Dragon and the Dove

by Janzen, Tara

  The Dragon and the Dove

  Tara Janzen

  Copyright Glenna McReynolds, 1994

  E-Book Copyright Tara Janzen, 2012

  E-Book Published by Tara Janzen at Smashwords, 2012

  Cover Design by Hot Damn Designs, 2012

  E-Book Format by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Reader Letter

  Titles

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Excerpt for Dragon’s Eden

  Excerpt for Stevie Lee

  Dear Reader ,

  Welcome to the Tara Janzen line of classic romances! New York Times Bestselling author, Tara Janzen, is the creator of the lightning-fast paced and super sexy CRAZY HOT and CRAZY COOL Steele Street series of romantic suspense novels. But before she fell in love with the hot cars, bad boys, big guns, and wild women of Steele Street, she wrote steamy romances for the Loveswept line under the name Glenna McReynolds. All thirteen of these much-loved classic romances are now available as eBooks.

  Writing as both Glenna McReynolds and Tara Janzen, this national bestselling author has won numerous awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America, and nine 4 ½ TOP PICKS from Romantic Times magazine. Two of her books are on the Romantic Times ALL-TIME FAVORITES list – RIVER OF EDEN and SHAMELESS . LOOSE AND EASY, a Steele Street novel, is one of Amazon’s TOP TEN ROMANCES for 2008 .

  She is also the author of an epic medieval fantasy trilogy, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, DREAM STONE, and PRINCE OF TIME.

  Titles

  Classic Romances

  Scout’s Honor

  Thieves In The Night

  Stevie Lee

  Dateline: Kydd and Rios

  Blue Dalton

  Outlaw Carson

  Moonlight and Shadows

  A Piece of Heaven

  Shameless

  The Courting Cowboy

  Avenging Angel

  The Dragon and the Dove

  Dragon’s Eden

  Medieval Fantasy Trilogy

  “A stunning epic of romantic fantasy.” Affaire de Coeur, five-star review

  The Chalice and the Blade

  Dream Stone

  Prince of Time

  River of Eden – “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! Glenna McReynolds has created an instant adventure classic.” Romantic Times – 2002 BEST ROMANTIC SUSPENSE AWARD WINNER

  Steele Street Series – “Hang on to your seat for the ride of your life…thrilling…sexy. Tara Janzen has outdone herself.” Fresh Fiction

  Crazy Hot

  Crazy Cool

  Crazy Wild

  Crazy Kisses

  Crazy Love

  Crazy Sweet

  On the Loose

  Cutting Loose

  Loose and Easy

  Breaking Loose

  Loose Ends

  SEAL Of My Dreams Anthology

  All proceeds from the sale of SEAL Of My Dreams are pledged to Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit foundation supporting veterans medical research.

  Panama Jack, by Tara Janzen

  For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen.

  One

  It was a shame, really, Jessica Langston thought, that anyone besides herself had their days held hostage by her eccentric employer. She cast another surreptitious glance over her desk at the Oriental woman waiting in the reception area of Daniels, Ltd. Two hours earlier the woman had given her a card identifying herself as Dr. Sharon Liu and had said she was there to see Cooper Daniels. When Jessica politely explained the futility of such an endeavor, the woman had only smiled and sat down to wait in the richly appointed office, sinking her elegant form into a wingback chair and balancing her slippers on the cinnabar-colored carpet.

  Jessica could have told her again that she was wasting her time, but she had already implied as much twice since their initial conversation. Her employer did not see people without an appointment. For that matter, her employer did not see people with an appointment. Truly, she doubted if her employer saw people in any capacity. Jessica had worked for Cooper Daniels for two weeks and he had not seen her.

  She hadn’t seen him either—unless she counted the dusty oil painting stuck up on the wall in the darkest corner of the office.

  Crotchety old man, she thought, giving the picture a bored glance. The artist certainly hadn’t been paid to glamorize her employer. Cooper Daniels looked stern, unforgiving, wrinkled up, dried out, and like he could kick off at any moment.

  Squelching a sigh of irritation, she went back to flipping through The Wall Street Journal. She hadn’t gone for an MBA on top of an undergraduate degree in accounting and subjected herself to six weeks of intensive testing and interviewing by a gray-haired harridan of a headhunter named Mrs. Crabb to spend her days reading. She was supposed to be Cooper Daniels’s assistant, not his receptionist.

  She shouldn’t complain, Jessica told herself. She was certainly getting paid as if she were assisting the owner and founder of Daniels, Ltd. in his Pacific Rim wheeling and dealing, as if she were tracking high-end real estate investment opportunities, which she’d been educated to do.

