Elizabeth Lowell - A Woman Without Lies

Grant had rowed for her. They had laughed and exulted together, making a pact to smoke the salmon and serve it at their wedding reception.

Ten days later Grant was dead.

“On weekend mornings,” Angel said, her voice husky, ignoring Hawk’s question, “Frenchman’s Pool is so crowded you can almost walk from boat to boat across it.”

Hawk had missed neither the instant of anguish written on Angel’s features nor the unanswered question.

“I’d like to try my hand at rowboat fishing,” he said. “Is the man who rowed for you still available?”

“No.” Angel’s voice was soft, final.

“Why?”

“I’m not strong enough to row for more than an hour against a strong current,” Angel said, ignoring this question as she had the other one. “That’s not long enough to give you a fair chance of a fish. Carlson would row you if I asked him to. Carlson is strong enough to row for days against any tide.”

“Carlson?”

“A friend,” Angel said softly. “A very old friend.”

The corner of Hawk’s mouth lifted. He wondered how many other very old friends Angel had up and down the strait.

Angel looked toward Hawk again.

“Would you like me to ask Carlson to row for you?” she asked.

“I’ll think about it.”

Hawk turned away from Angel.

The smooth shift of Hawk’s muscles beneath her fingers made Angel realize that her hand was still pressed against his upper arm. She lifted her fingers quickly.

“Do you want to wait while they land that fish?” asked Hawk, adjusting the boat’s throttles.

“No. It could be hours. Salmon are very strong. Unless you want to wait?”

“I’d rather get out of this crowd and teach you how to handle the boat. Which direction?”

“North,” Angel said succinctly. “The farther you go, the less people there are.”

“Sounds like my kind of direction.”

Hawk sat in the cockpit and gunned the engines, letting them lift the boat’s gleaming white prow above the waves.

As the boat picked up speed, Angel braced herself against the cockpit seat and stared through the windshield to the sea ahead. She looked at the water in front of the boat with intent, narrowed eyes.

“Have you been warned about deadheads?” Angel asked.

“What are they?” asked Hawk, answering her question and asking one of his own.

“Logs that have broken loose from a towing raft. When they get waterlogged, they bob up and down just below the surface until they finally sink.”

Hawk immediately cut back on the throttles.

“Sounds lethal,” he said.

“Sometimes. Most often you just get a cold dunking and a bashed boat.”

A powerboat came up on their left, passing them in a brilliant cloud of spray.

“Looks like no one told him about deadheads either,” Hawk said.

“You get used to them, like wind storms and fifteen knot currents. Comes with the territory.”

“Like car wrecks.” Angel flinched in the instant before she controlled herself.

“Yes,” she said. “Like car wrecks. We keep driving anyway.”

Hawk saw Angel’s ghost reappear, pain written for a second across the smooth skin of her face. Then the ghost was banished once more.

“What do you consider a safe speed?” he asked.

“Right now?”

Angel turned slowly, measuring the sea surrounding the boat.

“There’s good visibility,” she said. “The wind is down. The tide is running but not boiling.”

Hawk looked as well, measuring her perceptions against his own knowledge of water and racing hulls and his own reflexes.

Finally Angel gestured toward the power-boat surging away from them.

“About what he’s doing,” she said.

One black eyebrow lifted, but Hawk said nothing as he brought the boat up to speed again.

“There aren’t that many deadheads,” explained Angel. “And most of them are flagged as soon as they’re found.”

“Is that what those are for?” Hawk asked.

He gestured toward a handful of meter-length rods with a sharp point on one end and a bright triangular flag on the other.

Angel nodded. “If we spot a deadhead, we flag it.”

“Then what? Notify the Canadian equivalent of the Coast Guard?”

“Nope. Usually a log scavenger will pick up the flagged stuff. With the price of lumber so high, a log is worth several hundred dollars.”

“What if no one picks it up?” Hawk asked.

“Then the flag makes the deadhead easy to spot and avoid, even at twice this speed.”

“Be nice if all of life’s little trouble spots were so neatly posted,” said Hawk, his voice sardonic.

“The flags only work if you have the sense to heed them,” Angel said, her tone as sardonic as his.

Are you listening to your own advice? she asked herself in silence. There are flags sticking out all over Hawk, but I keep seeing past them to the man beneath, hunger and intelligence, heat and strength, all that made life valuable.

And danger. I see that too. Clearly.

Angel didn’t underestimate the danger inherent in Hawk. Nor did she fear it. She respected it.

Danger always existed, as much a part of life as love. To have the one you must accept the other. Grant Ramsey had taught Angel that… love and death.

The learning had nearly destroyed Angel. She didn’t know if she was strong enough to risk learning again.

She knew only that she was going to find out.

Angel directed Hawk toward a quiet stretch of water by touching his arm and pointing to the right. During the run up the Inside Passage, neither of them had attempted to talk over the unleashed thunder of diesels.

Smoothly, Hawk brought the boat into calm water in the lee of a gray headland. He put engines in neutral and waited, testing the amount of drift. There was very little.

With an easy motion, Hawk slid out from behind the helm. When he stood up, he was so close to Angel that she could smell the clean scent of his aftershave. His eyes were a clear, crystal brown with surprising flecks of gold. His mustache was as black as the center of his eyes.

Angel wondered what it would feel like to have that mustache against her skin. She wanted to know if it would be rough or soft or a tantalizing combination of the two.

