by Vonna Harper
Isolation. In a word, isolation.
And that makes you vulnerable; never forget that.
Where had that thought come from, damn it! She thrived on her fast-paced life, the thrill of chasing down rumors and getting to the truth. Pouring the truth out through her fingers and onto the keyboard made her feel strong and in control, not vulnerable.
Mato Hawk.
Startled because she hadn’t known the name had been about to burst free from her mind, she leaned forward and rubbed condensation off the windshield with her sleeve. As her surroundings cleared, she looked up but could barely make out the clouds for the trees. That’s why she was feeling a bit spooked. Who wouldn’t when it felt as if everything were closing in on her?
Mato Hawk.
“Knock it off!” she snapped. Just the same, the heat and energy between her legs increased. Damn it, how long had it been since she’d gotten laid? That’s all this was, a little pent-up sexual frustration on a miserable day in the middle of nowhere while trying to run down some information about a man who might have met with foul play but more likely was off getting some R & R.
She’d see this Hawk character tonight, put him in his place somewhere far from her mind.
Either that or learn he had something to do with Flann Castetter’s disappearance.
A whoosh of movement killed the thought. Gripping the steering wheel, she shivered.
No, she hadn’t just seen a hawk!
Or had she?
2
Sweat.
Sweat from too many bodies crammed into too little space. From where she sat in the second row, the stench filled Smokey’s senses and made her crave fresh air. Outside the storm threw its strength against the building’s west wall, and rain hit the windows with a staccato sound so sharp she thought the old glass would shatter.
Still, this was the Oregon coast, an area accustomed to powerful winds and urgent rain. Most of those in the packed school auditorium seemed unconcerned that the old structure might not survive, and except for Smokey, the hearing officer and his assistant, and the other reporters, everyone in the room all appeared to be locals. Those locals would know if the little town was in danger of being pummeled out of existence.
The question was, would they tell her?
The middle-aged hearing officer, Mr. Jacobs, looking remote and authoritative in his navy-blue suit with the red power tie, hadn’t moved in the past five minutes as he led the meeting, but she sensed that underneath he boiled.
Pondering the whys of his mood distracted her from trying to identify Mato Hawk among the audience. She also hadn’t spotted Halona, but that wasn’t surprising, because the young woman was only a little over a five feet tall and could have been sitting in the middle of the crowd.
Mr. Jacobs’s assistant, a slight man with thinning hair who’d been standing near the hearing officer’s desk, held up a watch. “That’s your time, Clyde,” he said, his eyes on the man who’d just spoken his peace among the nearly two hundred people hunched on folding metal chairs. “You want to leave your map with Mr. Jacobs?”
“Don’t bother.” Mr. Jacob’s mouth barely moved. “The thing’s not drawn to scale and doesn’t show any topographic features. It’s all but useless.”
“The hell it is,” Clyde sputtered from the audience. He jabbed a thick finger at what he’d sketched on a piece of typing paper. “That’s my place. Right there not more ’n half a mile from the river. I’m affected. I don’t want you forgettin’ that. I’m affected.”
“I’m aware of that.” The hearing officer sounded both weary and angry. “You said so, at least three times. How many more are set to speak? It’s getting late.”
He was right. It would soon be ten P.M. Thanks to the insufficient lights, she could barely make out those in the back rows. Still, she wished Mr. Jacobs had kept the irritation and impatience out of his voice. After all, he was being paid to conduct this public meeting about reaction to a resort a group of investors known as NewDirections wanted to build along the Spruce River, an issue vitally important to these people. They’d trooped into the elementary school hours ago, voices hard with determination, eyes cold and distrusting of the officer from the Northwest Fisheries Council.
If NewDirections’s vice president, Flann Castetter, had grown weary of butting his head against this collective opposition to his proposal, she couldn’t blame him for taking off—unless some of what she’d dug up about the past was responsible for his disappearance.
Something Mato Hawk was part of?