  Dr. Liu rose from her chair and walked over to the large oak-framed windows overlooking Powell Street and the Bay, drawing Jessica’s attention away from her newspaper. An olive-colored silk pantsuit with designer origins hugged the woman’s slender figure; her hair was drawn back in a severe but regal chignon. Jessica wondered how long she would wait before she finally gave up and left. The other woman’s patience made her think Dr. Liu knew something she didn’t, and that unnerved her. Any normal person would have taken her hints and left an hour ago. But that was the pot calling the kettle black. Any normal person wouldn’t have spent the last two weeks working for a man whose very existence was becoming doubtful. Sometimes she wondered if he’d died and nobody had remembered to tell her.

  “Ms. Langston, Cooper Daniels here. Please send Dr. Liu in.”

  The blue band of light blinking on her intercom and the accompanying masculine voice catapulted Jessica’s pulse into overdrive and paralyzed her from the neck down. A barrage of questions spilled into her mind, adding to the general confusion: How had he gotten into his office without her seeing him? How long had he been in his office? What was she supposed to do?

  Respond, came the answer. Regrouping quickly, she leaned forward and pressed the response panel on the intercom.

  “Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in.” She turned to the woman standing at the window. “Dr. Liu? Mr. Daniels will see you now.”

  Jessica waited for Dr. Liu to retrieve her medical bag, then with as much grace as she could manage, considering her heart was poun
ding a mile a minute, she rose and stepped over to the ornate doors leading to Cooper Daniels’s private office. Dragons with fangs bared and claws showing, wings spread and flames rolling, faced each other in frozen flight on the carved wooden panels. Surprisingly, the doors opened when she turned the handles. They never had before when she’d tried them, and she’d tried them many, many times—even going so far as to put her shoulder to the job and wiggle a bobby pin or two in the lock.

  “Thank you.” The Oriental woman slipped by her with a small smile that suggested, “I told you so.”

  Jessica responded with a tight little smile of her own, conceding defeat. The woman had known something she hadn’t known. Dr. Liu had known Cooper Daniels was alive and well and in residence.

  Before closing the doors, Jessica glanced into the office, intending to give the old man a nod of acknowledgment. He wasn’t anywhere in sight. The only indication of his presence was the sound of running water coming from an open door off to the left, the sound of a lot of running water, as if someone was taking a shower.

  After spending so many days looking at Cooper Daniels’s portrait, she refused to dwell on the picture her last thought brought to mind, let alone take the time to imagine what Dr. Liu was doing there. Instead she made a quick study of the rest of the office, noting an ancient private elevator against the south wall—which answered one of her questions—the massive desk commandeering the north wall, and the elaborate arrangement of flowers and foliage cascading over a large, low table that anchored a circle of chairs.

  She had turned to leave when a glimmer of gold caught her eye. She looked down and her next heartbeat caught for a second, captured by the dragon woven into the carpet. A hundred shades of bronze, yellow, copper, and brown edged the scales that began at the tail, where she stood with her feet perfectly placed in the heart-shaped point. Startled, she moved off the creature and looked up toward its head. Fierce emerald-green eyes warmed in the late-afternoon sunshine. Blue smoke curled out of the winged beast’s nostrils. Flames of red and orange danced upon its tongue.

  Fascinated and strangely wary, she let her gaze travel up the reptilian profile and down the crested rows of gilt scales. The animal was the essence of power, a force to be reckoned with, snaking across the cinnabar carpet and through a bank of white clouds in all its golden glory. And it was chained, collared at the neck by a broad iron band.

  Dr. Liu discreetly cleared her throat, and Jessica’s eyes flicked up. She knew she either had to leave or have a reason to stay. With the other woman moving about the large room with more familiarity than Jessica could claim, leaving was the only sensible option. When the shower was turned off in the adjoining room, leaving became the preferable option.

  With one last intrigued look at the dragon, she closed the doors and walked back to her desk. She felt like she’d passed a horrendously complicated test of nerves and composure, something along the lines of “Can a person sit in a room by herself for two weeks and not have a heart attack when the intercom suddenly comes to life?”

  Her smile returned in triumph. She’d passed with flying colors. Her “Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in,” had been delivered with unruffled efficiency, despite sweating palms and a still-jumping pulse. As soon as Dr. Sharon Liu left, she and Mr. Daniels were going to have to straighten a few things out. Outrageous salary or not, she wasn’t going to spend her whole career waiting to say “Yes, Mr. Daniels” once a month.

  An hour later her pulse had slowed to a near-comatose rate, she’d memorized a full quarter page of stock prices, and she’d decided she was leaving Daniels, Ltd. no matter what Cooper Daniels came up with as an explanation for his unorthodox behavior. She’d earned the right to be more than some old man’s glorified secretary.

  Besides, there wasn’t any irreplaceable prestige in working for a company and a man no one had ever heard of, especially if the company was on the skids—which, given her work load and despite her salary, she was beginning to suspect. If Daniels was going to go bankrupt, he’d have to do it without her. She needed her outrageous paycheck, every penny of it.

  Her MBA from Stanford University had not come cheap, emotionally or financially, but it had been the best chance she’d had of getting off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Stanford had been a chance to pull her life together after a dismal divorce, a chance to come home to San Francisco with her children.

