Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

“Why don’t the two of you build a god-damn shrine?” Hawk asked coldly.

He didn’t question the unreasonable rage that coiled within him at the thought of Angel loving anyone.

Even a dead man.

Fury tore at Angel like steel talons. With an effort that made her tremble, she kept her voice even.

“You are well named,” she said carefully. “Bird of prey. I was very easy prey, wasn’t I?”

“Is that why you raced home last night? Were you afraid you’d end up in bed with me again?”

The harsh expression on Hawk’s face steadied Angel as nothing else could have.

“No,” Angel said quietly. “I’m not afraid of ending up in bed with you again. I’ve learned the meaning of the old saying about casting pearls before swine.”

“Is that how you thought of your virginity – a real pearl?” asked Hawk caustically.

“No. But you made up for it. You were a real swine.”

There was a moment of savage silence.

Then Hawk said softly, dangerously, “Why did you give yourself to me, Angel? Because you did. I didn’t take you. Or is that the lie you’re consoling yourself with this morning? Poor little Angel,” he said mockingly, “done in by an experienced Hawk.”

Suddenly Angel was glad for the tears that she had cried last night. It made it possible not to cry now. Deep inside herself the silent, tearing question changed from Why? to How?

How did I so badly misjudge this man?

When the answer came to her, Angel spoke it aloud without thinking, without caring.

“I thought I loved you,” Angel said. “That was very stupid of me, I confused desire with love – and ended up with neither.”

Hawk’s pupils dilated, then narrowed to ebony points in brown eyes that were deep and clear. He said nothing, for he was too surprised to speak.

She had said love with the same mocking emphasis that he habitually used when he spoke the word. And in speaking that way, Angel had told Hawk that he had hurt her as badly as he had once been hurt.

The thought sank like a hook deep in his gut, twisting with each breath he took.

Hawk hadn’t even believed it was possible to wound Angel so savagely. To be hurt like that, you must first love. But Hawk hadn’t believed in love since he was eighteen.

Not for him.

Not for anyone.

“No more questions?” Angel asked, her voice even.

Hawk said nothing. There was nothing for him to say.

“Good,” Angel said crisply. “Let’s go fishing.”

The controlled chill of her words rocked Hawk, angering him. His mouth tightened.

“Cold as the sea, aren’t you?” he asked.

Angel looked out over the shimmering, cloud-shadowed expanse of water in front of her.

“The sea isn’t cold,” she said. “It teems with life. I’m as cold as a bird of prey. Death, not life. Do you want to go fishing this afternoon?”

“I’d like to break your neck.”

“That would be a pity, ” Angel said, her voice indifferent as she turned to face Hawk once again. “It’s about the only part of me that hasn’t been broken.”

Hawk’s voice changed as he leaned toward her.

“Including your heart?” he asked softly.

“My heart was broken long before I met you.”

“Angel… ”

Hawk’s voice was a warmth brushing over her temples. Emotions twisted inside her, trying to elude her control.

“Don’t call me that,” Angel said tightly.

“Why? Because he called you Angel?”

“He?”

Hawk’s nostrils flared. He leaned closer, so close that he could smell the delicate perfume Angel used.

“The boy you loved,” Hawk said. “Derry’s brother.”

Angel turned away, hating the treacherous warmth that radiated from Hawk through the filmy caftan.

“We’ll miss the tide change unless we hurry,” she said.

“Answer me.”

Angel turned back so quickly that tiny bells trembled and cried. But her voice was soft, almost too soft for Hawk to hear though he stood only inches from her.

“Grant called me Angie, darling, sweetheart, honey, love. He called me his own special sunrise, his hidden heart, his – ”

“But you didn’t sleep with him,” interrupted Hawk roughly, not wanting to hear any more.

“No. It’s the only thing I regret about my love for him.”

Angel tried to stop, but her voice went on softly, relentlessly. She was unable to halt the words even though they were shattering the peace she had so carefully rebuilt from the fragments of the past.

“My God, how I regret it!” she said hoarsely. “Especially now!”

Hawk’s breath came in with a sharp sound. He knew that Angel was remembering her unhappy initiation at his hands.

But she was still speaking softly, so softly that Hawk had to concentrate to hear every word, feel every hook sinking into him, barbs tearing through a lifetime of scars to the vulnerable flesh beneath.

“If I had known he was going to die, I would have made love with him.” Angel’s voice shook with intensity. “But I was young. I thought we had time. A lifetime. And Grant – ”

Her voice broke over his name and then reformed, empty again, controlled.

“Grant wanted the first time to be perfect for me,” Angel said. “Our own home, our own bed, every right in the world to make slow, beautiful love to each other.”

Hawk closed his eyes for an instant, remembering the moment when he had taken Angel with equal parts of lust and anger. But that moment was in the past, as irretrievable as childhood.

It was futile to shred himself over what could not be changed. All that could be changed, all that was left, was the future – an angel with torn wings and green eyes that had seen hell, and a hawk that hadn’t known heaven when he had pierced its warm surface with angry black talons.

Hawk put the past behind him, knowing he couldn’t touch it, change it, heal it.

He could learn, though.

That was how living things survived. Learning from mistakes.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Hawk said, his voice uninflected. “Why do you get angry when I call you Angel?”

“Everybody calls me Angie. There’s nothing special between us. Why should you call me anything but Angie?”

“The fact that you gave your virginity to me isn’t special?”

“It should have been, ” agreed Angel in sardonic tones that echoed his. “But it ended up about as special as a skinned knee.”

“Keep pushing me. You’ll find the limit,” promised Hawk, meaning every word.

