A Woman Without Lies

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He groaned and tightened inside her, sending sensations streaking through flesh that was still aroused, hypersensitive. Very gently, she caressed him again, learning the contours of his maleness as he had once learned her softer female curves.

  “Angel,” Hawk said, his low voice both husky and amused, “do you know what you are doing?”

  Before she could answer, he moved deeply inside her, stealing her breath. He drank Angel’s choked cry from her lips as his hips moved again.

  “Is this what you want?” he asked thickly, feeling hunger coil deep inside him again with each hot, sliding caress of her flesh over his.

  Hawk saw surprise widen Angel’s blue-green eyes, felt the clinging of her body as she instinctively sought to increase the beautiful, gliding pressure of his intimate caress.

  Passion tightened in Hawk, but its talons were no longer painful, merely sharp, because he knew his hunger was met and matched in Angel’s straining softness.

  “Hawk?” she asked.

  Angel’s breath was short already, her eyes smoky with the passion he could call out of her between one instant and the next.

  “I thought men couldn’t—not so soon.”

  “A few minutes ago I would have sworn you were right,” said Hawk.

  Then his body arched into hers, glorying in her response, the sweet clinging as she moaned and her hand closed around him, learning and caressing the tight flesh hidden within the midnight roughness of his hair, inflaming him until he could hardly breathe.

  “Guess we were both wrong,” he said, his voice gritty with passion. “When a hawk and an angel make love, the rules change.”

  The tiny, electronic alarm on Hawk’s watch cut through his sleep as delicately and ruthlessly as a steel cutter through glass. When Hawk moved to shut off the alarm, he realized that there was a soft, warm weight curled against him.

  Memories came back in a sensual flood that made him acutely aware of every sweet inch of Angel’s body pressed along his. The memories sent heat and blood hammering through him until both pooled thickly between his legs, passion’s sweet pressure crying for release.

  Hawk ached to be inside Angel again, feeling her heat and sultry softness surrounding him.

  The endless urgency of Hawk’s need for Angel shocked him. He had felt nothing like it with any other woman, even when he was young and Jenna had teased him to the point of violence.

  Hawk reached up and switched on the small, battery-powered light. Soft yellow illumination revealed the triangular bow bed. Angel’s hair was a pale golden fire burning against Hawk’s dark arm. Her lashes cast long, fringed shadows and her lips were very red, still slightly swollen from the passionate kisses she had given and taken.

  When Hawk bent and brushed his mouth against hers, he felt Angel smile and heard her gentle murmur as she snuggled closer to his warmth. He knew that she wasn’t awake. Her movement toward him was an unconscious reflex as deep and true as her loving of him had been.

  “Angel,” Hawk whispered. Then, even more softly, “My sweet, generous woman. What am I going to do with you?”

  There was no answer for the long term. There was only now, this moment, and the generous warmth Hawk knew awaited him within Angel.

  Without waking Angel up, Hawk found one of the foil packets that had been scattered across the bed in their haste. He smiled, remembering.

  A few moments later Hawk’s hand slid beneath the covers, finding and touching Angel’s breast, kneading it gently as his lips nestled in the curve of her neck. Slowly, languidly, Hawk caressed Angel’s body, calling to her wordlessly until she moved with his touch, neither asleep nor yet awake, suspended in a beautiful sensual dream.

  Her body melted, wanting him.

  “Angel,” Hawk said, his voice husky as he parted her legs. “Angel.”

  Her eyelids fluttered open in response to Hawk’s deep-voiced call. He waited until he knew that Angel was awake, aware, looking into her eyes . . . and in that instant he slid into her, taking her completely.

  His slow, sensual invasion undid Angel. Her soft cries of ecstasy rippled through Hawk, undoing him in turn. He flew with her, spiraling quickly upward into a sky that was neither cold nor dark, but hot and bright and infinite.

  When Angel had the breath and the strength to speak again, she whispered her love against the warmth and power of Hawk’s shoulder. His answer was an exquisitely gentle movement that made her cry out and cling to him all over again.

