Hawkins_McCullough’s Jamboree_Erotic Jaguar Shapeshifter Romance

by Kathi S. Barton

  “I’ve been fired.” Jackson asked her what she’d done. “Nothing, you moron. Nothing that you didn’t tell me to do. Christ, he was so calm when he was telling me that we were not going to see one another again. Then they came and told me that I’d been terminated for some after hours conduct. What the hell does that mean?”

  “You don’t think he’s the one that found out about the recorder, do you? Holy Christ, did you happen to get rid of the program before you left?” She told him that she’d not been able to do anything but get her purse. And that had been searched thoroughly. “We’re in deep shit here, Iris. Deeper than I’ve been in before.”

  When he started jabbering again, Hawkins wondered if the man’s cheese had slipped off his cracker. He’d heard that in a movie once and was happy that he’d been able to use it. But Jackson was talking about his contacts and what they were going to say about this. Then he looked at Iris.

  “You should have told him then that you were going to have his baby. At least that could get you some time there enough to destroy anything on your computer.” She said that she’d not ever had sex with him, so she wouldn’t be able to describe anything about the man, so that wouldn’t work either. Someone would be checking that out. “What were you thinking, then, when I came up with this plan? You should have worked harder in getting him in your bed, Iris.”

  Hawk did laugh then. For all their planning and crap, they were about the dumbest people he’d ever encountered. Neither one of them had a clue how to cover their tracks—not to mention, they were about as stealthy as a goose chasing someone across the yard.

  Jackson started pacing the yard. Hawk couldn’t figure out why neither of them seemed inclined to go into the house. But when Iris pulled out her keys and unlocked the door, Jackson followed. Hawk hadn’t realized that it was her home and not Jackson’s. Going to the deck that they’d been standing on, he listened in on their disjointed conversation.

  “I’m going to have to cut corners here. You’ll contribute some money towards things or we’ll both be homeless.” She put her purse on the table and opened the refrigerator. Hawk stood outside the kitchen as she fussed about food and money. Jackson was pacing the open living room now. Hawk watched him over her.

  “I really thought this would work out. That I’d be able to put my man in the office and we’d be all set for the rest of our lives. What am I going to do now? He’ll surely know that I had something to do with the accident.” Iris pointed out, without looking at Jackson, that he hadn’t been in an accident. “Yes, he had been. Don’t you see? He’s playing us. He wants us to ask him about it, and then he’ll know that we had something to do with it.”

  “I had nothing to do with that. I told you when you mentioned the plan that it was too dangerous, that someone might see it, being’s how it was in an open area. And you bringing in the chopper to take care of the mess—well, you have no idea how difficult that was for me to get arranged.” She turned from the still open refrigerator. “I can’t be without a job, Frank. I have obligations and people wanting their money. What am I going to do now?”

  “I don’t know, honey.” Jackson went to Iris and Hawk turned away from their embrace. They were nearly making out. When he heard the gunshot, he turned back to see Jackson dropping Iris to the floor. “You were a burden. I had to do this, honey. I just had to. Don’t you see? You were a weak link in my chain of events.”

  Jackson ran out the front door just as Hawk busted in the back. He might have followed Jackson, but he realized that Iris was still alive. He was sure that she’d not be for long. Her heart rate was slowing even as he tried to save her.

  “He shot me.” Hawk told her to be quiet. She was losing blood. “There is a safe here. You have to get it open.”

  “I’m going to call an ambulance for you. Just hold on.” Iris coughed once, and blood bubbled from her mouth and nose. “Christ. You have to hang on, Iris. You need to.”

  “The safe is under the couch. In the floor.” She told him the combination. “There are things in there that you need. Hawk, you have to bring him down. Promise me that you will.”

  “I’m working on it. Iris come on, you have to hold on for me.” He pulled out his cell phone and dialed emergency. He told the dispatcher who he was, what his rank was, and the address where he was. She asked him what he needed. “A woman has been shot and she’s dying. You have to hurry.”

  After he told her that they were on their way, he held Iris’s hand. But as she grew colder from the loss of blood, her voice was getting lower all the time. Iris told him over and over the combination to the safe and to get the things out of it now.

  Going to the couch, he moved it out of the way and pulled up the carpet. It wasn’t hidden all that well, but he opened it up and was surprised at how large the vault was. When he reached in and pulled out the medium sized suitcase that was there, he saw that there was nothing else. Taking it to the back door, he put it on the porch back there and called to Jon.

  In the five minutes that it took for him to get there, Iris had died. Telling the younger man to take the case to Lauren, he went back to the safe and covered it back up the way it had been. He wasn’t worried that Jon wouldn’t do it; he was more concerned with whether or not he’d be arrested himself as soon as the police got there.

  Hawk was—well, to say that he was armed would have been a gross understatement. He was carrying a gun, and enough other items to take out the entire police force if they were to make a big deal about it. Not that he’d not be able to take care of them without all the weaponry on him, but he didn’t want to think about how he’d have to explain it all to them.

