Hawk (A Stepbrother Romance #3)

Hawk (A Stepbrother Romance #3)

by Abigail Graham





Hawk





Now





I can see her, standing in the woods. The light is fading as the sun heads for night and it throws golden rays between the trees and dapples the ground with long shadows. Alex stands with one foot up on a rock, her scuffed hiking boot claiming her territory as she surveys the hillside spreading out in front of us. In mid-summer, her skin is a golden honey color from tanning, except for hints of ghostly pale tan-lines around the bottoms of her Daisy Dukes and her arms where her t-shirt sleeves ride up. Her thick honey brown hair hangs loose to the shoulders and she looks back at me and smiles. I never knew her to wear makeup or need it, or wear any scent besides deodorant.

She stinks, she's been sweating like a pig for hours while we hike the trail through the game lands. I've never smelled anything sweeter.

Then my eyes open and I'm back on the bus.

Four years.

Sometimes I feel like I've been alive forever, like it's been so long since I left home that my bones have turned to stone. I don't feel like I'm twenty-two years old. More like twenty-two going on fifty. Sitting at the back of the bus, watching the world slide by. It's like I've been asleep, trapped in a nightmare and now I'm waking up, but the dream still has its hooks in me, pulling me back under into the dark place just over my shoulder. Here I sit on a stinking seat, a duffel bag containing all my worldly goods at my feet. A man on a mission.

The bus rumbles to a stop, pitching me forward in my seat. The brakes chuff and the door opens. I'm the only one to rise and descend the steps. I take three strides onto the sidewalk and the doors snap shut behind me and the great beast rolls off with a snort of black smoke and a belch of sulfur stink. How's my driving? Call this number. The bus rolls away and leaves me standing as a stranger in a strange land. I know where I am, I've stood in this spot before, but everything is different and everything is the same.

Up ahead there's a motel that was always there. Everybody used to call it the Jack Shack; it was Jack's Motor Lodge and now Jack must have sold it or he's dead, because it's a chain now. Next to that is a gas station that didn't used to be there and across the street is a Wal-Mart and a shopping center I don't recognize. In the distance I see two red lights blinking in sequence. That would be the new bridge, built to replace the one that collapsed when I was sixteen. Every time they light up they bruise the cloud cover, turning the gray a hazy red.

It's going to storm tonight and it's going to be a bad one.

The motel office is plain, smells vaguely of cleaning chemicals and the clerk is behind a panel of grimy bulletproof glass. Tobacco smoke slithers on the inside, leaving pale brown trails. The clerk stubs a cigarette out as I walk inside and shuffles up to the counter, waving away the smoke as if I'm not going to notice. I don't make any comment about that.

"Need a room?" he says.

I nod and he furrows big beetley eyebrows and slides a form through an opening in the glass. I fill out the form quickly. Forty-six bucks a night feels like a rip-off for this place. He wants to run my credit card for damages, and stares at me the whole time. I know why.

I'm six foot one and I weigh two hundred and forty pounds, all muscle. He can't see all of it because I'm wearing a shirt, but I have tattoos covering most of my upper body. Chains and thorny vines weave around the arm and the V-neck of my shirt exposes the eye of the hawk spreading its wings across my chest. His eyes focus for an instant on the outline of my dog tags under my shirt and he relaxes, but not completely. After the credit card machine makes a little noise, he folds copies of the papers and hands them to me with a key on a plastic fob.

Good, now I have a place to sleep while I make plans to kill my father.

I step out, twirling the key. The first peal of distant thunder rumbles as I walk along under the overhang to Room 26. The door sticks a little and the inside smells like moth balls. The air conditioner rattles like a rock crusher and after half a minute it doesn't feel cold on my hands.

There's a bed and a toilet. It'll do.

I drop my bag on one bed -for some reason, they gave me two twins-and head to shower off the grime of travel. I don't have much to my name, just a few changes of clothes and a second, worn pair of boots. I banked as much of my pay as I can, lived like a monk. No booze, no bars, no strip clubs, no whores. Eat, sleep, do my duty. Every day unless they forced me to go on leave.

Waiting, biding my time.

Showered up and changed into my other set of clothes, I jaywalk across the highway to the strip mall and head into the Wal-Mart, find the cheapest clothes that will fit, some packaged food and other random sundries, endure the stares of the checkout girl and head back over to the motel. I sit on a folding metal chair and twirl my keys as my new wardrobe turns in the washing machine.

My legs quiver, and my hands keep making fists. It takes every ounce of concentration I have not to just get up and head into town now. I have to see her. I have to make sure she's okay.

Who the f*ck am I kidding? There's no way she's okay.

While I was in the service, my father got married, and along with that comes two new stepsisters.

The oldest, Alexis, is a lot more to me than a stepsister. Was. Is. I don't know. I haven't heard her voice or spoken to her since I left, abruptly. One day I was there and that night I was on my way to Philadelphia with enough cash in my pocket to hole up at the YMCA until it was time for me to ship out to basic training. I had a choice so I picked the Navy. I liked boats.