Summer Hawk

by Peggy Webb

  “I’m such a fraud, Peg.”

  “You are not, and I say that without even knowing what in the devil you’re talking about. What are you talking about, Callie?”

  “Joseph.”

  Peg sighed. “At last.” She reached across the table and covered Callie’s hand. “Honey, I knew you’d have to let your feelings out sometime. It’s not good to keep them all bottled up the way you have. You should know that.”

  “I do. Until now, I didn’t even know what I was keeping bottled up. Not really.”

  Peg took a bite of her porterhouse steak, waiting. Patience was not her strong suit, and she didn’t wait to take a second bite.

  “Tell me, for goodness sake. All this uncertainty is bad for my digestion.”

  “Do you remember when we first went to Houston?”

  “Good lord, Callie, are you in one of your musing moods? Darn it, I’m ready for the nitty-gritty.”

  Callie ignored her friend’s impatience. “Do you remember how it was, Peg, with me so bulldog determined to hate Joseph?”

  “Yes, but I can’t say I remember why.”

  “Because he denies his Sioux heritage.”

  “Shoot, who cares? Sorry, Callie. Obviously you do, and I can understand that, I really can.”

  “Well, I can’t. Not anymore.”

  Callie picked at her salad. Vivid memories of Joseph riding into her camp on Thunderbolt played in her mind, and she smiled.

  “Can you believe it?” Callie whispered.

  “Believe what? My lord, you’re talking in riddles. That’s not like you.”

  “I guess I’m not myself lately. More like somebody waking up from a dream.”

  “A good one or a bad one?”

  “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that my stubbornness gave me tunnel vision.” Callie could see everything so plainly now. “I was so pigheaded I didn’t even see the truth.”

  Peg shoved her porterhouse steak aside. “For Pete’s sake, tell me what you’re talking about before I lose interest in dessert, too.”

  “Don’t you see, Peg? It doesn’t matter whether Joseph is Sioux or Italian or Chinese. I love him.”

  Peg smiled. “Strange as this may seem, Callie, you didn’t invent that concept. That’s what love is, unconditional acceptance.”

  “I’ve been such a stubborn fool.”

  Callie wanted to leap from her seat, race to the hotel and find Joseph. She wanted to blurt out her discovery to him, and…then what? Just because she’d changed her mind, that didn’t mean Joseph had changed his.

  “Now, what?” Peg said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look like somebody’s just turned out your lights.” Peg leaned across the table, speaking urgently. “You listen to me, Callie Red Cloud. You’re one of the smartest people I know. Maybe too smart for your own good, sometimes. Don’t you dare let that mind of yours create obstacles that aren’t there. If you love Joseph, then go for it.”

  “I can’t,” Callie whispered. “Oh, Peg, don’t you see? Joseph made himself very plain from the beginning. After what happened to his wife, he will never get involved with another virologist.”

  “So what’s the problem? You’ve already quit your job at the center. Tell him, Callie.”

  “You mean try to win him by offering my brand-new not-so-dangerous position up as a bribe? No thanks.”

  “I see what you mean. I guess you haven’t told him about Ricky, either.”

  “No. And I don’t intend to. It’s like you said, Peg. Love has to be unconditional.”

  “Don’t worry, Callie. I won’t spill the beans.”

  “Thanks. I didn’t think you would.”

  The waitress came with the dessert menu. “Can we tempt you two with something sweet?”

  Peg latched onto her menu. “I can always be tempted with something sweet. How about it, Callie? After all that angst, I think a little self-indulgence is called for.”

  Callie had no appetite, but why throw a wet blanket on Peg’s party?

  “I’ll have the double chocolate brownie with whipped cream and cherries,” she said.

  “Way to go, girlfriend!”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Joseph walked along the side of the reflecting pool not really knowing where he was headed until he saw the wall. Black granite. Stretching far enough to carry the names of thousands who gave their lives for their country. Cool to the touch, its surface mirroring the gifts of flowers and letters laid at the base and the people who had brought them.

