Being hungry was only one part of Judith’s problem. More important was trying to figure out what, on a day-to-day basis, her role as official recorder might actually mean. There was little enough to record, except a lot of tramping around in the scrub, and since she couldn’t be with both parties at once, she could only do half a job at best. She was also finding it difficult to determine her status amongst the other members of the two groups, since both “leaders” clearly distrusted her neutrality. Derek seemed sure she was on his side but didn’t trust her, and Bevan was equally sure she stood with the conservationists and didn’t trust her either. That rankled.
Derek, she knew in her soul, was going to do his best to manipulate the project, but she couldn’t figure out how. It would be first for his own benefit, but beyond that everything made little sense because she couldn’t figure out what he could possibly do.
And Bevan was also scheming. He wasn’t as obvious about it, holding to his group’s stated intention of keeping the expedition honest and above board. But he was scheming just as much as Derek, and this was his turf, after all.
And neither of them trusts me. I suppose it’s no more than I should expect, to be fair – except who wants to be fair?
But even that degree of self-honesty didn’t override the fact she felt somehow soiled by Bevan’s assumption she was part of the enemy camp.
“I am not biased. I’m not,” she muttered aloud as she panted along behind Ted and Jan, and it wasn’t until Ted dropped back to ask if she was all right that Judith realized to her horror she’d been chanting the declaration in time to her plodding footsteps. Ted didn’t comment, but the look in his eyes told her he had both heard and somehow understood exactly what she was on about.
They were back in camp by late afternoon, footsore and weary but also flushed with enthusiasm at the success of the day’s work. A full dozen cameras, both still and video types, had been set out using the latest in solar technology to provide power for the cameras and sensor equipment.
Judith found everyone’s enthusiasm a bit overwhelming, and Ted Norton was even less amused. “This is only a shake-down cruise,” he was heard to mutter. “We’ll be lucky to get anything but pictures of devils and wallabies, and all that’ll prove is that the equipment is working.”
“You never know your luck,” was Bevan’s reply, and Judith noticed that when he said the words, he was looking across the evening campfire at her, and his eyes were putting a quite different meaning to his words.
20
Bevan had been watching her ever since their return to camp, almost as if he was expecting something, but what? During dinner, it became so unnerving Judith almost stood up and walked out. She had the feeling she had somehow become the butt of some terrible, malicious joke, only no one was laughing.
Now, the entire atmosphere altered by the eerie flickering of the fire and the night shadows and noises, she decided Bevan was trying to rattle her, and she was equally determined not to let him get away with it.
She got a sort of chance when she caught him deliberately leading the conversation round to where he gently but firmly pointed out that the area directly west of camp was, as of now and until further notice, totally off limits to everyone.
“We stay this side of the creek and out of that west gully entirely,” he said, looking from face to face, making firm, direct eye contact until he seemed satisfied with the level of acceptance.
“But why?” Judith protested, making the objection for the sake of doing so, and certain he knew it.
“Because I say so,” was his blunt reply. “All will be revealed at the proper time, but for the moment I must have total cooperation from everybody. You’ll just have to take it on trust that this is important.”
Yeah, sure. And pigs do fly.
“I have a great deal of trouble taking things on trust,” she insisted, still deliberately stirring the pot despite having no idea of the contents.
“So I’ve been led to understand,” Bevan said, and his eyes flashed a warning of some sort before flitting to Derek and back again.
Alarm rose to choke off Judith’s retort. Something was very, very wrong here, she decided, and her first reaction was to wonder what Derek had been telling Bevan. What lies? And – perhaps worse yet – what truths? Derek was, she knew, more than capable of twisting any truth to suit his own needs.
Suddenly she shivered uncontrollably at the brutal mental picture of Derek bragging to Bevan about his own involvement with Judith. It was no satisfaction to have that thought followed immediately by the certainty that Bevan wasn’t the type to indulge in locker-room gossip. How do I know that? Still, the mere thought of such a ploy by Derek made her skin crawl.
“On second thought, I guess I might allow you to be the exception to the rule, considering your official capacity as recorder of the truth,” Bevan suddenly said, bringing her to suspicious attention. He rose lithely to his feet and loomed specterlike across the fire, looking down at her. “Let’s you and I take a moonlight stroll, Ms. Bryan, and I shall attempt to explain to you the logic of it all.”
Not on your life, she thought, the idea of walking off with Bevan Keene into the darkness of the night suddenly terrifying. But even as she thought it, she was rising and moving around the fire to join him. Just as he’d known she would! His eyes laughed at her, devil’s eyes in the red glow of the flames.
But he waited – thank goodness! – until they were out of sight and hearing from the others before taking her hand, the gesture provoking a curious mixture of emotions in Judith. It was both completely natural and innocent, considering the darkness and the circumstances, and also somehow threatening. Her first reaction was to accept his hand, but her second was to flinch at her own reaction to his touch. Her third was to pull back in trepidation.
“You’re going out of your way to be difficult about this, Judith Theresa.” Bevan’s voice was whisper-soft but clear in the sudden silence of the night that cloaked them. “I wonder why.”
