A Woman Without Lies

by Elizabeth Lowell

  But he knew now.

  Angel had taught him that there was a woman without lies.

  He had taught her that there was a man without love. Her eyes darkened when she looked at him. She walked around tables to avoid being close to him. All that touched her were his questions, questions like talons sinking into her, making her writhe with pain.

  Yet Hawk had to ask, had to know. He had never in his life found anything more compelling to him than the truths spoken by her soft lips.

  As gently as Hawk had gathered it, he released the pale ribbon of Angel’s hair that he had wound around his finger. His skin suddenly felt chilled, missing the warmth of her silky hair. He touched the blond softness once more, sliding his fingertip down until he felt only the cold material of the sleeping bag.

  Then he turned and went back into the cabin, making no more noise than the sunrise staining the eastern horizon.

  Angel woke to the smell of coffee and fried bacon. She sat up quickly, her heart pounding, her mind disoriented in the instant before awakening. The cold air and multicolored sky told her that she was outside at dawn. Then she felt the subtle motions of the boat and remembered.

  Hawk.

  The first day of their fishing trip.

  “How many eggs?” asked Hawk, opening the cabin door and watching Angel’s tousled emergence into awareness.

  “Fried or scrambled?” she asked.

  “I’ll know as soon as I crack the shells,” he said.

  A smile curled the corners of Angel’s mouth. “Keep me posted.”

  With a curt nod, Hawk turned back toward the stove. The sight of Angel’s sleepy disarray made his whole body clench with hunger. Once that had made him angry. Now it made regret stab through him as deeply as desire.

  Angel unzipped the sleeping bag, shivered, and walked quickly to the cabin door, closing it behind her to keep in the heat from the galley stove.

  “Do you want me to make omelets?” she asked, hesitating.

  The cabin seemed very small. Hawk’s height and wide shoulders all but filled the area.

  Hawk looked over his shoulder, sensing Angel’s sudden unease.

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I enjoy cooking breakfast once in a while.”

  Angel hovered just inside the doorway. Her hair was rumpled, her shirttails showed beneath the hem of her dove-gray pullover sweater, and her stocking feet looked oddly vulnerable. Obviously she had changed her clothes last night and then crawled into her sleeping bag.

  “I’ll have to try your method tonight,” Hawk said.

  With an effort he forced himself to look away from Angel. He cracked eggs into the frying pan with the deftness of a man who cooked eggs more than once in a while.

  “My method?” Angel asked.

  “Putting on clean clothes before getting in bed,” explained Hawk. “I’d forgotten how cold clothes get when they’re left out all night.”

  “Especially when you’re all warm from bed.”

  “Fried,” Hawk said.

  “What?” asked Angel, off balance. “Oh, you didn’t break the yolks. Congratulations. I’ll have two.”

  Angel watched in fascination as the corner of Hawk’s mouth curled upward. She was close enough to see that the corners of his eyes crinkled slightly too. She held her breath, hoping to see him really smile. When he didn’t, she sighed quietly. Maybe when he caught a salmon . . . .

  The thought made her start guiltily.

  “We should be out on the water,” Angel said. “I overslept.”

  “I don’t think it matters.”

  “Why?”

  “Wind,” said Hawk succinctly. “Whitecaps until hell won’t have it.”

  He gestured with the spatula toward the bow windows.

  Angel eased past Hawk for a better look. The aisle was so narrow that she couldn’t prevent her body from brushing over his, couldn’t help but notice the width of his shoulders and the narrowness of his hips, the muscular lines of his body beneath jeans and wool shirt.

  She took a deep breath to steady herself. It only made things worse. The smell of soap and clean aftershave, wool and male warmth, assailed her.

  Abruptly Angel pushed past to the bow. She had known that the mornings would be the worst for her. They always were. Her mind woke up several beats behind her senses. With a man like Hawk around, that could be dangerous.

  Or would it? Angel thought. Hawk hasn’t crowded me with anything but questions since our disastrous attempt at making love.

  No, she corrected instantly. Sex. If it had been love, it would have ended a lot differently.

