Wild Hawk (12 page)

“That’s not true.” Kendall sounded so indignant it startled him. “Aaron never sent her away. She quit, after she told him she was pregnant but he told her he still couldn’t divorce Alice, because he’d lose everything. That’s when she left him.” Her arched brows furrowed as she looked at him. “Did she actually tell you Aaron abandoned her?”

Jason tried, but remembering that far back was difficult with a brain that was groggy from lack of sleep. “I . . . don’t remember. I just always knew.”

“It doesn’t make sense, Jason. If Aaron had truly done that, why would your mother have stayed here until you were nearly five?” She lifted the book. “Besides, you read it, you know why she left. You know it was because of Alice, and her threats.”

“She left because Aaron Hawk didn’t want her anymore,” he answered automatically. “And he sure as hell didn’t want me.” His brows lowered as the rest of what she’d said registered in his foggy mind at last. “I did read it. There wasn’t anything in there about Alice threatening my mother.”

Kendall blinked. She glanced down at the book, still open to the last page of precise, elegant script. Then she lifted her head to look at him again.

“It’s right here. After the list of just dates, in this part written like a story. Where it says you left Sunridge, and why.”

“Why?” he asked, his voice tight.

She looked at him curiously, but went on explaining without comment. “Yes. You know, about how Alice found out about you, and threatened your mother, and you, if she didn’t take you and leave Sunridge. That’s what I meant about Alice being so vicious. When she found out you’d been born, she seemed to lose control.”

Jason shook his head sharply, his gaze flicking from the book to her face. “What are you talking about?”

“Did you miss this part?” She pointed at the last page of writing. “Here, where it says your mother found you outside the apartment one day, and there was a man watching you, a man she’d seen with Alice before.”

“The bus stop,” he murmured, stunned as she mentioned the day he had remembered so vividly . . . was it just today? Yesterday, he thought vaguely. It had to be after midnight. God, he couldn’t think. “There was a man there . . .”

“Yes, it says so, right here.” She gestured at the page again.

He stared at the book. Then he looked at her face. There was no sign she was lying, no sign that she was anything but puzzled by his reaction. Jason’s heart began to slam in his chest.

“What else does it say?” His voice was taut and hoarse.

She looked mystified, but after a moment glanced down and said, “Just that she was frightened, frightened that Alice truly would harm you. So she took you and left for Los Angeles that same week.” Her head came up again. “Jason, are you all right?”

He ignored her concern, not wanting to hear about what must be showing in his face. He reached for the book.

“Let me see it.”

His voice was still harsh, and she surrendered it to him without protest.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look . . . pale.”

He stared down at the stylized writing. It was there, amid the simple timetable of events that no one should have been able to put together. It was just as she’d said. The story of Alice’s threats, of his mother’s fear, and their late-night escape from Sunridge. Just as it had happened. Even the explanation of how Alice had discovered in one of her spying forays into Aaron’s personal papers that five years prior he had paid the hospital bills for one Elizabeth West, who delivered a baby boy on October twenty-seventh. It was all there.

“My God, Jason, what is it?”

Kendall sounded distressed. And when at last he managed to look up at her, he saw that she looked more than concerned, she looked alarmed. Twice he tried to speak and failed. When he finally got the words out, they came brokenly, an echo of what he was feeling.

“I . . . this wasn’t there . . . when I read it. It only showed . . . the dates we moved. It never said why . . .”

Kendall stared at him. And he suddenly understood what it had been like for her to go up in the face of his disbelief. She looked at the book, then back at his face. He turned the book around and jabbed a desperate finger at the last page.

“Kendall,” he said urgently. “It wasn’t there. None of this was there. None of this stuff about Alice.”

“Are you saying,” she asked slowly, “that when you read this back in the room, these words weren’t there? That it ended”—she reached out and flipped a page backward—“back here?”

He nodded, feeling an odd numbness overtaking him as he stared at the page her finger rested upon. He couldn’t believe she’d done it. She hadn’t had time. But it was there. And she looked as bewildered as he felt.

“It was blank,” he whispered. “Right after that line. I swear it.”

Kendall stared at him, her eyes wide with wonder. “I believe you,” she said softly.

He dropped the book, heedless of how it fell to the floor, as if it had burned his fingers. He stared at it, very much afraid it had seared his soul.

