Wolf in Tiger's Stripes Read online

  “Would I lie to you?”

  It was a strange response, subtly out of context, definitely evasive, she thought. “I rather expect you would, in this case,” she replied honestly. “Although I don’t know why you’d bother. I’ve told you, I’m not working, not looking for any sort of scoop, which is an outdated word, by the way. I’m just curious.”

  “Ah, yes, so I noticed.”

  Bevan Keene’s words held both acceptance and accusation. Then he lapsed into silence. He just looked at her, his gaze once again moving across the terrain of her face as if he were attempting to memorize it. And the wry twist of his lips said it all. He didn’t believe her for a New York minute.

  “ ‘Ah,’ what?” she was finally forced to ask, knowing it was a stupid question even as the words left her lips, knowing there was no valid answer, only one that would take advantage of the opportunity she’d now given him to heap insult upon injury. To get even.

  Bevan Keene just shrugged, although there was a slight twist to his lips when he finally did speak. “I was walking through North Hobart one day,” he said, “and I saw a dog there. He was a blue heeler crossed with mastiff, or Rhodesian ridgeback, or pig dog of some kind, or all of the above. And he had stripes in just the right places, and just the right type of head, and the light was just right, and for an instant, there – right in the middle of the city – I could have sworn I’d just seen a tiger.”

  The calm, calculated evasiveness served only to infuriate Judith. She had asked her question in good faith, and now he was laughing at her.

  “Well, pardon me for asking,” she snapped, and turned away, glaring down at her dessert, wondering if she’d be able to resist the urge to make Bevan Keene wear it.

  “Now don’t get cranky,” he said with a broad grin. “I wasn’t playing word games. I was only making the point that there are times we see what we want to see, or maybe just what we hope to see. I can’t explain it better than that, and I realize it makes no sense, since obviously I wouldn’t expect to see a tiger in the middle of Hobart, would I?” Then he sighed and continued. “In my whole life, I’ve seen what I thought was a tiger three times. The very first time Phelan and I were together and we both saw it. Or did we? We were only boys then, and although we both knew the bush and would have been considered competent observers, at least in some circles, we were still just boys! Did we see a tiger? Or just what we wanted to see, expected to see, hoped to see?

  “Because at that age, of course, we were both total romantics. We wanted to believe, so we did believe.”

  He chuckled, a low, growling sound that rippled with humor. “Of course Phelan’s still a romantic, which is why he got all frothy there when the discussion was getting heavy.”

  “And you’re not? A romantic, I mean?” Judith asked the questions without thinking about how it might be interpreted, her mind solely on the subject at hand despite the intense attractiveness of the man she spoke to. But once the words were out, so were the implications. And again she felt that insane compulsion to reach out, to touch him, to dare to let herself drown in his eyes, to succumb to the inappropriate thoughts scheming in her mischievous brain.

  Bevan’s eyes and wry grin answered the innuendo even as it emerged. He looked into her eyes, then deliberately allowed his gaze to caress her cheek, her lips, her throat. It was as if he’d used his fingers; she felt her skin begin to tingle, felt a strange, hollow feeling that started in the pit of her stomach and flowed in waves of prickly heat to tauten her breasts, throb at her nipples and groin.

  “Not about tigers. But in other areas, I’m ... open to persuasion,” he responded. “Although as I said before, there is a time and place for everything and this, Ms. Bryan, is really not either one.” And his eyes danced with laughter.

  Judith retreated from them, turning her attention to her dessert and the sweet, sticky dessert wine in front of her. She had already drunk too much – that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it – but was obsessed by the need to do something, anything, to check the developing situation.

  Bevan Keene clearly felt no such compulsion.

  “You’re going all cranky again,” he said, reaching out to lift her fingers in one huge hand, his touch seeming gentle for the size of his hand. The gesture was so totally unexpected that Judith froze, then mentally cursed herself for losing the opportunity to escape, or snub him, or ... ? Because suddenly she was aware only of the touch of his fingers like thistledown along her wrist, tracing the pale veins that now throbbed to a cadence he was creating, controlling.

