Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

“Damn!” Angel said. “He was keeper size.”

Hawk watched the crab disappear. “I like crab.”

“So do I. Good thing they’re stupid. Sooner or later, he’ll be back for more.”

Hawk watched while Angel repeatedly lowered the mesh, counted beneath her breath, raised it quickly, and looked with varying degrees of disappointment at the contents of the trap. The crabs were either too small or of the wrong kind.

After twenty minutes, Angel and the bait were looking equally frayed.

“May I?” Hawk asked, holding out a hand for the trap.

Without a word Angel handed over the bright yellow rope. She peeled off her sweater and tied it around her neck. Sun reflected off the rocks and water, heating the air. Despite the wind beyond the bay, it was warm within the sheltering cliffs.

Hawk lowered the trap, counted, then pulled. The basket came up empty, not so much as one tiny crab.

He looked at Angel.

“I forgot to tell you,” she said, blowing wisps of hair off her hot forehead. “You have to pull straight up. If the basket tips over – ”

“The crabs get away,” finished Hawk.

After a few more tries, Hawk got the feel of it. Angel sat on the slanting shelf and watched him work. His powerful arms brought up the basket so quickly that whatever lay inside was all but flattened.

Hawk seemed tireless, raising and lowering the trap with the same ease after twenty tries as after two. Angel put her head on her knees and memorized the male grace and power of his body, designing a stained glass panel in her mind, the man and the rock and the sea.

Then Angel realized that Hawk had snagged a huge crab and was casually reaching in to take it out of the trap.

“No!” Angel said.

She lunged for Hawk’s wrist, yanking his fingers out of the mesh before he could get to the crab. And vice-versa.

Startled, Hawk looked from the slender hand wrapped around his wrist to the blue-green eyes only inches from his.

“Those pincers can hurt,” Angel explained.

Cautiously she approached the large crab from the rear, slid her thumb underneath and her fingers on top, and lifted the crab out of the trap. The crab was a male, more than eight inches across the shell. Its pincers waved and clicked angrily.

Hawk looked at the thick claws and realized that once again Angel had put herself between him and possible injury.

“First the hook, now the crab,” Hawk said softly. “Thanks. For both.”

His fingers touched Angel’s cheek for an instant. His hands were cool from the ocean and Angel’s cheeks were flushed with sun. The contrast only increased the sensual impact of his touch.

Angel stared at Hawk for a moment, too surprised to move. Then she turned her head away.

“I should have warned you about the crab,” she said, her voice even.

Hawk’s hand returned to the cold yellow rope.

“How many crabs do we need?” he asked.

“This should do it.”

Hawk gave Angel a sideways look.

“I suppose I can always swap my clams for your half of the crab,” he said.

“Not a chance,” she said quickly.

The corner of Hawk’s mouth lifted as bent over and lowered the trap into the sea again. While he counted, he watched Angel walk across the narrow beach and drop the crab into the clam bucket.

The faded jeans Angel wore fitted softly, firmly, to every curve of her hips and legs. Her hair had been gathered at the nape of her neck, but time and exertion had loosened the clip. Bright wisps burned around her face and across the gray sweater. She walked confidently despite the uneven surface and the rubber beach sandals snapping at her heels with each step.

Watching her grace, Hawk found it hard to believe that Angel had ever been broken, in agony, doomed but for Derry’s strength pulling her from the twisted wreckage of her life, her dreams.

Distantly Hawk realized that his hands were aching from the force with which he was holding the yellow rope. The thought of Angel lying in helpless agony was unbearable to him. He had known too many women that had no truth.

He had come too close to never knowing a woman who had no lies.

“Are you giving the crabs a free lunch?” asked Angel lightly, coming back to stand beside him.

Then his bleak expression and the coiled intensity of his body struck her.

“Hawk?”

Angel saw the tremor that went through him. When he turned and looked at her, hunger and hope and loneliness radiated from him. Transfixed, she stood without moving while all the colors of his emotions poured through her, illuminating man and woman alike.

The force of the moment overwhelmed Angel. Nothing in her life had prepared her for a man like Hawk.

Hawk saw Angel tremble and step back reflexively, even as her hand reached toward him.

“Hawk?” she whispered.

He turned away and pulled up the trap with swift, powerful movements.

“It’s all right, Angel,” he said quietly. “I was just thinking.”

“About what?” Then, quickly, “I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”

“I was thinking about women and lies,” Hawk said. “And about truth and angels.”

Angel tried not to ask, but found it impossible. She had to know what had made Hawk turn his back on emotion, on love.

“There’s more to it than your mother abandoning you, isn’t there?” Angel asked.

“More to what?”

“Your hatred of women.”

Hawk pulled up the trap. It was empty. He lowered the trap again.

“I don’t hate all women,” he said finally. “Not anymore.”

“It isn’t easy, is it?”

“What isn’t?”

“Not hating me.”

Stillness went through Hawk, Angel’s truth sinking into him.

She’s right.

Not hating Angel went against every reflex Hawk had acquired during a lifetime of surviving in a harsh world.

Yet it was impossible to hate Angel. She had the aching purity of one of her stained glass creations, all the colors of life distilled into a woman with haunted eyes and a mouth still willing to smile.

“It’s frighteningly easy not to hate you,” Hawk said, watching Angel with eyes that consumed her gently, utterly.

Angel’s breath wedged in her throat as she began to understand.

Frightening.

Yes, it was all of that and then some to have your personal beliefs shattered in a single savage instant.

It had happened to Angel twice. Once with Hawk, when she had learned to distrust her own judgment. And once in the wreck, when she had learned to distrust life itself.