Angel’s eyes narrowed. She smiled a tiny, cold smile, liking the idea of finding Hawk’s limit.

Of hurting him.

“So I find your limit. So what?” Angel asked carelessly. “Never argue with someone like me, Hawk. I’ve got nothing left to lose. It gives me an edge.”

“What about Derry?” Hawk asked smoothly, watching her.

Abruptly Angel curbed the cruelty that had snaked out of her own pain. She had forgotten how easy – and how terribly satisfying – it could be to turn agony into cruelty and then watch the rest of the world bleed with each razor cut of her tongue.

But cruelty only bred more cruelty, maiming the people around her, corroding her soul, until cruelty became a downward spiral of self-destruction that wouldn’t end short of death.

Angel’s realization that she hadn’t learned her lesson well enough in the past was like getting an open-handed blow across the mouth. She paled until her haunted eyes were the only color in her face.

I will try very hard not to destroy myself over Hawk. I will die rather than destroy Derry.

“Angel is the name I called myself after the accident, when I finally decided to live,” she said.

Hawk listened to the soft, controlled, emotionless words and felt a chill spreading through him.

“An angel is something alive that once was dead. Like me,” she said. “Alive and then dead and then alive again. Angel.”

Hawk fought the desire to take Angel in his arms. All that kept his hands at his side was the knowledge that she would turn on him like a cornered animal.

He didn’t blame her. He had hurt her cruelly, and he had no experience in healing. He had nothing to give her but emptiness and a ravenous, soul-deep curiosity about the fragile, elusive, powerful complex of emotions known as love.

A lifetime of questions waiting to be answered.

“Would you sleep with me again, for Derry?” Hawk asked.

Angel heard curiosity rather than desire in Hawk’s question.

“You don’t want me,” she said, “so the question doesn’t arise.”

“What makes you think I don’t want you?”

The harsh sound that came from Angel’s lips could hardly be called laughter. She looked up at Hawk, her eyes as hard as jade.

“You didn’t enjoy that disaster on the boat any more than I did,” she said. “So don’t worry. I won’t trip you and beat you to the floor. No more amateur hour for either one of us. That’s a promise.”

Angel tilted her head so that she could see the face of Hawk’s gold watch.

“The tide changes in twenty minutes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Which will it be, Hawk? Fish or cut bait.”

“Oh, I’ll fish. Always.”

Then Hawk bent down until he could feel Angel’s warmth seeping through the soft cotton of her dress. Close, very close, but not touching her.

“Did you really think you loved me, Angel?”

The stained glass rose Angel had held in her mind exploded into a thousand cutting shards. Suddenly she was unable to bear being close to Hawk any longer.

Angel turned and ran toward the cliff trail. Each movement brought silver cries from the bells she wore. The sweet sounds went into Hawk like tiny blows too small to dodge, tiny wounds opening, tiny hooks teaching him how to bleed.

Hawk ran after her, afraid that she would slip on the narrow trail, afraid that she would fall because her wings had been torn and she could no longer fly.

Yet even when he caught up with Angel and his hard hand held her to a more sensible pace, she ignored him, refusing in pale silence to answer his question about love.

Hawk did not ask again. He had learned that Angel’s truths were as painful for her as they were for him.

“Let me take that,” Hawk said.

He lifted the heavy, two-foot-square stained-glass panel from Angel’s hands. She didn’t object. It would have done no good, anyway. Hawk’s speed and strength were superior to hers.

Angel watched as his glance skimmed indifferently over Mrs. Carey’s gift. The light in the hall was dim, more twilight than day. The pieces of glass were subdued, almost dull, as ordinary as crayon colors on cheap paper.

Then Hawk walked into the sunlight pouring over the front steps. The panel in his hands leaped into radiance, colors flashing and expanding in a silent explosion of beauty.

He stopped, unable to move, consumed by colors. Silence stretched into one minute, two, three, but he didn’t notice. He tilted the panel first one way and then the other, wholly caught in the fantastic sensual wealth of colors pooling in his hands.

Finally he looked up and saw Angel watching him.

“That’s why I love stained glass,” she said, looking at the brilliance shimmering in Hawk’s grasp. “It’s like life. Everything depends on the light you view it in.”

The words had no more than left Angel’s lips that she realized that the words could be applied to Hawk. Silently she closed the door behind him, hoping that he hadn’t noticed.

“Are you trying to tell me that my point of view on life is too dark?” Hawk asked.

The question told Angel that he had not only noticed, he had understood all the subtle ramifications.

I should have expected it. Hawk is the quickest, most intelligent man I’ve ever met.

“No,” Angel said. “I was merely making an observation on the nature of stained glass and light.”

She walked toward her car, not looking at Hawk. In the three days since she and Hawk had talked on the beach, she had carefully avoided anything that hinted of personal topics.

“Nothing personal, is that it?” Hawk asked with a black lift of his eyebrow.

“As you say. Nothing personal.”

Angel opened the trunk of her car, shook out an old quilt, and gestured for Hawk to put the panel on the quilt.

“How much is a piece like this worth?” Hawk asked.

She watched as he handled the awkward panel with an ease she envied. Powerful, supple, hard, his body moved with a male grace that surprised her anew each time she noticed it. Like stained glass, Hawk kept changing with each angle, each moment, each shift of illumination.

And like glass, he could cut her to the bone in the first instant of her carelessness.

“A small panel like this would bring between ten and twelve hundred dollars,” Angel said, wrapping the stained glass with deft motions. “Minus the gallery commission, of course, and the cost of materials. Good glass is very expensive.”