Tiger Eyes

That was a mild way of putting it. He was an arrogant bastard with a cynical belief that money could buy everything. But did he know why Rick had run away from school halfway through the year?

She frowned, trying to remember if there had been any indication in his tone or expression. No; although that aloof, self-possessed face revealed very little, he hadn’t appeared to know. Rick had said no one did.

And now Grace Dacre was ill. Tansy hated the thought of Rick’s mother grieving and suspecting the worst, yet she still couldn’t convince herself that she should go against Rick’s wishes and tell his brother where he was. So much depended on it. Rick’s whole future, in fact.

She chewed a moment on her lip. Damn Leo Dacre; why had he come and upset her comparatively serene life?

And how had he found her? Sudden tension prickled up her backbone as she wondered whether he had set a spy to watch her.

Not that anyone could force her back home now. That caution was merely a leftover from the time when she’d lived looking over her shoulder in case someone arrived to drag her back home.

Tonight at the café, she decided as she got up to shower, she’d ask if she could ring the camp where Rick was trying to put his life back together again. He wouldn’t be able to speak to her, but she’d tell the man who ran the camp about this development. He’d be impartial, and she, cowardly though it probably was, would offload the responsibility on to him.

Three hours later she was sitting on a stool in the café when she realised Leo Dacre had followed her. The quaver in her smoky voice wasn’t obvious, but she saw his quick smile and cursed herself for the small betrayal. Nobody else noticed. But then, her rendition of French songs à la Edith Piaf two nights a week was merely a background to flirting and eating and drinking and, during the university year, deep philosophical discussions on the meaning of life and the possible existence of a theory of everything.

Leo Dacre looked as though he was well aware of the meaning of life and had his own, perfectly satisfactory, universal theory. For a fleeting moment Tansy wondered whether anything ever shook that powerful self-confidence. Only for a moment. She remembered the tiny, ominous flick of muscle against his angular jaw, and felt another twist of inchoate alarm at the barely caged emotions she had sensed behind his sophisticated front.

But the fact that he was here meant that unless she could get rid of him first she dare not ring the camp tonight.

Avoiding his eyes, she smiled at the applause and went with smooth precision into the rest of the set. By showing up he was sending a message. She was, she realised grimly, in for a hard time until she managed to convince him that she wasn’t going to tell him where Rick was.

Her life had suddenly become far too complicated. Perhaps she deserved it; anyone with any sense of self-preservation at all would have left thin, twitchy, obviously nervous Rick at the railway station that night six months ago, instead of taking him in like a starving stray and feeding him and keeping him warm and letting him talk to her as though his life and sanity depended on it.

Her voice lingered softly over the final silken syllables before trailing away into a plaintive silence. She smiled at the applause and slid down from the stool. Without looking at the table where Leo Dacre sat, she headed for the kitchen door. When it closed behind her with a soft thunk, her breath puffed through her lips in a sharp, relieved sigh.

‘Brilliant as ever,’ Arabella, who owned the café, said with her customary generosity. Large, flamboyant and in her late fifties, she was just outrageous enough to make it seem possible that it was her real name.

Tansy grinned. Arabella always tossed her the same compliment, and it didn’t mean a thing. The main reason she was employed here two nights a week was that she looked the part; skinny and intense and soulful. Arabella thought she gave the crowded café a bit of Continental flair.

‘Want something to eat, love?’ The older woman inspected Tansy with a perceptive eye. ‘You look a bit pale. Got some nice linguine tonight.’

‘Your pasta is delicious, but I think I’ll—’

Another thunk of the door silenced her. Prickles of recognition pulled the fine hair on the back of her neck upright. Arabella’s dyed red head swivelled. After a comprehensive, almost awed survey, she beamed at the man who had followed Tansy in.

‘Don’t run away, Tansy, I’ll buy you a drink,’ Leo Dacre said.

‘She doesn’t drink,’ the older woman told him throatily.

Normally her protective attitude amused Tansy, even warmed her a little, but for once she’d have liked Arabella to treat her as an adult capable of making her own decisions.

‘Indeed?’ He looked at Arabella, and smiled.