“It isn’t a matter of being difficult,” she said. “I just don’t want to take anything on trust. That’s not what my job is about.”
“Are you talking about me, or the concept in general?”
“From anybody!” She was firm in her reply, but cautious. She would trust Bevan with her very life, if it came to that, but she wasn’t about to trust him when it came to any discussion involving her past relationship with Derek. Not even to assert the now total distrust she had of anything the conservationist leader might say.
“Your boy speaks very highly of your journalistic integrity,” Bevan said, and Judith paused, tugging against his grip on her fingers as they moved along the narrow, ill-lit, forbidden track leading west from the camp. His simple remark was pregnant with unspoken possibilities, hidden messages. He was leading up to something, and Judith was dead-set certain she wasn’t going to like it.
“He is NOT ‘my boy,’” she snapped, angry at herself for letting him get to her, angry with him for trying, and the more so because of his success. “He is not my anything!”
“Uh huh.”
Which to Judith’s confused mind translated as, “That’s not the way he tells it.”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” she continued, half her mind wanting her willful mouth to shut itself and the other half wanting to scream out at him, to deny whatever Derek had said, to deny anything and everything.
“It isn’t my business, I agree,” Bevan said, voice infuriatingly calm. “But only as long as your personal situation doesn’t start influencing our objectivity. There’s a lot riding on this little junket, or at least there could be, and your objectivity might be the key to everything before all’s said and done.”
“Damn you! You’re off on that hobby-horse again, questioning my professional integrity without any basis for doing so.” The fierceness of her reaction wasn’t only the result of injured dignity. She had suddenly become far too aware of the way his fingers gripped her own, and o
f the way his thumb seemed to stroke at the throbbing pulse at her wrist. And how ridiculously intimate it all was, and how she wanted him to stop and didn’t want him ever to stop.
Whereupon he did stop. At least he stopped walking, only to turn Judith toward him and stare down into her eyes, his own features shadowed against the starlit sky above.
“No basis?”
His words seemed muffled, sounded as if they came from a great distance, like a vagrant wind. Perhaps because even as the words escaped his lips, those same lips swooped down to capture her mouth.
His kiss was forceful, demanding, but Judith knew instinctively that the demand had little if anything to do with the question that had preceded the kiss. This wasn’t a question, it was a claim, a deliberately provocative gesture that was only confirmed when he eventually released her mouth so he could speak to her.
“I’ve been wanting to do that all the damn day,” he said, his voice as soft as the black velvet sky above. Whereupon he proceeded, without waiting for any reply, to repeat the kiss, this time adding to its potency by the touch of his fingers along her spine, the warmth of his loins against her as he pulled her close.
His readiness was unmistakable. As was her immediate and instinctive response to feeling him swollen, hard, thrusting against her tummy, his agile tongue thrusting its way to a tryst with her own all-too-willing one.
Judith didn’t try to fight her body’s responses. Even as her mind questioned the logic of it, she was fitting herself into the embrace, thigh against thigh, her breasts crushed against the furnace heat of his chest, her hands moving to reach the muscular column of his neck, the sturdy bulk of his shoulders.
This is wrong, wrong, wrong! He’s only manipulating me, using me. He’s as bad as Derek. Worse! Because ...
Because I’m damned well falling into lust with him, and I’m afraid he knows it. Because he’s right, my objectivity is open to question, although not in any way he needs to be worried about.
Because ...
The inner questioning slid away like smoke as her body took over, tingling and stirring to his every touch, flinging off any semblance of control as strong fingers stroked her breasts with infinite gentleness and other fingers played a tune along her spine and drew patterns of fire along the softness of her waist, tugging her shirt free so as to reach the skin beneath.
Madness!
And worse than madness. She could feel the growing maleness of him against her belly, throbbing in tune to the melody his fingers drummed along her spine. When those same fingers reached to unsnap her bra, she twisted not in opposition, but to ease his task, and when he reached to unbutton her shirt, to lift the bra so her breasts could thrill to the touch of sensitive, knowing fingers, the sigh that escaped her came straight from the core of her desire.
Bevan’s head dipped so that he could take each breast in turn between his lips, his tongue rousing each nipple to a rigid, almost painful reaction that caught at her breath and made the velvet sky and white-hot stars swim in her blurred vision.
Judith threw back her head and closed her eyes against the instability of the night above, but one treacherous hand slid down between them to clutch at the strength of him, marveling at the firm, tangible evidence of his desire. Now it was Bevan’s turn to sigh, and his sigh was a groan of need, of wanting. He throbbed beneath her fingers, and his tongue against her nipple seemed to flutter in tune.
Madness ... but delightful madness.
His knuckles brushed her own as his fingers traced a slow, deliberate, tantalizing track along the swelling of her tummy, then hesitated before loosing the waist of her jeans and running paths of fire along the smoothness of her panties, circling ever lower until they reached the moistness his lovemaking had created.
One finger slid inside her, its tip gliding up and back against her, creating a rhythm that throbbed through her entire body, vibrating, thundering in her head, trembling in her legs.
