Tiger Sky, page 6
Then what was he talking about? Whose 'inhumanity' had caught him on the raw and turned him into an implacable adversary? Whatever the injustice was, it had outraged Luke so deeply that it had become almost a personal vendetta. She under-
stood this as intuitively as she knew now that his obsession was somehow bound up with the trek they were on. Perhaps even the main reason for it, going by what he had said earlier today.
But what on earth was there to fight for in the remote reaches of the Himalayas? What could this secret objective be? One look at his forbidding profile was sufficient to crush the question she longed to ask. Presently she saw his hands relax' on the wheel, and the tenseness went out of her too, but his moods were to unpredictable for her to pursue the conversation. The perplexities crowding her mind remained unspoken.
The stalwart little car bounced along a narrow trail through a stretch of tall, billowing elephant grass and eventually came out on to a rutted road where Luke put on speed, presumably to make up for the time lost dawdling through the forests. A lorry went past going the other way and Selina shrank down in the seat, instantly conscious of the fact that they were back in a world of other people, however sparsely populated it might be, and that the problem of disguising her identity would soon have to be faced. Strange that Luke hadn't mentioned Narayan's suggestions about it so far, she thought, coughing in the thin swirl of white dust the lorry had left behind which was blowing across her side of the car.
`Another few miles of rough riding and we'll take a break.' Luke flicked her one of his amused glances. 'A bit of dust on the sun-tan oil will do wonders for your complexion.' .
What else could she expect from the unfeeling brute! she thought crossly, fumbling for a hand-
kerChief. He reached forward and pulled a man-sized tissue from the jumble under, the dashboard, and she wiped her nose and mouth and the grit from her tongue, thankful that the sun-glasses had shielded her eyes. In the distance there were two figures near the roadside and as they drew nearer Selina saw that they were village women in off-White wrap-around garments more like sheets than the gracefully draped saris sophisticated Indian women wore. They were padding along in single file, the one in front with a basket on her head, the one behind leading a cow.
The speedometer needle swung back; Luke tooted the horn sharply. A moment later, to Selina's amazement, both women scuttled across the road in front of the car like -startled rabbits, leaving the cow behind. As the car went past Luke saluted them with a grin, at which they immediately pulled their head-cloths bashfully across their faces.
`Just as well you slowed down!' Selina scolded in her haughtiest tone. 'They must have been scared out of their wits by the horn. Dashing over the road in that stupid way at the last minute ! I suppose they're not used to seeing much traffic along here, poor things.'
`You have a lot to learn, Miss Supercilious Roxley! ' His grey eyes were dancing with amusement. `They may be villagers—yokels to you—but they're far from stupid. You had to take the brunt of the lorry's dust a mile back. They avoided ours. When , they heard the horn they looked to see which way the wind was blowing and crossed over As soon as the dust settles they'll be moving on.'
She subsided in the seat and said, `Oh-h-h,' in a small voice.
'Cheer up,' he spoke briskly. 'At least you were concerned about them, your heart's in the right place.'
'So were you, concerned I mean—slowing down and warning them.'
'Sure. My heart's in the right place too; The hint of mockery was back as he caught her hand and held it to his side. 'Here, feel.'
The warmth of his body and the steady heartbeat against her hand sent a sharp rush of feeling through her. She bit her lip and jerked her hand from his clasp. The quizzical tilt of his brow in her direction brought a wave of painful colour to the tender burn on her cheeks, and she assured herself that it was the way his mood kept changing that was the cause of her discomfiture. Her own moods seemed to veer perilously with his.
'It was meant as a joke, so don't get any uppity ideas,' he said with a touch of impatience. 'Trying to get you to smile is like cracking a safe, and I have yet to hear you laugh, really laugh without inhibitions, though that cockerel back there in the jungle came near to achieving it. It was a good sound, you ought to try it more often.'
'I haven't much of a sense of humour,' she turned her face away to the window, 'that's what you're saying, isn't it?'
