Free Heart of the Hawk by Justine Dare Justine Davis

nodded.
    “He needs it more than I do.”
    What was it going to take to get him to stop this? “You’ll have to sleep on the floor. There’s no room for a cot in the storeroom, and I won’t have you sleeping in my kitchen.”
    He shrugged. “It’s dry, level, and it’s clear of rocks. Better than a lot of places I’ve slept.” He glanced at the doorway at the back of the store. “Storeroom?” he asked. “No more office?”
    “Arly wanted to have an office to hang his name over. I want a storeroom, so I can carry more stock.”
    She looked at him steadily, daring him to comment on the unseemly speed of her changes with her dead husband’s store. She didn’t care if he did—the store was hers now. But he merely nodded.
    “What do you want me to do first?”
    “You can’t really be serious about doing this,” she exclaimed.
    In a tone so solemn she suspected he was doing exactly what he was denying, he said, “I never joke about sweeping floors, Mrs. Dixon.”
    “I’M SURE YOU realize this isn’t wise, Mrs. Dixon.”
    “What might that be, Reverend?” Kate asked, knowing perfectly well what the little man meant.
    “Why, you know what I mean. Now I know you’re not thinking clearly, what with poor Arly going so unexpected—”
    “I’m thinking quite clearly,” Kate said sweetly. For the first time in my life, she added silently, I’m thinking clearly. She paused in her sorting of the tangled mass of ribbons before her on the counter to look up at him. “But thank you for your concern, Reverend Babcock.”
    The man’s pale, watery eyes blinked behind his spectacles. How anyone could look at those eyes and, say Joshua Hawk’s, and call them both simply blue, was beyond her. Babcock’s were a washed-out, faded blue barely worth the name, compared to the blazing vividness of The Hawk’s.
    Josh, she corrected herself. He’d asked her again this morning, very nicely, to use his Christian name, and she was trying, but she’d thought of him as The Hawk for so long, it was difficult. And calling him by his given name didn’t seem to make him any less intimidating.
    “Well, that is my job, dear. I’m concerned about the welfare of all the residents of our fair town. Those in need most of all, naturally.”
    “Naturally. So perhaps you should go tend to them?” she suggested, turning back to her sorting. She drew out a yellow ribbon and set it aside, trying to stifle her irritation at how her day was going. Facing The Hawk—Josh—had been nerve-wracking enough. But then she’d spilled the tray of thread and ribbons. And then, to her dismay, the reverend had arrived.
    The garrulous man had entirely missed her implication that she didn’t need him. Or else he chose to ignore it. She decided it was the former, as he wasn’t clever enough for the latter.
    “Oh, but I know you need guidance right now, child, and it’s my godly duty to provide it before you stray down an ill-advised path.”
    Kate’s fingers stilled. “I am not,” she said carefully, “a child.”
    She was shaking inside, and she fought not to show it. For four years she’d been waiting for this time, the time when she would be free of Arly’s cruel domination. And for sixteen years before that she had chafed under her father’s careless neglect, knowing, somehow, deep in her soul, that there had to be another kind of life, that this couldn’t be all there was. That if there was nothing better to look forward to, she would surely die of despair. Or become like her mother, a pale, fragile woman who seemed nothing but a shadow of her father.
    And Kate had been planning for this day, planning the things she would do, the way she would act when she was at last free, at last accountable to no one but herself, for a very long time. She had thought she would have to do it all herself, and had been saving what money she could, cent by cent. She’d had enough once, but Arly had caught her before she could get away. But she’d