  This was worse than when he’d looked at her, when he’d seduced her with his eyes. Much worse! Now the seduction was as much physical as mental. And she was under his control. His fingers talked to her in a private, secret language known only to the two of them, in a conversation unnoticed by the others at the table, incomprehensible to them if they did notice. It was different – totally different – from her touching of him or his earlier flirting.

  This was far more serious, far more dangerous.

  “Yes, you’d believe in tigers,” he said aloud, literally sighing the words. “You’d have to, I reckon. You couldn’t help yourself.”

  “I’d like to believe they still exist, yes,” Judith answered, her voice trembling with the shudders of sensation he was creating with his fingertips. “But you’re not helping. If you’ve really seen them, why won’t you tell me more about it, help me to believe?”

  His chuckle was halfway to being a laugh.

  “You don’t need my help to believe,” he said. “I’ve just told you that. I also told you, if you were listening earlier, that no sane property owner would admit to seeing a tiger – especially to a journalist!”

  “But you’ve already admitted it.”

  “I have? Methinks, my dear Ms. Bryan, you’d best clean out your shell-like, virgin ears. All I said – and under duress I’d deny saying even that – was that I thought I saw a tiger, and that I was but an impressionable lad at the time. And that another time I thought I saw a tiger, but it was in the middle of Hobart, which makes the statement ridiculous from any viewpoint. No story in either, sorry as I am to disappoint you.”

  Sorry – my ass! You’re not one damned bit sorry. You’re enjoying yourself, and you’re enjoying making me look and feel like an idiot. Well damn you, and damn your Tasmanian tigers, too, Mr. Bevan-bloody-Keene.

  But what she said was, “I’m only disappointed I’m here on such a short visit. I’d have liked the chance to see a Tasmanian tiger for myself. In fact there are a lot of things I’d like to experience here in Tasmania, but I guess I’ll have to give most of them a miss.”

  She threw Bevan Keene her most haughty sneer, yanked her arm free, rose from her chair, and flounced from the room. Time to help Nessie in the kitchen, and this time she would plead a headache.

  And she did. It was easier than trying to forget Bevan Keene’s parting remark, softly spoken in a voice that was half threat, half promise.

  “You’ll keep,” was all he’d said, but it echoed through her real or imagined migraine and, eventually, into her dreams.

  3

  The first dream Judith ascribed to drinking too much wine and eating too little food. It crept into her mind that very night, padding softly on Tassie tiger feet.

  She was in a dense, subtropical rainforest. Running. Running from a myth, from a specter of her imagination. And she was naked, or nearly so, her nightgown torn and rent almost to rags, hiked up so she could run faster, could more easily clamber over huge windfall logs, scramble between the immense, old-growth trees that hid the sky.

  Slitted, sly yellow eyes peeked from the blackness of the surrounding night, then suddenly became gray as Tasmanian mudstone as the dream swirled and whirled with no obvious sense of direction. As she swirled and whirled with no sense of direction, she only had a sense of being followed, of being watched, of being prey!

  As if from the stygian darkness above, she somehow watched herself doing a t
uneless dance in a tiny clearing, could see the watching, terrifying eyes – feral and yellow, then foreboding and gray – but not the creatures they belonged to, saw only the vaguest of shapes, the shifting light patterns that suggested stripes, the flashes of ivory that bespoke gleaming fangs.

  And then she saw herself fall, and felt – rather than saw – the leap of the Tassie tiger as it pounced. Whereupon it all changed again, and the tiger wasn’t a Thylacine, and the eyes weren’t those of a Thylacine, but those of Bevan Keene – not that this made them any less powerful in their effect on her.

  She was in her own body then and saw, even recoiled slightly as she saw, his gleaming teeth bared in something between a smile and a snarl, his generous, expressive lips moving to her throat. She felt the touch of his teeth, but only for a second. Then the touch was replaced by the delicate touch of a lover’s fingers against the pulse in her throat.

