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‘I’m sorry,’ she said awkwardly.
‘Unfortunately she has to have further treatment, and she wants him with her.’
‘Naturally.’ It took a real effort to keep her face set in an expression of mild sympathy. This changed everything. Although Rick might chafe under his mother’s possessiveness, he loved her and he would certainly want to be with her when she needed him.
Tansy looked down at the hands clenched around her glass. Surreptitiously she relaxed the long, strong fingers while her brain raced, trying to find an answer to an insoluble question. What on earth should she do?
There was a balked silence, tingling with Leo Dacre’s frustration. ‘So you’re not going to help,’ he said.
He spoke quietly, but an inflexion in the smooth voice dragged Tansy’s gaze to his face. A muscle flicked several times just above the tough line of his jaw. It fascinated her; her eyes lingered compulsively on the tiny betrayal, made all the more obvious because his face revealed no other emotion. Yet anger emanated from him in dark waves and she knew with a sudden terrible intuition that he was holding on to his control with a fierce effort of will.
‘I can’t help you,’ she muttered, cross with herself because she was afraid. Striving to appear detached, she suspected she achieved a sullen boredom instead.
‘How much would it cost?’
His callous emphasis on payment brought topaz sparks to her eyes. In her most offhand tone she said, ‘I’m not interested in any money, thanks.’
‘Don’t make up your mind right away. Think about it overnight, and tell me tomorrow what your decision is,’ he said, his voice warm and persuasive.
Tansy remembered that he was a barrister, a courtroom expert, with all the acting skill that that implied. She could see now why Rick said he was heading straight for the heights of his profession. He used his voice and his expression, his powerful presence, like weapons. In a courtroom he must be lethal; pity any poor witnesses who allowed themselves to be seduced by that voice and the implicit sympathy in his tone.
She looked directly at him, her shuttered eyes concealing the turbulent emotions that rioted through her. ‘Sorry,’ she repeated, drained the milk and got to her feet, picking up her guitar case on the way. ‘Don’t waste your time, Mr Dacre. I can’t help you at all.’
As she made for the door she felt the intense impact of his stare right through to her bones. In its time Wellington had endured some awe-inspiring earthquakes, but the effect of that look, Tansy thought, trying to salvage some mordant humour from the situation, could well ricochet her off the top of her personal Richter scale. She tried hard not to be impressed.
Nevertheless, she noticed her boots took her across the floor faster than she wanted to go; she’d have felt better if she’d been able to saunter away, swinging her hips in a maddening parody of a sexy, come-hither walk.
Except that she didn’t think she could. Tansy had learnt to blend in, and she’d tailored her walk accordingly, moving with enough confidence to be rejected as a victim, but without provocation.
Once outside she exhaled in a rush, looking around with bright, dazed eyes that only slowly took in the familiar buildings of Quay Street and the usual scurrying people. Presumably he expected her to go home now that she had her fifty dollars. So, adjusting her pointed chin to a jaunty angle, she went back to her patch.
All the rest of the afternoon as her fingers moved across the guitar strings and her voice flowed from song to song, she kept her eyes open for Leo Dacre, and couldn’t have said whether she was relieved or disappointed when she didn’t see him again.
Not that she liked the man. He was an overbearing, high-handed bully, with a fine talent for intimidation! However, it wasn’t easy to banish an image of Rick’s mother, ill and wanting him home. Although Rick found her unbearably clinging, he understood his mother’s dependence on him. An inherited condition had almost killed him several times before he was five, a condition she had handed on to him. It had taken a miracle of science to snatch life from his living death, and years for him to recover and gain some strength. Horrified, his mother had refused to have more children.
He would, Tansy knew, want to be with her now.
What on earth should she do?
Still unsure when it was time to pack up, she struggled home in the teeth of the gale to her bed-sitting-room. Built under one of Wellington’s old wooden houses in the inner city, it was within walking distance of the streets she worked and the university, which offset the higher rent she paid for its situation. On the floors above were a couple of flats with constantly changing occupants.