Tansy caught it from the corner of her eye. It was the kind of smile that could melt icebergs at forty miles: although deliberate, even calculated, its lazy, appreciatively male sexuality would take a far tougher woman than the café owner to withstand.

Arabella swallowed. She might have been planning to say something more but Leo Dacre side-tracked her neatly by murmuring, ‘Not one of your vices, Tansy? But then, you haven’t many, have you? You’ve led a very sober and industrious life.’

‘Oh, you know each other, do you?’ Arabella was openly curious.

Tansy opened her mouth to refute this, only to be forestalled by Leo. ‘Yes, of course. Tansy, why don’t you introduce us?’

Wondering whether that billion-kilowatt smile had scrambled her brains beyond redemption, Tansy did.

Within two minutes he had Arabella, no fool in spite of her soft heart, eating out of his hand. Had Tansy been less apprehensive, less tense, she might have admired a master at work. As it was, she could only fume at the unfaltering, devilish skill with which he soothed Arabella while implying without a word that he and Tansy were close friends and that, although he found Arabella interesting and sexy, it wouldn’t be good manners for him to let Tansy see this.

He was clever. He was devious. He was beginning to scare the hell out of her. A man who could do that could turn her inside out and extract Rick’s whereabouts before she had time to realise what she was saying.

Tomorrow, she decided abruptly, on the way to see Professor Paxton, she’d buy a Telecom card and ring the camp from a public phone box. In the meantime it would be necessary to keep a clear head, and not let Leo Dacre’s smile short-circuit any more of the synapses in her brain.

‘Well, Tansy’s finished work for tonight,’ Arabella said, obviously convinced she was helping an incipient romance.

With a last benign, approving smile at them both, she bustled across the noisy, sizzling kitchen to where her youngest son seemed about to toss a large wok full of stir-fried vegetables on to the floor. Arabella’s cuisine was eclectic.

Tansy tried to pull away from Leo’s hand at her elbow. He merely tightened his grip and guided her through the door back into the café.

‘I’m going home now,’ she stated evenly.

‘Wait until I’ve finished my drink and I’ll take you there.’

Her small, sharp chin angled up. ‘I don’t know you well enough to go anywhere with you,’ she said, not attempting to hide the caustic undertone in her voice.

His smile was hard and enigmatic, green eyes the colour and clarity of peridots scanning her mutinous face. ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘I imagine Rick’s told you all about his horrible, unsympathetic, bad-tempered, far too demanding half-brother.’

Reluctantly, and only because she didn’t trust him not to plonk her into the chair if she objected, she sat down. Her frown turned to surprise as one of the waiters, yet another of the owner’s sons, arrived with a plate of linguine.

‘No—Arabella’s made a mistake,’ she said, smiling. ‘I told her I didn’t want it.’

Leo Dacre pushed the plate towards her. ‘Eat it up,’ he ordered. ‘No doubt the half-starved look is a professional asset when you’re singing Piaf, but it doesn’t do anything for your face.’

She didn’t like him, she didn’t trust him as far as she could throw him, yet the casual cruelty of his words hurt. ‘I’ve always been thin,’ she said stiffly.

‘So you starve yourself to make sure you stay that way? Eat up, there’s a good girl.’

Tansy hesitated. Leo nodded at the waiter, and said with enough command in his voice, ‘Thanks.’

Waiting until Peter had scurried off, Tansy said, ‘I don’t like being told what to eat.’

‘There’s no sense in being stubborn merely for the sake of it.’

He was, of course, maddeningly right. Until that moment Tansy hadn’t felt in the least hungry, but the steaming pasta smelt wonderful. Picking up her fork, she began to eat.

Tansy had a thing about hands. She believed they could tell her far more than expressions; people trained their faces to reveal only the thoughts and emotions that were politic, but hands and their movements were difficult to disguise.

Leo Dacre’s were competent as well as graceful. They were also under control. He didn’t wave them around, or drum them on the table, or scratch himself with them. Tansy found them distinctly unsettling.

Almost as unsettling as Leo Dacre himself.

A group of young men came in, shouting, laughing boisterously. Leo’s dark head swung around, presenting a profile as autocratic as a king on a coin; he checked them out before dismissing them as harmless.

