Tiger, Tiger

Lecia shrugged. ‘That’s the only possibility, but this man’s ancestor must have visited Australia, because I’ve never heard of a Spring travelling to New Zealand until my mother and I came back after my father died.’

‘If he’s not reasonably closely connected,’ Andrea pronounced, ‘I’ll give up champagne for a year.’

‘He must be beautiful.’ Peter’s tone made it obvious that the compliment was only directed at Lecia.

Andrea gave a little crow of laughter. ‘No, although he is gorgeous. He has the same features as Lecia but they’re completely, arrogantly and very sexily masculine. You know how brothers and sisters often look alike, yet there’s no mistaking which is the man and which the woman? Well, Lecia and this guy could be twins. Same physique too—he must be well over six feet. They even walk the same—that smooth, graceful gait with something slightly predatory in it.’

‘Oh, good Lord,’ Lecia sighed, unusually irritable. ‘What an imagination you have!’

‘You know what I mean, don’t you?’ Andrea said to Peter with the stunning lack of tact that occasionally made Lecia wonder why she was still her best friend. ‘There’s something not quite tamed about Lecia. That’s the way this guy looks; golden and lithe and dangerous. Monarch of all he surveys.’

And then, too late, Lecia saw her remember that, although Lecia liked Peter, only a week ago she’d decided not to encourage his pursuit of her.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Peter said with a slow, smiling glance that made Lecia squirm inside.

As Andrea’s current lover didn’t enjoy opera, she’d proposed that she and Lecia spend the afternoon together. Unfortunately, no sooner had they settled on their rug beneath the sun umbrella than Peter had seen them and suggested they join forces. There was no reason why they shouldn’t—except, Lecia thought with brutal honesty, that it was always disconcerting to meet someone who showed every sign of being in love with you when you couldn’t reciprocate.

Consciously unpleating her brows, Lecia said lightly, ‘Probably if you saw us side by side we’d only resemble each other very superficially.’

But the impact of that swift, shocking moment when her eyes had linked with the stranger’s had left her with a racing pulse and a body awash with adrenalin. She wanted to hide, to make sure he didn’t see her again.

Most emphatically she didn’t want to discuss him. Andrea, however, hadn’t finished with the subject. ‘It sounds as though the only possible link must be some sort of illicit liaison.’

Briskly Lecia conceded, ‘Almost certainly. According to my mother—one of the few bits of family history she knows—the first Spring came out to Australia from Britain, and apparently he always said he had no relatives.’

‘Of course nobody in those days would say anything about kids born on the wrong side of the blanket. He could be a long-lost second cousin several times removed,’ Andrea decided. ‘You should have made contact with that gorgeous beast, Lecia.’

Lecia shrugged. ‘Let sleeping beasts lie,’ she said curtly.

Within the space of a heartbeat the stranger had seen her, recognised their similarity, and rejected it. No way was she going to pursue him.

But she couldn’t get him out of her head. It had been so uncanny, that unexpected sight of her own features stamped in a more arrogant mould.

Once her mother had told her an old story of a girl who had looked into a well and seen beside her reflection the face of the man she would eventually marry.

In the hot sunlight Lecia’s skin chilled. Now she knew exactly how that girl felt.

‘...so Lecia told him that she wasn’t going to design a house for a woman she didn’t know,’ Andrea said, breaking into infectious laughter.

Scandalised, Peter said, ‘Lecia, how could you? What did he say?’

Amidst more gurgles, Andrea told him, ‘He said he liked a woman with spirit. And then—get this!—and then he asked her out to dinner to meet his wife!’

‘Hang on.’ Peter frowned. ‘You mean he’d commissioned you to design the house and his wife hadn’t been consulted?’

‘Exactly,’ Lecia said somewhat grimly. ‘I didn’t even realise there was a wife. Mind you, he turned out to be an old sweetie, and his wife actually knew how to manage him perfectly, but all the same it’s the first time I’ve been asked to design a house for a woman without even seeing her. I really thought I’d lost the commission and that he’d stamp out and find another architect.’