“Madness!” His whispered voice echoed her thoughts as he slowly, agonizingly, drew his fingers away, brushing aside her grip on him as he stepped back, away from her, no longer touching her, head tilted to stare into the night sky as he repeated the single word like a mantra. “Madness!”
Madness it was, but she didn’t care.
“Not now. Not here,” he said. “Our time will come, but this isn’t it.”
He didn’t speak again until Judith had time to zip her jeans, to replace her swollen, over-tender breasts into confinement, to button her shirt, but when he did speak, there was no hint of apology in his voice, nor – thankfully – any hint of self-satisfaction, either.
“This isn’t exactly what I brought you out here for,” he said, finally looking down to meet her eyes, reaching out to take her hand again into his own.
“I’m glad you finally remembered that,” she lied in a voice still shaky, a voice that trembled along with her insides. Even as she spoke, she was thinking she must have lost her mind to have let this sort of thing happen. Especially now, with both Bevan and Derek obviously plotting and scheming at things which could only end up with her being the bunny!
“I’m not sure I am. Glad, I mean,” Bevan said, then turned away along the track, his grip on her hand ensuring she would follow him.
They walked in silence then, Judith lost in a whirlwind of totally irrational thoughts and Bevan thinking ... whatever he was thinking. She didn’t want to know.
They moved quickly, considering the darkness, Bevan obviously confident of his orientation, surefooted as a night predator. Not surprising, Judith found herself thinking. Virtually every native animal in Australia was nocturnal. Why not him?
Suddenly the track ended in a broad, level clearing that was so specific it might have been deliberately carved from the surrounding scrub. And as they moved a few steps farther, it became evident to Judith that her impression was correct. The clearing was definitely man-made, and actually formed the turnaround at the end of a quite proper road.
Even in the starlight, it was obvious this road was far superior to the rough bush tracks they’d been lurching and bouncing and jouncing on for a full day just to reach this point, but the significance wasn’t entirely clear, and her first thought was to ask why.
“It’s a road,” she said. “But ... so what?”
“Well, for starters, it means we won’t have to bush-bash another full day when it’s time to head home,” Bevan replied with a slow grin that was almost apologetic. Or downright sinister. “There’s a passable track between here and camp, a bit rough but we can make it usable. Only it’s obscured at that end. For now.” And this time the grin was decidedly sinister.
Judith could only stare. What sort of convoluted mind did this man have?
“Are you telling me that we drove all day to get here, over those horrid, so-called tracks, eating all that dust, and we could have gotten here in less time and on a decent road? But why?”
“The best of reasons,” he said. “Simple psychology. Because of the rough trip in, everybody who doesn’t know better reckons they’re now in something approaching proper, pristine wilderness, so they’re acting accordingly. If they’d got here too readily, they’d be complaining that we might as well have done the testing in the scrub right behind the back paddock.”
“Which we probably could have. I wondered before why we had to go to all this trouble, just to test a bit of equipment.”
“Which we are!” And now the grin threatened to overflow. “If you and I set out to walk it, we could be watching the late evening news on the telly at home before that mob” ... with a gesture behind them ... “had barely got their swags warmed up. A swag is a bedroll, but you know that.”
His laugh, now, was infectious. But scary. Bevan Keene was enjoying this far, far too much for Judith’s taste.
“Actually, that’s not such a bad idea,” he said. “We could snuggle up on the sofa and—”
“You’re ... you’re ... impossible,” Judith stammered. “You’re as craz
y as a ... a—”
“Fox,” he said, not bothering to hide his amusement. “And not really crazy; just sneaky is all.”
“But why? What is the point of it all?”
“One point is to show you that I trust you, and that I want you to trust me in return,” he said with a wry grin. “And it does clarify all those greenie claims about how great they are at bushcraft, doesn’t it? Although maybe it’s just that, being bushwalkers, they don’t bother to consider directions when they’re being driven.” And he laughed again, softly.
“So we’re not, as everybody was told, just on the southern edge of Ben Lomond National Park? We’re—”
“Maybe half an hour from home as the kookaburra flies. Ben Lomond is that way,” he said, gesturing with an expansive wave of one hand. “But because we’re down in this little valley, you’d have to be part mountain goat to get to it, or get a sight of it.”
Judith simply couldn’t help it. The absurdity of what he’d done finally reached through the fog and found her funny bone. The laughter started deep down in her belly and rumbled up with ever-increasing, undeniable force. She could only just make out his next words as the almost-hysterical laughter took control of her.
“Of course it helped tremendously that the day was so cloudy,” he said. “Even a good bushman could be excused for getting turned around a bit when it’s cloudy.”
And he said it with a totally straight face, the bastard! Judith finally gained a measure of control, but it took effort. “They might shoot you when they find out,” she said, struggling for breath. “And you’ll deserve it, too.”
“It might be a small test of their collective sense of humor,” he admitted. “But not the real test. That’s still to come.”
“Surely you don’t mean there’s more?” Judith gasped out the question, unsure if she dared believe what she was hearing. Did Bevan think this was all just some sort of game? She was suddenly struck with the thought of how she would be forced to try and explain all this in the written reports of the expedition. Not a welcoming thought.
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