It was still dark outside, almost an hour until dawn. Angel worked quietly in the kitchen, putting food into grocery bags, wrapping sandwiches, and turning strips of bacon in the pan.

When she heard the thump of Derry’s crutches in the hallway, she peeled off another handful of bacon and put the strips into the pan to fry.

“You’re up early,” Angel said, turning to smile at Derry. “Did I wake you?”

“No.”

Derry grimaced as he shifted his weight. Normally he was cheerful – maddeningly so – in the morning. His present state told Angel that his ankle was throbbing.

“How did you sleep?” she asked, searching his face.

Derry glowered. Between that and his tousled blond curls, he looked a surly sixteen.

“Lousy,” he muttered. “I feel hung over.”

“You look it, too. Orange juice?”

Yawning, ruffling his hair with one hand, Derry nodded.

“Please,” he said. Then, hopefully, “Coffee?”

“Sit down. I’ll bring it to you.”

While Derry went to the little breakfast nook that had a view of the strait, Angel fixed up a tray with coffee, juice, toast, and homemade jams. The latter were courtesy of Mrs. Carey, a neighbor who made the best jams on Vancouver Island. Two months ago she had tripped over her cat and broken her hip. The cast was off now, but Angel still shopped for her, as well as for two other temporary shut-ins.

“Where’s Hawk?” Derry asked as Angel set the tray on the table.

“Telephone.”

Derry shook his head. “He works too hard. The sun isn’t even up.”

“It is in London. He’s talking to Lord Someone-or-other.”

“Must be the island he’s trying to buy.”

“A whole island?” asked Angel.

“Yeah,” Derry said. “He wants to turn it into a cracking plant for North Sea oil.”

Angel hesitated, then went back to the stove.

“Hawk must be very rich,” she said.

“I guess. When I asked the bank to check him out as a potential buyer for Eagle Head, I got no further than the name Miles Hawkins. Old Man Johnston’s eyes lit up like a Christmas tree.”

“Orange juice,” Angel said.

Obediently Derry drank the juice.

“Hawk has quite a reputation in what Johnston refers to as ‘the international financial community,’ ” Derry added. “A bona-fide high roller.”

Derry paused long enough to take several long swallows of the fragrant coffee. Sighing, he looked hopefully at the coffee pot.

Smiling, Angel picked up the coffee pot and topped off his cup.

“Odd, though,” Derry said after a moment. “Hawk doesn’t act rich.”

Shrugging, Angel returned to the bacon.

“How does someone ‘act rich’?” she asked.

“You know. Throwing money everywhere. Dropping the names of the right resorts, the right people. Private jets and cars faster than the speed of light.”

“Like Clarissa?”

Derry paused, then sighed. “Yeah. She was something else, wasn’t she?”

Angel suppressed a smile.

“I’d tell you what that something was,” Angel offered, “but I’m not supposed to know the word. Thank God you saw through her, Derry. She was gorgeous, sure, but she had the intelligence of a clam.”

“You’re slandering clams,” Derry said dryly.

Smiling openly, Angel set strips of bacon out to drain on paper towels.

“How many eggs?” she asked.

“Five.”

“Hungry, aren’t you?”

“I slept through dinner, remember?”

“Ummm,” Angel said, wielding a chopper over the crisp bacon.

She remembered dinner very well. She and Hawk had spent an hour working on a schedule. She had made up a list of things to do and the approximate times involved in doing them right. Hawk had scanned the list very quickly and set it aside.

Then Hawk had questioned Angel in detail, missing none of the thirty-seven items on the list that he had looked at for less than sixty seconds. His questions had been concise and incisive. At the end of the hour Angel had felt wrung out.

When Hawk had all the information he required, he – without looking at the list again – wrote out a tentative schedule, handed Angel several thousand dollars for expenses, and excused himself.

Hawk had spent the next hour talking to Tokyo’s equivalent of the stock exchange.

The beaten eggs hissed as they slid into the hot omelet pan. Angel swirled the pan deftly, adding ingredients as the omelet formed. Her hand hovered over the mounds of freshly prepared ingredients heaped on the breadboard by the stove.

“Mushrooms?” she asked.

“The works,” said Derry instantly.

The omelet thickened, glistening with melting cheese. Just as Angel folded it in half, a timer went off.

She slid Derry’s omelet onto a warm plate, then pulled a pan of croissants out of the oven and put them into a napkin-lined bun warmer. The marvelous fragrance of fresh croissants and steaming omelet preceded her to the table.

Derry smiled up at her.

“Thanks, Angie,” he said softly. “This beats hell out of peanut butter and toast.”

“Anything beats that.”

“Creamed liverwurst?” Derry asked innocently.

Angel shuddered.

Derry took a bite of the omelet and sighed. “Clarissa was right about one thing,” he said.

“Oh?”

“You’re gonna spoil me for any other woman.”

Angel laughed and ruffled Derry’s hair affectionately. Then she turned to go back to the stove – and nearly walked right into Hawk.

“Oh!” Angel stepped back, her eyes wide and startled. “Good Lord, but you’re light on your feet!”

Hawk simply looked down at Angel with a cold expression. The planes of his face seemed unusually harsh, his eyes black in the artificial light.

Angel would have backed away even farther but Derry’s plaster-encased leg prevented it.

“Didn’t you sleep well?” Angel asked, searching Hawk’s face.

“As well as I ever do.” Hawk’s voice was clipped, as cold as his eyes raking over her.

He turned and picked up a mug from the counter. Then he grabbed the coffee pot and poured a dark stream into the mug. As he took a sip of coffee, he eyed the omelet ingredients heaped colorfully on the counter.

“Sit down,” Angel said quickly to Hawk. “How many eggs do you want in your omelet?”