  The Vietnam Memorial.

  Joseph stood at a distance, watching. People who had been chattering and laughing as they viewed the Lincoln Memorial suddenly became somber. Men took off their caps and bowed their heads. Women held their hands over their hearts, trying to hold back the hurt. Grown children cried.

  Such was the power of the wall. Joseph had heard about the effect it had on people, but he’d never expected to be there to see it. Had struggled against being there.

  But finally, the struggle was over. The wall loomed before him, beckoning, and he could no longer deny the tug at his heart.

  He approached briskly, intending to take a quick walk-through, not even looking at the names. But the closer he came, the more his steps slowed. Names leaped at him from the stone, and a sense of awe stole over him.

  He saw himself reflected in the stone, a tall man with cheekbones like knife blades.

  You have your father’s face.

  His mother’s voice echoed through the tunnel of memories. Joseph deliberately turned his face away from the wall. He didn’t want to have his father’s face. He didn’t want to have anything that had belonged to Rocky Swift Hawk, including his name.

  He spun around, intending to hurry away, when the small piping voice of a child stopped him.

  “Was my grandpa a hero?”

  The little boy was about the same age as Ricky, a red-haired freckled-face cherub with fat little hands that traced the name carved in stone.

  “Yes, Herman, your grandpa was a hero. They’re all heroes, the men and women who came back as well as the ones who died.”

  The young woman was wearing black and carrying a bouquet of yellow roses. At her urging the little boy knelt beside his mother as they placed the roses at the foot of the wall below the long heartbreaking list of names.

  Right above the roses Joseph saw it, the name he’d been trying most of his life to avoid. Major Rocky Swift Hawk, USAF. Drawn by a power beyond his control, Joseph stood and stared at the name. Images flashed before his eyes—Rocky standing with the other doctors in front of the field hospital, big and bold and full of laughter, daring the fates; Rocky in front of a rice paddy, squatting beside two raggedy little South Vietnamese girls; Rocky lounging in his bunk, dog tags hanging around his bare chest, photos of Sarah and Joseph pinned to the wall behind him.

  The album where Sarah kept all the photos had sat on a table in the entry hall until Joseph renounced his name. She’d kept other things there, too—the baseball Rocky used to hit the winning run in a high school game, the dog tags that had been sent to her after his death, a silver-framed photo of Rocky in cap and gown, holding his medical diploma high.

  Until Joseph learned the awful truth, he used to stop beside the table every morning on his way to school and touch everything there, everything that had belonged to his father. It was a spiritual ritual, a transfer of power from a great man to the son who would carry on his name.

  Joseph sensed movement as the woman and her child stood up.

  “Mama, look at that man.” The little boy’s piping voice cut through Joseph’s consciousness.

  “Hush, Herman. It’s rude to point.”

  “But Mama…”

  “Hush, Herman.”

  The woman tugged her child away, but their voices drifted back to Joseph on the breeze.

  “Mama, why is that man crying?”

  “Because he lost a hero, too.”

  Joseph
knelt and pressed his face against the wall.

  The seminar, led by the renowned Dr. Claude LeGuen from France’s Pasteur Institute, was called “The Houdinis of the Virus World: How They Jump Species.”

  Claude LeGuen was a mesmerizing speaker, but not nearly as mesmerizing as the woman who sat at the back of the auditorium on Joseph’s left. She was wearing a hat. She and Peg had slid into their seats, flushed and happy, two minutes after Dr. LeGuen took the podium.

  “Virus amplification continues to mystify virologists,” Dr. LeGuen said.

  Callie continued to mystify Joseph. She was different each time he saw her—cool and efficient, warm and accessible, hot and insatiable, polite but distant. She was a multifaceted woman, and every one of them fascinated Joseph.

  Callie bent to whisper to Peg, and the outrageously attractive hat she was wearing hid her face. But not the fine black hair. It slid like a bolt of silk over her shoulder, and Joseph felt the quick hot rush of desire.

