Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

He bent over as though to see the screen more clearly, but it was the woman that filled his senses. His nostrils flared as he smelled the delicate perfume he had come to associate with Angel, a blend of sunshine and wind and hidden flowers.

“Salmon look less well defined, unless you happen onto a good school.”

Angel closed her eyes for an instant, sensing the heat radiating from Hawk’s body. Her thoughts scattered. Grimly she recalled them.

“Salmon are rarely on the bottom,” she said. “If you see a school just above the bottom, you’ve found cod, not salmon.”

Why did he have to stand so close? Angel asked silently. I can’t take a breath without breathing him in.

She felt caged by Hawk’s heat, serenity burning away with each breath she took, bringing his male scent deeply into her body.

“Are you nearsighted?” Angel asked tightly.

“Nearsighted?” There was surprise in his voice.

“As in not able to see things unless you’re right on top of them,” Angel explained dryly.

Hawk glanced sideways. His face was only inches from hers. In the slanting morning light her eyes were as green as matched emeralds.

“Sorry,” he said. Then, “Am I crowding you?”

“No more than I’m crowding you,” Angel retorted.

“Good,” Hawk said huskily, “because I don’t feel a bit crowded.”

Angel turned the wheel suddenly and gunned the engines. The motion forced Hawk to step back in order to keep his balance. She took the boat closer to the cliffs looming on the east side of the passage.

Hawk watched the cliffs approach at an alarming speed. He glanced at the sonar. The bottom was thirty-three fathoms and getting deeper every moment. He measured the cliff with narrow eyes.

One hundred feet at least, he estimated. No. Closer to two hundred.

Huge evergreens clung to cracks in the cliff’s face, but the trees looked no bigger than weeds against the immense expanse of rock.

With a sideways glance, Angel measured Hawk’s response to the cliff. To someone unaccustomed to the Inside Passage, it would seem like insanity to approach the shore at such speed because of the danger of running aground.

But Angel knew the land and the sea.

“Geologists call this land the drowned coast,” Angel said, automatically pitching her voice to carry above the sound of the engines.

“As in drowned people?” Hawk suggested sardonically.

“Nope. During the last ice age the sea level was several hundred feet lower. Then all the ice melted, flooding the land. That cliff ahead of us goes straight down about three hundred feet below the sea. There’s no way to run aground here unless I ram the cliff itself.”

“Like Norway,” Hawk said, understanding. He looked at the land with new eyes.

“That’s what one of my fishing clients said,” Angel agreed. “He was born in Norway. Said that all these fjords made him homesick. It was the first time I’d realized that a fjord is nothing but a valley drowned in salt water.”

Amused, Hawk glanced sideways at Angel.

She didn’t notice. She was easing back on the throttles and turning the boat so that they paralleled the cliff face at a distance of about twenty feet. Then she put the engines in neutral and left them idling while she estimated the amount of drift that would be caused by wind and currents.

The boat moved slowly away from the cliff.

“How much do you trust these engines?” Angel asked matter-of-factly.

“To do what?”

“Start the first time.”

“I wouldn’t bet my life on it. But then, I don’t bet my life on anything anymore.” Hawk shrugged. “They’ll start ninety-nine times out of a hundred.”

“Good enough. I wouldn’t mind a little silence.”

Angel cut the engines, then restarted them. They caught immediately. She turned them off again, giving the boat to the subtle movements of wind and water.

Silence flowed over Angel like a benediction. Unconsciously she closed her eyes and smiled with pleasure.

Hawk saw her pleasure and was tempted to run first his fingertip and then his lips over her smile. He did neither. For the first part of the chase he was content to let the prey set the course and the speed.

That didn’t mean he wouldn’t crowd Angel from time to time, just to watch sensuality deepen the color of her eyes and soften her mouth. But the crowding would be gentle, would seem utterly natural, and would give her no excuse to retreat too far.

Hawk sensed that Angel was not nearly so aggressive as many of the women he had taken. With those women, the sport had been to twist and dodge away from them, watching their frustration grow at his elusiveness.

With Angel, the sport would be to let her come to him.

Either way, the end was the same. Satiation and then dissatisfaction, tears and Hawk flying away, spreading his dark wings until he hung poised in the sky, waiting for the next chase to begin.

The thought made Hawk’s mouth turn down in a cruel curve that was aimed as much at himself as it was at the women he had brought down and then flown from. He was beginning to tire of it, the chase and the kill; and most of all he was tired of the restlessness that consumed him the morning after. The adrenaline was no longer enough.

But adrenaline was all there was.

He had learned that when he was eighteen. He had never accepted it, though. Not completely.

Hope was why he flew again, searched again, chased again. Hope kept telling him that there was more to life than betrayal and lies and the hollowness that came in the aftermath of adrenaline.

Hawk had learned to hate hope, but he hadn’t learned how to kill it.

Yet.

“Hawk?”

Hawk blinked, returning to the present and to the beautiful actress who promised to lead him on a fascinating chase.

For a time.

“Yes?” Hawk said.

“If you’ll move, I’ll start putting the fishing gear together.”

He stepped back just enough so that Angel could get out of the cockpit seat, but not enough so that she could avoid touching him as she got to her feet. Angel hesitated, then brushed quickly by him, leaving behind her scent and a hint of warmth.

Hawk absorbed both with a hot thrill of pleasure. But nothing showed on his face. He was as impassive as the cliff rising out of the sea.

