said slowly.

“You wanted to believe in stories about magic books?”

She nearly changed her mind then, but made herself go on. She had to, she told herself. For Aaron’s sake. She was his voice now, his only chance to reach out to the son he’d never known.

“It isn’t the book or the idea of magic. Not really. It was the idea of the Hawks, a family that continued uninterrupted, over centuries, that appealed to me. I think it’s wonderful.”

“Wonderful?” He nudged the book with his toe, none too gently. “This thing is some kind of bad cosmic joke, and you think it’s wonderful?”

“I never knew about my family, never knew where I came from. My parents died before they could tell me. Maybe that’s why . . .”

Her words trailed off as he gave her a look rife with suspicion, a look she read easily.

“No, this isn’t a ploy to try and gain your sympathy.” He looked startled, and she chuckled wryly. “You looked at me just like Aaron looked at anyone he thought was trying to manipulate him. Sorry,” she added hastily when he stiffened, “I know you don’t like being compared to him, but it’s really amazing.”

He glanced at the book on the floor, and she somehow knew what he was thinking.

“But not as amazing as the resemblance between you and Joshua Hawk, is it? What does the tree say? Is he your . . . that’d be what, half a dozen or so greats before the grandfather?”

“I don’t know,” he said as he stood there, staring down at the book, and there was something in his voice that hadn’t been there before, some catch, some tightness. She couldn’t put a name to it, but it made him seem vulnerable somehow. It didn’t seem possible, but it was an impression that wouldn’t go away. And Aaron had taught her to trust her impressions.

“You didn’t look?” she said, making her voice matter-of-fact with an effort. She leaned over to pick up the book.

“No,” he said. That odd tone was still there.

“Well, let’s see then,” she said, trying to sound no more concerned than if she were simply looking something up in a dictionary. She found the page, stared again for a moment at the uncanny resemblance between Jason and the man in the picture. She wished she could read the whole story; she wanted to know about this man, and the woman beside him. But now was not the time. She turned past the picture and the story to the page where the family tree began again. She turned the book sideways and lifted a finger to begin tracing the intricate trail that began anew with the five children born to Joshua and Kathleen Hawk. A trail whose first line belonged to their firstborn son.

Jason Hawk.

Chapter Nine

HE DIDN’T KNOW where he was going. He only knew he had to get out of here. He had to get away from this room. Away from that damned book. And away from Kendall.

He’d again thrown the book across the room, realizing the absurdity of reacting so strongly even as he did it. Just as he realized the absurdity of the fact that he was running, actually running, as if to escape some fate too horrible to be met head-on. Running in a way he hadn’t run since he’d been that scared kid living by his wits on the streets of Seattle.

The whole thing was nonsense, but he was reacting as if it were real. As if Kendall’s ridiculous tales were real.

He jammed his hands into his pockets as he slowed to a walk, wishing he’d grabbed his coat. Wishing he’d been rational enough to take the car, if not rational enough to stop himself from taking off at all, into the middle of the night.

And, he thought wryly, rational enough not to go charging down the main highway, where even at this late hour cars at high speed claimed the right of way and pedestrians were, if not actually targets, at least fair game. That white sedan had nearly taken him out.

He should go back. Or at least get off this road, he thought as he heard the squeal of tires as a car made a sharp turn.

What you should do is get the hell out of town
, he told himself
. Get yourself back home, where the only mystery you have to deal with is when and where are the salmon going to run, and why won’t that diesel on McKenna’s old trawler smooth out. Real things. Not fantasies. Not legends made up by a dying old man. Not books that materialized out of thin air and haunted you.

And sent you running away like a scared kid.

He lifted his head and looked around. If he hadn’t already known from the fresh, crisp breeze, here flowing down from the higher elevations of the Sierras unimpeded by buildings, carrying the scent of pine and fir and the coldness of snow, the gravel shoulder he stood on told him he was outside the city limits. Sunridge preferred landscaped highways, and with the Hawks as part of their tax base, they could afford it.

He sighed. If he went back, Kendall would . . . He wasn’t sure what she would do. She hadn’t tried to stop him from leaving. She hadn’t said a word, even when he’d slammed the book she seemed so enamored of against the wall.

He took a couple of steps back from the road and sat on the metal guardrail. It was cold and bit into the backs of his thighs. He thought he’d long been past this feeling of not being sure what to do, and he didn’t like revisiting it. And now that the initial reaction to the impossibility he’d just confronted had ebbed a little, he was feeling a little foolish. And he didn’t like that either.