Tansy’s room was small and dim, cold and more than a little musty. Sparsely furnished with a three-quarter bed and a chair that unwrapped into a single mattress, it had its own bathroom, if you could call the cupboard beneath the stairs that, and a tiny kitchen alcove. Not that she needed anything larger; her cooking tended to be just as spartan as her room.
All in all, the place was about as basic as it could be, yet Rick had fitted in quite unconcernedly.
Pulling off her coat and beret, she put them away in the cupboard that served as her wardrobe, and wondered caustically whether Leo Dacre had ever seen a place as down market as this. Probably not. Shrugging, she tidied the wild ginger tangle of her hair, eyeing her reflection in the mirror above the old chest of drawers beside the bed.
Her clothes were warm and clean, but showed their age and origins, and the maroon jersey clashed cruelly with her colouring. Like her wardrobe, the room was dominated by charity-shop finds, but the cushions and the pleasantly faded bedspread in subdued crimson and gold were chosen, as were the posters of South America on the wall, because their rich hues satisfied a hunger for colour and movement and drama that her clothes couldn’t.
While the kettle boiled she checked out her bank balance. It made less than encouraging reading. In the past she’d always made enough over the summer break to pay her fees at university, but that wasn’t going to happen this year. The recession was biting hard and people just didn’t have the money to spend on itinerant buskers. Even if the rest of the run-up to Christmas was as good as it had been so far, she still wouldn’t have enough.
And after Christmas, Wellington, like every other New Zealand city except the tourist towns, died over the summer.
Flicking the bankbook shut, she frowned. Now that her bachelor’s degree was safely under her belt she was determined to carry on, although a master’s meant an even greater commitment of time and effort for two years, and if the recession continued she wasn’t going to be able to afford to eat, much less pay her fees.
When she left home her ultimate goal had been university. It had been a hard slog, and she had sometimes regretted her obsession, but a fierce, unyielding obstinacy kept her going. That same stubbornness compressed her mouth now; she had gone too far to give up.
After putting her bankbook away, she made herself a cup of herbal tea. She had survived before; she’d do it again. Some months ago, when Tansy was still sure she’d be able to manage, Professor Paxton had talked to a friend about a possible scholarship. Tomorrow morning she’d contact him and find out what was offering.
Slowly she reached across the table and began to go through the sheets of music she had left stacked there that morning. It was awful. Totally banal. Derivative. An ironic smile tucked in the corners of her mouth. Of course, she always thought that.
Did other composers look at their work and wonder whether they would ever produce anything worthwhile? Had Beethoven? Or Mozart? It didn’t seem likely. As she drank her tea she scanned the sheets, hearing the music in her head. Then she made some corrections, and finally sat with her chin in her hand, wondering why she should be so convinced that her future lay in writing music. Not just songs, either. She enjoyed them, but they were ephemeral. She wanted to write music that would be listened to for the next hundred years.
Her eyes narrowed. It wasn’t a matter of wanting to write; she didn’t have any choice. Even if no one ever heard the sounds that filled her head, she would still be buying paper she couldn’t afford and setting them down. It was a compulsion she no longer tried to resist.
But her heart wasn’t in it tonight, and she knew why: Leo Dacre’s arrival had thrown her completely.
What a mess! Rick had been utterly convinced that this was his one chance to wrest control of his life away from the demons that were driving him to destruction, and she had agreed. Still did.
Which was why she had lied to Leo; she couldn’t let Rick down.
Nevertheless she felt like a worm. Even though Rick had warned her his brother would find her, she hadn’t expected Leo Dacre to erupt into her life like the Demon King in a pantomime. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel that shiver of fear. She’d discounted most of Rick’s endless discussions of his brother as adolescent hero-worship.
She’d been wrong; Leo Dacre was disturbingly forceful.
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.
