A Woman Without Lies (21 page)

“If I had known he was going to die, I would have made love with him.” Angel’s voice shook with intensity. “But I was young. I thought we had time. A lifetime. And Grant—”

Her voice broke over his name and then reformed, empty again, controlled.

“Grant wanted the first time to be perfect for me,” Angel said. “Our own home, our own bed, every right in the world to make slow, beautiful love to each other.”

Hawk closed his eyes for an instant, remembering the moment when he had taken Angel with equal parts of lust and anger. But that moment was in the past, as irretrievable as childhood.

It was futile to shred himself over what could not be changed. All that could be changed, all that was left, was the future—an angel with torn wings and green eyes that had seen hell, and a hawk that hadn’t known heaven when he had pierced its warm surface with angry black talons.

Hawk put the past behind him, knowing he couldn’t touch it, change it, heal it.

He could learn, though.

That was how living things survived. Learning from mistakes.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Hawk said, his voice uninflected. “Why do you get angry when I call you Angel?”

“Everybody calls me Angie. There’s nothing special between us. Why should you call me anything but Angie?”

“The fact that you gave your virginity to me isn’t special?”

“It should have been, “ agreed Angel in sardonic tones that echoed his. “But it ended up about as special as a skinned knee.”

“Keep pushing me. You’ll find the limit,” promised Hawk, meaning every word.

Angel’s eyes narrowed. She smiled a tiny, cold smile, liking the idea of finding Hawk’s limit.

Of hurting him.

“So I find your limit. So what?” Angel asked carelessly. “Never argue with someone like me, Hawk. I’ve got nothing left to lose. It gives me an edge.”

“What about Derry?” Hawk asked smoothly, watching her.

Abruptly Angel curbed the cruelty that had snaked out of her own pain. She had forgotten how easy—and how terribly satisfying—it could be to turn agony into cruelty and then watch the rest of the world bleed with each razor cut of her tongue.

But cruelty only bred more cruelty, maiming the people around her, corroding her soul, until cruelty became a downward spiral of self-destruction that wouldn’t end short of death.

Angel’s realization that she hadn’t learned her lesson well enough in the past was like getting an open-handed blow across the mouth. She paled until her haunted eyes were the only color in her face.

I will try very hard not to destroy myself over Hawk. I will die rather than destroy Derry.

“Angel is the name I called myself after the accident, when I finally decided to live,” she said.

Hawk listened to the soft, controlled, emotionless words and felt a chill spreading through him.

“An angel is something alive that once was dead. Like me,” she said. “Alive and then dead and then alive again. Angel.”

Hawk fought the desire to take Angel in his arms. All that kept his hands at his side was the knowledge that she would turn on him like a cornered animal.

He didn’t blame her. He had hurt her cruelly, and he had no experience in healing. He had nothing to give her but emptiness and a ravenous, soul-deep curiosity about the fragile, elusive, powerful complex of emotions known as love.

A lifetime of questions waiting to be answered.

“Would you sleep with me again, for Derry?” Hawk asked.

Angel heard curiosity rather than desire in Hawk’s question.

“You don’t want me,” she said, “so the question doesn’t arise.”

“What makes you think I don’t want you?”

The harsh sound that came from Angel’s lips could hardly be called laughter. She looked up at Hawk, her eyes as hard as jade.

“You didn’t enjoy that disaster on the boat any more than I did,” she said. “So don’t worry. I won’t trip you and beat you to the floor. No more amateur hour for either one of us. That’s a promise.”

Angel tilted her head so that she could see the face of Hawk’s gold watch.

“The tide changes in twenty minutes,” she said matter-of-factly. “Which will it be, Hawk? Fish or cut bait.”

“Oh, I’ll fish. Always.”

Then Hawk bent down until he could feel Angel’s warmth seeping through the soft cotton of her dress. Close, very close, but not touching her.

“Did you really think you loved me, Angel?”

The stained glass rose Angel had held in her mind exploded into a thousand cutting shards. Suddenly she was unable to bear being close to Hawk any longer.

Angel turned and ran toward the cliff trail. Each movement brought silver cries from the bells she wore. The sweet sounds went into Hawk like tiny blows too small to dodge, tiny wounds opening, tiny hooks teaching him how to bleed.

Hawk ran after her, afraid that she would slip on the narrow trail, afraid that she would fall because her wings had been torn and she could no longer fly.

Yet even when he caught up with Angel and his hard hand held her to a more sensible pace, she ignored him, refusing in pale silence to answer his question about love.

Hawk did not ask again. He had learned that Angel’s truths were as painful for her as they were for him.

“Let me take that,” Hawk said.

He lifted the heavy, two-foot-square stained-glass panel from Angel’s hands. She didn’t object. It would have done no good, anyway. Hawk’s speed and strength were superior to hers.

Angel watched as his glance skimmed indifferently over Mrs. Carey’s gift. The light in the hall was dim, more twilight than day. The pieces of glass were subdued, almost dull, as ordinary as crayon colors on cheap paper.

Then Hawk walked into the sunlight pouring over the front steps. The panel in his hands leaped into radiance, colors flashing and expanding in a silent explosion of beauty.

He stopped, unable to move, consumed by colors. Silence stretched into one minute, two, three, but he didn’t notice. He tilted the panel first one way and then the other, wholly caught in the fantastic sensual wealth of colors pooling in his hands.

Finally he looked up and saw Angel watching him.

“That’s why I love stained glass,” she said, looking at the brilliance shimmering in Hawk’s grasp. “It’s like life. Everything depends on the light you view it in.”