'Okay, don't take umbrage.' He paused, then said on a softer, gentler note : 'I guess you haven't had much to laugh at lately.'
`No....' She didn't want to think about Henry and Delia. She could still feel the warmth and the
strong, regular heartbeat on the back of her hand, unconsciously rubbing it with her other palm as if to wipe it away. She hadn't enjoyed the release of free, unrestrained laughter for a long, long time; and if Luke found the repressions forced on her amusing, he could laugh his head off at her for all she cared!
He said reflectively : 'Exactly how old are you, Selina?'
'I'll be eighteen in a month's time,' she informed him woodenly.
'Oh, my God! Under age! I never gave it a thought because you look older. Old enough—'
`For what?' she interjected sharply, a sudden catch in her breath.
`To make your own decisions. Yesterday it looked like a fair gamble, assisting a young woman in a tight corner. Now it turns out we're harbouring a runaway minor against the wishes of her guardians. Or worse! Abduction—kidnapping—you name it, they could charge us with it after this little caper ! Why didn't you tell me you're under age?'
'Why didn't you ask me?' She covered a sudden pang of anxiety with indignation. 'You're the know-all who checked in my passport for everything else.' The anxiety was gathering into a knot inside her.
`So I glanced at the birth date, but who had the time to reckon it by a few months one way or the other? You were knocked out and dead beat, remember? And woman-shaped in all the right places.'
'Wel-ll ! Thank you for those few kind words! '
'Cool it, Selina. It's too late to make any difference now. First things first. We'll have to pull a few
strings and get all the complications sorted out afterwards.'
A wave of relief washed over her and she pressed the back of her wrist to the moisture which had broken out on her forehead and upper lip. Exactly what she had been expecting him to do on discovering she was a minor wasn't clear, but it had ripped away some of the shaky confidence she had been building up.
He said grimly : 'Spender will have to answer for a good deal himself. Inveigling a young girl into going to an isolated place and scaring the hell out of her. Maybe he could have got away with it at that. What's the age of consent in England, about sixteen? Of all the crazy anomalies! Legally you're not a responsible adult, yet old enough to be seduced if you can he persuaded or pressured into consenting.'
'He did put on the pressure ... they both did. I had to fight to stop— stop him ... you know what I mean,' she faltered. 'Oh, he ... he wanted me all. right, but he had other motives as well.'
'Consent is one thing, coercion is rape, he knows that.' Luke scanned her face and the bitter line of her mouth, then down to the slender white hands clasping and unclasping restlessly in her lap. One big square hand closed over hers stilling the restlessness. His grip was brief, hard and sympathetic, and her heart swelled with emotion.
'I'll never go back to them ... never, whatever the consequences! I'll kill myself first!' she cried from the depths of overwrought feelings.
'Be quiet! ' he rapped out in such a harsh voice that Selina threw up her head and stared -at him.
His face was contorted, his grey glance almost black with a kind of rage. 'Do you know what you're saying, you impetuous little fool? If I hear you dramatising yourself again about suicide, if I even suspect you're thinking that way, I'll tan your bottom! '
Selina squeezed back against her door, holding her breath. She had had wild thoughts about it once or twice in the last few months when hysteria threatened to overpower her, but how much she had intended it was another matter. She was too spirited to accept defeat. She couldn't think why she had blurted out such a silly statement, except to convince him of her determination to get away from Henry and Delia, whether she was under age or not.
'Luke,' she pleaded in a wobbly voice, 'I didn't mean it. It was just ... just a figure of speech. But I meant what I said about not going back.'
After a moment he gave her a smile of such friendly warmth that she let out her breath in a long sigh.
'Okay,' he said. 'I told you before, Narayan and I will see you safe when this is all over.'
'You won't hand me over,' she pressed urgently, 'whatever happens?'
'I guarantee you that.' His voice was clipped, but the assertion held an unequivocal promise, and Selina leaned her head against the seat and shut her eyes, the worried lines gradually smoothing out of her thin, patrician features.
