Redhawk's Heart Read online

  The touch had been casual, yet the stab of desire that followed took Ashe completely by surprise

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Copyright

  The touch had been casual, yet the stab of desire that followed took Ashe completely by surprise

  She leaned into him for a heartbeat, then, as if suddenly aware of what she’d done, quickly stood up straight.

  Casey quickened her pace and walked past him, her hip accidentally brushing his thigh. The contact nearly destroyed him. He bit back a groan. The woman was killing him.

  The more time he spent around that woman, the more he wanted her. Navajo teachings held that all secrets were revealed when a man and a woman made love. There was nothing he wanted to do more than to put that ancient belief to the ultimate test.

  Ashe muttered an oath under his breath. He had to stop thinking like this. A night of passion with Casey, or even several, would never be enough for him. His feelings went too deep for a casual fling. What he wanted from Casey was the willing surrender of her heart....

  Dear Reader,

  Nothing attracts me more than a man with the guts to pursue what he knows is right, no matter what the odds. In THE BROTHERS OF ROCK RIDGE miniseries, I’ll introduce two very special men—Ashe and Travis Redhawk. Like most brothers, they’re often at odds with each other, but when the chips are down, they stand together ready to face any challenge. This series is about families like my own, the dynamics that separate us and yet, in the end, bring us together.

  The past, and tradition, define Ashe and the beliefs that give him direction and purpose. He never expected to have his life turned upside down by a beautiful outsider with as many secrets as there are grains of sand on the Navajo Nation. His story is about loyalty, to the woman he grows to love and to The People.

  Next, you’ll meet his brother, Travis. Travis is like the wind, which finds purpose only in movement. A warrior in every sense of the word, he’s made a place for himself as an Army Ranger. A promise made one moonlit night years ago, now brings him back to the Rez. Travis is a man who will pay any price to keep his word to the only woman he’s ever loved. His story is about honor.

  I hope you’ll grow to love these special men as I have, and that their stories will linger in your memories long after the books have ended.

  To receive a signed bookplate to go inside this book, and a newsletter, write me at P.O. Box 2747, Corrales, New Mexico 87048. Please send a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

  Walk in beauty,

  Aimée Thurlo

  REDHAWK’S HEART

  TORONTO • NEW YORK • LONDON

  AMSTERDAM • PARIS • SYDNEY • HAMBURG

  STOCKHOLM • ATHENS • TOKYO • MILAN • MADRID

  PRAGUE • WARSAW • BUDAPEST • AUCKLAND

  To Angela C and new beginnings

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Casey Feist—Casey said she was an FBI agent. Ashe knew there was a lot more to her than she was telling.

  Ashe Redhawk—He was a cop with a personal agenda that included finding out everything he could about the beautiful FBI agent.

  Travis Redhawk—If his brother, Ashe, couldn’t find Katrina, Travis would, even if it meant tearing the Rez apart.

  D.A. Ben Prescott—If he wanted to keep his job after the upcoming election, he had to control two cops with minds of their own.

  Delbert Spencer—Now out on parole, Spencer was looking for a way to strike back. Killing the people Ashe loved would be one way.

  Katrina Johnson—She was known as Fox, and with the survival skills worthy of her nickname, she’d disappeared without a trace.

  Jerry Walker—His interest in Katrina had always put him on a collision course with the Redhawk brothers.

  John Nakai—Ashe and Travis considered him a friend, but an old grudge between their families still simmered beneath the surface.

  Captain Todacheene—Why was Ashe’s boss concealing evidence from him that might break the case wide open?

  Patrick Gordon—With his own survival at stake, the ex-schoolteacher had planned to teach the Johnsons a lesson.

  Prologue

  Ashe Redhawk stared at the stone formations to the west, part of the Lukachukai Mountains. The land of the Diné—the land of the Navajo Nation—was a world filled with secrets; a place of sacred songs, rituals and prayers. Some said those rocks were warriors trapped in stone, guardians of The People.

  Ashe appealed to them in silence now, trying to push back the edginess that filled him. There was trouble coming. He was attuned to the rhythms and cadences of the desert, and could feel a change in the air. His ability to sense that growing imbalance was not magic, but part of being a cop and knowing his territory.

  As he headed back to town along the empty rural track, his thoughts wandered like the rambling, dusty trail before him. He’d gone to his ancestral shrine at Rock Ridge to leave prayer sticks. They had been an offering to Changing Woman, who had given birth to the Hero Twins—the mighty warriors who had made the land safe for the Navajos. Yet his quest to find the balance that would help him walk in beauty had failed. He had not attained harmony; nor would he, until he found answers to the questions that preyed on his mind.

  He thought of Katrina, the daughter of his foster parents. She’d been twelve at the time his brother Travis and he had come to live with the Johnsons. Katrina, whom they’d nicknamed Fox, had always confided in them, and treated them as longtime friends. The nickname they’d given her had been their gift to Katrina. She’d seen herself as a wallflower, and Travis and he had tried to change her perception of herself. Foxes, they’d explained, could merge with their surroundings and it was that ability to go unnoticed when they chose and observe others that gave them their power.

