Wolf in Tiger's Stripes Read online

  Wolf in Tiger’s Stripes

  by Victoria Gordon

  Copyright © 2010 by Victoria Gordon

  Print Publication 2010 by FIVE STAR, a part of GALE, CENGAGE LEARNING

  Dedication

  This book is for those who believe in Tasmanian tigers.

  And the Sasquatch, and maybe even unicorns.

  And romance, of course.

  We know why we do it.

  It’s because we must.

  And because we should!

  1

  The conversation seemed to hover like noxious smoke over the long, oval dining table, the words indistinct and, to Judith, irrelevant. She stared down at the incinerated contents of her plate, idly wondering how a woman who cooked as badly as her American-born but now thoroughly Tasmanian cousin, Vanessa, could even dare to hold a dinner party in the first place.

  Judith prodded gingerly at the charred remains of what had once been prime rib steak, wishing she had the nerve to feign a headache, nausea, anything to avoid having to actually try to eat this burnt offering. But with the dinner party ostensibly in her honor? No, not a chance.

  She wasn’t comfortable at being the supposed guest of honor, either. Her cousin, goodhearted as she was, had absolutely no compunction about blatant matchmaking, and on this occasion Vanessa had outdone herself. It was seriously unnerving for Judith to find herself partnered at dinner with a man so splendidly masculine that under normal circumstances she’d have been blessing her now-Tasmanian cousin with every bite.

  Bevan Keene, Judith had decided from the moment of seeing him for the first time, was the quintessential rugged Australian stockman – the physical manifestation of countless romantic and adventure novels. He was tall, lean, ruggedly handsome, but also urbane, clearly well educated, witty, dangerously charming, and too damned close for comfort.

  And you don’t believe in love at first sight. Not even lust at first sight. Well ... usually.

  But there was nothing usual about the effect Bevan Keene had created merely in being introduced to her, and sitting beside him now, Judith could almost feel the physical current that flowed between them. He wasn’t touching her, never had, but ... Judith’s tongue flicked across her lips just thinking about what she’d like to do with the man beside her. Under normal circumstances!

  These were not, however, normal circumstances. Here, now, Judith wasn’t interested in any man, not even one so attractive and charming as Bevan Keene. So Judith had ignored Keene from the very start of the evening, or at least as much as she could ignore him without being outright rude.

  None of her current antipathy toward men was his fault; it was all because of Derek Innes. And at the very least, there was no sexual baggage involved there, not on her part, anyway. But not really Derek’s fault, either. Not entirely. Your own fault, Judith Theresa – all your own fault.

  Judith was honest enough with herself to admit that, just as she admitted that Bevan Keene was turning her on just by sitting there beside her and assaulting his overdone steak with perfect teeth. He was himself edible in every way she could think of, except that she wished not to think of such things. Fat chance!

  Try as she might, Judith couldn’t stop herself from imagining those strong, tanned, capable hands touching her, that mobile mouth caressing her own lips before moving on to caress other parts of her body ...

  Tuning back into the hubbub of conversation, she had to give herself a mental shake. No wonder the table talk is so overwhelming. They’re all talking at once just to avoid having to eat. Lord love us, but I cannot understand why a vegetarian should ever be allowed to even try and cook meat, presuming of course that this ever was meat, which I’m beginning to doubt.

  Judith’s own taste tended to huge, thick steaks that hit the plate kicking and bellowing. Quite early in her Australian sojourn she’d heard a Queensland local in an upscale restaurant proclaim, “Just cut off its horns and wipe its bum and put it on the plate.” She had cringed at the vulgarity but secretly applauded the sentiment.

  Now, glancing round the table while still ignoring the conversation, she noticed suddenly that she wasn’t alone in her opinion of cousin Vanessa’s so-called cuisine. Even Vanessa’s husband Charles, the advertising executive known to be totally enthralled and totally smitten with what he termed his “imported wife,” had barely touched the offering in front of him. Vanessa herself hardly appeared to have eaten anything, but then she had the excuse of soon-to-be-delivered twins.