But her eyelids flew open again before many minutes had passed, for the car had left the road and was jolting along another timber track which cut through a sal forest and petered out on the bank of a canal. On the far side of the canal was the
brown, green and yellow patchwork of fields and paths, a remote grove of dark-leaved mango trees and, beyond that, half-hidden walls and roofs, probably the village to which the two women had-been making their way.
The sun was high and hot, the small car had begun to warm up like an oven. Selina sat forward and felt the cotton kaftan clinging to the sweat on her back. Luke pulled Up in the shade of a large flowering tree and when he had shifted his big, muscular body out of the confined space she realised just how much heat the controlled vitality of the man could generate. She was suddenly more aware of his explicit masculinity than at any moment since she had seen him coming back from the river the night before. She couldn't take her eyes off him as he walked round the bonnet.
'Want a drink?' Luke opened her door allowing a comparatively cool draught of air through the car. 'Lime juice and water?' She nodded, twisting her head away. He must have mistaken the constraint in her manner for sulky dissatisfaction at the discomforts she was putting up with, and added with drawling satire: 'My apologies, Your Highness, for not being able to offer you an air-conditioned limousine and iced champagne.'
She had to get away from him, if only for a few minutes. She slid out of the car, carefully avoiding any physical contact with him, and went off towards the darker line of trees calling, 'Back in a minute' over her shoulder: The gloom of the forest put a stop to her ludicrous flight. She stood in the middle of a small glade, with her hand pressed to her lips, listening intently, but if there was any movement
in the jungle the sound was drowned by the thudding of her heart.
She had been too worked up and weary in the last twenty-four hours to consider Luke's emphatic virility. A dynamic man. Not handsome, but blunt and physically powerful, with a blatant, assertive Masculinity that was bound to attract him to women. Herself included. But this was too alarming a notion to dwell on. She was bogged down in enough problems and confusions already without jeopardising her peace of mind still further with misgivings of this kind about Luke van Meer.
Five minutes on her Own was enough to pull herself together. Selina tidied her jeans and kaftan, re, tied the rag on her head and sauntered back to the canal. Luke had been leaning against the car, smoking. She looked him straight in the eye, determinedly casual, and settled herself in the front seat
, again, taking out her compact and the sun-tan oil and spreading another layer of it on her skin. Her black eye was less swollen but a rich, fruity hue. No man would give her a second glance, not even Luke van Meer, while she looked as battered and scruffy as this! she thought wryly. And in her present circumstances it was just as well.
Luke had pushed away from the car and gone round to the boot. He came back with some lime juice for her, scrutinising her with judicious thoroughness before passing her the mug. She put on her sun-glasses, tossed her handbag on to the other seat and took a sip of the cool, tangy liquid. She said nonchalantly: 'It's sultry today, isn't it.'
'Yep.' There was a faint smile on his mouth as he sat down in the shadow of the car, stretched out his
long legs and propped his back against the door near her feet. She drank the lime juice slowly and gazed around at the canal, the distant village, the trees, anything but Luke, wishing she could think of something more to say, wishing she still wasn't so acutely conscious of his robust maleness as he sprawled within reach of her hand.
She flickered a glance down at him. His eyes were closed. She let her glance drift over him for a stolen second. He had unbuttoned his loose, ill-fitting bush shirt and pushed it aside to let what little breeze there was get to his smooth, sun-browned skin, and Selina could see the mass of golden hair on dark tan diminishing in a fleecy line to the taut, flat muscles of his stomach. The gold-spiked lashes against his broad cheekbones moved and opened slightly. She shifted her eyes instantly, but not soon enough to escape a glimmer of steely grey which made her nerves jump.
Staring with assumed concentration at the thick, waxy blossoms of the tree under which they were parked, she said in what she hoped was a steady, composed voice: 'It's a magnificent tree, Luke, what is it?'