He didn’t know how long he’d been sitting there in the dark when it registered, that itchy feeling at the back of his neck, the same kind of prickly feeling he’d had coming out of the motel office. His head came up sharply and he looked around, wondering what was causing it this time. The only thing he noticed was a white sedan pulled over to the side across the road, its driver sitting motionless, appearing to be staring at something over Jason’s left shoulder.

A white sedan. Very much like the one that had nearly hit him minutes ago. The sound of those screeching tires seemed to echo in his head. And there was nothing but a stand of trees over his left shoulder. Especially nothing that could be seen in the dark of night.

He went very still, then grimaced. There were a million cars like that on the road. And it was unlikely that the driver of this one had made a screeching U-turn just to sit across the road and pretend not to be watching him.

It’s that damn book,
he thought with biting acidity
. It’s put your imagination into overdrive.

He stood up swiftly, shoved his hands back in his pockets, and started walking again. Only once did he glance back, laughing at himself when he saw the white car still sitting there, clearly uninterested in his departure.

He went slowly, uncertain if he wanted to go farther, but certain he didn’t want to go back. Even though he was tired. Too tired. He hadn’t slept in what seemed like forever, and he’d lost perspective on this whole thing, that was all. He was off balance; that was why he was thinking this way. Why he was imagining people following him. Why he was reacting like this to the book. And to Kendall. All he needed was some sleep, and things would slide back into place. Hell, maybe he hadn’t really seen what he thought he’d seen in the damn book. Maybe it was just too many memories stirring in his exhausted mind.

Every step made him feel more the fool. By the time he finally reached the mileage sign that told him the small airport was five miles away, it was almost overwhelming. He didn’t even have the energy to straighten his shoulders when he realized he was hunching them; he felt like he had in those wild years on the street, when he’d spent so much time trying to fade into the background, to make himself inconspicuous.

When another car whizzed by at close range, he thought again about turning back. He didn’t know where the hell he was going, anyway. Or what the point of this was.

And the farther you go, the longer it’s going to take you to get back,
he thought wryly
. Even if it’s just to jump in the car and get the hell out of Dodge.

Another car went by, slower this time. White again. His head came up sharply; the same car?

Before he could decide, he caught a glimpse of another car out of the corner of his eye. Blue, it looked like, although it was hard to tell in the faint light. He turned to see Kendall’s coupe approaching. He stopped walking, and she pulled to a halt beside him. The passenger window went down. She leaned over to look at him.

“It’s late. And it’s going to be a long walk back.”

“In more ways than one,” he muttered.

“Finding any answers out here?”

“No.”

“Might as well get in, then.”

He had a feeling that was a sure way not to find answers, but to further confuse the issue; Kendall Chase had a strange effect on his thinking process. When he was with her, she even managed to have him taking that silly book half seriously. But he still found himself reaching for the door handle.

He didn’t say anything, just pulled the door shut and sat looking rather doggedly forward. To his surprise, she didn’t head back for the motel. Instead she took a side road he didn’t recognize, and that wasn’t marked except with a county road sign. In what seemed like moments the busy highway was out of sight. And out of hearing; the buffer of hills and trees made it seem as if they’d crossed over into another world.

He gave her a sideways glance. Although she didn’t look at him, she seemed to sense his scrutiny.

“I thought you might want to go someplace . . . conducive to heavy thinking,” she said calmly, as if he hadn’t taken off like a seal spooked by a pod of orcas.

He didn’t say anything, just turned his attention back to the passing scene, trees and brush looking ghostly in the darkness. They climbed a little farther; then she turned off onto a narrow, unpaved track that wound through a thick stand of Douglas fir. The familiar trees, which grew in profusion at home, were an unexpectedly comforting sight. And smell; he rolled down the window and breathed deeply.

A few minutes later he caught a glimpse of water between the needled branches of the evergreens. He heard the crunch of dry needles and the sound of soft dirt beneath the tires as she turned off the unpaved road. She stopped the car a few yards farther on, near a break in the trees that led down to the edge of a pond large enough to be called a small lake. When she turned the car off, the quiet rolled in almost palpably, the only sounds the occasional stirring of branches and the rustle of some night creature not still confused by the unexpected snow.

A peaceful place. Conducive, as she’d said, to heavy thinking.

He leaned his head back on the headrest. He moved his hand to the seat to shift to a more comfortable position, and his fingers brushed a solid object. He smothered a sigh. He didn’t have to look to know it was the book; he’d gotten that same odd rush of warmth and comfort he got every time he touched the thing. It figured that she would bring it along. And right now he was too tired to care.

Silence spun out between them, but it wasn’t filled with the tension he’d come to expect. And when, after what seemed like a long time, he spoke, he was able to do it with some semblance of rational calm.

“I never told anybody where I’d gone when I ran away.”