  Poor kids. You’ll probably grow up without ever knowing what a good steak tastes like. Nessie will have Charles fully converted by the time you’re weaned, and she’ll raise the lot of you on bean curd and lentils. Judith couldn’t escape the thought when it struck her mind, or the frown that accompanied it.

  “This tucker’s a bit overdone, but not that bad, surely.” The voice was low, not quite a growl.

  Judith almost leapt from her chair as the remark penetrated her self-imposed solitude but failed to touch her understanding.

  “I’m sorry,” she replied, turning to the speaker. “I was ...”

  “You were looking as if you had a toothache, or more likely a stomachache,” was the reply from Bevan Keene, and it was accompanied by a scathing glance at the charred scraps on his own plate. He had done better justice to the meal than she, but not by much.

  “It wasn’t the food,” she replied, her lips curving in what she hoped would emerge as a grin. “Although it could have been, couldn’t it? No, I was thinking of ... something else.”

  “Some thing, or some body?” he replied, softening the query with a smile. “I wouldn’t want to be him if it was a person you were considering. The look on your face suggested hanging would be too good for him.”

  She’d been thinking of Charles and children, but his question thrust her mind back a notch, to Derek. “It would be,” Judith replied briskly. “Drawing and quartering would be preferable, I think. I’d like to watch him suffer.”

  Bevan Keene’s hooded gray eyes sparkled to match the gleam of white teeth that flashed a quick smile. The gesture made the ends of his heavy mustache quiver, giving him a bold, almost flamboyant air. A pirate, disguised as a prominent Australian grazier.

  “Pretty fierce talk,” he said. “Is it just because he done you wrong, or is there a helping of hell hath no fury in there?”

  Wrong question. Judith felt herself going cold inside, could feel the barrier lifting between them like an icy curtain. She didn’t reply, merely turned her attention back to her charred steak. Bevan Keene watched her for a moment; she could feel his eyes as his gaze strayed across her features in a bold, if not blatantly sexual, appraisal.

  It was as if he’d physically caressed her – she could actually feel his touch on her cheek, her lips. But then he accepted the rebuke without further comment and turned to speak to the person on his other side.

  Judith returned to her reverie, all too aware that she might be visibly trembling at the intensity of the feelings his incautious questions had aroused. Done her wrong? Derek had done worse than that. He had virtually destroyed her career as an environmental journalist – that’s what he’d done! What she now felt had nothing to do with being scorned. It had to do with her shame and guilt at having been so easily manipulated.

  So here I am, ten thousand miles from home, out of a job, probably blacklisted in the entire industry. All because of my own stupidity! Judith shook her head angrily. Because Derek was just so damned smooth? So damned plausible? Or just because I’m what’s known as a natural victim?

  Judith stared blindly at her plate, wondering, not for the first time, how she could be smart enough to know her weaknesses, yet so stupid as to have let Derek manipulate her in t
he first place. Of course, with hindsight, she shouldn’t have let herself be led astray by Derek’s seemingly solid principles. The rising star of the Queensland environmental movement, he was, of course, relevant to her own work. But having trusted him was nothing short of stupid, and she’d known that even as she walked wide-eyed and innocent into his idealism-baited trap. Professionally questionable. Personally, little short of outright foolhardiness.

  Right from the start, there had been a question of who was using whom, an issue Judith had idealistically assumed she could handle. Derek, as she now realized, had handled it better. He had used her right from the beginning and, worse, had always intended to!

  He’d been handsome (not that it mattered because she hadn’t been attracted to him sexually), charming, persuasive, charismatic – and as crooked as a dog’s hind leg. Behind the façade, he was cunning, devious, and manipulative, a man so self-centered he would use anybody and everything to achieve his objectives. For Judith, it had been a monumental disaster, the ensuing story so blatantly and obviously rigged that it had given her New York boss – who’d been trying for two years without success to lure her into his bed – the excuse he’d been looking for to fire her on the spot. Derek had come out looking triumphant; Judith had emerged jobless and looking a fool.