It had been very hard for Angel to crawl out of the wreckage of her world, to learn to walk again in a new world, a world that never could be as secure as the old had been.

Love had given her strength. Derry’s love. Carlson’s love. And finally, painfully, her own memories of Grant had been allowed to return, healing much of the regret and all of the bitterness.

How much worse it must be for Hawk to stand naked and alone amid the shattered pieces of his beliefs, Angel thought painfully. Hawk, who has never known love.

The sound of the trap being pulled from the sea’s green embrace startled Angel. She saw the dark, angular shape clinging to the mesh and came quickly to her feet, drawn again into the world she had chosen, the world she loved. She stood on tiptoe and peered over Hawk’s arm.

“It’s keeper size,” she crowed. “Just look at that beauty!”

Hawk’s eyebrow climbed at Angel’s enthusiasm. The black-eyed crab was crouched against the trap, waving its thick, serrated pincers around.

“Looks mean as hell to me,” Hawk said.

“The harder the shell, the sweeter the meat.”

“That’s not the way I remember that particular bit of folk wisdom.”

“New world, new saying,” Angel retorted blithely.

She shook the trap soundly. Then, swiftly, she grabbed the distracted crab and headed back up the beach.

Hawk coiled the yellow rope, hefted the trap, and followed, wondering with each step how something as soft and silky as Angel had survived a world where teeth and claws were the rule.

Then he remembered her deft capture of the wicked-looking crab. The corners of Hawk’s mouth lifted.

Maybe the better question would be how teeth and claws could survive in the presence of an angel.

Hawk waded back from the boat to the shore. Angel waited there, stretched out on her stomach on an old quilt. Her chin was propped on her hands as she watched huge, sleek bumblebees go from blossom to blossom among the scattered wildflowers.

“Feeling sorry for the flowers?” Hawk asked.

“Hmmm?” murmured Angel. “Why should I feel sorry for them?”

“The bee goes from flower to flower to flower, sipping honey and then flying on without a backward look.”

“That’s the bee’s point of view.” Angel’s lips curved upward in a small, secret smile.

Hawk saw the smile as she rolled over gracefully and sat up to take a soda from his hand. Deftly he opened the can and gave it to her.

“What other point of view is there?” Hawk asked, popping open his beer.

“The flower’s.”

“Which is?” prompted Hawk, enjoying the very feminine smile on Angel’s lips.

“The flower gets bee after bee after bee.”

The corners of Hawk’s mouth shifted beneath the midnight mustache. There was a flash of white teeth and then the soft, rough-edged sound of male laughter.

Angel watched, riveted by Hawk’s transformation. The hard planes of his face gentled, making his expression younger, more open, a face both experienced and warm. She had thought him harshly handsome before; when he laughed, he was more beautiful than a pagan god.

Then Hawk turned and smiled directly at Angel. She felt as though she had been handed the sun after years of darkness. Her blue-green eyes drank in every instant of Hawk’s transformation.

“Bee after bee after bee,” he said. He shook his head, still smiling. “Angel, you’re… special.”

“So are you. And when you smile,” she added huskily, “you’re incredible.”

Surprise changed Hawk’s face again. Eyes that had lit with laughter changed to a blaze of brown when he saw that Angel, as always, was telling the truth. No matter how intently he searched her eyes, he saw only pleasure. There were no shadows of fear or unease.

“I’ll have to smile more often,” Hawk said quietly.

“Yes,” Angel said, meeting Hawk’s eyes. “That would be… special.”

Hawk’s lean brown hand reached slowly toward Angel. His fingertips traced the burnished curve of one eyebrow, the straight line above her nose and the hollow beneath one high, slanted cheekbone. He wanted very much to lower his mouth and taste her very gently, feeling the warmth of her skin beneath his lips.

Instead, Hawk smiled at Angel again and felt her own smile go through him, transforming everything it touched into radiant colors. Slowly, he withdrew his touch before the pleasure glowing in her eyes became shadowed by fear of him again.

“What else do we have to do for our dinner?” Hawk asked.

Although he had turned away and was gathering up the debris of the impromptu picnic, Angel heard the faint huskiness beneath Hawk’s impersonal words. Suddenly she realized that she had been sitting motionless while his fingers memorized her face.

A tremor moved through Angel as she remembered what being intimate with Hawk had been like. Gentle, at first, and then fierce, hurtful.

“F-fish,” Angel said. Then she cleared her throat and tried again. “Fish.”

Hawk looked out beyond the narrow neck of the bay. Wind and whitecaps claimed the Inside Passage.

“Maybe we should settle for crabs and clams,” he said doubtfully.

“In the bay,” Angel added quickly. “For cod. Maybe even a halibut if we’re lucky.”

“Salmon?” Angel sighed. “Doubt it, but anything is possible.”

Even a smile from a hawk.

Working together they bundled up all the equipment. Angel waded into the bay this time. The heat of the day made the water feel merely bracing rather than punishing. When she got to the boat, the water was just up to the curve of her hips.

The boat’s railing was at her eye level, and there was no sea ladder at the stern.

“Now comes the hard part,” Angel said, shifting her grip on the bucket.

Saying nothing, Hawk dumped everything he held onto the deck. Then he grabbed the railing and pulled himself out of the water and into the boat with a single, powerful movement.

Angel stared in disbelief as Hawk leaned over and plucked the bucket out of her hand.

“What hard part?” Hawk asked. “Cleaning the crabs?”

After a moment Angel realized that Hawk wasn’t teasing her. He really didn’t know what she had meant. She threw a glance at the sky, silently asking why life distributed physical gifts so unfairly.