“IT’S COLD OUT here,” the man with the barren eyes and wispy, pale blond hair complained as he sat on the handiest gravestone. He looked down at one sleeve of his dark jacket, frowned, and plucked at something. “And why did we have to meet so damned early in the morning? It’s barely after dawn.”

“I’m almost twice your age,” Alice Hawk said unsympathetically. “If I can stand it, you can.”

It gave her a perverse sort of pleasure to do this here, beside Aaron’s fresh grave. This was the final payback, and it was fitting that it should be arranged here.

It was a gloomy, dismal day, a major snowstorm was in the forecast for the coming week, and the wind that blew up the small valley to whirl around the cemetery seemed exceptionally chilly today. It bit into her bones despite her heavy coat, but she hid all signs of discomfort, knowing with some primal instinct she didn’t question that to show weakness to this man could be dangerous.

The man held up what appeared to be a pale blond hair from his sleeve, apparently one of his own, and frowned again. He flicked his fingers to discard it, then looked at her assessingly. He grinned, a mirthless contortion of his thin mouth that spoke more of cruelty than pleasure. Or of a man who got the latter out of the former.

“You always were a tough old bat,” he said with an admiration that could have been real.

“I still am,” Alice answered, the faintest hint of warning in her voice.

He had been a twenty-year-old punk, cocky and arrogant, when she’d first met him. She’d overheard him mentioned then as a ruthless kid who didn’t much care how he earned his money as long as it was enough to keep him in the lifestyle he aspired to. It had been ludicrously easy for her to convince him her plan would be mutually beneficial to them both, and he’d had the shrewdness to take her money—and her assurance of retribution if he ever talked—very seriously. He’d done the job neatly, without incriminating evidence left behind, and had kept his mouth shut as promised. For twenty years.

She’d had someone watch him, for a while, long enough to satisfy herself that he wouldn’t be foolish enough to attempt some kind of blackmail. But instead, he’d used her money and the little task he’d done for her to build a profitable career out of handling messy little problems for people who needed the guarantee of discretion.

In a way, she really was responsible for him, she thought, with a twisted sort of pride. Whether that actually had anything to do with his quick response when she had contacted him after this time, she didn’t know. It didn’t matter. He was here, that was what counted, and if necessary he would do what had to be done, when it had to be done. She could relax; everything would be all right, as long as she had this last line of defense. And in the meantime, he would be useful in hurrying things along.

She studied him for a moment. In the twenty years since she’d first used him, he’d changed very little. He was a bit heavier, and his hair was thinning, but his eyes were still the barren, lifeless things they’d been at twenty.

And he was still the only person she’d ever met who made her genuinely, thoroughly nervous. He was worse than a restless tiger on a thin leash; he was that tiger with that leash already chewed halfway through. She would use his nerveless, emotionless expertise, but she would never, ever turn her back on him.

He was exactly what she needed now.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Things have been going pretty smoothly for you since I took care of that little problem,” he asserted.

Smoothly. She quashed an acid retort. Smooth was hardly the word she would use for her life in the past twenty years. She had had to fight every day of that time. She had known the gamble she was taking when she’d hired him the first time. She had known that were Aaron to find out, it could well be the last straw, the one thing that would break her hold on him. She’d lived in fear of that for years. But he hadn’t found out.

And she’d had the pleasure of knowing she’d taken the heart out of the man who had refused to give it to her.

“So,” he said, “what is it this time?”

“The end,” she said flatly.

“The end?”

“Of something that never should have happened. That should have ended a long time ago.”

He looked at her with those inert eyes that had at first made her think he wasn’t very bright, but that she had soon learned were merely the outward sign of his inward amoral nature. He was ruled by no law but his own unyielding, egocentric one. It was what made him good at what he did. And unswayable in intent; right and wrong were merely words to him, and his targets just that and nothing more, rousing no more emotion in him than any inanimate object.

Suddenly he grinned at her again, that same twisting of his lips as before. “Something that should have ended twenty years ago, maybe?” he suggested.

She hesitated, then decided it would be wise to give him his due.

“Exactly,” she said. She reached into her bag and pulled out a manila envelope. “Here are photographs of the two people I’m concerned about. And what information I have.”

