by Janzen, Tara
“Baolian isn’t some simple bitch with nothing better to do than kill off bounty hunters.” The cigar left a trail of smoke in the air from Strachan’s abrupt hand gesture. “The word out says she wants the Daniels name wiped off the face of the earth. Why? What did you do to her, Cooper?”
“That’s between me and Baolian,” he said.
“I warned you not to get personally involved,” Strachan said, his voice low and serious. “I warned you what she was like.”
“We were never personally involved.” Cooper’s jaw grew tight with anger. “She wanted Jackson, and when Jackson didn’t want her, she wanted him dead. Well, she got what she wanted, and it’s going to cost her more than she’s willing to pay.”
With a disgusted snort, Strachan stepped forward to the desk and crushed his cigar into a pristine cloisonné ashtray. “You’ll never hurt her badly enough to make up for what she did.” He lifted his head and looked directly at Jessica. “Reason with him. I’d rather not lose two close friends in the same year.”
* * *
“Crown jewel,” Jessica muttered, flipping through the computer printouts and notes she’d been compiling for three days. With Cooper’s weeks of intensive research and years of knowledge, and Cao Bo’s new information—which included all of Fang’s Western Hemisphere properties, businesses that were so deeply hidden, it would have taken Jessica two years to find them—Jessica had an extensive list of Fang Baolian’s holdings. But she had not been able to find anything even remotely resembling a crown jewel.
Neither had she been able to reason with Cooper. Strachan’s warnings had not fallen completely on deaf ears. She’d heard every word and taken them to heart. But nothing was going to stop Cooper in his quest for revenge.
She had discovered that Baolian’s favorite port was Manila, but the pirate actually did more business out of Hong Kong. She knew the Dragon Lady lived on a phantom ship now named Sea Cloud, a floating palace that plowed the waters of the South China Sea. She did not know what it would take to entice the pirate off her ill-gotten home and into Cooper Daniels’s clutches, or what he would do to Baolian once he had her. She didn’t want to know.
Laughter from Cooper’s office stopped her in the middle of flipping a page. Cao Bo had not gone away, or home, or back to whatever boat had brought her to California’s shores. She had gone to Cooper’s house.
Straightening her shoulders, Jessica forced her thoughts back to the work at hand. Cao Bo wasn’t her concern. Lots of people lived at Cooper’s house, John Liu for one, Yuxi for another.
And Cooper.
And Cao Bo.
“Damn,” she whispered, turning back a page to pick up where her thoughts had trailed off.
He was being nice. The same way she had been nice to the young woman. It was the least Ms. Cao deserved. Without her information, Jessica wouldn’t have half of the facts she’d been working with all morning. Without Cao Bo, she wouldn’t have known of Baolian’s connections to a small herb shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. With assets well under ten thousand dollars, it was a virtual nonentity in the pirate’s portfolio, which only increased its importance.
What was a multimillionaire doing with a tiny herb shop in the States? That was the question Jessica was trying to answer. That and what in the world did she think she was doing hunting pirates. She liked to tell herself it was a good-paying job, but her conscience wouldn’t accept the lie. She was in up to her ears with tankers, freighters, and merchant vessels, because Cooper Daniels had kissed her.
The deep laughter came again, and she gave up the pretense of work. She couldn’t concentrate with the two of them in there laughing. Cooper had never laughed with her about anything.
Standing, she smoothed her skirt and checked her watch. It was lunchtime, the perfect excuse for finding out what was going on in his office.
There were a few things she questioned about Ms. Cao, not the least of which was her most opportune appearance. Luke had yet to come up with anything suspicious beyond Bo’s illegal status, but Jessica still felt uncomfortable with the younger woman. She wasn’t alone in her feelings; Bo herself was uneasy with everyone. Her discomfort showed in her silent alertness and the way she always kept a certain distance between herself and other people in a room, as if she was afraid someone might try to grab her.
