Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

The motion of the limousine changed as it turned toward Vancouver harbor. Angel swayed slightly, caught herself, and recognized her surroundings. Island Taxi’s bright sign poked above the calm water. Just beyond the sign a pontoon plane floated.

Angel turned quickly to Hawk.

He was watching her.

She sensed that he had been watching her the whole time. With a shock, she noticed that he had a mustache, a smooth band of midnight just above his hard mouth, black hair shifting and gleaming subtly as he moved his head.

She hadn’t noticed the mustache before, not with those hard, dark eyes watching her.

“Hawk – Mr. Hawkins – ”

“Hawk,” he said, watching for her reaction as he spoke. “Call me Hawk, Angel. It will help both of us to remember what we really are.”

“What does that mean?”

“That I’m a hawk and you’re an angel.”

He laughed briefly, a sound without humor or warmth.

“Well,” he added, “that’s half the truth, anyway. One of us is just what he seems.”

“Are we flying to Vancouver Island?” asked Angel, irritated with the enigmatic conversation.

“Don’t tell me an angel is afraid to fly?” he asked softly.

“No more than a hawk,” she retorted. Angel frowned. Hawk had a devastating effect on her temper. She took a slow breath, then another, until she felt calm again.

“My car is at the gallery,” Angel said. “I’d planned to take the ferry over to see Derry.”

Hawk pulled a small leather-bound book and a gold pen from his pocket. He handed both to her.

“Write down the gallery’s address, the car’s license number, and a description of the car,” he said. “You’ll have it by tomorrow.”

Angel hesitated, then gave in.

The pen was warm to Angel’s touch, radiating the heat of the man who sat so close. She wrote quickly, feeling as though the pen were burning her skin.

Hawk took the keys she pulled out of her purse, the book, and the pen. For a moment his fingertips caressed the smooth length of the gold metal.

Angel knew that Hawk was feeling her heat as surely as she had felt his. The knowledge shortened her breath.

Then Hawk looked quickly at her, catching the sensual knowledge in her eyes. The corner of his mouth tilted sardonically.

He replaced the pen in his pocket. The sound of paper tearing was very loud in the silence as he removed the page Angel had written on. He handed the paper and the car keys to the chauffeur.

“When – when did Derry hurt himself?” asked Angel, hating the breathless quality of her voice, yet unable to change it.

“Two days ago. I didn’t know about it until he got out of surgery.”

“Surgery!”

Instantly Angel forgot about everything, including her reaction to Hawk.

“But you said he just broke his leg!” she cried, turning on Hawk.

Hawk saw the fear darkening Angel’s eyes again.

Hell of an actress, he thought sardonically. Able to control her body on command. The best actresses are always like that. While they’re playing the part, they believe. Change the scenes and the lines, and they believe in that part, too, and the next and the next.

Beautiful, shallow creatures living on lies.

Once Hawk had believed the soft words and softer kisses. Then he had learned to see through the shimmering, sensuous light to the darkness beneath.

“He broke his ankle, to be precise,” Hawk said in a clipped voice. “Clean through. The surgery was to put in a pin until everything grew together again.”

“Oh, my God,” Angel said hoarsely, fighting nausea. “I should have been with him! To come out of anesthesia alone, in pain and confusion, no one there to touch you, comfort you… ”

Hawk’s intense brown eyes narrowed, searching Angel’s face. He knew what it was to wake up in a hospital, disoriented and in pain, the horrible moments until memory came and told you what had happened.

It surprised him that Angel, too, seemed to know how it felt.

“You sound like you’ve been there,” said Hawk.

For a moment Angel didn’t answer.

Then, softly, “I have.”

Before Hawk could ask another question, Angel turned on him, her voice cold and controlled.

“Is there anything else you haven’t told me about Derry?” she asked.

“He refuses the painkillers.”

“Why?”

“He says that pain has a purpose.”

Angel closed her eyes, remembering the months after the wreck when she had thrown away her painkillers and her cane and forced herself to walk again. Derry had wept with her, supporting her for those first few steps.

Then she had made him leave, telling him that it was all right, that pain had a purpose. It told her that she was alive.

Hawk started to ask another question when the limousine eased to a stop in the Island Taxi parking lot.

Automatically Angel groped for the door handle, not wanting to face the curiosity in Hawk’s eyes. Before the chauffeur could get out to open Angel’s door, Hawk was out and standing beside the car, extending his hand to Angel across the seat.

She hesitated, then put her hand in his. The male heat and power of him shocked her, but it was too late to retreat.

With the same easy strength that Hawk did everything, he pulled Angel out of the limousine. As he released her hand, he let his fingertips glide from her wrist to the sensitive pads of her fingers, stroking her as he had stroked the gold pen. He felt the sudden surge in her pulse, saw the delicate bloom of color beneath her pale cheeks.

She looked up at him, confusion in her startled blue-green eyes.

His left eyebrow lifted in a black arc.

“Is something wrong?” he asked mildly.

Angel’s flush deepened. She felt like a fool for being so physically aware of this hard stranger. With a quiet breath, she recalled serenity to herself, yet she could not help puzzling over the enigma that was Hawk.

At times it almost seems that he wants me, Angel thought, yet more often it seems that he dislikes or resents me.

Hawk’s emotions were complex, quick, and very intense beneath his utterly controlled exterior. He was unlike any man Angel had ever known. She had no way to measure him. She could only respond to his searching intelligence, and to the loneliness and male sensuality she had glimpsed beneath his cold exterior.