  “Hawk,” Angel said finally, her breath uneven, “we’re going to miss the tide again.”

  He murmured something against her neck.

  “What?” she asked.

  Reluctantly, he lifted his lips from her fragrant skin. “I set the alarm a bit early,” he admitted.

  Angel’s eyes lit with understanding and laughter.

  “Such a clever hawk,” she said. “I’ll have to reward you.”

  “You already have,” Hawk said smiling.

  Angel’s breath stopped at the beauty of his smile. She touched his lips with fingers that trembled, measuring anew the depth of her love for this hard and gentle man.

  “What are you thinking?” Hawk asked, wondering at the emotions he sensed quivering through Angel.

  “How much I love you.”

  Hawk’s eyes closed.

  “I shouldn’t let you,” he said fiercely.

  With a harsh sound Hawk pulled Angel against him and buried his head between her breasts.

  “Oh, God, what am I going to do?” he asked starkly. “I can’t love you and I can’t let you go.”

  Gently, Angel stroked Hawk’s hair, trying to comfort him, to tell him that she understood.

  And, sadly, she did.

  She understood that every time she told him of her love, it brought him pain rather than pleasure. Hawk didn’t want to hurt her. Angel knew that as certainly as he knew that she loved him. Yet he believed himself incapable of love.

  And, believing that, he would hurt her as surely as she loved him.

  She understood that, too, and accepted it as she had learned to accept so many painful things.

  With a skill won at great cost from the past, Angel reached for the serenity of the rose. When she had achieved it, she stirred in Hawk’s embrace.

  “I know what you’re going to do,” Angel said, kissing Hawk gently, smiling against his lips. “You’re going fishing. We’re going to catch a beautiful dawn salmon.”

  Hawk lifted his head and looked at her. Tears came to Angel in a burning instant as she saw the pain and sadness and regret in Hawk’s clear, dark eyes.

  “It’s all right,” she said, stroking his face. “Please, Hawk. Believe me. I know you’ll do everything you can not to hurt me. I don’t ask any more than that of you. Don’t ask it of yourself. Please.”

  Hawk saw his own sadness and desire not to hurt reflected in Angel’s haunted eyes.

  And then he saw deeper, her certainty and her love. She understood his limitations, his lifetime beyond the closed circle of human warmth, his inability to love her as she deserved to be loved. Yet she loved him anyway.

  Hawk bowed to that, and to Angel.

  Very gently he kissed her palm, accepting her as she had accepted him.

  25

  The minutes and hours, days and weeks with Hawk swept by, each with its own aching beauty. Angel didn’t allow herself to count the days, to add them up and discover the end of summer coming toward her with each sunset. Loving and losing Grant had taught her not to live in the past.

  Loving and knowing she would lose Hawk had taught Angel not to live in the future. Instead she lived in each moment, loving Hawk more with each touch, each smile, each shared memory.

  “Angie?”

  Angel looked up, startled out of her thoughts by Derry’s call. The tiny silver bells hanging from her ears rang sweetly with her sudden movement.

  “I’m in my studio,” she answered.

  Derry swung easily into the room. He had long sinc
e overcome any awkwardness with his crutches. Nor had there been any awkwardness over Angel’s changed relationship with Hawk. Angel knew that Hawk had talked to Derry, but she didn’t know what had been said.

  Any fear Angel might have had that Derry would resent her loving a man other than Grant had been erased when Derry hugged her and told her that she had never looked more beautiful.

  “Where’s Hawk?” Derry asked.

  “On the—”

  “Phone,” Derry finished, grimacing. “Who is it this time?”

  Angel shrugged and smiled sadly.

  “Tokyo, I guess,” she said. “He’s already talked with London, New York, Houston, L.A., and whoever was vacationing on Maui.”

  In the last week Hawk had spent more and more time on the phone. Despite her determination not to count, Angel knew that Hawk had already stayed past his original time limit. The complex, interlocking business transactions that he had mentioned when he first came to the island were coming to fruition.

  “From what I’ve gathered,” Angel said, “things are getting to the crisis stage.”