She didn’t seem surprised that he’d picked up where they’d left off when he’d flung the book aside. She merely flipped on an interior car light and reached for the book.

“You mean when you were twelve?”

He nodded without looking at her. “No one ever knew I came back here. I didn’t see anyone, talk to anyone, and nobody saw me. The cops found me on a bus back to L.A., and I never told them that I’d come here. Or my mother. She would have been . . .”

He stopped, unable to find the words for how upset he knew his mother would have been had she ever known he’d come back here, how hurt she would have been if she’d known he’d come to try to find out something about his father. He’d wondered, later, if she’d guessed, if that’s why she had packed them up and moved to Seattle a month later, to put more distance between him and the man he was so angrily curious about.

“But it’s there,” Kendall said. “Listed with the date you left and were found.”

“No one knew,” he insisted. “There’s no way that could be listed there.”

Jason looked at Kendall then, with eyes that felt dry and gritty from lack of sleep. He locked his hands together, resisting the urge to rub at his eyes, knowing it would only exacerbate the sandy feeling to a burning that would be even worse. She looked at the book, her expression pensive.

“I never told anyone about that knife fight, either,” he added.

He saw her gaze flick from the book to his left hand, and realized he’d been unconsciously running his fingers along the scar. He made himself stop. His mouth twisted. “And I learned to fight a lot better, after that. With or without a knife.”

Or with or without a gun, or damn near any other weapon you could find on the street, Jason added silently, catching himself rubbing at the old scar again and yanking his hands apart in irritation.

“The point is,” he said, “there’s no way in hell anybody could have found out all this. So how the hell did it end up here? And why—how—is it changing? First it was just a list of dates and events. Now it’s becoming a story in places, written like some damn family saga, like the rest of this thing is.”

Kendall hesitated. He didn’t blame her. She kept coming up with the same answer, and he kept throwing it back at her. It was pointless. She glanced down at the book, then reached to open it to the section that began with his name. It didn’t bother him much that she’d probably read it; there didn’t seem to be much point. This whole thing was becoming too weird to worry about someone discovering secrets he’d kept for years. Especially when they’d apparently already been discovered.

She turned in the driver’s seat to face him. “Is the rest . . . true, too?”

He shrugged wearily. There didn’t seem to be any point in denying the truth, either.

“The timing fits. I don’t know if the exact dates are right. What happened to me is . . . accurate. And the facts about my mother are right, I think. What I remember, anyway. The rest, about the old man, I don’t know. My mother never talked about him.”

“I didn’t mean the part about Aaron. I know that’s true. He told me how he met your mother, when she came to work for him. He said he knew the first time he saw her that she was the one, but he was already married to Alice.”

“Love at first sight?” His tone was bitter.

“He loved her, Jason.”

“Right,” he muttered. “If that book is right, then no matter what his reputation, he was a spineless, gutless coward. First he let that woman buy him, then walk all over him.”

“Alice had him over a barrel,” Kendall said, “thanks to her father tying up what he’d loaned Aaron with stock and options. The only peace he found in his life was with your mother. But he couldn’t divorce Alice and marry her.”

He lifted a brow. “So you don’t think he should give up his empire for love? And here I thought you were a romantic.”

He heard her breath catch, but Jason had the oddest feeling it wasn’t because of what he’d said. At least not in the way he’d meant it. She as looking at him as if she was afraid he could read her mind.

“What I think he should or shouldn’t have done doesn’t matter,” she said. “Even Hawks have their weak spots, and perhaps Aaron’s was not having the courage to give it all up and go to the woman he loved.”

“ ‘Even Hawks’? Is that him talking, or you?”

“That doesn’t matter either. What matters is that he couldn’t walk away. Hawk Industries was Aaron’s life. He’d fought for years to build it, and then fought to keep it.”

“Sold himself, you mean. Body and soul.”

“Yes,” she said, surprising him with her easy agreement. She leaned forward. “He did. And he knew it. Alice made certain of that. But I swear, Jason, he never knew how vicious she really was. He never would have stayed if he had.”

“I doubt that.”

“You wouldn’t, if you’d seen the life he lived with Alice. The longer he lived with her, the worse he got. And the worse she got. She made him pay every day of his life.”

“As my mother paid every day of hers,” he said coldly. “I heard her crying at night, when she thought I was asleep. I saw her get old before her time, never smiling, never laughing. So much for love.”

“He did love her,” Kendall insisted.

“Then why the hell did he send her away?”

She looked at him in surprise. “What?”

His mouth twisted. “Never mind. I know. Because of me. Because after years of being his quiet, obedient mistress, she had the bad judgment to get pregnant. So he fired her. Then he dumped her.”