If only she could stop thinking about painting the damnable hawk, stop aching to challenge her artistic skill by trying to bring the predator to life on her canvas.
“Just one more speaker,” the balding assistant said. “Mato? You want to get yourself on up here?”
As a broad-shouldered, black-haired, dark-eyed man clad in work-worn jeans and an unironed flannel shirt emerged from the back of the room and took his place at the speaker’s podium, her mind stumbled. Male! One hundred and fifty percent male.
Just like that, she was no longer in this stuffy building but somewhere deep in the forest, walking alone down what might be a deer trail, her nerves on alert, ears tuned for any sound, eyes constantly scanning. She was being watched; she knew it! By a man, a primal and possessive man.
Whether she walked or ran through the forest made no difference because when he was ready, he’d reveal himself to her. More than just reveal—he’d touch. Rub his body against hers, press his strength against hers, pull her into his space. And change her.
No, damn it! What are you thinking!
Most of those who’d preceded him had brought along notes to which they’d frequently referred. By their body language and the way their voices either turned shrill or fell away revealed that they obviously were unaccustomed to public speaking. Mato was as casually dressed as the others, his thick black hair long and unkempt and begging to have her fingers in them, his feet locked into sturdy boots that said he didn’t earn his living sitting behind a desk.
The resemblance between him and the others ended there. He was the first to fasten his unwavering gaze on the hearing officer, the first to use his own silence to quiet the room. The only to rattle her. She didn’t feel anger in him so much as determination, but that might have been deceptive.
At least he was unaware of her existence.
So far.
“When my ancestors fished the Snake River,” he began, “nearly twenty thousand sockeyes returned each year to spawn in Redfish Lake. Now there are only a handful. Once the Columbia River watershed was one of the richest salmon-producing areas in the world. Now those salmon are in danger of extinction.” He took a deep breath that expanded his chest and sent her fingertips tingling from the need to touch him. “Governmental agencies study and research, argue and assess blame, while the clock ticks. A few more years, and there won’t be a need for you people because there won’t be any fish left to mismanage.”
He paused, and she wondered if he was waiting for his words to settle in; it worked, at least on her. Heat pressed on her temples and crawled over her thighs. “That’s what the NewDirections corporation will accomplish,” he continued. “Tens of thousands of years of existence snuffed out because of man’s greed.”
To her shock, his gaze slid to her and held for a few seconds. There was a message, something, in the contact that turned her hot and cold at the same time. A warning maybe? A promise? A challenge? Just like that, her skin from the top of her head to her toes burned. Oh, my god. Turned on with a look.
Black hair, midnight eyes, body honed from physical labor, passion and power rolled together, hands…those incredibly sexy and dangerous hands.
“I’m a fact finder,” Mr. Jacobs said, his voice even. “I didn’t build the dams or canneries that put your salmon in jeopardy in the first place.”
“Forget the past; we’re trying to salvage the future.” Mato folded his arms across his chest and tilted his head to the s
ide, the gesture putting his features into shadow except for eyes, which had the power to dig deep into her. “It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about a dam that prevents salmon from spawning or logging near a river until the banks erode. Impact is impact. There’s no such thing as a salmon being a little bit dead.”
A number of people grunted agreement, but, against all reason, she believed he was speaking to her alone. More than speaking. Touching. Igniting. He didn’t even have to look at her again for her to feel that way. “So far the Spruce has escaped the caging that’s taken place along the Columbia and Snake only because the Spruce is smaller, wilder, less easily reached and contained. Anyone who believes that all it takes to protect something is to draw up regulations is an idiot.”
A shaft of lightning outside the window closest to Mato painted his features blue-gold. He paused while thunder rumbled, and she pondered whether the environment were trying to swallow him. “Developers such as those who destroyed Lake Owyhee in eastern Oregon went through your organization and got your so-called stamp of approval. Either the council looked the other way, or you’re incompetent. Only one thing works. Leaving everything the hell alone.”