  “Hawk and I will probably take the same plane off the island,” said Derry.

  Tomorrow Derry would finally get his cast removed and fly to Harvard. His dream of becoming a doctor had been made possible by Hawk, who had bought Eagle Head for more than Derry thought the land was worth.

  But as pleased as Derry was about his own future, when he mentioned leaving, Derry saw the quick flash of pain that Angel couldn’t wholly conceal.

  “Hey,” Derry said quickly, “I’ll visit you in Seattle.”

  He didn’t say anything about Hawk visiting her, because it never occurred to Derry that Hawk would not be in Seattle too.

  Angel smiled and kissed Derry’s cheek.

  “Summers and holidays,” she agreed.

  But the instant Derry could no longer see her face, Angel’s mouth turned down in a sad curve.

  Yes, Derry will come back to me.

  Hawk will not.

  “I think I’ll take my sketch pad and go up to Eagle Head,” Angel said. “If Hawk gets off the phone before five, give him directions to the old Smith homestead. The raspberries are ripe, and he’s never gone berrying.”

  “He got his salmon, though.”

  Angel smiled. Yes, Hawk had caught his dawn salmon, had known the thrilling, primal power of the fish as it leaped and tail-walked across the radiant sea. The look of awe and delight on Hawk’s face as he had felt the seething, silver life was something Angel would remember long after the pain of losing him had faded. If it ever faded.

  She had never known anyone like Hawk. She could only guess what life would feel like when he was gone.

  “I still don’t know why he turned that salmon loose,” Derry said.

  “It was too beautiful to kill.”

  “So were the other fish he caught, but we ate them anyway, and quarreled over the last scrap.”

  “They weren’t the first salmon of dawn,” Angel said simply, remembering and loving Hawk until she thought she would break.

  Derry hesitated, seeing the depth of emotion that transformed Angel.

  “I may have dragged you out of that wreck,” Derry said softly, “but it’s Hawk who brought you alive. I’m so glad, Angie. There were times when I was afraid that I had condemned you to a lifetime of unhappiness.”

  Angel hugged Derry a little fiercely, then grabbed her sketch pad and fled.

  She thought of Derry’s words as she climbed the steep trail to the top of Eagle Head. The small chiming bells around her wrist and ankle kept her company with each step. She was still thinking about Derry’s words as she sat on the very edge of the summit, sketch pad forgotten in her lap.

  Before her was the Inside Passage, the restless sea and ragged islands crowned with evergreens. Peak after peak fell away to the east, receding into a distance veiled with a blue so deep that it verged on black.

  Both harsh and serene, the country called to her senses as nothing had—until Hawk. He was like the land itself, a paradox of stone and warmth, midnight and noon, the enigmatic distance of the horizon and the intimate textures of the air, the salt of the sea and the sweetness of berries heavy with the promise of harvest.

  “You love this land, don’t you?”

  Hawk’s quiet question didn’t startle Angel. Beneath her concentration on the view had been a growing awareness of Hawk’s presence, a subtle certainty like the knowledge of her own heartbeat deep inside her body.

  “More than anything except you,” Angel said simply.

  Then she realized that she had done exactly what she had been trying so hard to avoid. She had spoken of her love for Hawk. She didn’t want to hurt him with the very words that should give him pleasure.

  “What time is it?” Angel asked, speaking quickly.

  She didn’t want there to be any silence that might seem like a demand that Hawk speak to her of love. She didn’t expect that of him.

  She never had, once she understood what his life had been like.

  “It’s almost five,” Hawk said.

  “Do you have time to go berrying?”

  “I made time.”

  Angel looked into Hawk’s dark eyes and saw the future coming down on her in a soundless rush.

  He will be leaving.

  Soon.

  It was there in Hawk’s eyes, in his voice, in the fact that he had made time to be with her.

  “Angel—” said Hawk tightly, seeing the shadows deepen in her eyes, knowing why.

  Overhead an eagle called. The high, savagely beautiful whistle descended until there was nothing left but silence and empty sky.

  “We’d better hurry,” she said “We haven’t much time.”