The words had no more than left Angel’s lips that she realized that the words could be applied to Hawk. Silently she closed the door behind him, hoping that he hadn’t noticed.

“Are you trying to tell me that my point of view on life is too dark?” Hawk asked.

The question told Angel that he had not only noticed, he had understood all the subtle ramifications.

I should have expected it. Hawk is the quickest, most intelligent man I’ve ever met.

“No,” Angel said. “I was merely making an observation on the nature of stained glass and light.”

She walked toward her car, not looking at Hawk. In the three days since she and Hawk had talked on the beach, she had carefully avoided anything that hinted of personal topics.

“Nothing personal, is that it?” Hawk asked with a black lift of his eyebrow.

“As you say. Nothing personal.”

Angel opened the trunk of her car, shook out an old quilt, and gestured for Hawk to put the panel on the quilt.

“How much is a piece like this worth?” Hawk asked.

She watched as he handled the awkward panel with an ease she envied. Powerful, supple, hard, his body moved with a male grace that surprised her anew each time she noticed it. Like stained glass, Hawk kept changing with each angle, each moment, each shift of illumination.

And like glass, he could cut her to the bone in the first instant of her carelessness.

“A small panel like this would bring between ten and twelve hundred dollars,” Angel said, wrapping the stained glass with deft motions. “Minus the gallery commission, of course, and the cost of materials. Good glass is very expensive.”

She closed the trunk lid.

“How many pieces did you have in the show in Vancouver?” persisted Hawk.

“Thirty-two.”

Angel opened her purse and rummaged for her keys.

“Did they sell?” Hawk asked.

She looked up, only to find herself impaled on eyes as brown and clear as crystal.

“All but three,” she said.

“The ones that sold—were they small?”

“No. They were quite large. Why?”

Hawk ignored the question.

“How many shows do you do a year?” he asked.

Angel pulled her keys out of her purse and faced Hawk, wondering why he cared. But it was easier to answer than to argue. In any case, it didn’t really matter.

Money was a safe topic. It wasn’t personal, like emotions.

“Three shows this year,” Angel said. “One in Seattle, one in Portland, and one in Vancouver.”

“Did they all go well?”

“Yes.”

“You really don’t need the money from Eagle Head, do you?” asked Hawk.

“No.”

“But Derry does.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Angel hesitated, then shrugged. Hawk could always ask Derry. It was hardly a secret in any case.

“Derry wants to be a surgeon,” she said. “That means between six and ten more years of advanced training. He’s been accepted at Harvard, but no scholarship was offered because, technically, Derry is wealthy.”

“Eagle Head.”

“Yes.”

“I see.”

“Do you?” Angel asked, looking swiftly at Hawk. “For once, let me be sure there’s enough
light
on the subject.”

She took a swift breath, steeling herself for the words to come.

“This isn’t a boyish whim on Derry’s part,” Angel said. “My parents were killed instantly in the wreck. Derry’s mother wasn’t. His brother wasn’t. Derry dragged them free—and then watched them bleed to death because he didn’t know enough to save their lives.”

Hawk’s face was expressionless, utterly still, his eyes almost black. There was a question he wanted to ask but he didn’t know how to word it without watching ghosts darken Angel’s eyes.

“And you?” he asked finally, softly. “Were you conscious after Derry pulled you out of the wreckage?”

“Yes. I couldn’t help Derry.”

Angel heard the question Hawk didn’t quite know how to ask. She knew how to answer it, though.

And she knew how much the answer would hurt her.

Derry. Derry needs Hawk,
Angel told herself harshly
. I have to make Hawk understand.

“My collarbone was smashed, my ribs were broken, I had multiple fractures of both legs,” she said neutrally. “Derry’s mother was unconscious. His brother wasn’t that lucky. So I lay there, I couldn’t move, and I listened to Grant—”

Her voice stopped. When the words resumed, they were like powdered glass, no color, just sharp edges abrading everything they touched.

“When it was over,” Angel said carefully, “Derry wept and beat his fists against the road until there was no skin, only blood. I could do nothing about that, either.”

“Angel,” Hawk said softly, touching her cheek with gentle fingertips, regretting his question and her pain.

She stepped away from the touch.

“Derry swore then to become a doctor, saving lives to replace the lives he hadn’t known how to save,” Angel said. “It’s his way to make peace with a life that was cruel enough to leave him uninjured so that he could watch his mother bleed to death and his brother die in agony.”

Angel looked up and her breath caught. She had seen enough sadness and pain to recognize it in Hawk’s dark features.

“You really do like Derry, don’t you?” she said, surprised that Hawk could feel that much emotion. “He likes you, too. God knows why,” she added absently, frowning.

She had never understood Derry’s smiling acceptance of Hawk’s razor tongue.

Hawk’s face became expressionless again.

“Maybe I remind Derry of Grant,” suggested Hawk.

“You’re nothing like Derry’s brother.”

“Oh?”

The black arc of Hawk’s eyebrow irritated Angel.

“Grant was capable of love,” she said coolly.

“Then he must have been loved,” Hawk shot back.

“What do you mean?”

“Grant’s mother loved him. Derry loved him. You loved him.”

“Yes.”

“That must have been nice,” Hawk said.

His voice was flat. His words were simple statement rather than ironic mockery: It must have been nice to be loved.

“And you were loved, weren’t you, Angel? Your parents, Grant, Derry, even Carlson. In their own way, they all loved you.”

“Yes,” whispered Angel. “And I loved them.”

“Love linking to love. A bright, magic, closed circle.”