  In addition to his gun, he had three magazines for it, a knife in his boot, and a wire at the top of his boot that was as thin as a hair, but much stronger. A much longer but thinner knife was on his back, attached with a small covering that held his holster in place. The corded bracelet that he had around his wrist was used to garrote should he need it, as well as tie someone up that he’d not killed, which wasn’t often. Hawk had learned the hard way that killing was better than them coming back a second time to take you down.

  Calling out to the only person he knew that could get his ass out of this mess, he told Lauren what was going on, what he’d sent to her, and that the police were on their way. He asked her if she could come down there, work her magic, and get him out of this.

  I don’t know, Hawk. What are you going to give me in exchange for helping you out? I mean, you should owe me something. He growled at her and she laughed. We’re on our way already. Jon brought us the case and I’ve not opened it, because I thought you’d need us first. By the way, you should know that Jamie is with us. And she’s madder than I’ve ever been when things don’t go my way.

  Jamie would be mad, he supposed. He had gotten himself in a pickle, as his dad was fond of saying, and there wasn’t any hope for him to come out of this unscathed. He looked down at the dead woman, and wondered if she was going to make this worth his while in the form of the suitcase. He hoped so—he didn’t want his Jamie to be mad at him.

  When the police arrived first, he was put in cuffs. He had enough blood all over him that it was something that he would have done too. Exercise caution until you figure out who the good guys are. He didn’t say anything to them other than he’d heard her scream and had come to find her on the floor, and that a man he knew, Frank Jackson, had been running from the house.

  Hawk was glad that he’d reached out to Lauren when he had, because now it looked like he might be going to jail. As soon as she and Jamie got there, he could only sit there and marvel at the way the men were bowing and scraping to her. Not to Lauren this time, but to Jamie.

  Christ, Jamie was as bad if not worse than Lauren when she was pissed. But Jamie was so much prettier when she did it. No less caustic, but beautiful all the same. When she grabbed the ear of one of the officers, he thought for sure she was going to rip it off. But she was telling him to uncuff her husband or there
would be hell to pay. They were removed immediately.

  Chapter 7

  Jamie wasn’t in the best of humor. It seemed as if she was pissed off all the time lately. As she paced the big porch, where she’d come to so that she could cool off, she tried hard to pull in her temper. When Hawk joined her, her first instinct was to hit him. And she had an idea where that was coming from, but she didn’t know how to broach the subject with him.

  “You all right?” Jamie nodded, but didn’t dare open her mouth. She was afraid of what would spew out from her lips. “You want to talk about it? Or are you happier just ripping the heads off the people who are only supposed to serve and protect?”

  “I found your books, your journals that you wrote in.” He didn’t say anything, but she could tell that he was upset about it. “I wasn’t searching for them. In fact, I didn’t know about them. But when I was looking for one of your shirts to wear, some of them fell on my head when I was reaching for the one on the shelf.”

  Hawk stared off in the distance and didn’t speak to her. Her heart was ripped up by what she’d read in those books. And the worse part was, where she’d read about her. Not her in particular, but a mate. He was adamant about not having one, and his reasoning was there too. He thought that he was a broken man. And he had wanted to have his head removed before anyone could come along that wanted to be a part of his life.

  Jamie wanted to go to him, to hug him and tell him it was all right. And the longer he sat there, the more she needed to touch him. Stepping forward, she reached for him, but he stood and backed away from her. Jamie felt her heart explode in pain.

  “You shouldn’t have read them. I’m assuming that you read them all.” Jamie nodded at him, not sure that she could speak after having her heart broken like it was. “They’re my feelings, Jamie. You had no right to go through those. They were mine.”

  “I want to help you. I need to.” He shook his head and backed more away from her. Not just physically this time, but she could feel the emotional side of him pulling back as well. “Hawkins, I had no idea that you were going through all that. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I guess I won’t have to now, will I? You’ve gone through all of them, so you know what sort of person I am, what I’ve done. Did it give you nightmares? It does me, every time I close my eyes. When I have a few minutes to call my own, I see them all there, lined up in a neat row with their eyes open.” He moved to the stairs that led out into the yard. “You should leave now. Or I will. You can stay here. I’m not coming back.”

  Jamie sat there for a long time after he disappeared into the woods. He’d been his cat when he’d jumped off the last step to leave her, and it was the first time that she’d ever seen him as one. She thought about what he’d written in one of the books, the part that he was speaking of before leaving her.

  He’d been on a mission to take out a house that was a known home of one of the men that they’d been looking for. Hawk had watched the place for days. Kept track of all the people that came and went from the house. And on the tenth night, ten days without food and only sips of water, he made his way into the house to take the man out.

  As soon as he entered, he’d written in the journal, he knew that there were bodies in the place. The smell was almost more than he could take. But he moved through each room, looking for the man that had been on their list for a long time, his gun at the ready.

  The man was in the last bedroom down the long hall. Hawk didn’t hesitate, but shot him once in the head. The man was dead before he could even lift his own gun to fire back at him. Hawk didn’t put his weapon away until he was sure that the building was cleared of living people. Once he did that, he called in the rest.