  And now here I am in Tasmania, of all places, licking my wounds and hiding from the world like a wounded animal. Good one, Judith Theresa!

  She found herself thinking of the North American wolverine, an animal, which habitually fouled whatever it could not use itself, just to be sure no other animal could use it. She had once playfully told Derek the wolverine should have been dubbed the original political animal. Now, she realized, Derek himself was the classic wolverine, the consummate politician. A user, no more and no less.

  It was the name of another animal, however, that brought her out of her fugue and back to the present with an almost visible start.

  “... Tassie tiger? Well of course they’re extinct. It would be nice, of course, to believe otherwise, but really ...”

  “It’s not only the greenies that believe they still exist,” said Phelan Keene, the brother of Judith’s dinner companion. “A lot of genuine bushies and graziers – people who should know – believe it too. Even the top scientists who’ve studied the Thylacine believe it might still exist.”

  Or might truly be extinct, Judith thought. The Thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger despite being – technically – a marsupial wolf, was a conservation icon both in Tasmania and in the rest of Australia. The weirdly doglike creature with its tawny striped coat and distinctive gaping “yawn” was a much larger cousin to the Tasmanian devil so grossly miscast in cartoons, but had never quite gained international recognition in the same way. “And every year, some weirdo gets on his favorite hobby horse and starts things up again.” This came from the other end of the table. “And of course the media leap onto the bandwagon, and we’re off and running. Tasmanian Tiger Sighted! It’s a load of old cobblers, if you ask me. Damn it, Phelan, if tigers do exist, why don’t we get reports of them from somebody responsible? Like Bevan, or some other knowledgeable grazier, for instance.”

  “Because no sane property owner would ever admit to seeing a Tassie tiger within a hundred miles of his own property,” replied the sandy-haired man seated beside Judith. In a voice that, while soft, seemed to reverberate through the sudden quiet in the room, he added, “If he did, he’d be overrun by government boffins and politicians and bloody journalists.”

  A boffin is a so-called expert. Judith made the mental translation while almost tasting the acid in Bevan Keene’s final word, “journalists.” Not a new response to her, but seldom had she seen such a pronounced antipathy from a person who seemed otherwise calm and rational.

  “Not to mention being held to ridicule and quite deservedly being called a liar and a damned fool,” came from the other end of the table, and Judith actually felt the tension that ran through her dinner companion, like some strange current of static electricity. Bevan Keene seemed to freeze in a posture that suggested he might leap to his feet and commit mayhem.

  He replied with a quick and ready grin, but his tension was obvious enough, at least to her.

  “That too,” he replied in that deceptively soft, growly voice. And Judith noticed he was looking not at the obnoxious speaker, but at his own brother. And the look was alive with warning.

  Too late. Even as Judith began trying to interpret the subtle signal between the brothers, Phelan Keene was halfway to his feet and glaring across the dinner table at the man who’d mentioned fools and liars.

  “A damned fool, maybe,” Phelan said through clenched teeth. “But I’d go easy about calling people liars, if I were you. Bevan might accept it – he’s a peaceful soul and he’s a grazier, after all. He can’t, as he said earlier, very well go around admitting he’s seen tigers more than once in his short life. But I’ve seen them too, and my temper is a bit less gentle than his.”

  Judith could hardly believe her eyes and ears. It was like being transported back in history to a time when duels were fought. Phelan Keene had visibly flung down a challenging gauntlet and was poised for a fight – a startling transformation from the man who only moments before had been trading tax collector jokes with his stunning, relatively new wife, a woman who worked for the tax office and seemed quite used to her husband’s teasing her about her work.

  “Settle, boy.” Bevan’s voice was still low, but somehow it penetrated the now-hostile atmosphere at the other end of the table. The older brother at her side was, Judith felt, of a much less volatile nature than Phelan, but no less dangerous for all that. Probably even more dangerous. But for now his calmer temperament stood out as he spoke to defuse the issue. He spoke to the man who’d upset Phelan, but his eyes and attention were locked on his brother.

