Читать книгу Tiger, Tiger - Robyn Donald - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

‘LECIA, look at that man! The tall one walking towards us with the very chic blonde beside him. He could be your twin!’

Lecia Spring’s clear green gaze followed her friend’s discreet nod towards the man coming up the marked path between the thousands of people who’d decided that watching opera in the Auckland Domain was the perfect way to spend this summer afternoon.

Broad-shouldered in a well-cut shirt, and with legs that seemed to stretch for miles, he strode through the press of people, apparently expecting them to part in front of him and his companion like the sea before Moses. Which was exactly what was happening.

That formidable confidence was something Lecia envied. He stood about six inches taller than her five feet eight inches, and except for a pronounced male toughness his face was the one that looked out from her mirror every morning.

Primitive, superstitious apprehension kicked her in the gut.

‘Same bone structure,’ Andrea was muttering excitedly. ‘Same straight, long nose with the tiniest bump on the bridge and—heavens, yes—the same cleft chin! I can’t believe it! You’re fairer, but you both have honey-coloured hair. Dark manuka honey in his case, closer to clover in yours! He must be related to you.’

‘He can’t be,’ Lecia returned, prickling all over with absurd diffidence. ‘I agree, he looks just like Dad, but Dad had no relatives except his parents.’

‘Cousins? Everyone has cousins.’

‘Not in Dad’s family. They were a most unproductive lot. Just one child each generation back as far as anyone remembers—and always a son until I turned up to break the pattern.’

Lecia’s glance travelled to the woman beside the unknown man. Slim, with a patrician face, she wore clothes that were exactly right. As befitted the occasion, they were casual, although she’d dressed the outfit up with a gold chain and supple Italian sandals. The floaty silk shirt and trousers, cool, expensive and elegant, suited her. And she knew it.

Repressing a sudden twist to her heart, Lecia concentrated on what she was about to say. ‘Anyway, Dad was an Australian and this is New Zealand.’

‘What a shame.’ Andrea sighed and murmured throatily, ‘If he was a relative you could introduce me. Talk about the it factor! That woman’s staring at him as though she’d eat him if she had the chance.’

Andrea was right. Although nothing but relaxed interest showed in that lovely face, the man’s companion couldn’t hide the awareness surrounding her like an aura.

Switching her gaze back to the strong bones and hard-honed masculinity that stamped the stranger’s face, Lecia observed, ‘He’d be a tough mouthful.’

‘Those calories I’d really enjoy,’ Andrea said suggestively. ‘I lo-o-ove the way he walks! As though he expects the whole world to scuttle out of his way. I’ll bet he’s a tiger in bed.’

Lecia forced a smile into her tone. ‘You can tell that by looking at him?’

‘And so can every other woman here. You’re just obstinately refusing to read the signals.’ Andrea put on her sunglasses and assumed what she thought was an English accent. ‘Note, my dear Watson, the way those muscles work together, so powerfully smooth and sure. He’s coming up the hill without even sweating, so he has stamina.’ She growled the final word with comical lasciviousness. ‘Terribly important is stamina. And because he’s wearing clothes that cost more than half my salary—and we know how rare inherited wealth is in New Zealand—we can deduce that he’s not only rich, he’s intelligent enough to hold down a very good job. Intelligence, dear Watson, is another vital attribute in a lover.’

Lecia’s amusement was diluted by another emotion, a kind of shocked bewilderment. Hypnotised, she gazed at the man, absorbing greedily the cool, commanding presence, the way the sun was imprisoned in the tawny amber hair, the golden hue of his skin.

Beside her, Andrea continued, ‘As for passion—well, just take a quick glance at that mouth! It’s kept very firmly under restraint, but it’s there.’ Shuddering enjoyably, she pushed her sunglasses onto the top of her head and surveyed the approaching man with bright, intrigued eyes.

Lecia swallowed. ‘It’s uncanny,’ she mumbled, assailed by an odd feeling of connection, a bond forged only by their shared features. ‘And very unsettling.’

Reluctantly, Andrea dragged her gaze away to scan Lecia’s taut face. ‘I suppose it is,’ she said slowly. ‘Come to think of it, I wouldn’t like to meet my double, however gorgeous he was.’

By this time it was plain that the man and his companion were making for the corporate tents on the low hill behind the crowd. All his attention seemed to be on the woman at his side, but when a small child barrelled out in front of him and tripped, he stopped in mid-stride and picked the child up, setting her on her feet with a gentleness at variance with his autocratic air.