  Up front Dr. LeGuen was talking about pathogenic and nonpathogenic filoviruses. Joseph decided that Callie was pathogenic, capable of causing the disease he now suffered, a disease whose symptoms ranged from insomnia to loss of appetite to outright heartbreak.

  What was he going to do about her? About himself? About them?

  His mind only halfway devoted to the speaker, Joseph watched Callie out the corner of his eye. She was by turns attentive, restless, animated and pensive. Was she thinking about him?

  He prayed she was not, then hoped she was. The conference would last a week, long days and even longer nights of knowing that she was in the same city, the same hotel, the same room.

  He had to see her. Alone.

  Dr. LeGuen wound up his lecture to resounding applause, and Joseph began to make his way toward Callie, hoping she didn’t bolt before he got there. She was only three feet from the door.

  Fortunately she got held up in a clot of people. Joseph moved her way as fast as he could, but suddenly a colleague from New York stopped him.

  “Joseph! I see you tore yourself away from that beautiful villa.”

  Sammy Preston clapped Joseph on the shoulder, then blocked his path with l85 pounds of solid muscle. Joseph shifted so he could keep an eye on Callie. Peg was nowhere in sight now, but Callie was still there, head tilted back laughing, surrounded by admirers, every one of them male.

  Joseph wanted to punch them all in the face.

  “So, how are you, my friend?” Sammy asked.

  Murderous. That’s how he was. Trapped in the middle of a crowd in a jealous rage because some other man dared look at Callie with a combination of interest and ill-disguised lust.

  “I’m great, Sammy, and you?”

  Joseph had never known he was such a smooth liar. Of course, before today he’d never had occasion to practice lying.

  One of Callie’s admirers bent close to whisper something in her ear, and his hand came up to rest on Callie’s waist. Joseph balled his hands into fists and rammed them into his pocket.

  “Can’t complain,” Sammy was saying. “Sally and the kids do, though. They say they never see me.” He clapped Joseph on the shoulder. “Lucky you’re not married.”

  Across the way, the man’s lips were so close to Callie’s cheek it looked as if he were kissing her.

  “Will you excuse me, Sammy? I have pressing business to take care of.”

  Callie could have killed Peg for going off and leaving her stranded. She’d seen him coming the minute the seminar was over, a virologist from Kansas who had followed her like a lapdog at every one of these annual seminars.

  “Don’t look now,” she told Peg, “but here comes Mr. Touchy Feely.”

  “Robert Clayton? I think he’s kind of cute.” Peg scrambled toward the door. “Ta ta, see you later.”

  “Peg, come back here.”

  “I’m doing this for your own good, Callie.”

  That had been Peg’s parting shot, but Callie failed to see the what good it was doing her to be pawed by Robert Clayton. Besides that, he had an irritating way of standing too close and spraying her ear when he talked. And talked. And talked.

  Everybody else was laughing, so Callie joined in, though she had no idea what the man had said for she’d spotted Joseph heading her way.

  “Of course, that wasn’t the funniest thing that happened to me in Arizona.” Robert squeezed her waist and leaned closer. “I’ve saved the best for last, Callie.”

  “Hmm,” she said, not the least bit interested in Robert’s best.

  Nor was anybody else. One by one the rest of the group drifted away. Callie didn’t want to be impolite and leave poor Robert in midsentence, but she did wish he would hurry.

  Joseph bore down on them. Lightning about to strike.

  Robert stood watching her expectantly, and Callie realized he was no longer talking, he was waiting for a comment.

  “Hmm,” she murmured, because she had no idea what he’d said. Then because Joseph was looming ever nearer, a cobra coiled for the kill, Callie beamed at Robert.

  “Fascinating,” she said, and she didn’t even hate herself for stooping so low.

  “You really think so?”

  “Indeed, I do.”

  Elated, Robert tightened his arm around her and edged closer. He was wearing an aftershave that nauseated Callie.