They didn’t know where she’d come from or who had sent her, or what her motives were for giving them so much information. That she was in someone’s employ was a reasonable assumption. That her employer continued to remain anonymous was unsettling. A loose end of such profound proportions could prove to be dangerous. They had expected Bo’s employer to show his hand by now, to request a favor in payment for the information. Jessica hoped granting that favor wouldn’t be the final burden to crush Daniels, Ltd., or get Cooper killed.
She knew Cooper also felt the inherent, blind obligation in accepting Bo’s help, but he was more than willing to take a risk if it could get him what he wanted.
She stood before the closed office doors, suddenly reluctant to open them and face Cooper. He should never have kissed her, especially to the point of combustion. And he most certainly should never have stopped kissing her. For the first two weeks she’d worked there, nary a soul had shown up at Daniels, Ltd. Since the dragon had taken up residence, the office had turned into Grand Central Station. They hadn’t had one quiet moment together since Sunday night on her couch. Even those rare times when the stars had aligned to give them quiet and a moment, Bo was always there, or John, or Yuxi, or any number of other less savory characters who came in to sell information.
He was driving her crazy. Her situation was untenable. She didn’t know how she was going to walk away from him, and the mess he was in, on Friday, but she had to find a way.
Until then, she had a responsibility to do her job, and her job included finding out what in the hell they were giggling about in the next room.
After a perfunctory knock, she opened the dragon doors, hardly giving the fierce beasts a second glance. Cooper and Bo were not alone as she’d thought, and it wasn’t Cooper laughing with the young woman. John and Yuxi must have arrived via the private elevator, because they were in the room, setting out lunch and talking to each other in what Jessica now recognized as Cantonese. Both men were laughing, but John was looking at Bo with a teasing expression. He spoke again, his voice soft and imploring, and his effort elicited a shy response.
Jessica could tell by the color blooming on Bo’s cheeks that she thought Chinese-American men were very forward.
“Ms. Langston,” John greeted her as she entered. “Your and Cooper’s lunch will be ready in a moment. Yuxi and I will be taking Ms. Cao out to eat.”
The man knew how to get a startling amount of information across in very few words. She and Cooper were having a private lunch together, an important lunch if he was relinquishing the responsibility for Ms. Cao’s safety. Not that John Liu didn’t look more than capable of handling anyone who tried to grab the woman.
She looked over at Cooper and caught his eye just as he turned away. He was standing by the large window overlooking Powell Street and the Bay beyond. Sunlight illuminated his profile and cast golden highlights in his hair and along the curve of his cheekbone. His mouth was grim, his jaw tight, and Jessica suddenly felt selfish for resenting the thought of his laughing with another woman. If she was smart, and she was beginning to have her doubts that she was, he’d be doing a lot more than laughing with another woman. He needed some sort of comfort, some easing away of the stress drawing lines in his face. He needed a soothing touch, and more and more, she wanted to be the one to give it.
In an act of pure self-defense, she forced her gaze back to John and the lunch. Cooper Daniels was not for her. She couldn’t make the facts any plainer to herself. Green-eyed dragons living on the edge of danger did not make suitable companions for mothers of growing children, no matter how incredibly they kissed.
John set a delicate porcelain teapot
on the low table next to a bottle of chilled white wine and pulled silk cushions out from underneath, arranging them to make comfortable seating. Next came two sets of finely made chopsticks with their tiny porcelain rests.
Jessica watched the careful preparations with growing dismay.
Silk cushions and privacy automatically, and much to her embarrassment, made her think of sex, or at least of kissing. Cooper Daniels had given her a one-track mind.
When the last dish was set out, John rose from the floor and went over to speak privately with Cooper. With Cooper’s quiet dismissal, they all left, and Jessica noticed that neither John, nor Yuxi, nor Bo stepped on the dragon, not so much as an accidental tweak of an ear or a shoe scraping against a bronze scale.