Silently Angel looked at Hawk, nearly afraid of him.

And almost afraid of herself.

Hawk watched Angel, measuring the emotions that were conveyed so clearly on her face. With a sense of triumph, he realized that he had found Angel’s weakness.

A gentle touch will unravel her.

Hawk almost smiled. Like a raptor soaring on the wind, he had caught the flash of movement, of vulnerability, far below. The prey had revealed itself. Now would come the swift darts and turns, sudden shifts of direction, a chase to heat the blood.

And then she would be his, an angel brought down by a hawk, an angel shivering and crying in his arms.

Perched on the edge of a slate-gray cliff, the Ramsey house faced east, toward the Inside Passage and its many islands. Between the indigo mainland and Vancouver Island itself, the ocean was a smooth, burning gold, a molten contrast to the nearly black, ragged rise of tiny islands.

Small boats circled favored islands, dancing on the choppy sea while fishermen trolled in search of elusive silver salmon.

To the right of the house lay the small city of Campbell River. The town’s boundaries were determined by salt water and a jade-green river rolling powerfully to the sea. The late afternoon air was clear, almost surreal, as though diamond dust hung suspended in the sky, quivering with light.

Angel barely spared a glance for the magnificent view. The closer she got to the Ramsey house, the more she was afraid that Hawk hadn’t told her the truth about the extent of Derry’s injuries. It had taken all of her discipline not to question Hawk during the flight and the short drive from the Island Taxi terminus on Vancouver Island.

She had kept her silence, though. Some instinct warned Angel that she had already revealed too much of herself to Hawk.

The instant Hawk’s powerful BMW stopped in front of the house, Angel was out of the car and running to the front door. She went into the house without calling out or knocking.

She and Derry had shared the house for three years. Initially the arrangement had been necessary; she hadn’t been able to care for herself in those first months after the accident. Later she and Derry had continued to share the house during the summer, for she had sold her own family’s Campbell River vacation home in order to help Derry pay the inheritance taxes on Eagle Head.

Technically, one quarter of this house and the surrounding twelve hundred acres belonged to Angel. It was something she rarely thought about. So far as she was concerned, the Ramsey house and Eagle Head still belonged entirely to the surviving Ramsey – Derry.

“Derry?” called Angel, moving quickly through the entry and living room, searching for him. “Derry, where are you?”

“Back here,” called Derry.

Hawk came in the front door just in time to see Angel run toward the back of the house, her pale blond hair rippling and lifting with each step. He stood without moving for an instant, riveted by her grace and the smooth curves of her legs.

He wondered how it would feel when she wrapped those long legs around him, holding him tightly within her.

With an impatient curse at his own thoughts, Hawk shut the door and stalked across the living room. The fair-haired Angel was getting under his skin. Hawk knew of only one way to exorcise that type of obsession.

In bed.

That was where the lies always showed for what they were, no matter how beautiful the lips that uttered them. Practiced passions and movements choreographed by lies rather than love. Using and taking and discarding with a check and a casual wave.

Then back to the cold, transparent sky, back to circling and gliding and waiting for that flash of vulnerability far below, the instant when adrenaline raced and the chase began, making Hawk alive again.

Years ago Hawk had stopped believing that he would ever capture a woman who had no lies. He didn’t even know he was looking for one.

He only knew the hunt, and the kill.

Impassively Hawk caught up to Angel as she raced through the kitchen and family room to the enormous, cantilevered cedar deck that flared like bronzed wings over the rocks and sea.

Derry was stretched out on a chaise lounge. From his left thigh to his big toe there was a swath of bright white plaster, immobilizing his normally active body.

Angel caught her breath at the paleness of Derry’s skin, the purple smudges beneath his eyes, the full mouth drawn thin and bracketed by pain. Soundlessly she went to her knees beside him, cradling his head against her breasts. When she spoke, her voice was low, crooning, as though he were a sleepless baby.

“Take the pills, Derry,” she murmured.

She threaded her fingers through his blond curls, kneading neck and scalp muscles that had knotted against the agony that spread through him in waves with each incautious movement.

“Pain has nothing new to teach you,” Angel said gently. “Take the pills for a few days. Just until you can move without feeling as though a knife is turning in your ankle.”

Derry said nothing.

Angel leaned back, searching Derry’s blue eyes.

“Promise me?” she asked in a husky voice.

“Hey,” said Derry, his supple tenor voice at odds with the muscular breadth of his shoulders and chest. “I’m all right, Angie. Really.”

“The only thing you really are is pale,” retorted Angel.

Derry smiled and hugged her close.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Or I will be as soon as my back teeth stop floating.”

Angel smiled despite her worry. “That bad, is it?”

“Worse.”

She looked around for Derry’s crutches. She spotted them, grabbed them, and put her arm around Derry, helping him into a sitting position.

“Come on, ox,” Angel muttered. “Use those muscles for something besides impressing the pretty tourists.”

Belatedly Hawk understood that Angel was trying to help Derry to his feet. She looked absurdly fragile next to Derry’s bulk.

Yet before Hawk could object, she began levering Derry to his feet.

Instantly Hawk moved closer, taking Derry’s weight from Angel’s slim shoulders.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Hawk demanded.

“Helping Derry to the bathroom,” said Angel.

She was surprised by the harshness of Hawk’s voice, and by his strength. He had literally lifted Derry off the chaise.