“Don’t bother.” Hawk gave her a dark glance. “I’d hate like hell to be spoiled for other women.”

Derry made a choking sound that rapidly escalated into unrestrained laughter.

Angel’s lips flattened in the instant before her normal control asserted itself. She wished she could find Hawk’s caustic comments as entertaining as Derry did. Instead, she forever seemed to take them personally.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Angel said, crossing quickly to the stove. “How many eggs?”

“Six.”

Angel looked startled. She glanced covertly at Hawk and realized that he was even bigger than she had remembered. He had to be at least six foot three, lean, hard, and very male.

Somehow the casual clothing Hawk wore now revealed his size more than the civilized three-piece suit he had worn yesterday. The black pullover that fitted his chest so well was patterned after Irish fishermen’s sweaters. Just standing there, he looked unreasonably large, his shoulders wide enough to block out the light.

He seemed taller, too, than yesterday, more… primal. Faded jeans fit snugly across his thighs and hinted at the muscular calves beneath. Soft-soled suede moccasins wrapped neatly around his feet.

But it was the power of his body that drew Angel’s eyes, the deceptively slender line of his hips and waist blending into the male wedge of his shoulders.

“Everything zipped?” asked Hawk, too softly for Derry to hear.

Angel flushed.

“Everything except your mouth,” she retorted. But she was careful not to let Derry overhear.

A corner of Hawk’s mouth turned up.

“You aren’t,” he murmured.

“What?”

“Zipped.”

Angel looked down and discovered that Hawk was right. In her haste to get dressed, she had overlooked the zipper on her jeans. A ribbon of silky tangerine briefs showed through the narrow opening.

The reversal of the usual unzipped roles made Angel’s irritation evaporate into a laugh.

Maybe Derry has the right outlook, she admitted silently. Hawk’s abrasive, unexpected humor could grow on you.

Still smiling, Angel matter-of-factly zipped up her jeans. Then she turned to the counter and began cracking eggs into a bowl.

Hawk watched while Angel made his omelet with the casual skill that came only from experience. It didn’t surprise him that she was an accomplished cook. Men liked being cooked for, and Angel was obviously a woman who had made a career out of pleasing men.

As Hawk sipped the rich coffee, he wondered how else she had learned to please men. The thought made desire ripple darkly through him. Smoothly, he changed the focus of his thoughts, knowing that his curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied today. Probably not for several days.

Like a doe that enjoyed running the hounds, Hawk suspected that Angel would twist and turn and double back, tantalizing him by staying just beyond reach. Not that he minded. It only made the inevitable end of the chase sweeter, hotter.

Easy prey wasn’t worth the trouble it took to reach out and pick it up.

In silence Hawk ate the tender, succulent omelet. The croissants were flaky, steaming as he pulled them apart, so rich with butter that his fingertips glistened. The jams were unique, tasting of fruit rather than sugar, and as colorful as jewels.

Out over the strait, the first hint of predawn light slowly transformed night into luminous shades of black and gray. Around Hawk there were the small, companionable sounds of silver clicking lightly against plates, the gentle thump of a coffee mug returning to the table-top, the creak of a chair as Derry shifted his weight, Angel’s soft footsteps as she joined them at the table.

The peace of the moment seeped past Hawk’s barriers, spreading through him as silently and completely as dawn itself. It had been a long, long time since Hawk had eaten breakfast like this.

Usually he was alone. When he wasn’t, there was a woman trying to talk to him, words and more words pouring out as she tried to fill the emptiness that came the morning after the end of the chase. That kind of desperate chatter left Hawk cold. To be with people who demanded nothing of him was as unusual as it was peaceful.

And then Hawk heard his own thoughts. His lips flattened and he pushed away his empty plate.

Who am I trying to kid? Hawk asked himself sardonically. Of course Derry and Angel want something from me.

Money.

Angel isn’t showing me Vancouver Island out of the goodness of her gold-digging little heart. If I buy Eagle Head, she will be well paid for her trouble.

And even if I don’t, she should be able to make a tidy profit by padding the expenses.

The same is true for Derry.

Nor did Hawk mind particularly. It was how the game was played, and he had known it since his eighteenth birthday. That was the day he learned that to be an emotionally honest man in a world of lies is to be a fool.

Angel finished her small omelet, stood, and began to clear the table.

Derry looked out at the strait. Tiny lights bobbed about, marking the sport-fishing boats pouring out of the Campbell River marina into the strait.

“Leave the dishes,” Derry said. “You’ll miss the tide.”

“We’ve already missed it,” Angel said, sighing.

Hawk heard the wistfulness in Angel voice.

“You actually like fishing?” Hawk asked, surprised.

“No, I’m actually crazy about it.”

“She’s good at it too,” Derry said. “Better than I am. She knows just where to go, how deep to fish, what lure to use, which little coves and bays and headlands – ”

“Enough,” Angel dryly interrupted. “Hawk obviously isn’t a fisherman.”

“Why do you say that?” asked Hawk.

“You were on the phone when we should have been on the water.”

“That was business.”

“Like I said, not a fisherman,” Angel said succinctly. “Nothing, but nothing, gets in the way of a dawn salmon raid if you’re a fisherman.”

Derry chuckled.

“Give the man a break,” Derry said. “He’s never caught a salmon, so he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”

Angel looked at Hawk, who returned the look with interest. In the odd radiant predawn light, her eyes were dark green, very brilliant against the pale nimbus of her hair.

“Have you ever fished at all?” Angel asked as she bent over to take Hawk’s plate.

Hawk remembered the small reservoir on the farm where he had grown up. Whenever his father could steal a few minutes from the endless demands of a marginal farm, the two of them would go to the reservoir. One of the few times Hawk could ever remember his father laughing was when he had pulled a ten-pound catfish out of the opaque water.