  “You know, Callie, you and I have an awful lot of catching up to do. Why don’t we skip out of here and have dinner together?

  Suddenly Joseph was there, towering over Robert. “The lady will be occupied this evening.” He glowered pointedly at the arm Robert had around Callie. “She’s having dinner with me.”

  “Sorry, old pal. No harm meant.” Robert dropped his possessive hold, then scooted toward the door.

  The crowd filed out, the auditorium emptied and Callie drowned in Joseph’s eyes while conflicting emotions stormed within her—rage, triumph, love.

  Rage won. She moved in close, standing toe-to-toe with him.

  “How dare you?”

  “He was mauling you.”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Joseph’s eyes were lasers, searching for clues.

  “I made it my business when I rode into the White Mountains on your father’s horse.”

  “That’s over and done with.” Callie snatched up her briefcase and held it in front of herself like a shield. “And so are we.”

  She tried to push past him to the door, but he caught her shoulders and held her as easily as if she were a bird in a cage.

  “Are we, Callie?”

  Her blood was a raging river, its wild song beating in her ears. No, she wanted to scream. They would never be through. Neither in this life nor the next. Always, there would be Joseph.

  But what did that matter? He would never risk loving her, and suddenly Callie knew that love was all that mattered. Real love. The kind that involves commitment and risk and joy and sorrow and exultation and pain. The kind of love that needs nothing more than a single look, a single touch to forge a bond that nothing can break. The kind of love her parents had.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper, and certainly without conviction. But Callie was beyond caring. All she wanted to do was get through the conference in one piece, then go home and lick her wounds and start all over again.

  “Yes. We’re finished.” Amazing that she could tell an outright lie without even blinking.

  “You would deny everything we were, everything we had?”

  The great Dr. Swift, famous for keeping his feelings under wraps, let his mask slip. Lord, why did he have to look like a wounded warrior? Why did he have to be so compelling?

  Callie’s only defense was to go on the warpath.

  “What were we, Joseph? What did we have? A few chance encounters, a few laughs?” She forced a brittle laugh. “It happens every day. Men and women are like trains—they meet, link up for a while then go off on separate tracks.”

  She wanted to have
the last word, then stalk toward the door, but Joseph’s eyes pinned her to the spot.

  “Bravo, Callie. That’s a convincing speech.” A muscle ticked in his jaw and his fingers bit into her upper arms.

  “I don’t buy it, Callie…any of it.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. I believe it, Joseph, and that’s all that counts.”

  She tipped her chin back and glared at him, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. He was undressing her with his eyes, kissing her with his eyes, making love to her with his deep, dark eyes.

  Tangled in a web of memories, she melted, and so did he. His grip loosened, softened, and he caressed her shoulders. She felt herself going slack, felt her knees giving way, felt herself leaning toward him.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he said. “A part of you belongs to me, Callie. A part of you will always belong to me.”

  Wanting and needing and loving rushed through her. If he had said the word, Callie would have spread herself on the floor of the auditorium and given herself to this beloved warrior, this magnificent Sioux. In a public place. Without shame. Without regret.

  He saw it all in her face. She could tell by the way his eyes darkened.

  Please. Was it a word, a thought, a sigh? Callie didn’t know. All she knew was that Joseph had suddenly turned gallant and tender.

  “I’m sorry, Callie. My only excuse is that I lose all perspective around you.”

  He rammed his hands into his pockets, but neither of them could move. Somewhere in the distance a door opened, and there was the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Still, their eyes held each other captive.

  Finally Joseph broke the silence.

  “Do you have plans for dinner?” If he had been arrogant or presumptuous or the least bit possessive, Callie would have said yes. But Joseph’s invitation was simple, straightforward, and friendly, one colleague to another. Almost.

  “No,” she said.

  “Would you join me? Please?”

  It was the please that did it for Callie.

  “Yes, I’ll have dinner with you.”

  “Is seven all right with you?”

  “Fine. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”