Would his mustache be cool beneath my fingertips, or would it have the same heat that the rest of Hawk’s body has, a heat that touches me even though I’m not touching him?

The intensity of Angel’s silence and speculations froze her, overriding even the need to breathe. Then she saw Hawk’s pupils dilate suddenly as he became aware of her appraisal.

Angel retreated, looking away from the hard, sensual line of Hawk’s lips. She wanted to say something, anything, because she sensed that he was looking at her as completely as she had looked at him.

No words came to her.

With downcast eyes, Angel brushed past him and sat behind the helm of the powerful boat.

Hawk bent over her and the boat’s controls, knowing from her quickly indrawn breath that his presence disturbed her. He was careful not to touch her. He had seen her retreat as clearly as he had seen the consuming sensuality of her appraisal.

Though Hawk controlled his desire to stroke the rapid pulse beating visibly in Angel’s throat, he couldn’t deny the sudden coursing of blood through his veins, the adrenaline and heat as the chase began. None of what he felt showed in his voice or his body.

Like the prey, the predator was capable of measured retreat, knowing always that retreat was temporary.

“Have you ever handled anything as powerful as this?” asked Hawk, his voice low, almost intimate.

Angel kept her eyes on the gauges in front of her.

“No,” she said.

The word sounded ragged to her ears. She breathed deeply, evenly, calming the erratic race of her pulse.

“No,” Angel repeated. “Derry’s boat was about half this size and a quarter the power.”

“Was?”

“He sold it a few months ago.”

What Angel didn’t say was that it had been sold without her knowledge. Sold to pay off debts that had piled up in the last year of Derry’s undergraduate education.

Angel would have given him the money if she had known he needed it. At least, she would have tried. But Derry was determined not to take any more from her, even though she could think of nothing she would rather spend money on than his future.

“You didn’t approve,” Hawk said flatly.

“Of what?”

“Derry selling his boat.”

“It was his to sell.”

Angel’s voice was calm. She was in control again.

“But you loved taking it out on the water,” Hawk said.

Angel looked up, caught by the harsh current of emotion in Hawk’s voice.

“Yes,” she said.

“Lucky for you I came along,” Hawk said, straightening. “Otherwise you might have had to sell your pretty little… smile… to get a ride.”

“The people who take me out pay for more than a smile,” said Angel, deliberately giving Hawk an opening.

“I’ll bet.” Hawk’s voice was laced with contempt.

“You’ll lose.”

Angel watched his face impassively while the silence stretched.

“I’m a licensed fishing guide,” she said calmly.

Other than the rakish tilt of his left eyebrow, Hawk made no reply.

“As I told you once, Hawk, you don’t know a damn thing about me.”

“You’d be surprised, honey,” he said.

His voice was flat but for the slight, sardonic lilt that was as much a part of Hawk as his thick black hair. For an instant Angel wondered what woman had so embittered Hawk that he assumed all women were shallow and unfeeling.

But speculating about the woman or women in Hawk’s life splintered Angel’s calm into a thousand sharp pieces. She had no control over Hawk, his women, or the conclusions that he drew from his past and then applied to the present, to her.

All Angel could control was herself, her own reactions and conclusions.

Deliberately, as she had learned to do in the terrible months following Grant’s death, Angel created again in her mind a vision of the most beautiful thing she had ever seen…

A single rose unfolding in the summer dawn. The petals were crimson, luminous, serene. The possibility of beauty that had endured through the cruel winter and uncertain spring was consummated in radiant silence.

A simple thing.

A single rose, victorious and serene.

Calmness spread visibly through Angel as the rose unfolded in her mind. Confidently she put her hands on the boat’s controls, her body and mind united in a sensitive appraisal of the unnamed boat.

Fascinated by the change that had swept over Angel, Hawk watched her every move with narrowed, measuring eyes. He sensed that she had retreated.

No, she hasn’t retreated, Hawk realized after a moment. She simply gathered herself into an inner place, a quiet place.

A place where I can’t touch her.

Angel slid the throttles up, increasing the revolutions on the twin diesels. She watched the gauges carefully. The engines were beautifully balanced, performing in exact synchronization with each other.

With a sound of approval, she decreased the revs, shifted the engines into gear, and began to put the boat through its paces under Hawk’s intense, and finally approving, scrutiny. The boat responded eagerly to her touch, the prow curving and recurving through green water, sending chaotic wakes slapping across the shifting surface of the sea.

Angel flipped on the sonar and watched the changing pattern as the boat roved up and down the strait. Hawk looked curiously at the plate-sized screen that looked like green TV.

“Ever used a fish finder before?” asked Angel.

“No.”

She pointed toward the lower part of the screen, then indicated the depth scale alongside.

“Right now,” Angel said, “the bottom is about twenty fathoms. There’s nothing between us and the bottom but – wait!”

Without looking away from the screen, Angel cut back on the throttles and turned the boat, retracing her path slowly.

“There,” she said, pointing to a bright, shifting series of lines that had appeared at about ten fathoms on the scale. “A school of fish. Herring, probably.”

“How can you tell?”

Angel shrugged slightly, a graceful movement that caught Hawk’s eye.

“Experience,” she said simply. “Herring are erratic yet dense. See how quickly the lines shift?”

Hawk watched the screen, but much of his attention was on the slender hands that had so quickly learned how to handle the powerboat. Whatever else Angel was, she had the confidence and coordination of a race driver.

“What do salmon look like on the screen?” asked Hawk in a quiet, deep voice.