The toddler puckered up her face and let out a wail. Immediately the man swung her to his shoulder and turned so that the people in the crowd could see the child. A woman scrambled to her feet and began to shuffle through the blankets and picnics and umbrellas and seated people.

When she reached him the man handed the child over with a few unsmiling words before walking on. Cuddling the toddler, the woman stared with an offended expression after the tall, lean figure. Not until somebody bumped into her did she shrug and make her way back into the crowd.

‘I wonder what he said?’ Andrea hissed. ‘Judging by the frown on the mother’s face it wasn’t exactly a compliment.’

‘The child shouldn’t have been able to get that far without her noticing,’ Lecia said curtly. ‘It would be so easy for a little thing to get lost in all this crowd. Her mother should have kept a closer watch on her.’

Andrea laughed. ‘That’s probably exactly what he said. You see, you even think alive.’

The stranger was only a few metres away. For some reason Lecia wanted to hunch down, keep her head low in case he saw her. It was a ridiculous impulse, and one she refused to obey, although she did turn her face away and look across to the stage.

But at the sound of her name her head whipped around, and her gaze collided with that of the stranger.

Something dissolved in her stomach—no, she thought dazedly, in her bones. His dark blue eyes registered astonishment before they hardened into a polished, unreadable sheen.

‘Here you are, girls,’ came a male voice. ‘Eat them quickly because they’re already melting.’

Peter Farring looped an arm around Lecia’s shoulders and dropped a kiss on the top of her head before she had time to move away. The stranger’s burnished gaze flicked over the man beside her. Without breaking stride, he switched it to the path ahead and walked on up the hill.

Shakily Lecia took the proffered ice-cream cone, took a deep breath and produced a smile. ‘Thanks very much.’

‘My pleasure,’ Peter said gallantly.

Between enthusiastic ticks, Andrea told him all about the man with Lecia’s face. ‘Lecia says he looks just like her father,’ she finished, ‘in spite of the fact that she doesn’t have any relatives on her father’s side.’

‘None?’ Peter asked, intrigued. ‘But there could have been—ah—well, not all families know exactly who all their relatives are.’ His flush made his meaning clear.

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?’

‘It’s a device that uses electricity and air to purify water. They’ve been around for ever, but the ones Paget’s marketing are much more refined than the basic device, as well as cheaper and safer. He’s an up-and-coming industrialist, astute and hard-hitting, with his head screwed on the right way.’

‘I take that to mean that as well as being tough and clever he’s already rich and getting richer,’ Andrea said thoughtfully.

Amused, Peter replied, ‘Yes. He owns that firm, and he’s not going public in the immediate future.’ When Andrea opened her mouth he forestalled her with, ‘He’s not married, although he’s been seen out and about with some very beautiful women. And no, I don’t know who the woman with him was. I don’t move in his circle—haven’t the background or the connections.’

Andrea turned to Lecia. ‘So you’re almost certainly related to a man who’s making lots and lots of very nice money,’ she said, her eyes gleaming with mock avarice. ‘Nice going.’

Shocked by the relief she’d felt when Peter pronounced Keane Paget single, Lecia shrugged. ‘If we’re related. It gives me the creeps to know that someone else is wandering around with my face.’

‘Paget’s not a wanderer,’ Peter said wryly. ‘He’s a man who knows where he’s heading, and he’s getting there in a hurry. He’s begun exporting to Asia—doing very nicely too—and for all the profits to be made there it’s not an easy market. It needs enormous patience, guts and integrity, as well as a good brain and a damned good product.’

A gap in the crowd opened out; they slid into it and made their way the mile or so to Lecia’s flat in an old building down by the waterfront. As Peter escorted them all the way, common courtesy forced her to invite him into her sanctuary for a cup of coffee.

Once inside, Andrea asked, ‘Why haven’t we heard about Keane Paget? I mean, apart from being utterly gorgeous, he sounds the sort of man who turns up as the subject of respectful articles in high-powered magazines and newspapers.’

Peter grinned. ‘He is and he does. However, he doesn’t seem to indulge in the social round that ends up as photographs in the glossies. I suppose he likes his privacy.’

