Tiger Eyes

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.