“Leave it alone? Then I’m assuming I can put you down as another vote against, Mr.—”
“Mato. Mato Hawk. You’re damn right you can. I read NewDirections’s proposal. Read every word of that piece of garbage. It gave lip service to EPA, DEQ, LCDC, even BLM, but what it all boils down to is that the land around the Spruce, and the river itself, is going to be impacted the way Owyhee was. I love that word, impacted. Why don’t they come out and say it? Raped. Destroyed.”
Unfolding his arms, Mato gripped the speaker’s podium with fingers that looked capable of any physical task. His eyes were fierce and angry and more alive than any eyes she’d ever seen. She would die for eyes like that—fight and die. “My ancestors walked this land. They didn’t own it, because that isn’t the Indian way. For tens of thousands of years they lived in harmony with the environment; they understood its balance. Today people have gotten too far from the land. They don’t know its song. The only way that song is going to continue is by keeping the Spruce free.”
Mr. Jacobs grunted. “This isn’t ten thousand years ago. That’s what the Fisheries Council is for, to accommodate change.”
“To accommodate greed.” The flesh around Mato’s knuckles bleached white in contrast to his dark flesh. He seemed too large for the packed room. Too everything for her senses, and yet she prayed the sensation wouldn’t end. “There’s nothing necessary about rich people building five-thousand-square-foot homes in the middle of a forest with a river in their backyard. This so-called planned community doesn’t have to be. It can’t be.”
“Because you want to live the way your ancestors did.” Sarcasm coated Mr. Jacobs’s words. “Spare me. This is not about ideology or tradition, Mr. Hawk. This is about whether you want Storm Bay to continue to have close to thirty percent unemployment and a stagnant population because residents can’t make a living fishing anymore. Wake up! Adaptation’s the name of the game.”
“Adaptation, yes. Destruction, no!”
“Enough! Damn it, I’ve got only one thing to say. If you and the rest of your people refuse to embrace and exploit change, you’ll wind up as endangered as the sockeye.”
Shocked, she dismissed Mato’s eyes, the storm, the dark room, and the foul-smelling air and for a heartbeat hated the man who’d just spoken. He was a fact finder. His job was to conduct public hearings and report back to the rest of the Northwest Fisheries Council. Their decision to approve or reject NewDirections’s development would be based on his objective findings and recommendations.
Instead, he was arguing.
“I’d rather be extinct than insensitive to what’s been on this earth for generations.” Mato let his arms drop to his side, but they remained rigid, like the rest of him ready for action. “Most of us in this room refuse to see the remaining salmon and the river they thrive in sacrificed to greed. We won’t allow another Owyhee disaster. If you can’t see what’s being risked here—”
“That’s enough!”
“No, it isn’t. It won’t ever be enough. There’s nothing I won’t do to protect the river that fed my ancestors and that deserves to be here for my grandchildren. Laws, regulations—” he tapped his chest, “—have nothing to do with what happens inside a man when he looks at wild water.”
Powerful words. Words with the strength to tear at her soul—and to drop her to her knees at his feet?
“Laws and regulations are what keep us a step above animals, don’t you get that?” Mr. Jacobs heaved himself to his feet. “You said you’d studied NewDirections’s concept. If you really had, you’d see they’ve addressed all environmental considerations.”
“The hell they have.”
“The hell they haven’t! This hearing is concluded, done and over. Wake up, people. Progress is the only thing that’s going to keep you from rotting in this backwater town.”
Hawk wasn’t rotting. He was alive, maybe the most rawly alive man she had ever seen. Looking at him took her back to youthful emotions when not a moment passed that she didn’t think about the differences between the sexes. Before life had taught her its lessons, she’d dreamed of falling hopelessly in love with a perfect male body and a quick, inquisitive mind. They’d never argue, make nightly passionate love, and ride into the sunset together.
Mostly they’d have sex because she couldn’t get enough of that perfect body, and he was tireless in bed—or wherever they fucked.