He was a barrister, Tansy knew, well on the way to taking silk and becoming a Queen’s Counsel. Rick had been very proud of his brother’s speedy rise through the ranks.

Leo worked in offices and courtrooms. Why then did he look as though he’d be more than competent to deal with any number of rowdy youths? Unwillingly, Tansy was intrigued. A good gym and a certain amount of dedication and sweat would give him the muscles that covered his long bones, but beneath the sophisticated, disciplined veneer she sensed something untamed and lethal.

He had a predator’s focused awareness of his surroundings, a predator’s skill in finding the weak spots in armour—look at the way he had charmed Arabella into submission, the way he had homed in on her own reluctance to make things worse for Rick’s mother. As well, he displayed a predator’s frighteningly fast reactions, and that invisible, potent aura of danger.

Altogether an alarming man. And she was his prey, the person that sharp, clear brain wanted to break.

For as long as she could remember, Tansy had singlemindedly aimed for one goal. She had sacrificed almost everything—a family, an easy life, even friends—for it. She had put herself in jeopardy, had learned to be streetwise, had gone hungry and cold for her ambition, and she had come to believe that nothing scared her any more.

But Leo Dacre did. Of course, she could save herself all this worry, and tell him where his brother was; she had done more for Rick than most would expect from a chance-met stranger. Unfortunately it wasn’t in her to tamely knuckle under. And if she had been tempted, she’d only to recall Rick’s desperate face and urgent plea to change her mind.

‘This is my last chance,’ he’d said just before he left, his determination as obvious as his fear. ‘I have to do this, Tansy, and if Leo finds out where I am he’ll have me out of there without a second thought.’

‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Surely he’d be pleased that you’re getting help.’

‘You don’t know Leo. He’d never find himself in a situation like this, he’s too strong, but if somehow he did he’d deal with it himself. In our family Leo’s the one everyone goes to when they need help, the only one who doesn’t need help himself. He’s tough, and he’s brilliant, and he’s got no weaknesses. People admire him, they look up to him. More than anything in the world I want to be like him. If he finds out where I am he’ll take me home and make me see a psychiatrist, and it won’t work, because he’ll be there, he’ll be watching all the time, and if I let him down again I—’ He looked at her with such painful intensity that her heart twisted.

Then he said heavily, ‘It would kill me, Tansy. If I can only have the time and the privacy, I know this will work. I can’t cope with things like he does—I’m not as tough as he is—but I have to prove to myself and to him that I can do something right.’

All of his longing, the echo of years growing up in another man’s shadow, sounded in his voice.

Tansy grimaced. She knew what was driving him, his need to prove himself. Her relationship with her foster-family had foundered on the rock of her inability to be the daughter and sister they wanted.

She looked at Rick’s bent brown head and said angrily, ‘Surely he doesn’t expect you to be a clone of him, and if he is so insensitive, you’re better off without him!’

‘He’s not like that,’ he said simply. ‘Just don’t tell him where I am, OK? I hate asking you, because Leo’s a master of applying pressure and you’ve been so good to me.’

Tansy laughed. ‘If he finds me, which I doubt, he can’t do anything more than ask. He’s got no leverage.’

Rick eyed her with a grimness she now understood. ‘You don’t know Leo. He’ll find something to threaten you with. But please, promise me.’

She’d promised. So, she thought, shaking her head at the offer of coffee, she would make sure that, whatever tactics Leo Dacre tried, she wouldn’t give Rick away. He’d convinced himself that this was his last chance, and he deserved his opportunity.

A strange, fierce exhilaration flooded her. She would show Leo Dacre that she wasn’t easily intimidated.

‘Let’s go,’ he said, getting to his feet.

Apparently one of the tricks in his armoury was to take it for granted that she was going to fall in with whatever he suggested. Tonight she’d do that, for her own good reasons. Outside the bitter wind was now driving rain before it, and if she walked she’d be drenched by the time she got halfway home.

He didn’t ask where she lived. She didn’t tell him, but he drove straight there.

At the door of her flat he said, ‘Are you going to ask me in?’

‘No,’ she said abruptly, bracing herself for an argument. Huddling a little further into her coat, she said coolly, ‘It’s no use, you know.’