`Um-m-m?' he tipped his head back to look at it. `Semul ... silk cotton.'
'I thought cotton grew on bushes.' She was prattling. 'And silkworms lived on mulberry trees.' Of all the inane remarks! she thought.
`Neither of those,' he replied lazily. 'This one grows a large seedpod full of silky cotton floss. Very useful, but it can't be spun in the ordinary way. Heard of kapok? That's the stuff. They used to put it in mattresses and cushions, lifebelts, sleeping bags
.
too. It doesn't absorb water, so it's good for keeping the warmth in and the wet out.' He relaxed and shut his eyes. 'Are you hungry?'
Lethargy invaded her limbs. 'Not particularly. It's too hot.'
'We'll take another ten minutes before moving on.'
When they returned to the main road and resumed their journey Selina found that a short, uneasy doze had done nothing to dispel her disquiet. She knew little about Luke's real motives, nor his intentions towards her. Still less, now, about her own capacity to resist him. He was no Henry : physically she wouldn't stand a chance against him. As a friend and ally he would be all that she could have hoped for; but if he chose to exert himself in other ways....
With Luke filling the little car with his forceful presence so close beside her, she wondered how she could have been so ingenuously happy and frank with him all morning. The result was that the constraint between them developed into an edgy, almost pulsating silence, and after a few miles of this Luke turned a swift, scowling glance on her, then glowered over the wheel and said bitingly :
'God knows what you're so uptight about all of a sudden, Miss Roxley, but if you've decided in the last half hour—with typically feminine perversity —that you don't like the conditions out here, let me remind you that you let yourself in for this when you first absconded with the jeep. A sullen temper won't improve matters. Try and come to terms with it
'I've ... I've got a headache,' she retorted mor-
osely, a panicky evasion which was speedily coming true. And it was no consolation to have his manner. alter at once to gentler concern as he said:
'I'll give you something for that, and you can rest as soon as we make camp.'
Narayan was waiting for them in the shelter of a dry watercourse near a hilly track. Selina couldn't wait to get out, and as she stood flexing the slightly stiff muscles of her graceful arms and legs, the exuberant pi-dog came scampering across the scree to hurl himself at her, barking and leaping a welcome that would have warmed a sterner heart. She laughed shakily, blinking back absurd tears as she fended him off and petted him.
She heard Luke say: 'I guess since he sniffed you out of the elephant grass like a pedigree bloodhound he reckons you belong to him. I've never seen him take to anyone so quickly.' And looking round she realised that he and Narayan had been watching the boisterous pantomime with amusement.
She straightened defensively. 'I've never owned a dog. But I like him.'
'Well, don't get too fond of the flea-bitten scallywag.'
Luke's blunt, offhand tone brought her down to earth, reminding her again of her insecurity in this venture. 'I won't,' she returned loftily, and moved away from the two men, deliberately isolating herself as they started to set up the camp.
By this time her head was well and truly aching with physical and psychological fatigue. She scrambled through a wash, without changing her clothes, pecked uninterestedly at a stew Luke had reconstituted from a camping pack, swallowed the pills
he gave her and rolled herself up in a blanket cocoon, turning her back on the flickering fire with a shiver. In these sub-montane valleys the temperature dropped drastically at night.
She knew the men had taken the radio equipment away, further down the stony ravine, and there were no comforting voices, only the whirring of cicadas and an occasional nightjar. It had been a strange day of turmoil and unpredictable emotions, and she was no nearer finding out what was going on, or what lay ahead of her.
The pills began to work, the tensions and headache faded. She slept.
CHAPTER FIVE
LUKE's advice about coming to terms with herself and with the extraordinary events which had befallen her must have penetrated Selina's subconscious, for when she woke the next morning, after a good twelve hours of deep, undisturbed sleep, she felt stronger physically and quite calm and cheerful. She stretched and a new, tingling vibrance ran along her muscles as her brain took stock of the situation.
