The Hawk and the Lamb

'Hawkwood. He's over there. Behind you. At the first-class check-in for Air Caledonie.' By slumping his shoulders her brawny Uncle Simon suddenly metamor­phosed himself into the shuffling stance of an elderly man rather than the fifty-five-year-old he was. Elizabeth couldn’t help admiring the chameleon-like disguise as she automatically began to turn.

'No, don’t look now!' Her uncle grabbed her shoulder to stop her. 'He mustn’t see us together. Just stand in front of me as if you're saying goodbye...'

'I need to know what he looks like if I'm going to be spying on him,' Elizabeth pointed out drily, and the old man before her frowned.

'There's a photo of him in the file. Whatever you do be discreet, be casual. I'm going to walk away in a minute; you can take a look at him then. You won’t be able to miss him. He's the arrogant one in the brown coat with the long black hair and the earring.'

'Earring?' Elizabeth was startled.

'It's apparently a Hawkwood male tradition,' her uncle shrugged dismissively. 'Something to do with some Renaissance ancestor and an old superstition about the Hawkwood luck. They seem to have a lot of it and they guard it fairly jealously.'

Elizabeth was dying to look around by now. 'What about her—your client's wife? Is she with him?'

'Serena. Serena Corvell. She flew up this morning, I guess so her husband wouldn’t see Hawkwood and start to ask questions.' He proceeded to tell her a few other things that he thought she ought to know and gave her some last-minute instructions and reassurances.

When he was gone and Elizabeth turned around her eyes had instantly found the arrogant man whom her uncle had said she couldn’t miss.

He was third in line at the check-in desk, frowning fiercely after a rapidly retreating figure in a dark coat whom Elizabeth ignored, assuming that it was some minion who had delivered His Highness to the airport and managed in the process to annoy him in some way. She had been shocked by the pony-tail and surprised at the sight of jeans beneath the stylish brown trench coat he wore, but, not particularly fashion-conscious herself, she presumed that even millionaire businessmen were glad to get out of suits on occasion, and J.J. Hawkwood was obviously in a sartorial class of his own. She had nervously made her way to the adjacent queue and em­barked on her trail of minor catastrophes.

Someone rattled the toilet door now and Elizabeth re­luctantly acknowledged that she had lingered as long as she could. She put her sunglasses back on and practised an enigmatic expression in the mirror.

Neither J.J. Hawkwood nor her own fears were going to defeat her. To do a great right it was often necessary to do a little wrong. From now on discretion would be her watchword.

Elizabeth Lamb: undercover operative!

CHAPTER THREE

ELIZABETH slipped back into her seat and re-fastened her seatbelt, saying primly as she did so, 'Thank you for the loan of your shirt.'

'My pleasure,' J.J. Hawkwood murmured, studying her dignified expression with a veiled amusement. 'It suits you far better than it ever did me.'

She was unnerved by the faint hint of possessiveness in his amused look, and Elizabeth's blood boiled at the facile compliment.

She muttered a frosty reply and looked for her magazine to rescue her from any further conversation. To her frustration she realised she must have left it in the front pocket of her economy-class seat. She couldn’t even sneak a peak at the file Uncle Simon had given her, not with the subject sitting right beside her.

'Perhaps, since you're wearing my clothes, we ought to introduce ourselves.'

His silky suggestion sent a wave of panic thrilling through Elizabeth's veins.

'I think the hostess has already taken care of the in­troductions, Monsieur Hawkwood.' Goodness, she sounded even prissier than ever, but she didn’t know how else to discourage idle conversation.

Wrong move.

'So she has, Miss Lamb,' he replied equably, but the spark in the silver eyes suggested that he found her evasion annoying and—more dangerous for her—slightly intriguing.

'The hawk and the lamb—a curious coincidence, wouldn’t you say? In the wild we would be natural enemies...' His mouth curved in a thin, predatory smile and Elizabeth was hard put to it not to shiver at the appropriateness of his idle musing.

'Yes, I suppose we would,' she said steadily, suddenly remembering the thick instruction booklet that came with the camera Uncle Simon had given her. She fished it out of the camera bag with an inward sigh of relief. Now she had a substantial excuse to ignore him. It would take her a long time to plod through the whole thing—longer if she also intended to try to actually comprehend what she was reading.

'New camera?'

Elizabeth gritted her teeth. For some reason J.J. Hawkwood was determined to thwart her attempts at aloofness. Was it his wounded vanity? Would he keep pestering her until she paid him the kind of attention he was obviously used to receiving from women? She wouldn’t have thought his ego would be so insecure.

'Yes—I mean, no...it's borrowed—from a relative.' Her hands tightened on the cover as she realised that she was telling him more than he needed to know. Stick to minimal answers, Beth!

He leaned towards her to look over her shoulder at the print, close enough for her to inhale the crisp, clean male scent of him, unmasked by cologne. ‘Interested in photography?'

In her nervous state she almost snapped out the truth. Just in time she remembered the image she was sup­posed to be projecting. 'It's a hobby of mine.'