Of course she’d known she wouldn’t put him off so easily, but she was unprepared for his low laughter.

‘I enjoy a good fight,’ he said, a note of mockery giving emphasis to the words. ‘Open your door.’

‘I don’t want—’

Ignoring her struggles, he picked up the hand that held her key and, with his warm one around it, forced the key into the lock and turned it. His other hand came up and switched the light on.

‘All right?’ He looked around her cramped domain with eyes that took in everything.

‘Of course it’s all right,’ she said, her voice rising jaggedly. That swift, comprehensive glance was like a violation. Defensively trying to block his view, she stepped inside and swung around to face him.

‘Right. See you tomorrow.’

He closed the door behind him with a loud click of the lock. Automatically, Tansy put the chain across, her eyes narrowed beneath her fine, straight brows as she tried to work out what that had been.

Macho display? No, he had to know that men were stronger than women. Was he proving that he could make her do whatever he wanted to? Hardly. He was subtle, not brutal and as lacking in finesse as a battle-axe.

He knew Rick wasn’t there so it hadn’t been that, either, unless he thought his brother might have come back that very day.

Was he concerned about her safety, for heaven’s sake?

It gave her an odd little warmth, a warmth she instantly doused. She had lived on her own since a year after she had run away, but even before that she had to some extent always been on her own. Her foster-parents’ decision that she leave school and work in the local supermarket had merely made obvious what she had always sensed. So she had run away as far as she could, determined to follow her dream and compose beautiful, exciting music, music that would touch the hearts of generations unborn.

And she had managed, with help, to survive. Chin tilted, she looked around the small room, trying to see it with Leo Dacre’s eyes. OK, so she didn’t live in particularly salubrious surroundings, but they were hers. If she never produced anything more than the pretty little songs she sang on the streets, she had made a life on her own terms.

But she would make music. It was a kind of rage in her, a need that was more important than anything else, more necessary than food, more vital than affection, more intensely satisfying than the most ardent love-affair.

It was her future and her present. She didn’t regret jettisoning her relationship with her foster-family, and she’d not regret it if she never found anyone to love, because love could only ever take second place. There might come a time when she’d want marriage, and children, but at the moment she couldn’t imagine it.

CHAPTER TWO

COLLAPSING bonelessly into the chair, Tansy sighed and pulled off her beret, tossing it on to the bed. Her hair sprang out around her narrow face like wildfire. It was, she thought gloomily, about the only thing about her that actually had any life to it. Too much life: completely uncontrollable and far too obvious, she kept it covered as much as possible. It contrasted brashly with the pale, scrawny, unobtrusive rest of her.

Suddenly weary, she got ready for bed, where she lay awake for too long, wondering how Rick was getting on in his self-imposed exile. And exactly what effect his mother’s illness was going to have on his life.

* * *

On her way to Lambton Quay the next morning she tried to ring the camp, but was rebuffed by the very unforthcoming man who answered. He informed her he was the cook and that everyone else was out for the day, and as she opened her mouth, hung up.

‘Damn,’ she muttered, seething with frustration. That was several dollars down the drain. Hastily she rang the university, hoping to be able to talk to Professor Paxton about grants, but he wasn’t there, and wasn’t expected in that day.

Altogether an exercise in futility.

* * *

Just before lunch she watched a limousine pull up outside a very upmarket hotel and disgorge three men. One she recognised as an important industralist, one was a quintessential yes-man, dark-suited and eager, and the third was Leo Dacre. He saw her, but apart from a quizzical lift of his brows gave no sign of recognition.

Ignoring him, she hurried on her way, but the incident dramatised the difference between them. King Cophetua and the beggar maid, she thought ironically. Except that the beggar maid had been beautiful, and the king had fallen in love with her. Young as Tansy had been when she’d read the story, she’d always wondered whether the beggar maid had really enjoyed being queen.

It wasn’t a good day; the weather was still unseasonable so there were few shoppers about, and those who had to brave the wind weren’t wanting to stop and listen. At three-thirty she let herself think wistfully of Auckland summers that started in November and went on sometimes until June.