  Hawk had been the one that had been called on when there were lives to be taken. He had claimed in his journals that he was cold, a heartless bastard that gave little to no thought to the people that he shot. Nor did he care that they might have children waiting for them to come home. Hawk had labeled himself as a murderer, and Jamie was sure that he believed that too.

  Going into the house, she looked around the bedroom that they had shared. There was nothing here that belonged to her. The man that she’d fallen in love with had taken the only part of the home that she’d wanted. His heart was closed up around himself, and she wasn’t going to be able to breach it.

  The front door was right in front of her. She only had to turn the handle and she’d be gone from him. Crying, she reached for it and turned the knob. Each step she took seemed as if she was losing more and more of herself.

  Jamie walked to town. There wasn’t anyone that she could call on to help her. All the people she knew, they were friends or family of Hawkins. Walking blindly, the tears hurting her badly, she thought of what he’d done after he’d been able to clear the house.

  The bodies, twenty-three of them, had been brought out of the house by Hawkins and the rest of Lauren’s men and lined up. Some of them had been dead longer than the others, but it mattered little. The smell was too much, and several of the people that came to help had gone to the woods to throw up.

  Hawk said that he didn’t speak to anyone for several days, not even his boss, Lauren, when she’d called out to him. It wasn’t that he was sorry for what he’d done, but he did need to think of what he’d seen. Death, it seemed, followed him around a great deal. When he returned to his unit, he didn’t say a word about why he’d left, nor did he mention the assignment again.

  Jamie had even read where he’d had the encounter with Mackenzie. How he’d ordered her to repair his dead friend before he was sent home. Even though his friend had lost a leg and the majority of the other, as well as his left hand and most of his face, he’d ordered her to work on him. He was pissed at her, blamed her for the way his mom had found her little boy—she had been the one that dressed the dead before they were sent home. And Hawkins blamed Mackenzie for that too.

  Then under that it told how he’d made a mistake, that he’d done something unthinkable to a woman that was trying her best to save the men who had a chance to walk out of the place. He’d been cruel to her, caustic even. And when he’d left her the second time, he’d threatened her with nightmares by giving her the picture that he’d taken of his friend’s mom leaning over the box that her son had arrived in.

  He told how it had haunted him, his treatment of the woman. Mackenzie wasn’t his brother’s mate then—he had no idea at the time that Jamie would be his either. But Mackenzie had left the service that next day and he’d lost track of her. Lauren had helped her along with the discharge, because she knew that Mackenzie had been responsible for Hawk being put in irons when he’d hit her.

  Some of the other entries were disjointed. There was a long rant about the former President Joe Irwin and his buddy, Garth Wilson. He talked about taking them out someplace and making them suffer. To suffer in ways that no one would ever find their bodies again. He described, in great detail, what he’d have done to them given the chance. But he hadn’t.

  There were entries about his family, his mom and dad mostly. About his brothers finding their mates and how he didn’t envy them at all. Having a mate, in his words, was akin to being locked away in a prison cell, and he thought he might prefer that over having someone around all the time.

  When she got to the town’s limit she moved to the hotel, only to remember at the last minute that she had no money of her own. But she did have his credit cards. Making a turn on the street corner, she headed to the bank. She would finish this once and for all.

  “I’m sorry, miss, but I don’t understand what it is you wish me to do.” She told him, again, to take the cards. “But Hawk put you on his account and had these made for you. Is there something wrong with them? I assure you that Mr. McCullough has a great deal of money in the account if you’re worried about that.”

  “I’m not worried about his money.” She just wanted him to take them so that she could go and mend her broken heart. “Just take the fucking cards and
return them to him. Or one of his family members. I don’t need them.”

  Tossing them on his desk, she went out into the street again. It was raining now, a perfect way to end her day, she thought. Walking again, soaked to the skin, Jamie thought about nothing but the pain in her heart and soul. For as surely as he didn’t want her around, Jamie wanted to be with him more than ever.

  It was dark when she came upon the barn. There weren’t any animals in it, not even any kind of straw or hay. There was a ladder that she was tempted to go up and throw herself off of, but that would be stupid. And one thing she wasn’t was stupid. Going into one of the cleaner stalls, she sat in the corner with her back to the door that had let her in.

  She felt the touch of someone trying to talk to her. Jamie had just learned how to block them out, not let them breach her mind. Rolling to her side, she put out her hand and started a small fire, just enough to keep her warm while she rested.

  When she startled awake, she found Jon sharing the stall with her. He looked as if he’d been there all the time she’d been resting, and he put out a backpack, which she refused.

  “What are you doing here? I’m sure that you have things that need your attention.” He took the backpack and opened it. He began pulling out containers of what looked like sandwiches, crackers, and cheese. Then he handed her a bottle of water. “I’m not hungry. Please go away.”

  “No one knows that I’m here.” She felt tears, wasted tears, fill her eyes. “Hawkins is looking for you.”

  “I’m sure that he wishes to finish killing me off, at least my heart. Go away, Jon. I don’t want to have to hurt you.” He just smiled at her. She knew that if it came to it, he’d be the winner every time. “I haven’t taken anything of his, nor will I repeat anything that I read. You can tell him that if you wish. I don’t care.”