  The sight of wind-churned water took Angel’s mind off Hawk’s male presence and the difference between sex and love.

  The ocean beyond Needle Bay’s protective cliffs was a seething mass of whitecaps and spray torn off by the wind. Fishing of any kind was out of the question.

  “You’re right,” Angel said. “Whitecaps until hell won’t have it. I wouldn’t risk that water unless a life was at stake.”

  Hawk looked beyond Angel to the violence of wind and sea. Nothing had changed.

  “Do these winds usually last long?” he asked.

  “Anywhere from an hour to a week. Nothing was predicted, though. It should blow over by evening.”

  “If it doesn’t?”

  Angel sighed. “Do you know how to play cribbage?”

  Again the corner of Hawk’s mouth curved up.

  “I’m willing to learn,” he said simply.

  Angel listened to Hawk’s deep, gritty voice and found herself wondering if cribbage was all that he was willing to learn from her. No matter how she fought it, she was still haunted by the feeling that beneath Hawk’s harshness there was capacity for love as great as his capacity for cynicism and hate.

  It had been that way with her. Her rage and hatred at life had been as deep as her love for Grant. In the end she had survived both the love and the violent rage.

  What would it have been like if I had known only violence, only rage, only cruelty? What would it be like never to have known love?

  Then she remembered what Hawk had said, and the bittersweet acceptance in his tone. Love linking to love. A beautiful closed circle.

  And Hawk, always on the outside.

  How long can a man live on the outside before he loses the ability to love? Angel asked herself silently. How long before there’s no more hope?

  “Your eggs are getting cold.”

  Hawk’s matter-of-fact voice cut across Angel’s thoughts. She sat and ate the food that Hawk had cooked for her, drank the coffee that he poured into a mug and handed to her. When he sat across from her to eat his own breakfast, their knees met briefly under the table.

  The enforced intimacy of the boat was as unsettling to Angel’s serenity as the northern wind was to the surface of the sea. By the time she finished her breakfast, she knew that she wasn’t going to spend the day on the boat with nothing between her and Hawk but a cribbage board.

  Quickly Angel got up and rinsed her dishes in the small galley sink.

  “Do you like bouillabaisse?” she asked a bit grimly.

  “Yes.”

  Hawk watched Angel work with narrowed eyes. He had sensed her flinching away from even the most casual kind of physical contact with him. That fact that he had earned her fear didn’t make it any easier to take.

  “What I have in mind is closer to beachcomber’s stew,” she admitted. “I wish I’d thought to bring a crab trap.”

  Hawk gestured toward the lower row of cupboards that lined the hull.

  “Try in there,” he said. “First door to the left.”

  Angel bent and opened the cupboard door. A coil of yellow plastic rope and a bright, collapsible metal mesh basket met her eager fingers. She stood and smiled at Hawk, holding the new trap triumphantly.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Derry said you loved to eat crabs. The man at the bait store said that trap would be fine for casual cra
bbing.”

  For a moment Angel simply stared at Hawk, realizing that he had gone out of his way to find something that would please her.

  “Thank you,” she said slowly, almost uncertainly. “You didn’t have to.”

  “I know.” Hawk’s voice was soft, as deep as the color of his eyes. “That’s why I enjoyed doing it.”

  As Angel looked into Hawk’s clear brown eyes, her hands tightened on the trap. She had never thought of brown as a warm color before.

  But it was.

  The brown of Hawk’s eyes was deep and warm with flecks of gold like laughter suspended, waiting only for the right moment to be set free.

  Suddenly Angel felt as though she couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t fear of being close to Hawk. Not quite. And that was most unnerving of all. She turned away from him in a rush.

  “First,” Angel said huskily, “clams.”

  “Clams?”

  “Clams,” she repeated firmly. “And a bucket.”

  “Third cupboard from the end.” Then, amusement rippling beneath his words, Hawk added, “The bucket, not the clams.”

  Hawk saw Angel’s eyes widen with understanding. He stretched out his leg and hooked the cupboard open with his toe.