Angel rigged the fishing rods quickly, explaining as she worked. The rods she chosewere eight feet long and as flexible as fly rods. The boat rocked idly, drifting almost imperceptibly toward the shallow end of the tiny bay.

“I won’t try trolling or drift fishing for salmon,” Angel said.

“Why not?”

“They aren’t here yet.”

“How can you tell?”

Angel’s lips curved in a small smile.

“Carlson isn’t here,” she said simply. “That man’s uncanny. If there are salmon around, he knows it. Must be his Tlingit heritage.”

“An old gray shaman?” asked Hawk with an amused tilt of his eyebrow.

Angel laughed as she bent over the tackle box and pulled out a spinning reel. When the reel was fixed in place on the rod, she began threading line through the guides.

“Carlson isn’t old,” she said. “His hair is as black and thick as yours. Handsome as sin and hard as that cliff. Like you.”

Angel’s voice was so matter-of-fact that it took Hawk a moment to understand what she said.

“Thank you,” he said calmly, watching her.

Angel pulled a wicked-looking jig out of its slot in the tray. The hook gleamed cruelly in the sun.

“Thank your parents,” she said. “I had nothing to do with it.”

For a moment Hawk was off-balance. Women had told him he was handsome before. Often. He was tired of hearing it, just as he was tired of so many things.

But Angel’s offhand summation of his appearance was… pleasing. She expected nothing in return. Not a touch, not even words.

It was as though she had pointed out that he had ten fingers. Nothing remarkable. Everyone had ten fingers.

A feeling of quiet exhilaration rippled through Hawk. First Angel retreated, then she returned, but she returned so delicately that he had all but missed her reappearance.

Never before had Hawk’s prey moved so gracefully, so unexpectedly. He had been right to let her set the pace.

He would continue to do so, until desire overcame his predator’s patience and he swooped down, ending it.

“What if I said you were beautiful?” asked Hawk, real curiosity in his voice.

“I’d say you had good manners and bad eyesight,” answered Angel.

As she spoke, she fastened the roundheaded jig to the fishing line by means of a bronze safety pin that was already tied to the line.

“My eyesight is excellent,” Hawk said.

“Then you can see that my forehead is too high, my cheekbones are too prominent, my hair is too thick, my body is too thin, and my skin is too pale.”

Angel touched the tip of the hook with an experimental fingertip. Not quite the way it should be – lethally sharp.

“On the plus side,” Angel continued, “my eyes are a nice color and everything else works better than it has any right to. There’s nothing wrong with my mind, either – most of the time,” she amended wryly.

As she spoke, Angel pulled out a small whetstone and begun sharpening the jig’s hook.

Hawk watched, intrigued both by her words and by her casual inventory of herself.

What Angel said about herself is true in the strict factual sense, Hawk admitted. She isn’t beautiful in a conventional way.

She is fascinating.

Like a kaleidoscope, changing with each breath, never the same, always subtly shifting, brilliant.

Hawk was astonished. He was certain that she must know how unusual she was, yet she had sounded absolutely certain of her lack of appeal to men.

“You’re an amazing actress,” murmured Hawk, meaning every word of the ambiguous compliment. “Quite the best I’ve ever seen.”

Startled, Angel looked up.

The hook slipped, piercing the skin on the ball of her thumb. She snatched her hand away from the hook and frowned at the single bright drop of blood rising on her thumb.

“What do you mean?” Angel asked.

Hawk shook his head admiringly.

“Just that, Angel.”

He took her hand and brought it to his mouth. He sucked lightly on her thumb.

“Your blood is real, though,” he murmured, releasing her with a final, flicking caress from his tongue.

Hawk had moved very quickly, capturing and releasing Angel before she understood what was happening.

But her body understood. She could still feel the soft rasp of his tongue, the quick pressure and heat of his mouth. Her breath was wedged tightly in her throat.

Hawk took the rod from Angel’s hands as though nothing had happened.

“I think the hook is sharp enough now, don’t you?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” said Angel, looking away from him.

She walked quickly back into the cockpit and checked the sonar. They had drifted past the cliff face. Now the bottom was shelving up steeply. No more than eighty feet of water lay beneath the boat. With a quick glance at the land, she estimated where they were in relation to the rock reef that lay beneath the lower portion of the tiny bay.

Absently Angel sucked her stinging thumb. When she realized that her skin tasted of Hawk, her pulse hesitated, then accelerated raggedly. She took several steadying breaths, recalling the tranquil rose to her mind. It was the only way she had found to gather and steel herself against the pain of learning how to walk again, how to live again.

Frowning, Angel looked at her thumb. Until this moment she hadn’t realized that her special rose was the exact color of blood, the color of life itself.

Angel let the understanding radiate through her like light through stained glass, bringing color to everything it touched. When she returned to the open stern of the boat, her breathing was easy, her voice and body relaxed.

“Have you ever jigged for cod?” she asked Hawk calmly, taking the rod from his hands.

“No. Is it difficult?”

“For you? I doubt it. You’re very quick.”

“Another compliment? You’ll turn my head.”

Angel gave Hawk a cool sideways look.

“Another fact,” she said distinctly. “And it would take a bulldozer to turn your head.”

The left corner of Hawk’s mouth turned up.

It was as close to a smile as Angel had seen from him.

Maybe it’s as close to a smile as he ever gets, she thought.

It wasn’t a comforting insight.

“Have you used a spinning reel before?” asked Angel, turning away from the intent brown eyes watching her.

“Yes. Then I was soundly whipped for taking it without permission.”