Wild Hawk (2 page)

“Aaron could always appreciate a healthy hatred. And he’d be the first to admit he’d given you ample cause.”

Jason made an inelegant snorting sound. He backed up a step, and looked her up and down. For a moment Kendall felt as she did after walking into a high-level meeting, when the people present watched with careful nonexpressions as she took a seat at Aaron’s right hand rather than starting to pour coffee or sharpen pencils. But she forced herself not to flinch or draw back from his intent study of her.

“Who are you, Kendall Chase?” he asked at last.

“Your father’s executive assistant.”

“Executive assistant?” The words were followed by a disbelieving laugh. “You’re all of . . . what, twenty-five?”

“I’m thirty-three,” she said carefully. “I’ve had the job since I got out of college.”

Something flickered in his eyes, but she couldn’t tell if it was surprise or amusement.

“And just what exactly did you do as his . . . executive assistant?”

She lifted a brow at him. “I think the title is self-explanatory.”

He laughed again. “Oh, it’s self-explanatory all right. I’ll bet you were . . . indispensable.”

She drew herself up to her full five-foot-two. She knew her size and gender sometimes made people—especially men—tend to belittle both her position and her intellect. She resented it, but hadn’t yet found a way around it other than working harder to prove herself. And occasionally slicing the hapless offender to ribbons with what Aaron had called a whiplash tongue commanded by a razor wit.

“I was your father’s executive assistant for ten years, Mr. . . . West. There wasn’t a move made in or by Hawk Industries that I didn’t know about,” she said. “Aaron trusted me completely.”

“Went a long way with pillow talk, did he?”

For a moment Kendall didn’t understand. When his inference registered, she felt herself pale, then redden as anger flooded her. With an effort, she fought it down, drawing on the control she’d learned in the early years of dealing with Aaron Hawk, who back then could have given even this arrogant son of his lessons in rudeness.

“Now that was an interesting parade of expressions.” Jason sounded mildly amused. “Can’t decide between righteous indignation and insulted fury?”

“What I can’t decide right now,” Kendall said, proud that her voice was steady, “is whether you’re worth all the effort Aaron put into looking for you.”

His amusement vanished. “That’s the third time you’ve said something like that.”

“Pardon me, but it’s at the forefront of my mind, after spending all these months watching Aaron so desperately trying to find you.”

She’d thought his eyes hard before, but they’d been warm in comparison to the icy blue she saw now. “To find me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” he said, in a tone that told her clearly he didn’t believe a word of what she’d said.

“You’re his son,” she said simply.

“And you expect me to believe he gave a damn about that?”

Kendall had to remind herself of her purpose here in order to bite back a sharp reply. She managed an even tone when she said, “I can show you the bills from the investigator he hired, if you like.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt you can. You don’t look stupid enough to say that if you couldn’t back it up.”

She wasn’t quite as successful this time in keeping the snap out of her voice. “Why, thank you. You certainly are a flatterer, aren’t you?”

His mouth quirked. “I’m sure you didn’t reach your position as—what was it again, executive assistant?—by being stupid.” He looked her up and down in an assessing manner that was cool enough to be insulting. “Despite your obvious qualifications.”

“This is about your father and you, Mr. Haw—West,” Kendall said tightly, his exaggerated drawl of her title grating on her. “I would appreciate it if you would keep your assumptions about me out of it.”

“And what makes you think I care one bit about what you would appreciate, Ms. Chase? I’m not the sucker for a pretty face that my
father
apparently was.”

She drew in a breath.
Forgive me, Aaron
, she thought,
but this is really too much
.

“So that’s all your mother was? A pretty face?”

He drew back sharply. He stared at her for a long moment. His face held no expression she could read, but his eyes held more than she could interpret.

“Touché, Ms. Chase,” he said at last. “I think I begin to see why the old bastard kept you around.” Something must have shown in her expression, because he added quickly, “In whatever capacity.”

She wondered why he bothered to ameliorate it, but decided not to pursue it; her feelings were hardly the issue here. Aaron’s final wishes were.

“No matter what you think, Aaron did try to find you. He’d been trying for months.”

“I repeat, why?”

“I told you—”

“And I told you that I don’t believe a word of it. If you’re going to try and convince me that old man had some kind of late in life change of heart, you can forget it. He didn’t even
have
a
heart.”

With an effort, Kendall smothered a small sigh. “So most people think.”