  “Buckets, digger, and beach shoes,” he said.

  “You thought of everything.”

  “No,” softly, “but I’m trying to learn.”

  Angel’s hands tightened painfully in the wire mesh. She knew that Hawk wasn’t referring to beachcombing.

  “Don’t look so frightened, Angel,” Hawk said. His voice was low, almost harsh. “I’m not asking you to do anything except be yourself.”

  Angel took a swift breath.

  “Is that too much to ask?” Hawk said, but now his voice was rich with shades of curiosity and regret.

  Angel breath came out shakily.

  “No,” she whispered. “That’s not too much to ask. But—”

  Her voice broke. She closed her eyes and rebuilt a rose in her mind, petal by scarlet petal, until her pulse was steady and her throat was no longer tight.

  Hawk watched her, wondering if she was remembering a hook and a hawk buried in her, making her bleed. He felt an almost overwhelming need to hold her, to protect her from sadness and hurt, to replace pain with pleasure.

  The intensity of the feeling shook Hawk. He had felt nothing like it before in his life. All that kept him from gathering Angel into his arms was the certainty that she would fight him, and then they both would lose.

  Quickly Angel gathered everything she and Hawk would need for the beach. The tide was out, leaving behind a small sandbar at the mouth of the creek that drained into Needle Bay.

  The bay itself was long and narrow, more a notch in the mountains than a true bay. Several hundred yards deep and less than eighty feet wide where it opened into the Inside Passage, Needle Bay was walled by cliffs and steep-sided hills bristling with rock and cedars. Where Needle Creek came in, the cliffs gave way to a narrow ravine.

  The beach was tiny, filled with coarse sand and small pebbles. As it blended into the cliffs, the beach became more rocky. That was where clams burrowed and oysters clung stubbornly to gray stones.

  With great care and gentle nudges of the throttle, Angel lightly beached the bow of the boat on the sandbar. Hawk vaulted over the bow and landed with the lithe grace she had come to expect from him. She handed equipment to him, then backed the boat off a few feet to allow for ebbing of the tide. She anchored, peeled off her jeans, and prepared to wade ashore.

  Hawk had beaten her to it. He was waiting for her by the bow. Like Angel, he had taken off his jeans to reveal a swimsuit beneath. His red wool shirt looked incongruous above the black trunks. A few inches of tanned, powerful thigh showed above the chilly water. The result was startling in its sensual contrast, the heavy shirt and muscular bare legs with a sheen of black hair slicked into small curves by water dripping down.

  With a face as impassive as the sea, Hawk watched Angel hesitate at the railing. He held his arms up to carry her to dry land as though she were just one more parcel of equipment.

  If it had been Carlson or Derry, Angel would have stepped off the bow without a second thought. But this was Hawk. She paused before she remembered what he had said about being herself.

  “How did you know that I hate cold water?” Angel asked lightly.

  Hawk’s face relaxed into something close to a smile. His eyes warmed.

  “A lucky guess,” he said, lifting her off the bow.

  Angel held on to her jeans with one hand and Hawk with the other. When she felt the heat of his hand on her bare leg, something uncomfortably like fear shot through her. She couldn’t help the stiffening of her body.

  Nor could Hawk help feeling it. In silence he waded the short distance to the beach. He set Angel on her feet immediately, not prolonging the moment of intimacy.

  “Thank you,” Angel said.

  Hawk wondered whether she was thanking him for being carried above the chilly sea, or for being set down so quickly.

  “No trouble,” he said with a shrug. “Angels don’t weigh much.”

  Smoothly Hawk turned away and began to pull on his jeans. He concentrated on the stubborn fabric clinging to his wet legs, on the cold rivulets of water running down to his ankles, on the coarse sand caught between the soles of his feet and the rubber beach sandals he wore.

  He concentrated on everything except the tactile memory of Angel’s smooth flesh burning into his hand . . . and then her withdrawal, a reflex as involuntary as breathing.

  It took a great amount of pain to instill such a reflex after only one lesson.

