A Woman Without Lies by Elizabeth Lowell

Author:Elizabeth Lowell [Lowell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061802645
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

15

Angel looked up, surprised to find that so many minutes had passed.

It was morning.

A little of the tension in Angel eased. The first night was the hardest.

Blinking slowly, she focused for the first time in hours on something that was farther away than the surface of a worktable.

Derry came closer, swinging easily between the crutches.

“Angie? How long have you been working?”

“A while,” Angel said evasively, returning her attention to the stained glass. “I’m almost finished.”

Actually she had been finished an hour ago. She was simply using the wooden scraper to retrace the lines of what she had created. She enjoyed the colors and shapes, the wholeness where only dreams and lethal fragments of glass had been.

Derry frowned. “You must have been at it all night.”

She made a neutral sound.

“Angie?”

She sighed and put the wooden scraper aside, knowing she couldn’t evade the issue of why she was home rather than out guiding Hawk.

“Yes, I worked all night.”

“You haven’t done that for a long time.”

“Yes.”

“Angie,” Derry said softly, “what’s wrong? Is it because last night was the night of the wreck? Four years . . . ”

Angel hesitated. It would be easier to let Derry believe that she was mourning the past.

Easier, but hardly the whole truth.

“That’s part of it,” Angel said, looking up and meeting Derry’s eyes for the first time. “But most of it is that your Mr. Hawkins and I don’t get along worth a damn.”

Blue eyes widened in surprise.

“What happened?” Then Derry’s eyes narrowed. “He didn’t make a pass at you, did he?”

Derry’s voice was suddenly hard, much older.

Angel’s mouth turned down at one corner, a sardonic echo of the man called Hawk.

“A pass?” she echoed. “Nothing that personal. There isn’t a personal bone in Hawk’s body.”

Angel’s voice carried conviction, for she didn’t feel that she was lying. A pass implied unwanted attentions. Hawk’s touch hadn’t been unwanted, not at first. Nor had there been anything personal between them, not in the deepest sense of the word.

They didn’t know each other well enough to be personal. They had proved it when they had so badly misjudged one another.

Derry relaxed slowly. “Then what happened?”

“We don’t speak the same language,” Angel said succinctly.

Puzzled, Derry waited.

Angel said no more.

“What do you mean?” Derry persisted.

“Does the word misogynist ring any bells?” asked Angel, fiddling absently with the wooden scraper.

“It’s too early in the morning for dictionary games,” retorted Derry.

“Mr. Miles Hawkins is a misogynist. He distrusts and hates women. I am a woman. Therefore, he distrusts and hates me. That,” Angel said quietly, looking up at Derry with dark green eyes, “makes it very uncomfortable for me to be around him. He feels just as unhappy to be around me.”

There was shocked silence for a moment while Derry tried to imagine anyone hating and distrusting the pale, tired woman who stood before him, her eyes haunted by too many sad memories.

“I can’t believe that,” Derry said.

“I can.”

Angel set aside the scraper with a weary gesture.

“Call Carlson on the radio phone,” she said. “When we ran into him at Brown’s Bay, he offered to take Hawk fishing.

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