  Now she owed a bundle to Stanford and the government, and to her family for all their help. She couldn’t afford to take a chance with Daniels, Ltd.

  Before she left, though, she was going to ask her employer about the chained dragon. A man didn’t have something like that splashed all over his carpet without its having some significance. What that significance might be, she couldn’t begin to guess. But it meant something, something powerful. She knew it. She’d felt it.

  “Ms. Langston? Cooper Daniels. I’d like to see you in my office.” His surprisingly strong voice sounded on the intercom again without warning, startling her into another minor stroke.

  Damn the man. She pressed a hand to her chest for a few seconds to calm her heart before pushing the response panel.

  “Yes, Mr. Daniels,” she said, silently swearing it would be the last time the words passed her lips. “I’ll be right in.”

  She didn’t know what to expect, but she knew what he expected. Mrs. Crabb had been very explicit about the high level of professionalism and creative intelligence required by Cooper Daniels, about the value of thinking on one’s feet and being able to roll with the punches. Jessica had never doubted her supply of any of those attributes—until she stood outside the dragon-carved doors and prepared to meet the man who had kept her cooling her heels for ten-and-three-quarters working days.

  The instant she stepped inside his office she realized she hadn’t done nearly enough preparation. On the other hand, she consoled herself, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a man who was young, healthy . . . and naked.

  And that, she realized, was why most of her classmates at Stanford had opted for jobs with Fortune 500 companies or on Wall Street. At certain levels of success, people tended to take a bit more care with their appearance, most of them being dressed to impress—the operative word being “dressed.”

  Dr. Liu ignored her presence and continued working her hands down the warmly bronzed expanse of back bared to the California sunshine. The man was lying on a massage table that had been set up beneath the windows. His head was buried in his arms with nothing showing except an unruly mop of sun-streaked light brown hair. A discreetly placed sheet covered him from waist to thigh, but Jessica didn’t have any doubts that he was naked underneath it—and she was mesmerized despite herself.

  “There are two leather folders on my desk, Ms. Langston,” the man said without lifting his head, confirming his identity as Cooper Daniels. His voice was unmistakably the one she’d just heard on her intercom. “The green one is mine. The red one is yours. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the red folder.”

  Jessica nodded in agreement, but made no move to comply, her gaze fixed on the sleek, powerful lines of his body. He was beautiful, like a sated animal in repose, oblivious to watching eyes and social decorum.

  The curves of muscle in his arms flowed down from strong, broad shoulders to square, masculine hands. Dr. Liu moved to massage his legs, and Jessica’s gaze followed as the other woman’s long, slender fingers kneaded and soothed his well-muscled thighs.

  Jessica swallowed softly, suddenly feeling overly warm. The Cooper Daniels in the painting was obviously a much older relative of the man in Dr. Sharon Liu’s inestimable care.

  “There is a stock offering on a company in Jakarta,” her employer said. “They’re trying to buy themselves into a major building project, a resort. I want you to find out the names of everyone involved in the project and then get me a rundown of their other financial investments.”

  She nodded again, embarrassingly dumbstruck, b
ut able to rouse herself enough to step over to the desk. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she became immediately aware that she was walking on the dragon. She made an unconscious move to keep from putting her foot into its fiery mouth. Another sidestep kept her from pressing into the iron-gray band around its neck. It was then that she noticed the words inscribed on the collar. Still heading toward the desk, she turned in a half circle to get the golden letters upright in her line of vision.

  By Love Alone, she read, her eyebrows drawing together in disbelief as she came to a stop beside the desk. She read the words again to make sure she’d gotten them right. Then her gaze moved onward, to the golden chain attached to the collar. The gilt links wound their way through silver-lined clouds, until they broke free and found the dragon’s master.

  Her first thought was that not even love would enable such a delicate creature to hold the beast at the other end of the chain.

  Behind her, Cooper Daniels groaned, a soft sound rumbling up from deep in his chest, and Jessica felt a disconcerting flush of heat sweep through her body. By Love Alone. She looked away from the white dove holding the chain in its beak and returned her gaze to the man stretched out on the table. He changed positions with languorous grace, drawing one knee up and turning his head to the other side with a deep sigh. Using a subtle move, Dr. Liu unfolded another length of the sheet before any really interesting part of him could be exposed. When he was covered, she continued to work her magic down his thighs to the backs of his knees.

  “You have my most humble gratitude, lao pengyou,” he said to the doctor. His voice had grown gravelly with pleasure, sparking another wave of heat through Jessica’s midsection. The impropriety of him having a massage in her presence was nothing compared with the wild imaginings filling her mind.

  He was the dragon—she had no doubts—but who was the dove? Not Dr. Liu, she knew. Despite the physical intimacy of the massage, Sharon Liu appeared to be professionally detached. She worked Cooper Daniels’s body with skill and care, but not with love or tenderness. Not with the uncomfortable awareness Jessica felt while watching him.