Taking their carefulness as a sure sign that there was an ancient Chinese proverb detailing the ills that befell those who trampled dragons, she was glad she’d always been equally careful—except for that once when her foot may have skimmed the dragon’s nose.
The dragon posing the more immediate danger stepped away from the window then, drawing her attention back to the problem at hand: eating lunch with Cooper Daniels while lounging on a pile of silk cushions and keeping her hands to herself.
“Have you come up with anything?” he asked, circling behind his desk with a lazy grace at odds with the grimness of his expression. His limp was still present in his walk, but it was far overshadowed by the deliberateness of his movements. Every muscle in his body was responding as if on cue, fluid and charged with energy.
He was on the prowl. She felt it as surely as she was standing there. She watched him pick up an envelope and glance at the return address before tossing it aside. In the next heartbeat, she was captured and held by his glittering gaze.
“Well?” he asked, his voice devoid of any polite modulation. He was angry and tense, and neither state was hidden. Unlike herself, she realized, the man did not have kissing on his mind.
She knew what he wanted—the same impossible thing he’d wanted her to give him all along, the edge on Fang Baolian. No pirate hunter had ever succeeded in getting close to the dragon lady. No one had ever gotten the best of her.
“There’s a small business, an herb shop on Grant Street,” she said, “that doesn’t fit her portfolio. It’s not big enough to launder a significant amount of cash, but she could be running some money through it.” She knew it wasn’t much, but it was all she had to offer.
“What about Singapore? Jakarta? Hong Kong? Manila?” he asked, naming Baolian’s bases of operation.
“She doesn’t have a big enough piece of the Jakarta project for it to be a crown jewel. As far as anything else in the Far East is concerned, I think there’s too much risk for too little chance of success on her home ground, unless you’re willing to spend a year or more getting someone inside her organization. At that point, your options would be limitless. You could run your own investigation into her underground financial structure, and could probably get any number of governments interested in commandeering a fair share. You could sabotage her pirating runs, or embezzle her into bankruptcy. Extortion might work, providing there is anything such as honor among thieves. I, of—”
“There is,” he assured her, interrupting as he came around the side of his desk.
“I, of course,” she continued, “will not be involved in those decisions.”
She watched as he picked up a folder from his desk and crossed his office. His footsteps stair-stepped the crenellations of the dragon’s back with impunity. He walked on and over the snapping furl of the dragon’s tail and stopped on the cream-and-gilt-encrusted breast scales that would have covered the dragon’s heart, if such a beast had a heart.
“There’s a name in here,” he said, handing her the folder. “The man is a banker on Grand Cayman. It’s what saved Pablo Lopez’s life.”
“I’ll see what I can find out.” She accepted the folder with only the slightest hesitation.
“Do you believe in what I’m doing?” he asked.
“I understand revenge. I’m not sure I sanction it.”
“Do you think I’m going to get revenge?” One dark eyebrow lifted as he spoke, adding the dragon’s own edge to his question. After a moment of her silence he moved closer, bringing a wash of tension with him across the room. He stopped near enough for her to see the streaks of turquoise darkening the subtler green of his eyes.
“You’re going to get something,” she said, measuring her words against the sudden quickening of her pulse. “Maybe revenge. Maybe yourself killed. I’m not sure which.”
“Will you miss me when I’m gone?”
“That’s a terrible question.”
He lowered his lashes for a second, as if agreeing with her, then his gaze was back on hers, intense and inquiring, and his voice softened.
“Will you kiss me?”
His question was straightforward. Her reaction was a maelstrom.
Her palms dampened and her mouth went dry. A curling sensation wound down through her stomach, heightening her awareness of her body and the closeness of his. Warmth radiated off him along with tension, acting like a magnet to draw her nearer. She closed her hands into fists, resisting the urge to reach for him, to give him the caress he’d asked for.
“Please?” His voice was husky as he moved a step closer. His hand came up to stroke her cheek. “Chow Sheng was right. You have beautiful skin.”
