Carlson’s big arms irritated him.
“Today is the twelfth, isn’t it?” Hawk asked.
Carlson nodded and said nothing.
“Is there something special about that date?” Hawk asked, his voice sardonic and his eyes piercing. “This is the second time I’ve heard it mentioned in hushed tones.”
Carlson’s eyes changed, becoming as opaque as the black rocks lining the bay. Everything about the big Indian warned Hawk that he was trespassing.
Hawk stood without flinching, waiting for his answer. He had fought big men before. And he was tired of watching Angel nestled within those thick arms.
Angel ignored Hawk, looking only at Carlson.
“If you’re going out right away,” Angel said distinctly, “the fishing must be pretty good.”
“Not bad. I set aside a smiley to smoke for you and Derry.”
“What’s a smiley?” Hawk asked. “Or is that another taboo matter?”
Carlson gave Hawk a second black look.
Hawk didn’t budge.
Grudgingly, Carlson realized that Hawk wasn’t going to be intimidated short of a brawl, and probably not even then. Under other circumstances, Carlson would have enjoyed testing Hawk. But not today, with Angel fighting memories.
Carlson suspected that Hawk was more than a little interested in the woman who was curled so trustingly against his own chest. The thought made Carlson’s lips stretch into a smile that was neither welcoming nor cruel.
“A smiley,” said Carlson, his voice so deep that it rumbled like water over rocks, “is a salmon that weighs more than thirty pounds. When you pull one of them off the long line, you smile.”
The corner of Hawk’s mouth curled up almost unwillingly. “I see.”
“You will when you catch one,” Carlson said. “Or do you ever smile?”
“I’m smiling now.”
Carlson laughed.
“Come fishing with me, Hawk,” Carlson offered. “By the end of the trip we’ll be friends – or one of us will be dead.”
For a moment Hawk simply looked at the massive man standing so confidently on the dock. Then Hawk held out his hand, liking the big Indian in spite of himself.
“I’ll hold you to that, Carlson,” Hawk said.
Carlson took the offered hand. Just before he released it, he said easily, “One other thing, Hawk. If you touch Angie, I’ll cut you into thin strips and use you for bait.”
“Carlson -!” Angel said, angry and appalled.
Hawk was neither. “What if she wants me to touch her?”
Carlson looked from Angel’s flushed face to Hawk’s fiercely impassive expression.
“Then I’d say you were the luckiest man alive.” Carlson turned and kissed Angel’s forehead. “Don’s waving for you to get that fancy boat out of the way. See you in a few days, Angie. By then,” he added, smiling, “maybe you’ll be over your mad.”
Shaking her head helplessly, Angel stood on tiptoe to kiss Carlson’s black-stubbled cheek.
“I can’t ever stay mad at you,” she said. Then she added crisply, “Though God knows I should. You might consider apologizing to Hawk.”
Carlson’s black eyes were brilliant with suppressed laughter as he looked over Angel’s head at Hawk.
“I might, but I’m not going to. You understand, don’t you, Hawk?”
“Perfectly.”
Hawk’s mouth had a tiny sardonic curl at the left corner that said he understood very well indeed.
Angel went back down the dock, hurried on her way by a friendly swat from Carlson’s big hand. She glanced sideways at Hawk, still embarrassed by Carlson’s warning. The slight upward tilt of Hawk’s mouth told Angel that he was amused rather than angered.
But then, he had shown no signs of wanting to touch her. Not really.
Not the way she wanted to be touched.
Chapter 12
Angel took the powerboat out of Brown’s Bay and across the channel to work her way up to Deepwater Bay. She watched the ocean carefully. It was Saturday, and the water was alive with small craft.
“Hang on,” Angel said to Hawk, spotting a slick ahead.
The slick’s deceptively smooth surface concealed an enormous shift in the current. Some of the slicks were upwellings of water from below, where the ocean was squeezed between invisible rocky barriers until water surged powerfully upward. Other slicks became whirlpools during the height of the tidal race. Small boats could be capsized and sucked down into the cold sea if the person at the helm was careless or inexperienced.
The helm bucked suddenly in Angel’s hands. She was braced, expecting it. The stern of the boat drifted like the back end of a car on a patch of icy road.
Angel turned the bow into the watery skid, controlling the motion of the boat. Within seconds they shot off the slick and back into the normally roiled water that came with changing tides.
Sensing Hawk’s eyes on her, Angel turned and smiled.
“Fun, wasn’t it?” she asked.
A black eyebrow lifted, rewarding Angel’s smile.
“Looked like a rather nasty piece of water to me,” said Hawk.
“That was just a baby. At some times of the year it gets rough, though.”
“Storms?”
Angel shrugged.
“Storms are bad any time of the year,” she said. “So are the tides, if you don’t know what to expect. The Inside Passage isn’t for amateurs. Ask him.”
Angel gestured toward a towboat and barge. The towboat was straining northward up the narrowing channel. The thick, braided steel cable that connected the towboat to the heavily loaded barge was taut, humming with energy.
Despite the obvious laboring of the heavy engines, the towboat was barely making one knot forward speed.
“Missed the tide,” Angel said succinctly.
“What will happen to him?”
“He’ll spend the next few hours like that, going flat out and getting nowhere. Then the race will stop and he’ll pop forward like a cork out of a bottle. Until then, though, he’s stuck, working like the devil just to stay even and keep the tow cable straight against corkscrew tidal rips.”
“Is that the voice of experience talking?” asked Hawk.
Even as Hawk asked the question, he realized that he wouldn’t be surprised if Angel had handled one of the tugboats that dotted the Inside Passage. She was supremely at home on the water.
But apparently it wasn’t something Angel wanted to talk about, for she didn’t answer his question.
“Have you worked on towboats?” Hawk asked.
The silence stretched as Angel struggled with memories welling like blood from a fresh wound. The summer she and Grant had fallen in love, he had piloted towboats up the Inside Passage. Even today the visceral, elemental pounding of diesel engines going flat out peeled away the years, leaving Angel naked and bleeding with memories.
“I’ve ridden on the towboats,” said Angel, her voice even and her eyes too dark.
“With a man.”
Angel didn’t answer. It hadn’t been a question.