‘What a waste,’ Andrea mourned. ‘He could be making the lives of all young women—and a good few older ones, I bet—so much brighter if he just smiled at the camera occasionally. We could all practise swooning.’

‘Coffee’s ready,’ Lecia said, cutting into her friend’s flight of fancy as she carried the tray across to the low table in front of the sofa.

She steered the conversation away from Keane Paget, away from anything personal, her nerves tightening when Peter admired her flat, congratulating her on her clever design for the conversion of the old factory into apartments. He was amusing and intelligent and often perceptive, but his open desire to know her better sawed across emotions already fretted by the stranger with her face.

With great relief she heard Andrea redeem her earlier tactlessness by jumping to her feet and saying, ‘Time to go! Come on, Peter, we’ll share a taxi, shall we?’

Reluctantly, after an appealing glance at Lecia, he nodded, trailing behind Andrea as she strode off towards the lift.

Peter, Lecia decided when she’d waved them goodbye and locked the door behind them, looked like becoming a bit of problem. Unfortunately he was really a nice man, and she just didn’t have it in her to be rude to nice men.

‘Although you should have learned that lesson well and truly...’ she muttered, remembering another nice man she hadn’t been able to turn down. Poor Barry.

Well, that had been seven years ago. She’d grown up a lot since then, and as soon as possible she’d make sure Peter understood that they had no future together.

After she’d showered off the sunscreen and sweat she pulled on a loose cotton wrap striped in her favourite peach and cream, colours that went so well with her hair and clear ivory skin.

Keane Paget would look good in them too.

Wry amusement softened the wide curves of her mouth as she imagined that very masculine face and form decked out in such gentle, pretty shades.

The amusement faded as she stared at herself in the mirror. He’d cope; he looked as though he could cope with anything! He knew what colours suited him too; he’d been wearing a cream shirt with trousers the same intense dark blue as his eyes.

At the memory of those eyes something hot and tight knotted in the pit of Lecia’s stomach. ‘You’re an idiot,’ she told her reflection, slathering on moisturiser before using the hairdrier.

Only then did she go into her bedroom and take his card from her bag.

It was severe, restrained and conventional—a personal one, not a business affair. Keane Paget lived across the harbour bridge in the marine suburb of Takapuna, and from the street name his house probably overlooked Rangitoto, the dormant volcanic island that gave Auckland its distinctive skyline.

Money, she thought, and put the card down.

She was horrified at her disappointment when he didn’t ring the next day. Her Christmas and New Year had been so hectically social she’d decided to keep just for herself the January weekend when Auckland celebrated its status as a province of New Zealand.

However, in spite of having looked forward to it for weeks, she found Sunday echoing emptily, with yet another holiday on Monday to live through. The usually busy streets were empty and simmering with heat; everyone who could get there had deserted Auckland for the country or the beach.

Lecia opened every window in the flat, watered her plants and went down into the communal garden in search of inspiration. She’d been asked to supply sketches for a house needed by a vigorous middle-aged woman who’d bought a cross-leased section in the heart of one of the more expensive suburbs.

For such a decisive person, the prospective client had few ideas on what she needed beyond two bedrooms and space close by for a potting shed. Lecia played around with sketches, fitting rough floor plans into the site, knowing that if the woman decided to commission her she’d choose the house that allowed her most scope for a splendid garden and time to spend in it.

Absorbed by the challenge, Lecia spent hours in the lounger beneath the jacaranda, doodling and scribbling.

When she wasn’t thinking with a pencil in her hand she cleaned out two cupboards, went to the gym, ate dinner with her godson—a twenty-month-old charmer called Hugh, who spent the night with her—and delivered him to his parents the next morning, brushing aside their thanks for the opportunity to have had a glorious evening on the town.

Keane Paget still didn’t contact her.

And she did not ring him.

By the end of the week, Lecia had given up hope of hearing from the man. Not that it was hope, she told herself firmly on the too-frequent occasions when she recalled that proud, angular face. No, she certainly wasn’t hopeful, just curious, because she’d never previously experienced anything like that moment of obstinate, elemental identification. For a second she’d been wrenched out of time and space, as though she and Keane Paget had fused together.

During the hot, humid days of late summer Lecia tried to persuade herself that the half-hidden, inchoate feeling was a simple sense of kinship—and that the primal recognition, the compulsion of affinity, had not been darkened by a shadowy foreboding that still imprisoned her in a nebulous enthrallment.