Jason laughed harshly. “I noticed.” He gestured toward the milling people around the graveside. “Every one of them is here because they have to be, probably because that old battle-ax ordered them to come. You can see it in their eyes. There’s not a one who really mourns him.”

Kendall had no answer; it was true and she knew it. She stood staring at the gathered group, knowing each of them probably felt relief, if not actual joy, that the old man who had ruled their lives mostly by intimidation was dead.

“Except you,” Jason added after a moment.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I do mourn him. I knew an Aaron Hawk most people here would deny existed.”

“I’ll bet you did.”

Her head snapped around. He obviously hadn’t abandoned his theory of whom and what she had been to his father. And she’d had enough of it. More than enough.

“Do you insult any woman in a position of some power, or am I just lucky?”

“I never insult a woman who’s earned a position of power, because I know she probably had to work twice as hard as any man to get there.”

“I see. Insinuating, I presume, that I haven’t
earned
my position?”

“Oh, I’m sure you have. One way or another.”

She was known at Hawk Industries for her level head and her even disposition, both having been necessities for dealing with the irascible Aaron Hawk. She’d thought herself prepared for this encounter. But while she’d expected Jason to be difficult, she hadn’t expected him to be worse than his father. And she was rapidly losing her grip on her temper.

“I will say this once, Mr. . . . West”—she drew the name out in the same exaggerated way he had said “executive assistant”—“I worked for your father. My duties were varied and extensive. But at no time did they ever include anything of a sexual nature. Your father loved only one woman in his life. And that woman was your mother.”

A chill swept her at the look that came over his face then. Had Aaron still been alive, even he would have shivered, Kendall thought. She had never in her life seen a man look so grim.

“You may be beautiful, Ms. Chase, but you are also either a fool or a liar. And I don’t suffer either gracefully.”

He turned on his heel then, and never looked back as he walked away.

Chapter Two

“HE’S BEEN USING the name West as you suspected. That should help. All of the other information is the same. And he’s here, now.”

“What?”

The startled query from the private detective Aaron had hired echoed in Kendall’s ear. She understood his surprise. Despite what had seemed to be a genuine effort on her part to remain hidden, and the extreme coldness of the trail, George Alton had managed to methodically trace Elizabeth West’s movements with her son up until her death in a traffic accident in Seattle twenty years ago, news that had devastated Aaron.

And he had discovered that after her dreary, meager funeral, her sixteen-year-old son had literally disappeared. When the county child services agency had gone to their small apartment to pick up the boy, he’d been nowhere to be found. No one had seen him since. He had, quite simply, vanished.

Alton had been unable to find even a thread to follow; he’d had to resort to simply searching out men of the right age, going on the assumption that the boy had stayed in the Seattle area. He had found a couple of Jason Hawks, whom he’d soon eliminated as possibilities, and far too many Jason Wests to check out easily or quickly. No footprint, paper or digital, seemed to match. He’d kept trying, but had honestly told Aaron success was unlikely for a long time. Time Aaron hadn’t had.

“He’s here,” Kendall repeated. “In Sunridge. He showed up at the funeral.”

There was a pause. “If you know where he is, why do you need me?”

“First, I need to know where he’s staying. And then, I want to know who he is.”

Another pause. Kendall waited; Alton, a onetime homicide investigator, was usually a very perceptive man. She knew he had understood her request when he didn’t ask her to explain what she’d meant.

“Where he’s staying should be easy enough to find out, especially if it’s in Sunridge. Who he is could take some time. I’ll get on it. Do you know how he got here? Or where from?”

“Afraid not. But he left the funeral in a dark gray coupe. It looked like a rental from the sticker on the bumper, but I couldn’t see what company.”

“What kind of coupe?”

She thought for a moment, trying to remember. She’d watched Jason West pull off his dark, heavy coat, revealing a black sweater over black jeans and boots, toss the coat into the back seat, and fold his tall, lean frame into the car. She’d been so intent on him, more than a little fascinated by the fluid grace with which he moved, that she hadn’t really noticed the car.

“I’m not sure,” she said at last, regretfully. “Something racy, though.”

“Not a bottom of the rental scale compact, then.”

“No,” she said, “definitely not.”

“Interesting.”

She supposed it was, but she wasn’t exactly sure why at the moment. “Maybe he’s just too big for a compact. He’s over six feet tall, I’d say.” And nicely built, she added silently, with that kind of rangy muscularity that had always appealed to her.