  “I’ve seen a pink elephant or two in my time,” Bevan said with a deprecating grin, “and a flying pig, too – once. But I wouldn’t reckon any of them, or the circumstances, are subjects for discussion in polite company. We ought to change the subject.”

  Which, Judith realized, was a casual but deliberate way of telling his younger brother to drop the subject and do it now. Bevan Keene’s apparent relaxation might seem real at the other end of the table, but she could feel the tension that remained in his large, muscular frame. Their elbows touched, although she didn’t think Keene was aware of it – his concentration was elsewhere. But she could feel his muscles flexing, could see the taut tendons in his neck and jaw.

  It was like being next to a wild animal poised to pounce, and without thinking, Judith reached out a hand and laid it on his thigh, seeking to calm him.

  Not a good move! Because it wasn’t his muscular thigh that her fingers encountered, but his lap. And because her touch didn’t reduce any tensions, merely created tension of a different sort entirely!

  Judith froze, strangely unable to obey the instinct to let go, move her hand, flee the encounter – maybe flee the entire scene! It was as if her fingers had been coated with glue, and when he turned to capture her startled gaze with his own, that only made things worse.

  Keene’s wonderfully mobile mouth curved in a grin that could have been amusement or sheer satisfaction. It didn’t matter because Judith was transfixed by it, could only sit there, stunned as a tiny prey animal confronted by its nemesis predator.

  She blushed – couldn’t not blush, couldn’t not be aware how her fair, freckled skin and copper-red hair made the blush impossible to hide. But she couldn’t speak, couldn’t think, and – worst of all – couldn’t seem to let go of him!

  Her mind had gone into idiocy mode. All she could hear in her head was a nonsense rhyme about the dreaded one-eyed trouser snake, and she wanted to laugh and didn’t dare, wanted to let go of this thing that writhed and squirmed beneath her fingers, but couldn’t do that, either.

  She could only meet the amused stare from the softest gray eyes she’d ever seen on
a man, could only fix a death-grip on what little composure she could still claim, could only nod in response when Bevan Keene finally spoke.

  “Well,” he said, “that certainly got my attention.”

  2

  Six words only, but enough to break the spell. Judith snatched her hand away as if Keene’s lap were a glowing stovetop. Somehow, she also tore herself free of his gaze. But she couldn’t summon the clarity of thought it would take her to formulate a reply or – first choice! – leave the table without making a total spectacle of herself.

  And then things got even worse.

  Judith had been warned about the Keene family by her cousin and was half surprised that sister Alana, also at the other end of the table, hadn’t leapt into the fray as well. The Keenes loved nothing better, she’d been warned by Vanessa, than to engage in familial slanging matches that to outsiders seemed uncommonly fierce.

  But it wasn’t the diminutive and lovely Alana that stirred the possum again. It was – and this, Judith thought, she ought to have expected – her own dear, severely pregnant cousin, Vanessa.

  “Well I’m certain that Tasmanian tigers aren’t really extinct,” Vanessa said, beginning innocently enough. “Not that I’ve seen one, of course, although I’d love to some day. But if you and Bevan have seen them, Phelan, I know Judith would just adore to talk to you about it. Being an environmental journalist, she’d be absolutely fascinated, I’m sure.”

  Fascinated? No, dear cousin – more like MURDEROUS! If a Tassie tiger walked into this room right now, I’d feed you to it! How COULD you?

  Judith could have cheerfully crawled under the table, she was so mortified. Her journalistic career, post-Derek, was nonexistent, and Vanessa not only knew that, but had been specifically told that it was an off-limits subject. Worse, the change in focus that Nessie’s naïve comment had created was worse – if anything could be worse – than her feelings of embarrassment. Phelan Keene positively glowered at her from his end of the table, and she’d distinctly heard a gasp of surprise from his sister Alana. And beside her ...