His gaze trailed over her face like a touch, making a path for his fingertips to follow. This was the soothing he needed, the soothing she longed to give—a kiss, a caress. He lowered his head close to hers, resting his cheek on hers before sliding his mouth down the side of her neck. He came back up the same way with exquisite slowness, making every moment last. His breath blew against her skin as he spoke.
“Open your mouth for me, Jessie . . . kiss me.” He stopped just short of the deed, making it unbearably easy for her to rise on her toes and turn her face a bare inch to find his lips. She was lost.
She tasted him with her tongue, a tentative foray beginning at the corner of his mouth and following the full curve of his lower lip. A sigh of satisfaction rumbled up from deep in his chest, but he did no more than tighten his arm around her waist and pull her against his pelvis. The kiss was hers to initiate, a task that became easier and easier with the increase in contact between their bodies. Where they touched, there was heat. Where he moved against her, there was meltdown.
His anger hadn’t abated. It had been changed, refocused, been transformed into need.
Her eyes closed on a soft exhalation, and her arms slid up his chest and around his neck. She wanted to savor him, explore him. She touched her mouth to his and felt his breathing slow. Her lips parted and pleasure suffused her senses.
This was the kiss Cooper had wanted. Her tongue laving the inside of his mouth and filling him with a hunger for more. Her giving instead of just accepting, a kiss without tears.
She molded herself to him, and the soft crush of her breasts against his chest made his gut tighten. He slanted his mouth over hers to deepen the kiss and take them both higher. She was his. She felt so right, too right not to be his. He rubbed himself against her and groaned with the pleasure the simple act gave.
The timing was dead wrong, but his feelings were undeniable. He wanted to make love to her, sink himself inside her and lose himself in the sweet mystery of her. She was beautifully female, all giving softness with a seductive power he didn’t even attempt to resist. He wanted her to take him.
With that goal in mind, he slid his hands down her hips and began inching up her skirt. He got the hemline up about an inch and a half before her hands covered his and stopped his little adventure.
“This is going to happen,” he murmured against her mouth.
She didn’t deny him; she only kissed him and kept kissing him. The skirt came up another inch.
“Damn.” He stopped himself, then swore again. “But it isn’t going to happen here, and it isn’t going
to happen now. How in the hell do you do it?”
“Do what?” she asked, her voice breathless in a way that made him wish something was going to happen.
“Make me into the gentleman I most certainly am not,” he said, thoroughly disgusted with his attack of virtue.
He pulled back far enough to see her eyes, and she did the damndest thing. She grinned at him. He would have laughed at the sheer audacity of it, if he’d been in any condition to laugh.
Ten
Lunch was strained, and Jessica knew Cooper was making darn sure she knew why. She’d grinned at him with pure satisfied delight, enjoying her backhanded victory over him—and she’d been paying the price ever since.
“Have you ever made love on a pile of silk pillows spread out on top of a dragon?” he asked, reaching for another shrimp-and-coconut delicacy. His gaze flicked over her. “You can take that any way you want.”
“No. I have not, in any way.” She watched him pick up the crustacean with his chopsticks, refusing to meet his eyes. She had progressed far beyond blushing. She didn’t think anything more he said could shock her.
He leaned over and whispered in her ear, and her face warmed to a rosy hue.
“You’re scandalous and . . . and . . .” She gave up in frustration. She didn’t know what else he was, so she busied herself with moving food around on her plate. The lunch was haute cuisine, but she hadn’t put anything in her mouth yet that was even close to tasting as good as he had tasted. If he hadn’t stopped of his own accord, the silk-and-dragon issue would have been a done deal, and they both knew it.
The kiss had hit her like a bolt of lightning. She still hadn’t recovered her equilibrium, which was why he was getting away with his outrageous conversation. He’d turned physical foreplay into verbal foreplay. She was incapable of resisting either.
“Wanting to take your clothes off is hardly scandalous, Jessie. You’re driving me crazy and have been ever since you walked in my door,” he said, not sounding any too happy about the fact.