“Maybe. Can you give me more of a description, now that you’ve seen him? It might help.”

She laughed. “Use any picture of Aaron from thirty years ago, pare down the nose to a nice size and shape, and you’ve got it.”

“That much of a resemblance?”

“Yes. There’s no mistaking him.”

“I’ll get to work on it. I assume now that Aaron is gone, you’ll be wanting the report?”

There was nothing in the man’s tone except polite inquiry, but Kendall found herself a bit touchy lately, for reasons she hadn’t yet had time to explore. She had a feeling it was more than simple uncertainty about her position now that Aaron was dead. She felt a jab of pain as she thought the word.
Dead.
That final, irrevocable, and last word. It put an edge in her voice.

“Is there a problem with that, Mr. Alton?”

“Not at all,” the man said easily. “Aaron told me at the beginning that if it came from you, it came from him. I was just checking.”

“Oh.” Kendall felt a bit deflated, and more than a little silly for her reaction. “Thank you. Yes, I want whatever you find out. And I need to know where he’s staying right away. I don’t want him to leave before I have the chance to talk to him again.”

“Again? You’ve already talked to him?”

“Yes. Briefly, at the funeral.”

“But he didn’t tell you where he was staying?”

“Jason West,” Kendall said dryly, “stopped just short of telling me to go straight to hell.”

She heard a chuckle, and could picture the expression she imagined was on Alton’s face. While he had adequate computer investigative skills, he preferred a personal touch when possible. The silver-haired, rather rotund ex-cop looked like everybody’s ideal grandfather, a fact she suspected he used to wheedle information out of people who instinctively trusted his benign face and jovial personality.

“Like father, like son, is that it?”

“Precisely,” Kendall agreed, although she wasn’t sure if the son wasn’t worse than the father had been.

“Usually people cheer up at the mention of that much money.”

“We never got that far.”

“Really? I find that surprising. You could charm a vulture out of his feathers.”

Kendall laughed; Alton was given to absurd flattery couched in down-home observations that invariably made her smile. He was also very observant, and she supposed he had sensed her tension earlier and was trying to ease it.

“Well, that sounds like a very useful knack,” she said. “But Jason West would have to improve his disposition a bit before I’d lump him with the vultures.”

“That bad?”

“Worse,” she said ruefully. “You’d swear Aaron raised him, and then he went bad.”

Alton, who had dealt with Aaron by simply ignoring his explosions of temper, letting the old man run down before he went on as if it had never happened, laughed.

“Well, if anyone can get through to him, you can. You had that old curmudgeon wrapped around your little finger.”

“No one,” she retorted, “ever had Aaron Hawk wrapped around their little finger. I just knew him better than most people.”

And it hadn’t been easy, she thought as she hung up the phone. The man who had been a powerful, charismatic figure as he’d built his fortune had become a set-in-his-ways despot as he’d aged. It had been a long, difficult trek to get from the somewhat starry-eyed girl she’d been, thrilled to get a high-level job right out of college at a place the size of Hawk Industries, to the coolheaded, unflappable woman who took Aaron Hawk’s temper in stride and got results when everyone else had given up on making the old man see reason.

The question was, was she cool-headed and unflappable enough to deal with Aaron Hawk’s son?

She didn’t know. Her complex relationship with Aaron had been built over ten years; she had only a very short time to convince Jason West to listen to her. And he didn’t seem to be in a very receptive mood. He’d laughed, hadn’t he? At a funeral. Out loud, and in front of the entire gathering. Not the act of a man who was sorry or grief-stricken. But then, why would he be? He’d never known Aaron. Had never known even the gruff, quarrelsome man the rest of the world knew, let alone the gentler man she had known, or the man who had become nothing less than repentant in those final months.

Jason West had never seen the softer Aaron, the man who had given an inexperienced girl the chance of a lifetime, the man who had taught her more than all her years of college ever had, the man who had spent hours in the evenings telling her incredible tales, legends of magic and the Hawks through the years, as if the two were inextricably and forever linked. Fanciful legends of his ancestors, and wizards and magic books, that she was half convinced the old man truly believed.

With a sigh, she went back to work. Her desk was cluttered with files, and papers buried her computer keyboard. She felt as if she were swimming madly through a sea infested with unknown threats. And one very large, very well-known shark. Aaron had warned her she’d have to move fast, because it wouldn’t take long for Alice to begin circling.