‘Nonsense,’ Andrea said, her tone tinged with mock resignation. ‘Like all your other clients, he fell in love with you.’

‘Hardly,’ Lecia said drily, wishing she could kick her, and skilfully turned the conversation.

After that the afternoon passed pleasantly, and Lecia told herself that the strange sensation between her shoulderblades was simply overreaction. There was no way the man with her face could see her amidst the three hundred and fifty thousand people who had poured into the low-sided crater of the Domain. In company with a third of Auckland’s population, she ate and talked and laughed and drank until eventually the sun went down and the concert began.

It was a confection of favourites delivered with verve and joie de vivre to the good-humoured crowd, the programme topped off by four songs from the golden throat of a world-famous soprano. Then came the part most of the children—and many of the adults, Lecia thought, looking at the excited faces around her—had been waiting for.

‘“The Ride of the Valkyries”!’ the presenter announced with a flourish. Orchestra and conductor swung into the music, followed almost immediately by green and red lasers creating an unearthly light show. Fireworks soared and burst dramatically into the warm, clear night sky, and from the low rim of the crater more fireworks surrounded the huge crowd with a smoky red glow.

Entranced by the eerie light, Lecia jumped when a battery from the army fired guns beside the stage, but the unleashed thunder satisfied something childlike and primitive in her. Tipping back her head, she admired more sunbursts of flame high in the sky, all to the sound of Wagner at his most dramatic.

And when it was all over she laughed as Andrea said irrepressibly, ‘Totally over the top! That’s what I call a climax!’

Still charmed by the spectacle, they collected together the rugs and sunshades, lifted the insulated boxes that had held their food, and waited a moment for a gap in the crowd making for the various roads around the Domain.

A sharp dig in her ribs made Lecia jump and look round indignantly.

‘I knew it,’ Andrea muttered. ‘Look, over there...’

Coming towards them was the stranger.

Lecia’s heart kicked into overdrive. For a second she tried to convince herself that he hadn’t seen her—that he was just going home as they were—but the purposefulness in his expression as he cut through the crowd convinced her she was wrong.

She only had time to gulp in a meagre breath before he stopped in front of her, and helplessly she looked up into eyes of a dark, brilliant steel-blue. Her mouth dried. Behind her she heard Peter speak, but the roaring in her ears prevented his words from registering.

She had no difficulty hearing the stranger, however.

‘I think,’ he said, in a deep, deliberate voice with an exciting rasp in it like gravel beneath water, ‘we must share a gene pool. I’m Keane Paget.’

Subliminally she felt a rearrangement of the atmosphere that meant either Peter or Andrea had recognised the name. It took all of the poise she’d acquired in her twenty-nine years to reply steadily, ‘I’m Lecia Spring.’

‘So—cousin?’ He held out his hand.

Although she put hers into it, she shook her head. ‘We can’t be. I look like my father, and he looked like his father, and there are no other Spring relatives.’

His handshake was firm, his eyes searching. ‘The resemblance is too marked to be coincidental,’ he said with aloof assurance. ‘Here’s my card.’

After a quick, fumbling grope in her bag Lecia found one of her own. Without looking at his she put it into her pocket and said, trying hard to sound brisk and casual, ‘It must be an amazing, accidental fluke. Isn’t everyone supposed to have a double?’

Unfortunately the words tumbled out with all the precision and confidence of water babbling from a hose. So much, she thought bitterly, for casual briskness.

‘So the old wives say,’ Keane Paget said with a brief smile. ‘I prefer science to folklore every time.’ His gaze sweeping the other two, he nodded and said, ‘Good evening.’

And headed back towards the corporate tents.

‘Oh, boy!’ Andrea sighed, fanning herself with her open hand as her eyes rolled upwards. ‘I might faint. That voice sent shivers up and down my spine. To say nothing of what his eyes did to me! Who is he? You recognised the name, Peter, didn’t you?’

‘I did.’ Peter was an investment adviser, and from the tone of his voice Keane Paget came within his area of expertise. ‘He owns a company that makes ozone generators.’

‘And exactly what,’ asked Andrea, who lectured in Art History at the university, ‘is an ozone generator?’