  And those same fingers then magically journeyed across the terrain of her half-naked body, pausing to tease at a nipple, bringing it to a turgid erectness, a painful tenderness, then to play a silent tune across the flatness of her tummy, the fingertips able to drum up butterfly sensations inside.

  Were these Bevan’s fingers, then, which stroked and tickled and stimulated her to the edge? Which made her body arch to lift herself against their touch? Which suddenly went from tender to fierce as they lifted her passion higher and higher and then, ruthlessly, threw her into overdrive, ignorant and uncaring of the uncontrollable bucking and thrusting of her body as ...

  They were, Judith discovered when the spasms of passion had ceased and her eyes were suddenly, almost frighteningly, wide open to the reality of the bedroom around her, not Bevan Keene’s fingers, but her own body twisted in the sheets.

  She lay there, sleepy and wide awake at the same time, staring at the ceiling but seeing Bevan Keene’s face, Bevan Keene’s eyes, even hearing – in her half-awake memory – Bevan Keene’s voice. Until it changed from predator’s growl to the maniacal shrieks of kookaburras laughing up the dawn.

  *

  Judith didn’t believe in omens or even in coincidence, but it was a challenge not to. It was as if the conversation from what she thought of as the incineration dinner had itself ignited and now seemed destined to spread unchecked. A tiger sighting was reported from near Diddleum Plains, northeast of Launceston, followed by another, less believable sighting by some tourists who had managed to get lost in their attempt to reach Holwell Falls, to the northwest.

  There was nothing particularly relevant about either report except the excuse for every newspaper in the state to bring out all the hoary old theories and pictures from their files. The various conservation groups leapt onto the bandwagon with quite predictable speed, demanding that yet another area be locked away from all development, exploration, or public access.

  “Except from the bushwalkers, of course,” Judith found herself remarking wryly to her still-pregnant cousin Vanessa. “It’s really quite amazing how all these conservation groups believe that their own people are so pristine and lily-white, but everybody else is some sort of villain.”

  “You really are getting cynical, dear,” Nessie replied calmly. “You want to watch yourself, or you’ll have no credibility left unless you’re prepared to lie down in front of a bulldozer somewhere.”

  “I will NOT! And, I would remind you, cynicism is part and parcel of being objective about these things. Environmental journalism is a highly emotive subject.”

  Judith’s horror at the suggestion wasn’t even remotely feigned. She was herself a conservationist but had always prided herself on being a reasonable conservationist. She had little time for the radicals who chained themselves to trees or – worse! – deliberately spiked trees, putting honest forestry workers at risk just to make a political point. As for lying down in front of bulldozers, she felt that backing extremist views with extremist actions did nothing but give the entire conservation movement a bad name.

  Her own journalistic credibility had been solidly founded on a staunch neutrality and a fair presentation of every side of the issues until she’d been led into treacherous waters up in Queensland by Derek damn-his-soul Innes and discredited in the process.

  “I doubt if I’ve got any credibility left anyway,” she admitted to her cousin, equally an admission to herself that she had now faced up to the situation and accepted the reality of it, if not the unfairness. “What I ought to do is go looking for a job selling shoes or something,” she mused aloud. “I really don’t think there’s much left for me as a journalist.”

  “You’re wrong, and what’s more, you know it,” Vanessa stated with typically naïve conviction.

  And was proven correct not five minutes later when the telephone rang to connect Judith with Jeremiah Cottrell in England.

  4

  “Just setting up this final bit of the operation has kept me on the telephone for three days. I assume you do know about the time difference between here and the antipodes? It is an ungodly hour here right now; let me assure you of that much.”

  Jeremiah’s voice registered weariness, but it was a weariness tempered by satisfaction. The smugness traveled better than his ferocious Yorkshire accent.

  “And I must say, Judith, that your conservation types there down under are a strange and motley crew. They are positively bilious with distrust for each other. I’ve had the devil’s own time getting an agreement about who’s to be involved in this little project.”