“She won’t even wait until I’m cold, girl, so don’t you either,” he’d said the day he’d begun to dictate to her the lengthy and involved list of things he wanted her to do when the inevitable happened.

By that time she knew he was truly dying, and hadn’t wasted any breath on efforts to deny it. And if he suspected that at night she wept in her room, he never let on. She knew he wouldn’t have welcomed her tears. Aaron Hawk had never had time for such soft emotions as grief and pain—or love—in his life. Except for once, years ago, in the affair that had resulted in his son.

She brushed at her eyes; crying was not going to get all of this done. But she found she missed the temperamental old man more than she would have thought possible. Aaron might have been considered a bullheaded, intractable tyrant by many, but he’d always been fair to her. More than fair on occasion, she thought. There had been times when Aaron had been nothing less than kind and generous to her, although few would believe it.

Especially Jason West.

He would never believe the Aaron she’d known, the Aaron who had one day called her into his office, telling her to put on the voice mail and close the door after her. She’d known he hadn’t been feeling well, knew he’d been seeing several doctors in the past few months, fearing a recurrence of the cancer that had cost him a lung two decades ago, so she’d been appalled but not shocked by his first announcement.

“I’m dying,” he’d said in his typical blunt manner. Then, before she could even react, he had gone on to add the words that had startled her into not being able to react at all. “I only have a few months. I have to find my son before then.”

She’d gaped at him. “Your son? You have a son?”

He’d given her the patented Hawk glare, which had lost its power to intimidate her the day she’d discovered the softness at the core of this ill-tempered man who had become so much more to her than a boss.

“You don’t know everything there is to know about me, girl, even though you think you do. This goes at the top of that list I gave you. Nothing else matters as much as finding that boy. Nothing.”

She had stared at him for a long moment, her only coherent thought being that he’d done it this way on purpose, delivered the news of his impending death quickly, then followed it up with what he knew would be a shock that would take her mind off of that news before she could react with any kind of unwelcome emotion.

Then a series of things had clicked in her mind, like the last number of a combination causing the lock’s tumblers to fall into place. All the times when she’d come upon him sitting silently in his office long after the rest of the staff had gone home, looking at a photograph he always hid the moment she came in, all the times when she’d seen him searching crowds with eyes that had lost none of their quickness with age, when she’d seen him look sharply at a blond woman on the street, or in a restaurant, or a hotel . . . and what she had finally realized was a ritual on October twenty-seventh every year.

“The yellow roses,” she had whispered.

Aaron had stared at her as if stunned. “I swear, girl,” he’d muttered at last, “you’re as fey as that crazy grandmother of mine was.”

She wished it were true, she thought now. She could use some supernatural foresight. Or maybe a little magical help, out of one of Aaron’s Hawk family legends. Help to get this list of Aaron’s completed. To keep Alice at bay until she did. To figure out what she was going to do with her life now that Aaron was gone.

But she had a feeling she was going to need magic the most to deal with Aaron’s son.

“HE’S HERE.”

“Who’s here?”

Idiots,
Alice Hawk thought. She was surrounded by them. And this lawyer was no different. “Aaron’s bastard,” she snapped.

“Oh?”

Alice’s grip tightened on the telephone receiver. She was paying Whitewood obscene amounts of money, and all she got was “Oh?” She reined in her fury; the man was the best she could do on such short notice.

“You’re certain it’s him?”

“Certain? Of course I’m certain. It was like looking at a young Aaron all over again. The eyes, the hair, the jaw, everything but the nose was Aaron—”

She broke off abruptly, hating herself for the pain that had crept into her voice. She steadied herself and went on.

“We have to move now, quickly.”

“Move? We have the will, and the—”

“I’m not talking about that, you fool. I want him followed. I want to know where he goes, what he does, why he’s here.”

“Wasn’t he here for the funeral?” Whitewood asked, sounding puzzled.

The man was a bigger idiot than she’d thought. “For a man he hasn’t seen in thirty years? If you think he doesn’t have more than that in mind, you’re a fool.”

“You think he’s after something?”

“I know he is. Especially after he talked to that bitch of Aaron’s.”

“Kendall?”

“Yes,
Kendall
,”
Alice spat out, sick of the effect that woman seemed to have on men even as stupid as Whitewood.

“Do you think she told him?”

“I don’t know. They didn’t speak long. But I can’t take any chances. There is far too much at stake.”

There was a pause before the man said hesitantly, “What do you want me to do?”