He took it without looking at the contents, without ever looking away from her face. He waited, silently. She wondered if the silence was some kind of power play, the kind she had learned early on from watching her father, then Aaron over the years. For a moment she weighed the possible cost of giving in to him, the chances he would think her afraid to play the game with him.

She smiled at him, a chilly, superior smile that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, and that she was willing to concede on this small point because she was still, ultimately, in charge. She’d come to enjoy this kind of encounter, she realized. Having a dangerous man like this at her beck and call was simply another form of exercising her power. The more powerful the man who had to come to heel at her command, the greater her enjoyment.

She had never quite managed to bring Aaron completely to heel. But she would settle for destroying his son.

“Are you ready for your instructions?” she asked.

He smiled back at her, allowing her the superiority as she had allowed him the power play. They understood each other, Alice thought.

Yes, he was just what she needed.

Chapter Ten

THE TAP ON THE door brought Kendall out of a light doze. She felt disoriented, looking around the motel room groggily. The grayish light of early morning was seeping in from behind the customary blackout curtains. She moved gingerly, stiff from having fallen asleep in the chair, her head on the table, pillowed by her arms.

She shook her head to clear it. And became instantly aware of the sound of Jason West’s steady breathing. She glanced at the bed, able to make out only the long, lean shape of him in the dim light.

He’d looked so worn out last night, and she could guess the kind of emotional toll the past few hours must have taken on him, even if he refused to acknowledge it. When they’d at last come back here, and he’d finally admitted how long he’d been up, with only four hours of sleep, she’d made him lie down. Or rather, she suspected, he’d let her convince him, no doubt only because he was too exhausted to argue. And despite the mystery, despite the unanswered questions, he’d tugged off his sweater and boots, toppled over, and gone quickly, if restlessly, to sleep.

The tap on the door came again, and her head cleared a little more. She got up from the chair and went to peer through the peephole. The sight of George Alton’s round, comfortably familiar face, made rounder by the fish-eye effect of the peephole, eased her nerves a little. As quietly as she could, she unlatched the locks on the door and edged it open enough so she could slip outside without waking Jason.

“Are you all right?” Alton said, glancing into the room in the moment before she closed the door, stopping just short of the lock snapping so she could get back in.

“I’m fine.”

“I swung by here on my way to the office and saw that car here, next to yours. It looked like the one West had rented, so I stopped. It is the same car. The plate matches.”

She nodded. “He came back late last night. He missed his plane.”

Alton swore softly. “Damn it. I should have stuck with him. I followed him out to the airport, watched him check in his car and go into the terminal. I figured he was on his way, so I came back to town. He must have walked right back out and gotten the same car back.”

“It’s all right, George.”

“Why didn’t he just take another flight last night? Why did he come back here? Why didn’t he stay out near the airport, for a flight this morning? Did he bother you? Is he in the next room or—”

She held up her hand to stop the flow of questions. She could answer them all, but she knew that for all his amiable disposition, Alton was a man very much grounded in reality. He’d be no more likely to believe in the appearance of the Hawk family history than Jason had, and she didn’t have the energy to go through that again.

“He didn’t bother me, George.”

At least not the way you mean,
she amended silently, and somewhat embarrassedly; she figured “bother” was a good enough word for the strange effect Jason had on her.

“And he’s not next door,” she added, nodding at the door behind her. “He’s in there.”

“What?” Alton said, clearly startled.

“Asleep. He was exhausted,” she explained. “He’d been up for nearly forty hours, and only slept here for four hours before the funeral. I couldn’t very well kick him out when he was dead on his feet, practically falling over.”

Alton didn’t look happy. “I’ll stay until he wakes up, then. And gets out of here.”

Kendall shook her head. “That’s not necessary.”

Alton looked at her much as Aaron sometimes had, when she’d come in the morning after one of her rare dates. Since her father had died when she was so young, it had taken her a long time to recognize it as a sort of fatherly concern. It touched her, but still she stifled a sigh. She was thirty-three years old, yet so many men seemed to feel compelled to treat her as if she were a child who needed protection, simply because she was small and looked younger than her age.

Stop it,
she chastised herself inwardly.
You should be glad someone cares at all.
She smiled, reaching out to pat Alton’s arm appreciatively, tried to reassure him.

“Thank you, George. But really, believe me, he has a lot more on his mind than . . . bothering me. It would be better if you left. We made some progress last night, and I don’t want to lose that.”