3
In Smokey’s mind, rain was a step up from mist, a dripping, quieting condition leading to long evenings with a good book or a lingering fuck—not that she’d had the latter opportunity in too long. In contrast, this was a deluge, an angry sky demonstrating how much power it contained. Maybe, she pondered, the storm gods were angry. If so, she knew at whom the anger was aimed: the closed-minded hearing officer.
Instead of making a run for her vehicle and risk falling on her ass in the mud, she paused under the pitiful metal overhang outside the front door. The pounding drops made so much noise she had to strain to hear the nearby reporters and couldn’t begin to pick up what the hunkered-over men and women who stood in tight, wet groups on the ground three steps below were saying.
Cursing the rain not for what it was but because she’d lost sight of Hawk—why had she stopped thinking of him by his first name?—she searched in vain for him. Something seriously strange had happened during the meeting. Bottom line: for a few seconds there’d been only the two of them. At least in her mind.
His body had spoken to hers. More than spoken—it had called out, demanded. The aftermath had left her weak and hungry in a way that both frightened and strengthened the woman in her. After a hibernation of months, her sexuality had awakened. In spades.
But why was Hawk the trigger? Yes, he epitomized everything rugged about the male sex that had always appealed to her, but she didn’t know a thing about what went on inside the man’s head. For all she knew, he was gay or over-his-head in love.
Please not that.
“Smokey? Smokey Powers, right?” one of the reporters called out, his voice tearing her from her thoughts. “I recognize you from the picture in your column. What are you doing in this hellhole? You don’t cover this kind of news.”
“Maybe I’m taking a busman’s holiday,” she countered. “On a fishing trip but not knowing enough to stay away from the only piece of news in this town.”
“The hell you are,” the twentysomething reporter said, his gaze trailing from her face down her body but not touching her as Hawk’s look had. “No one would willingly take a vacation here, especially this time of year. What are you sniffing around? Hell, I bet I know. That developer guy who up and poofed. What do you think happened to him?”
“Give it up, Brad. She’s not going to tell you.” The reporter who’d spoken this appeared to be much older than the first, th
ough with his jacket collar up around his neck and a rain hat pulled low, it was hard to be sure. “But I’m guessing Brad’s right. You’re looking to see if there’s a story behind what’s-his-name’s disappearance. From what we’ve seen and heard tonight, I’m thinking the man’s met with an ‘accident’ at the hands of these people. It’s no secret they aren’t crazy about what he stands—or maybe I should say stood for.”
“The police aren’t sure what’s happened to him,” she said in what she hoped was a casual tone. “There are strong indications Castetter was under a lot of pressure from the rest of the NewDirections partners. He might have decided ‘To hell with the whole thing.’ After what I just saw, I don’t blame him. Maybe he concluded everyone in town hated him, said screw that, and rode off into the sunset.”
“With that kind of money at stake?” the older reporter countered. “Not likely. Men like this Castetter character thrive on a challenge. Besides, from what we saw tonight, it’s obvious the hearing officer is on NewDirections’s side.”
Stifling the urge to agree with him, she shrugged. “If it’s been raining like this very long, I vote for Castetter getting fed up with this whole part of the coast. How many inches a year does it get around here?”
“He isn’t the only one who’s had it with this joint,” Brad grumbled. “I don’t care what time it is, I’m heading inland. What about you?” He directed his question at her.
Shrugging again, she explained that she’d rented a place to stay. If anyone asked how long she intended to remain in town, she’d change the subject. Fortunately her fellow newshounds didn’t show any inclination to stand around talking. Trying to work up the courage to step out into the rain, she looked down.
As she did, the largest group shuffled, changed configuration. As they put their backs to the wind, one form stood out. Mato Hawk. Though most had on yellow slickers, he stood bareheaded and straight-backed as if oblivious to the wind. Suddenly he looked her way, a long, strong stare.
