The Defender. Lindsay McKenna

she danced a little dance around the office area. She heard Hank, her red-tailed hawk, whistling softly. Moon, the barn owl who had the mew next to her office desk, was sleeping the day away in her wooden nest box. Sam, the golden eagle whistled, his piercing call echoing throughout the facility. Laughing, Katie called out, “It’s okay, Sam. I’m dancing for joy. There’s a falconer coming for the job! Yippee!”

      * * *

      JOE EASED OUT of his car and admired the huge metal-and-glass building with louvered windows. He could see the many mews through the clean glass. The entire roof was draped in dark netting, shielding the inner area from an excessive build-up of heat. Raptors don’t do well in high heat. He spotted a propane tank at the other end of the building to warm it during the winter. Huge fans positioned on both ends of the building were turned on to push fresh Wyoming air through the state-of-the-art facility. Iris had said she had spared no expense on this modern raptor facility and she was right.

      As Joe shut the car door, he saw the glass entrance door slide open. Katie Bergstrom appeared. He wasn’t prepared for her natural beauty as she waved enthusiastically and hurried toward him. Her black hair was loose, shining like a raven’s wing in the sunlight, blue highlights dancing here and there. But it was her eyes that mesmerized him as he walked around the front of his car to greet her. They were a turquoise blue, the kind of color he’d found in Belize where he had scuba-dived. Her oval face was wide, her eyes incredibly alluring and yet, as his swift gaze dropped to her mouth, Joe felt himself go suddenly hot. How to keep his face carefully arranged?

      “Hi, I’m Katie. You must be Joe Gannon?” She gripped his hand and felt his monitored strength. Indeed, her heart pounded, but not because she was excited about his possibly working with her raptors. No, Joe was ruggedly handsome and he made her pulse race. Katie drowned beneath his very male smile, those forest-green eyes alert as an eagle’s. His black pupils were large, the surrounding color reminding her of the Douglas firs on the slopes of the Tetons. What was there not to like about this gorgeous man? Nothing! Breathless with building hope, Katie released his hand.

      “Yes, I’m Joe Gannon. Nice to meet you, Miss Bergstrom.”

      “Call me Katie. I don’t stand much on formality. Come on in. Let me show you around.”

      Joe admired her willowlike form and those legs fired his imagination. Joe tried to tamp down his unexpected reaction toward her. Katie was far more attractive than any photo in the FBI files. Her eyes danced with life, like gold sunlight dappling across a blue lake’s surface. She moved ahead of him to the door and turned, a wide smile on her lips. She wore no makeup, and he thought Katie looked more like a wood nymph from the Greek myths than a real woman. He sharply reminded himself that she was suspected of working for the Los Lobos cartel, yet, she had a trusting face.

      Inside the facility, Joe stopped to admire it. Katie stood off to his right, cheeks flushed. Why was she blushing? Because he was applying for the job? He secretly wished it was her reaction to him but that was idiocy. “Wow,” he uttered, admiration in his tone, “this place rocks. I thought Eddie had a modern facility, but yours puts his to shame.”

      “Thank you. I owe it all to Iris. I showed her blueprints of other state-of-the-art raptor facilities and she wanted the whole package. I feel very lucky to have her underwriting my business.” Katie wished she’d stop blushing like a teenager, but the timbre of Joe’s voice, the admiration gleaming in his eyes as he absorbed the facility, excited her. If he liked what he saw enough, he might want to work for her. Katie had never thought a man would apply for the job; every falconer she’d ever worked with had been a woman. Could a man be as gentle and intuitive as was needed in order to work with her super-psychic raptors? Katie would test Joe on this very point to find out. If her raptors didn’t respond well to Joe, she wouldn’t hire him. Her birds would evaluate him.

      “Well, this is something else,” Joe said in a low murmur. He heard the chirping calls of the hawks on the right side of the concrete aisle. On the left, halfway down, he spotted Sam, the golden eagle. He had a mew twice the size of the hawks or owls. Turning, he held Katie’s warm gaze. Why did she have to look so damned innocent? Why couldn’t she be much less attractive? Joe wanted to find some way to dislike her. Katie reminded him of an excited girl who couldn’t stand still for two seconds. He could clearly see her interest in him, but how to read it?

      “Let me show you around.” Katie gestured toward the small office on the right. “You can see we have a cabinet and lockers on the other side of the desk along the wall.” She walked over and opened up one of the lockers. “All the kangaroo leather and tools you need to make jesses, hoods for the falcons or anything else are located in here. You can use the desk to work on.”

      Joe saw the tools of their trade neatly placed in individual drawers. The kangaroo leather was in different colors. “Are your raptors color-coded?” he asked.

      “Yes. In fact,” Katie said, “I picked up that idea a long time ago from Eddie Barton’s books on eagles. You can see there’s a name of a raptor on each color of leather. That way, you can identify them.” And then she laughed. “Not that you wouldn’t be able to recognize each raptor. But you know what I mean.” She looked up at him. Joe was pure eye candy. Without thinking, she glanced down at his left hand. Was he wearing a wedding ring? No. But that meant nothing nowadays. She didn’t dare ask if he had a partner. More than likely, with his rugged looks and fabulously athletic body, Joe had a woman in his life. Maybe more than one. A bit of her found that a disappointing possibility. She closed the locker doors and gestured across the aisleway.

      “This is the whiteboard where I write up the list for the coming day. The hours of the job are 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. When you come in each morning, this is the first place you’ll come. I have a lot of speaking engagements and I put the info up along with the names of the raptors I take with me.”

      Joe studied the huge whiteboard. Clearly, Katie was in demand as a speaker. He saw ten engagements in the next two weeks. “You are busy,” he agreed, his hands coming to rest on his hips. “No wonder you need help.” He shared a slight grin with her. Her cheeks reddened even more.

      “My passion in life,” Katie said, “is educating the public about how important our raptors are to the overall environment. I made a promise to myself to talk wherever I could. The more people who know not to shoot raptors or think of them as vermin, the more I feel I am accomplishing my mission.”

      “It’s a good mission to have,” Joe agreed. And it was a perfect cover being part of a cartel, too. Katie could travel wherever she wanted and not be suspected. “I trained with Eddie two to three times a week. He has the same belief as you and he does a lot of speaking engagements around the Washington, D.C., area. One time, he took his bald eagle, Jefferson, into the Senate. The senators had invited him to come and speak to all of them about our country’s national bird. Jefferson wowed them by flying from the lectern down on the floor up to where I was standing in the balcony. That got their attention.”

      “You’ve got some eagle training, too?” Katie desperately needed a falconer with some knowledge of how to handle an eagle. They were very different from working with a hawk, falcon or owl.

      “Yes, I do,” Joe said, “but I’m not licensed to work with eagles.”

      “Right, I understand,” she said, not hiding the excitement in her voice. “But working with Eddie, you worked with his eagles?”

      “Yes, every day. He has two bald eagles, a golden eagle, a harpy eagle from South America and a Black eagle from South Africa, among others.”

      Katie said in a wistful voice, “Joe, you are an answer to my prayers. You know that getting an eagle license is rare? Most falconers have no knowledge of how to handle an eagle. I told Iris I was praying someone who had training with them would answer my ad.” She gazed up into his green eyes. “Truly, you are an angel.”

      Joe felt his conscience bite him. Was Katie for real? She seemed like a rainbow shimmering in the sky after a destructive storm. And rainbows magically dissolved back into the sky. Yes, magical was the word for this woman who held such hope in her eyes.