  With every moment Hawk was close to Angel, he was learning how deeply he had wounded her. He hadn’t thought it was possible for a woman to feel that much emotion, that much pain. Nor had he thought it possible to share another’s hurt the way he was coming to share hers.

  The complexity of the emotions flowing between himself and Angel was as baffling, difficult, and compelling to him as the truths she gave to him so painfully, not knowing that each truth was a separate talon rending the certainties of Hawk’s past.

  Hawk took a slow, tight breath and wondered how much more he could bear to learn.

  20

  Angel pulled on her own jeans, rolled them to her knees, and helped Hawk carry everything up beyond the high-tide mark. There was a small patch of grass near the stream. They put everything but the clam buckets and digging tools there. Angel led the way to the beach.

  The sky was absolutely clear, as deep and cold as time. The ocean reflected every shade of blue, except along the cliffs. There the water became green, reflecting the color of cedar branches sweeping low over the sea. Small fragments of wind found their way into the bay, barely enough to ruffle the sun-struck surface. It was silent but for the nibbling of the sea at the rocky shore.

  Angel gauged the line of beach revealed by the ebbing tide. Narrow, but enough.

  “Ever dug for clams?” she asked.

  “Not too many clams in west Texas.”

  Angel smiled slightly. “No, I guess not.”

  She sat on her heels near a stretch of mixed rock and sand beach that was just above the water.

  “Clams are easy to find at low tide,” Angel said. “You only have to go down a few inches. If you find one, you’ll find more nearby.”

  Hawk sat on his heels near Angel, watching her rake through the sand and rock with a digging tool. It wasn’t a true clamming fork. There were too many rocks for that. What she used was a three-pronged, hand-held garden tool that was sturdy enough to survive stones, salt water, and abuse.

  With a triumphant sound, Angel held her sandy hand out to Hawk. Several clams lay in her palm. At least, Hawk assumed that the lumps were clams. They were so covered with sand that he couldn’t tell.

  “Clam?” he asked doubtfully.

  “As ever were. Watch.”

  Angel rinsed off the clams, revealing their smoothly curving, plum
p shells.

  “Clams,” Hawk agreed.

  Smiling, Angel filled the bucket halfway with salt-water and chucked in the clams. Then she returned to scrounging happily in the sand and occasional patches of sea slime that covered the intertidal zone.

  “Most people wait a day or two before they eat the clams,” Angel said. “Gives them a chance to get the sand out of their systems. But I haven’t had bouillabaisse since last summer and I can’t wait. Do you mind?”

  Hawk’s expression softened into something very like a smile.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

  Caught by the unexpected gentleness in Hawk’s voice, Angel looked up. Hawk was very close, his leg all but brushing hers as he began to dig in the sand with another tool.

  She looked down quickly at the sea, disturbed by having him so near. Not that it was his fault. The beach was very narrow, and he was only following her lead, digging through cold sand in search of succulent bits of flesh.

  But she wished his sheer maleness didn’t affect her so deeply.

  “I never asked,” Angel said after a moment, struck by a sudden thought. “Do you like clams?”

  “I’ll find out tonight.”

  For a time there was only silence and the low sounds of steel grating over rocks and sand. Hawk set aside his digger and probed through the sand he had raked up. His sensitive fingertips quickly learned to distinguish between the random rough surface of rocks and the curved, gently ribbed surface of clam shells.

  “I’ll be damned,” Hawk murmured as he pulled out a handful of clams. “You’re quite a teacher, Angel.”

  She looked up into his dark features and smiled almost shyly.

  “Clamming is easy to teach,” she said.

  After that, Hawk and Angel dug clams in a companionable silence that reminded her of the time she and Hawk had spent before the fishhook has gone into her back. She was aware of him, definitely, but not afraid.

  Angel was aware of the hook wound, too. It was more tender today than yesterday or the day before. She had meant to have Derry check her back, but every time she had thought of it, he had been immersed in formulas as long as his cast. She had tried cleaning the wounds herself and had given up in disgust. It would take a contortionist to effectively treat that particular place.