“He actually listened to you?”

“A little,” she said carefully, knowing full well it had been the mysterious book that had gotten Jason’s attention so undividedly, not any power of persuasion on her part. “I think he’ll really listen today, after he’s had some sleep. I’ll be fine.”

Alton didn’t look happy, but he finally agreed. And again Kendall was touched by his obvious concern; it was something she’d had little of in her life. She knew Alton had grown children of his own, and she felt a pang she hadn’t experienced in a long time, a wish that she had had her own father a little longer. He would have been an honest, caring man like this, she thought. She knew he would have.

“If you’re sure,” he said doubtfully.

She nodded. “I think he’ll listen,” she repeated.

She was certain he would; he’d been too agitated over the extraordinary happenings with the book not to. Not that he didn’t have reason to be agitated, what with the contents changing practically before their eyes—

“George, wait,” she said in the instant he turned to go. He stopped and turned back to her.

She had earlier decided not to do this, not without consulting Jason, but what had appeared in the book last night had changed her mind. If the events detailed there were true, and Alice had threatened Jason’s mother, if she had stooped so low as to threaten a small child, then her threat to frame Jason and herself was just the latest in a pattern. A pattern someone else should know about.

Quickly she told the detective what had happened in her meeting with Alice and Darren Whitewood. When she’d finished, he whistled, long and low.

“She’s going for all the marbles, isn’t she?”

Kendall nodded. “I just wanted someone else to know.” She didn’t say “just in case,” but she knew Alton knew it as well as she did.

“You want me to talk to some people on the force?”

Kendall shook her head. “Not yet. She hasn’t really done anything, just . . . threatened.”

“And bought a lawyer. You want me to start looking into it? Maybe check out this Whitewood character, see who these contacts he’s bragging about might be?”

She thought about it for a moment, then shook her head. “Keep going on doing what you’re doing. I don’t think they’ll do anything until they know for sure they have to. And I need to know about Jason first. How to get him to accede to what Aaron wanted.”

“You think he will?”

“I don’t know. I only know I have to try.”

“And if he won’t?”

“Then I’ll do it myself.” She reached for the door, which seemed to have slipped open a little.

“And bring Alice down on you? She’ll carry out that threat, you know.”

“I have no choice,” she said simply. “It’s Aaron’s last wish that Jason have this inheritance.”

“You know he never would have wanted you to risk going to jail.”

She smiled wryly. “I’m under no illusions about Aaron, George. No, he wouldn’t have wanted me in jail, but he wanted this more. Jason is his son.”

“I think you underestimate Aaron’s feelings for you.” Alton jerked a thumb toward the door. “That may be his son in there, but you were practically a daughter to him. I knew Aaron for a long time, and he never worried about anyone the way he did about you.”

“Especially not his son.”

Kendall smothered a startled yelp and spun around at the sound of the deep, sleep-husky voice from behind and above her. The door obviously hadn’t slipped open by itself, and she tried to remember when she’d noticed it, how much Jason might have heard. And tried not to think about the havoc that throaty voice had caused in her.

“So,” Alton said, looking Jason up and down, “you’re the young Hawk.”

Kendall darted a glance at Alton, thinking she’d have to appease Jason, knowing how he reacted to being called by his father’s name. But when she looked back at Jason, and really saw him this time, her breath caught in her throat and all words escaped her.

He looked just like he had sounded: slightly rumpled and tousle-haired, and sleepily sexy. His shirt buttons had worked loose in his restless slumber, and the fabric was gaping open, baring an unsettling amount of muscular chest and belly to her. She had to force herself to look away, to raise her eyes to his face.

There was nothing sleepily sexy about his eyes. They were fixed on George Alton, and they were as coolly assessing as Kendall had ever seen them. But to her surprise, he didn’t react to Alton’s use of the name. Nor to Alton’s obvious knowledge of who he was.

“So,” he said, mimicking Alton’s tone perfectly, “who—and what—are you?”

Kendall tensed, but Alton handled it smoothly.

“I’m a friend of Kendall’s. I saw her car here and stopped to see if she was all right.” His eyes flicked over Jason once more, seeming to linger for a moment on the unbuttoned shirt. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

Jason’s mouth quirked. “Worried about her virtue?”

