A Mating of Hawks Read Free Page B

instead a graded road that led back through a spine of hills, a road she didn’t remember.
    â€œWhere are we going?” she demanded.
    Shea slanted her a frown. “Didn’t you know?”
    â€œKnow what?”
    He let out an explosive breath. “Vashti never liked the old house. As Patrick got blinder, she kept yammering about how selfish he was to make her stay in a place she hated when he couldn’t see it anyway. For peace’s sake, he let her pick what she wanted and where, just so she’d drop nagging him to move to Tucson.”
    â€œOh.” Tracy, with a queer sense of bereavement, glanced over her shoulder at the compound with the family graveyard on the slope behind it, the corrals and barns and bunkhouses. “No one lives there?”
    â€œMy uncle does,” comforted Geronimo. “He’s foreman, though Judd’s the overall manager.”
    Tracy frowned at the name, though she couldn’t have said why. She scarcely knew Judd, Patrick’s eldest son. Six years older than Shea, he’d been at college when she came to live at the ranch, and he’d never paid any attention to her on his visits home.
    â€œIt’s so strange that Patrick never mentioned it,” she murmured.
    â€œGuess he didn’t like to think about it,” Geronimo offered. “Since he can’t see, maybe now it’s done, he doesn’t mind too much.”
    Trying to imagine darkness, Tracy shivered and thought it would make it all the more important to be in familiar surroundings, using rooms and furniture intimately known.
    â€œPatrick wouldn’t pave the road, though,” Shea chuckled. “Not that it bothers Vashti much. She’s learned to fly, and her friends mostly come in their own planes.”
    Patrick had mentioned an airstrip and that Judd used a plane to patrol the ranch and attend to business in and out of the state. Shea swerved to avoid a snake and Tracy bumped against Geronimo.
    â€œSorry,” she apologized.
    â€œAnytime, chica .”
    â€œWatch him,” Shea warned. When he smiled, it changed his whole face, making it young, warming his stern masculine beauty—and he was beautiful, though it was not a word she’d ever before applied to a man. “The main reason we don’t have a phone is so his women can’t track him down.”
    â€œYou don’t live at the main ranch?”
    He shook his head. “I’ve moved to El Charco.”
    That, she knew, was the part of the ranch inherited through his mother. There was something unspoken, something mysterious, about the dead Elena, Patrick’s second wife. El Charco’s southern boundary was the Mexico border.
    â€œYou’ll have to come see us,” Geronimo invited. “I make the best Margarita you’ll ever drink.”
    Shea frowned at him. “Sanchez, you know damn well our place isn’t set up for entertaining ladies.”
    â€œYeah?” Sanchez scowled. “Then how about—”
    â€œNever mind,” cut in Shea. “Tracy’s here to see Patrick.”
    What’s wrong with you—or is it me? Tracy wondered, hurt and a little angry. Lord above, cousin, you act as if you were the one who’d been raped!
    The pickup cornered the side of a hill, opening up a far vista of Mexican mountains. Across a broad sandy wash, dominating a hilltop, a massive modern adobe two stories high was surrounded by adobe walls. A pool glinted in the rear courtyard. From this vantage point, Tracy saw the airstrip and hangar on a cleared expanse that covered the far end of the long flat hill beyond a tennis court.
    She’d done a feature on similar airstrips in the Texas hills, and couldn’t repress a nervous laugh. “What a setup for smuggling drugs!”
    Shea’s gray eyes flicked her with scornful rebuke. “Sensationalism may sell papers, but I hope you won’t worry Patrick with your