  Throughout the years, the friendship the three of them shared had never wavered. If anything, they’d grown closer. Until a week ago, Ashe would have sworn that there were no secrets between them. But now he knew differently, and that knowledge had taken its toll on the confidence and faith he’d always had in Fox.

  As Ashe recalled the police file he’d seen on his captain’s desk a week ago with Katrina’s name typed on the tab, his hand clenched tightly around the steering wheel. The existence of anything like that had come as a complete surprise to him. His gut wrenched and his chest felt as if a great weight rested on it as he remembered.

  Another hard blow had come when the captain had refused to let him examine the file. Ashe was, by all previous standards, a highly regarded member of the tribal police. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, the captain had felt it necessary to lie to him. The captain had quickly put the file away, refusing to let him see it, insisting that Ashe had been mistaken about the name. That obvious lack of trust had shaken Ashe badly. He had done nothing to deserve it.

  Ashe tapped his index finger against the steering wheel as he weighed the matter. In the confines of his tribal police vehicle the radio crackled. He was off duty and only half listening, but he was still aware of every word.

  In an odd way the police chatter soothed him, much like the voice of an old, trusted friend. The f
orce was a second family to him these days. His time was divided between the disciplines of the Navajo Way and his work. Though some in the tribe considered it impossible to be both a cop and a traditionalist, Ashe didn’t see a conflict. Like the Diné of old, he was a warrior whose beliefs gave him strength.

  Ashe concentrated on regulating his breathing, seeking balance within himself. If Katrina did have a darker side, then he’d learn to accept it and help her work through it. Navajo tradition taught that everything had two parts, and that to achieve harmony, both sides of nature had to be embraced. He would do his best to help Katrina find such a balance. He drew on his traditional beliefs now for strength to face whatever lay ahead.

  He was just minutes away from his house trailer when he heard a radio call that made his blood turn to ice. There was a 10-39—a disturbance—at the Johnson home. His thoughts quickly returned to his foster parents and Katrina as he spun the vehicle around in the road, switched on his emergency lights, and pressed down hard on the accelerator.

  He was certain that this was one source of the imbalance he’d felt. Something was terribly wrong with his adoptive family. A silent cry rose inside him as he raced across the Reservation toward the place he’d once called home.

  Chapter One

  Ashe drove up to the small, one-story, wood-frame-andstucco house the Johnsons leased from the tribe. It was set at the base of a hill above the bluffs, about two miles from the school the Johnsons ran.

  He scanned the area quickly, but he couldn’t see either of his foster parents around, and no other officers had responded yet. That wasn’t surprising, considering the tribal police’s chronic manpower shortage. As he pulled up and parked beside the Johnsons’ faded green van, Ashe caught a glimpse of movement to his left. A figure running from the back of the house disappeared into the tall sagebrush on the hillside.

  Ashe jumped out of the carryall, pistol in hand, and identified himself, ordering the running man to stop. Although he must have heard Ashe, he just picked up speed. Ashe’s gut knotted as he suppressed the instinct to pursue the fleeing suspect. As a police officer, his priority had to be those inside the house. Fear stabbed through him. He would make sure his foster parents were all right, then go after the fugitive. Fox’s car was gone, he noted gratefully. Hopefully, she was attending summer class at the college. He jogged toward the front porch, his gaze darting everywhere, alert to a danger he sensed but could not see.

  Everything looked still—disturbingly so. One thing that had always marked the Johnson household was the constant flurry of activity at this time of the year. Alice Johnson spent her mornings gardening, or baking pies for the church and setting them out along the wide porch rail to cool. Nick Johnson was perpetually in the garage, building or repairing furniture. With school scheduled to begin in less than a month, he would be working now to make sure every desk and table was in good condition. Yet, instead, there was only silence.

  Fear held him in an icy grip. If anyone had hurt his foster parents, they’d answer to him. He reached the porch steps and noted that the front door was closed. Ashe suddenly heard a car racing up the drive behind him. He turned as an unfamiliar vehicle slid to a stop, throwing a cloud of dust and gravel into the air. Weapon in hand, Ashe crouched behind a post. The new arrival was not a tribal police vehicle but an unmarked, generic-looking sedan that had “government” written all over it.

  He’d never seen the beautiful, shapely woman who emerged from the dusty gray sedan before. The sun danced on her shoulder-length reddish-blond hair, making it gleam like melting gold. As she strode up to the house, her movements were graceful and feminine, yet held a hint of challenge.

  “Stop where you are,” he ordered.

  When her gaze met his, he noted the quick, speculative look she gave him. Her eyes were weighing everything. He knew then, without a doubt, that she was some kind of cop, too.

  She held up a gold badge. “Casey Feist, FBI,” she said.

  “A suspect just took off,” he said, gesturing uphill. Ashe listened again for sounds coming from inside the house. Either no one was home or... He didn’t want to contemplate the possibility. “Check inside the buildings,” he added quickly. “A man and woman in their mid-fifties should be at home right now. I’ll be back.”