  Angel came to her feet in a graceful surge. As she moved, silver bells cried and chimed.

  The exquisite sounds went into Hawk like a thousand tiny knives. His arms came around Angel, lifting her off her feet. He held her with all his strength and kissed her as though the world was crumbling beneath their feet.

  Time stopped until Hawk finally released Angel, allowing her to lead him down the rocky path. Neither of them spoke, content to share the other’s presence with simple touches, gentle smiles, swift looks, as though each feared the other had vanished between one heartbeat and the next.

  The silence remained while they drove to the berry patch. It was at the end of an abandoned, rutted road. A long time ago there had been a farmhouse, neat fields, and the orderly rows of a home garden. Now the fields were nearly consumed by returning forest. All that remained were waist-high fieldstone fences where raspberry bushes strove and twined thickly, growing over stone and field alike.

  An ancient, magnificent climbing rose mantled the ruined stone chimney, all that remained of the farmhouse. From this bush had come the crimson rose that bloomed deep within Angel’s mind, triumphant and serene. She had first seen the Smith homestead and the climbing rose as a child. She had been haunted by the rose ever since.

  As though at a distance, Angel heard the car trunk close. Hawk was standing near the rosebush, waiting for her. He had empty pails in one hand, a picnic basket in the other, and a thick quilt over his shoulder.

  Angel took a deep breath, letting the future slide away, taking all shadows with it. There was only this instant, Hawk waiting for her, smiling his heartbreaking, beautiful smile.

  She walked toward Hawk, wrapped in the sweet chiming of bells. She looked at the picnic basket and smiled at Hawk in return, loving him for thinking of it.

  “A picnic,” Angel said softly. “What a wonderful idea.”

  “I have ulterior motives,” Hawk said, his voice deep. “As much as I like Derry, I want some time just with you.”

  Angel’s smile slipped, then steadied. She understood how Hawk felt. They were alone only when they were on the boat or late at night when the house was all darkness. There hadn’t been enough time for just being together, sharing the silences and small touches that spoke
so eloquently of their pleasure in each other.

  Not enough time.

  How much time is left? Angel thought.

  Not enough.

  Deliberately, Angel tilted her face up to the old climbing rose. A single blossom remained, its petals soft and quivering, gathering the rich afternoon light into each luminous crimson curve.

  She closed her eyes and wondered if the fragile rose knew that winter was closer with each sunset.

  Hawk bent and kissed Angel’s lips gently. He sensed the sorrow in her, knew its cause, and was helpless to ease it.

  The thought of how he was hurting Angel tore at Hawk, making him bleed in ways he had never imagined possible. He knew that the longer he spent with her, the greater the hurt would be each time she was brought up against his inability to love her as she should be loved.

  Every day Hawk had promised himself that he would leave Angel, set her free, stop hurting her.

  And every day he had awakened and seen an angel sheltered in the dark curve of his body. She would look at him, smiling, and he would know that he could not leave her.

  Not yet.

  He had to taste for a few more hours the miracle of her love.

  “Where should we begin?” Hawk asked, lifting his mouth just enough to let Angel answer.

  “In the center,” she murmured, rubbing her lips against his. “I know a path through the center of the brambles. That’s where the sweetest berries are. Surrounded by thorns.”

  “And mosquitoes?”

  “A few,” Angel admitted. “No such thing as a free lunch, remember?”

  Hawk smiled. “I remember. That’s why I brought insect repellent. I didn’t want anything but me biting your smooth skin.”

  Angel felt a frisson of desire race through her. The more Hawk touched her, the more she wanted to be touched by him. She never tired of his lovemaking, of having him become a part of her.

  “It’s in my pocket,” Hawk said. “Would you get it?”

  He held out his hands to her, showing that they were fully occupied with buckets and picnic basket and couldn’t be expected to pull a bottle of insect repellent from a tight pocket.

  First, Angel tried the back pockets of Hawk’s jeans, which was where she carried repellent when she thought to bring it. Hawk’s back pockets were empty. She tried his front pockets, wiggling her hands into the worn, confining cloth.