“Not unless you’re a lot dumber than you look.”

Jason didn’t react at all to the jab. He just stood there, watching Alton steadily, unflinching. After a moment the older man chuckled.

“Damn. You really are a chip off the old block of ice, aren’t you?”

“So I’ve been told.”

Jason’s tone was dry rather than sharp, and Kendall wondered if it was a sign he was perhaps beginning to accept his heritage. More likely, she told herself firmly, it just meant he still hadn’t had enough sleep.

Alton gave Kendall a final glance before saying, “I’ll be on my way, then.”

Kendall nodded, reassuring the man without speaking that she was in no danger from Jason. At least, not the kind of danger he was thinking of. The only danger she was in when it came to Jason West seemed to stem from her own seemingly irrepressible imagination.

She wondered, as she watched Alton give them a final glance before driving away, if the strangeness of this whole thing with the mysterious Hawk book was affecting her, making her react in a way her unruffled composure and level head never would have allowed before.

“Who is he really?”

She turned back at Jason’s words, to see him leaning with one shoulder propped against the doorjamb, his arms crossed in front of him. His stance thankfully hid that heart-accelerating view of his chest, and the ridged, flat abdomen that made her want to touch to see if it was truly as solidly muscled as it appeared—but somehow he was having the same effect on her as before. The same effect he’d had on her when she’d sat in the chair he’d been using, watching him sleep. Watching the dark, thick semicircles of his lashes, so long they rested against his cheeks, watching the slight relaxation of his mouth, allowing her for the first time to recognize the sensual fullness of his lips.

She had wanted to lie down beside him, to soothe away the lines of strain from his brow, to simply hold him until he slept quietly, without that restive tossing and turning. She had wanted to smooth his hair back from his forehead, to run her fingers through the dark thickness of it. She had wanted to kiss his temple, his cheek, his mouth.

She had wanted to do things that utterly astonished her with both their unexpectedness and their unfamiliarity. Things that made her blood heat and her heart pound even now, when he was looking at her with that cool detachment she’d come to know so well.

With an effort—enough of an effort to embarrass her with her own foolishness—she made herself remember what he’d asked her.

“George Alton is . . . what he said. A friend.”

It was true. More than she’d realized until the past couple of days. It just wasn’t all of the truth.

Jason just looked at her. The way Aaron looked at someone he didn’t believe. The way Jason had been looking at her since she’d first seen him at the cemetery.

And she’d had enough. She straightened her shoulders and said with dignity, “He was a friend of Aaron’s for years. And now he seems to be looking out for me.”

“Did the old man ask him to?”

Startled by the idea, she considered it. “I . . . don’t know. I never . . . why would he?”

“Seems logical,” Jason said. He gestured in the direction Alton had gone. “According to him, you were practically the old man’s daughter.”

A fierce, swamping emotion flooded her, one she’d been experiencing off and on since the day Aaron had first told her he had a son he’d never known. It was guilt, that most crippling of emotions, and no matter how often she told herself it wasn’t her fault, that she had had nothing to do with Aaron’s choices, she still felt it.

“I’m so sorry, Jason,” she whispered.

He blinked, apparently startled. Then, as usual, his expression settled into one of wary suspicion. “Sorry about what?”

“That I was here, and you weren’t. That I had Aaron’s help and support when you didn’t. That he spent so much time, gave me so many chances, and that he . . . cared for me, when it should have all gone to you.”

For an instant she saw something flicker in his eyes, some hesitation that she’d never seen there before. But it was gone before she could put a name to it, to be replaced with his usual mocking flippancy.

“Very nice, Kendall. Touching. Generous. If I were even the tiniest bit of a fool, I might buy it. But I assure you, I’m not.”

“No,” she said on an exhalation, weary of the fight, “I’m sure you’re not. You’re too much your father’s son for that.”

She pushed past him back into the room, wishing right now for nothing more than that he would go away and let her sleep for about a week. Hopefully she would then wake up recovered from whatever lunacy had seized her, making her look at him as she had while he slept, imagining a softness that wasn’t there, a need for comfort he would scorn, and a pain he would no doubt deny to the death. But the memory of his face when he’d talked of his mother, about stealing a car to save her a long walk in freezing rain, had settled somewhere in a corner of her mind and refused to leave.