  “What project? I’m sorry, Jeremiah, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Judith was frantically signaling to her cousin for some paper and something to write with. She knew only too well how abrupt Jeremiah Cottrell could be, not to mention his propensity for assuming he’d told people things that had never left his own devious little mind. That mind had made him a multimillionaire, but it didn’t make him any the easier to converse with. He might have been an educated Yorkshire man, but his real degree was from the school of hard knocks, with no courses in elocution.

  “The Tasmanian tiger project, of course.” He replied brusquely, then softened his tone. “I’m sorry, my dear. I forgot you haven’t been told yet, although it seems you must be the only person involved who hasn’t. So I shall start at the beginning and promise that from now on, you shall know everything – everything! – because you’ll be my official Johnny-on-the-spot, won’t you?”

  “I will?” Judith tried to hide the note of caution she knew would be creeping into her voice with only those few words. Jeremiah Cottrell was notorious for hare-brained schemes and initially simple projects that ended up complex beyond all belief, although usually – and astonishingly – profitable. More seasoned journalists than Judith had – having survived one of his projects – tossed aside their jobs with Jeremiah and considered their lives vastly improved for having done so.

  “But of course you will, Judith me old love. It’s the chance of a lifetime for you and of course you’ll accept. You’d better, because I doubt if I could pull this one off without you.”

  “Accept what? And I will not accept, Jeremiah – not just like that! Not without you telling me a good deal more than you have.” Judith tried to force some calm into her voice. Already, it all sounded too good to be true, which she had found often to be the case, initially, with Jeremiah’s ideas.

  The publisher’s own voice, as always, registered supreme confidence as he went on to explain how he had arranged for funding from one of his companies – translation: a major advertiser – for a three-month expedition to seek reliable, positive evidence about the Tasmanian tiger’s existence. “New evidence, my dear! And there will be some, no doubt about it.” He chuckled enthusiastically. “There might not be much, but whatever does come out will have to be acceptable and accepted, given the credentials of the people involved.”

  “Who are ... ?”

  This, to Judith, would be the crux of the issue. Over the years all sorts of expeditions had been mounted to search for and find
the elusive, allegedly extinct Tasmanian tiger. Some quite respectable scientists and naturalists, but also some – in her cousin’s words, “ratbags and rum’ns” – had embarked on extensive but fruitless tiger hunts in the Tasmanian wilderness.

  Among the most credible had been Stephen J. Smith of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Tasmania, and Dr. Eric Guilder of the University of Tasmania. They had separately conducted serious but inconclusive searches in the early 1980s, using World Wildlife Fund money. Others, ranging from serious amateurs to raving lunatics, occasionally turned up on usually ill-founded and underfunded projects. Many had taken quite unique approaches in a bid to prove the non-extinction of the animal, but hard evidence was harder yet to establish.

  The first names Jeremiah mentioned were unknown to Judith, but she dutifully wrote them down. Reg Hudson, Ron Peters, and Jan Smythe. All, apparently, locally known die-hard conservationists, but with impeccable credentials.

  “And of course your old friend Derek Innes will be in joint command, which ought to please you,” the publisher continued, apparently – or deliberately – oblivious to Judith’s involuntary gasp of astonishment and dismay. Jeremiah plunged on relentlessly before she could get out the words to reject him, his project, or anything else that might involve dealing with Derek Innes.

  “Of course the real coup was getting a chap called Bevan Keene to lead on behalf of the local establishment,” Jeremiah continued, thankfully unable to see the effect that had on Judith’s already shattered composure.

  She was so shaken she could barely hold the pencil to write down the other names he spieled off – Roberta Jardine and Ted Norton – both, apparently, rural people in Bevan Keene’s establishment circle. What Jeremiah said next was even more astonishing, and she nearly dropped the phone from a hand that suddenly went sweaty and trembling.

  “And of course I’ve you to thank for bagging Keene,” Jeremiah added, his tone of voice suggesting he would actually be doing it only as a favor.