Remember the sticky, airless humidity, too, she told herself, slipping into a rollicking Caribbean folksong with forced enthusiasm. A few people tossed coins into her guitar case. They were going to be the last; as she finished the song with a flourish she realised that the street was almost empty of people.

Lord, she hoped things picked up. Perhaps she should go north to Auckland. There were more people there. Or Queenstown...there were always tourists visiting the South Island’s lovely lakes and mountains. And where there were holidaymakers, there was a delightfully casual attitude about money.

Unfortunately it cost money to get there. Of course, she could hitch hike.

No, it wasn’t worth the risk.

She packed up and set off, telling herself that the odd sensation under her breastbone was just hunger, not disappointment nor foreboding. The guitar dragged heavily on her arm.

A moment later she decided that she might be psychic after all. A car drew up beside her and Leo Dacre said, ‘Hop in and I’ll take you for a drink somewhere.’

‘I’m on my way home.’ She was astounded at the treacherous warmth spreading through her.

‘Get in,’ he said calmly.

She shook her head.

‘I want to talk about Rick.’ He got out and opened the rear door, holding out his hand for the guitar. ‘Come on, we’ll have afternoon tea and then I’ll take you straight home.’

And even as she wondered why he had such an effect on her, she found herself handing over the instrument and getting in.

‘How long have you been busking?’ he asked as he set the car in motion.

‘Why ask me questions you already know the answers to?’ she retorted.

He sent her a slanted look from unreadable eyes. ‘What exactly do you mean by that?’

Exasperated, she glowered at him. ‘Well, you obviously put a private detective on to Rick. How else would you have found me? And I’ll bet you didn’t just stop at a name; I’m sure there’s a dossier about me somewhere.’

His hard-edged smile applauded her shrewdness. ‘You’re right, of course. Yes, I know you ran away from home and dropped completely out of sight for a year. Why did you run away?’

‘Doesn’t the dossier have it all set out for you?’

He ignored the sharp sarcasm in her question. ‘Your family say you were always difficult to control, which doesn’t match your reputation at school.’

She shrugged. ‘My foster-parents and I didn’t see eye to eye. I don’t blame them; I must have been impossible to live with.’

‘What happened to your own family?’

Tansy was beginning to realise that she was too vulnerable to this man; she needed barriers. And because she didn’t seem to be able to keep behind the ones of her own making, she decided to hand him some. However, she couldn’t resist asking, ‘Didn’t your detective find that out either?’

‘He wasn’t asked to,’ he said. ‘I know you were four when you went to live with the O’Briens, and that you lived in a social welfare institution before that.’

‘My mother was a prostitute, I believe,’ she said deliberately. ‘She didn’t look after me properly, so the welfare took me away and put me into a foster-home.’

She cast a challenging look at him, but to her surprise there was no sign of disgust or surprise in his face.

‘How old were you then?’

‘Eighteen months.’ He might as well, she thought savagely, know the whole story. It had been a shock to Tansy when Pam O’Brien hurled the truth at her during one of their battles just before she’d run away; it would be an even greater jolt to Leo Dacre, brought up with all the advantages of wealth and security. ‘She went off for the weekend with some man. Apparently a friend was supposed to come and pick me up, but she had a better offer so I stayed in the flat until the neighbours got sick of my screaming.’

He swore under his breath. ‘Humanity can be incredibly cruel,’ he said. ‘Did you ever see your mother again?’

‘No.’ Tansy didn’t want him to pity her. ‘She died a couple of years later. I don’t remember her.’

‘If you lived happily with your foster-family until you were fifteen, what happened to change things?’

Beneath her jersey Tansy’s shoulders moved uneasily. ‘We disagreed on the course my future should take,’ she said, not attempting to hide the ironic note in her voice.

‘Some disagreement.’ He waited several seconds, and, when she remained silent, said, ‘So you ran away. How did you survive that first year on the streets?’

Tansy wasn’t surprised his detective hadn’t been able to discover anything about that year. She’d dropped out, living with a woman who’d made it her life’s work to take in runaways and street kids. With a better knowledge of what could have been her future, Tansy never stopped thanking the fates that the tough, big-hearted widow had noticed the skinny, frightened girl at the railway station and taken her home.