  Ashe didn’t give the woman agent a chance to argue. FBI training didn’t generally stress tracking skills and he was certain he could track someone out here far better than she could. After all, he had been trained as a tracker, was at home in the desert, and there were few people who knew this particular piece of property as well as he did. He ran over to where he’d last seen the figure and crouched down, focusing on the boot tracks that led into a drought-hardened arroyo. The suspect obviously didn’t know how to avoid leaving a trail. Had he gone around the base of the hill, it would have been far more difficult for anyone to follow because of the rocky ground. Instead, however, the fugitive had stayed on the relatively smooth, softer ground of the arroyo, where he could make better speed.

  Ashe increased his pace, and as he broke through an area where tumbleweeds had gathered, he saw the darkly clad suspect about thirty yards ahead, climbing up the steep ten-foot side of the arroyo. The man pulled himself up onto the top, stood, and glanced behind him. Ashe instantly noted the suspect was wearing a ski mask, and that he was armed. His gut turned to solid ice as intuition told him there was death on the man’s trail.

  Dropping to one knee, Ashe aimed his own weapon. “Police officer! Don’t move!”

  The man dived away, hiding from Ashe, who couldn’t see out of the arroyo from his position at the bottom.

  Ashe ran to the arroyo’s side, leaped up high, and grabbed on to the top of the vertical bank, pulling himself up and out with the ease of familiarity. As he emerged, the suspect, who’d paused behind a clump of nearby brush, fired two shots.

  Ashe rolled for cover, regretting not having peered over the top of the arroyo first to check for an ambush. Anger had clouded his judgment, and now he might pay the ultimate price. He zigzagged in a random pattern as he headed for the cluster of sagebrush to his left. More bullets whined by his head.

  Suddenly he heard a burst of gunfire from somewhere behind him. He didn’t have to look to know that the FBI woman had followed him. She was giving him covering fire now, forcing the suspect to take shelter.

  Trying not to speculate on what she’d found at the house, Ashe dived for safety behind a two-foot-high ridge of hardened sand.

  The barrage of gunfire forced his adversary back into the thick brush of the bosque, which paralleled the river not more than a hundred yards away. Ashe took advantage of the moment, jumped up and continued his pursuit, using the tall vegetation to screen himself from view. Intuition told him that catching the fleeing man was imperative.

  He was a fast runner with plenty of staying power, but despite his speed and his familiarity with the terrain, Ashe knew he’d lost his suspect for now when he heard the noisy rattle of a motorcycle engine starting up. He caught a glimpse of blue smoke and a dark-colored dirt bike as it roared out of the bosque and disappeared over the hill.

  “He got away,” the woman said, and cursed softly as she joined him.

  Ashe bit back a curt response, wondering why she’d felt it necessary to state the obvious. He gazed down at her, momentarily distracted from his annoyance by the luster of her hair and the way the loose, flame-colored strands caressed her cheeks. As his gaze drifted down, he noticed a dark crimson stain in the center of her chest. His gut turned into a lump of ice. “Were you hit?”

  Even as he said it, he knew it couldn’t be so. A wound like that would have killed or completely incapacitated her. Another thought pushed in from the edges of his mind. He held himself still, waiting for her answer, but he felt as if something was slowly breaking inside him.

  “I’m fine.” She holstered her weapon and reached for the cell phone attached to her belt. “More tribal cops arrived at the scene, so I hurried to join the pursuit
.”

  “If you’re not hurt, who was?” He felt nothing inside him but horror as the answer came unbidden to his mind, even before she responded.

  “The man and woman in the house are both dead,” she said quietly. “Did you know them?”

  Ashe could only nod. Rage, sorrow and despair ricocheted wildly inside him. The agony that pierced him was overwhelming. Knowing he needed to take action to stay sane, Ashe started running back to the house.

  He heard the FBI woman telephoning in a brief description of the dirt bike and the perp as she tried to keep up with him. He was grateful that she was taking care of that, because right now, he knew only one responsibility: He had to see his foster parents for himself and try to figure out what had happened.

  Ashe concentrated on putting one foot before the other, never breaking stride until he reached the front porch. There were two Navajo tribal police units parked out front beside his carryall and the FBI woman’s sedan. Slowing to a walk, he took a deep breath, then entered the house, waving his badge in the air so the other cops who’d arrived could see it. It was an automatic gesture, but unnecessary. He knew all these officers, and they knew him.

  Navajo beliefs had given him a deep aversion to death and anything connected with it but, now, other emotions drove him. A part of him still hoped it was all a mistake; that no one had died here—or else it was someone he didn’t know. He was aware that all eyes were on him as he knelt beside the bodies. One was covered by a handmade orange-and-black-checkered blanket he remembered from his boyhood days. Alice Johnson had finished crocheting it one Christmas. Memories filled his mind, but he pushed them back, forcing the cop in him to come through. Taking a deep breath, he pulled back the blanket.