LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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