Each lazy, sultry evening she thought of Keane Paget as she drifted off to sleep; she woke, tense and aching after nights of restless, urgent dreams, with his name and arrogant face stamped so strongly on her mind that she couldn’t banish either.

And sometimes during the day the dreams she couldn’t recall resurfaced as fleeting images, clear and bright as miniatures, each erotic glimpse firing her skin and drying her mouth.

The telephone rang early one morning while she was halfway through toast and Earl Grey tea. After swallowing some toast in such a rush it scraped her throat, she said, ‘Hello.’

‘Lecia, it’s Keane Paget. I’d like to take you out to lunch today if that’s possible.’

‘I’ll see,’ she said, not even thinking of refusing as she scrabbled through her diary. ‘Yes, I can do lunch.’

‘Good. Can you manage the South Seas at twelve-thirty?’

She had an appointment at three, so that gave her plenty of time. ‘No problem,’ she said, and because she must have sounded curt, added, ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

‘I’ll see you then,’ he said, and hung up.

Short and to the point, she thought, replacing the receiver.

A bubble of—what? Elation? Excitement? Apprehension? No, an unnerving mixture of all three—expanded in her stomach. Lecia looked down at her fingers. Long and tense and—seeking—they were curled across the plastic handpiece as though she couldn’t bear to break contact.

Only once before in her life had she been so intensely conscious of her physicalness, of the nerves and cells, the atoms and electrons that made up the body she took for granted. Only once before had she been seduced by an inner force that bewitched her with a compulsi ve siren song, propelling her towards disaster.

Lecia had learned in a hard school that life went much more smoothly if she faced the truth about her emotions. So now she forced herself to accept what the reckless dreams, the constant preoccupation, the sensuous intensity of her feelings all meant.

It was quite simple really. She wanted the man who looked so much like her they could be twins. Except that wanting didn’t begin to describe what she felt. She couldn’t label her emotions; they were so tangled that it was impossible to separate out the strands.

Was she indulging in a pathetic, slightly sinister narcissism? Or was she taking the first step down the twisted, ruinous road to obsession? Obsession she understood. Eight years ago, after freeing herself from a messy relationship with a man who’d turned out to be married, she’d vowed that she’d never again allow it to clutch her in its mindless, greedy, degrading embrace.

Not that she’d learned her lesson properly. As though that humiliating episode with Anthony hadn’t been shattering enough, only a year later she’d been too thick to realise that Barry loved her with the same abject adoration she’d given to Anthony.

She’d got over Anthony; once she’d realised he was married, disgust and willpower had transformed her passion into revulsion. But Barry—whose only mistake had been his inability to set limits on his emotions—Barry was still suffering from her stupidity.

So she’d have lunch with Keane Paget just to satisfy her curiosity. If he wanted to take the acquaintanceship further, she’d very politely, very subtly, but very definitely pull away. She wasn’t going to fall into that trap again.

As though released from some spell, she stepped back from the telephone and picked up her teacup.

However, that morning she needed all her determination to concentrate on calculating specifications, and she stopped at least an hour before she needed to. With her office at home it would have been easy for her to wear comfortable, casual clothes like shorts and T-shirts, but she was a professional and she dressed accordingly.

A swift glance in the mirror revealed that however professional it was, the neat cotton dress wasn’t suitable for lunch at the South Seas, which was both fashionable and noted for its food. After she’d showered, Lecia a opened the doors of her wardrobe and stared morosely at the clothes inside.

It annoyed her that she wanted to look her best for Keane Paget. Frightened her too. In fact, she almost put the dress she’d been wearing back on, only to realise that if she did that she’d really be establishing his importance in her mind.

‘What would I wear if I was going out to lunch with a client?’ she asked the unresponsive air.

Old faithful, of course. Resignedly she took down the silk shift, dressy enough to be elegant, casual enough to be comfortable, in exactly the same clear green as her eyes. She hesitated over her hair; during the day she usually wore it free, but this time, for some reason she wasn’t prepared to examine, she wound the straight, glossy hank into a knot high on her head.

With more than normal care she applied lipstick and the lightest touch of eyeshadow in a gold-brown so pale it was a mere emphasis of her natural skin tone, then sprayed herself with her favourite perfume, Joy.

And, avoiding her reflection in the mirror as though they shared a guilty secret, she went out into the brilliant sunlight.