by Janzen, Tara
She sank against him, feeling his heartbeat under her palm and the strength of his arms around her. He twined their legs together. A heavy breath escaped him, sounding like a sigh of resignation, but he said no more. He only held her, letting the quietness fall and deepen.
When he knew he could keep her no longer, Cooper eased his arm from underneath her and helped her to her feet. He gave her a kiss before he let her go, but not the ravenous, sexual kisses he’d given her during their lovemaking. Tenderness and appreciation were his goals when he brushed his mouth over hers, gently rubbing her lips.
“I don’t know how to tell you what happened to me when we made love,” he said, still holding her close. “But I want more.” He kissed her again and released her. “I’ll get your skirt.”
Jessica watched him leave, walking naked across the room and out through the door. The curtains blew around him for an instant before he disappeared.
She wanted more too, much more. For her sake even more than for his, she wished she could stay.
She wanted to wake up in his arms, without any time apart for her doubts to surface.
* * *
Jessica hadn’t planned on being back at Cooper’s house ready to go to work before he’d even gotten out of bed, but that’s what happened.
John answered the door and let her in, and within minutes after she’d reopened her files in the makeshift office, he brought in a tea tray with croissants and fresh fruit.
An hour later Cooper still had not surfaced. Tempted as she was to go to his bedroom, Jessica refrained. John and Bo both had the run of the place, and she didn’t want to be found in an unprofessional, compromising position with her boss. She very much wanted to be in an unprofessional, compromising position with her boss. She just didn’t want to get caught in one.
Her doubts about what had happened between them had surfaced in spades, just as she’d expected. She’d forgotten to be embarrassed and shy the moment he had touched her, but she’d had the rest of the night and all of the morning to make up for lost mortification.
“Jessie?”
The sound of his voice brought her head around. He was standing in the doorway in a pair of plaid boxer shorts, his hair all tousled from sleep, his eyes drowsy with invitation, and his mouth curved in a purely wicked grin.
“Come on.” He turned sideways in the door and held his hand out for her, beckoning. When she didn’t move, he arched his brow.
It was the last bit of coercion he had to use the rest of the morning.
* * *
One and a half more days to survive, Jessica told herself that afternoon, then she could get a grip. She turned on her computer and tried to focus on the job at hand. She got as far as opening a file before a dreamy smile came over her, physically, emotionally, and mentally.
She’d made love with Cooper Daniels and left part of her heart in his bed, a bigger part than she could afford to lose. She wasn’t an affair-type person, yet she’d made love with a man she barely knew—twice, maybe even more. She wasn’t sure how a person counted the things she and Cooper had done. She did know the climaxes that had once been so rare in her life were starting to run together in her mind.
On a less rational side she felt as if she knew him very well indeed, like her own heartbeat. A ridiculous, romantic fantasy, she told herself, but the feeling persisted. She knew he would protect her with his life, that his courage could be counted on. She knew what had brought him his pain and that the loss was consuming him, guiding him down a path of certain destruction. If he lost against Baolian, he would lose all of the trappings of his life and maybe his life itself. If he won against the Dragon Lady, he would lose something else, something less easy to name but surely as important. And if he killed Baolian, he would kill part of himself.
She didn’t think he understood the price his revenge would exact, and his lack of understanding compelled her to protect him. She was a mother. She knew the value of life, the preciousness of it, the miracle of it, the strength needed to bring it forth and the care needed to sustain it.
With a worried sigh, she forced her attention back to her work. She’d traced the Grand Cayman banker to a number of stateside businesses, but all of them were perfectly legitimate and had nothing to do with Fang Baolian. She doubted if the two of them were in league on anything other than the banker providing his professional services to a customer with an inordinate amount of cash.
The running of the fax machine brought her head around, and she pushed away from her desk to go over and see what was coming in. The first page was a hastily scrawled note: Hello, luv—Tell Cooper he owes me another eight hundred pounds. Original sent by courier. George.
The second page of the transmission was a photograph. At first glance, and despite the lack of clarity, Jessica thought it was a picture of Cao Bo, and she was a little irritated. The information wasn’t worth eight hundred pounds. It wasn’t worth two pounds. They already knew what Cao Bo looked like. What they needed to know was where she’d come from, who she represented, why in the world she’d searched Cooper out at exactly the right time with exactly the right information.
Bo had given them the world on a platter and asked for nothing except protection. George Leeds sent a useless photograph and asked for eight hundred pounds. No wonder Cooper’s financial base was dissolving like so many sand castles in a deluge. His friends were a greedy lot.
Jessica picked up the picture when the transmission was finished and carried it back to her desk. Bo had once had much longer hair, she noted with interest, and wondered when the young woman had had herself shorn.
She stopped by her chair and rested her hand on its back, her gaze fastened on the photograph. After a moment’s perusal, her brows drew together in bewilderment. Something about the nose wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t decide what was different, but something was. The same held true for the mouth, and the shape of the face. As a matter of fact, the longer she looked at the picture, the less it looked like Bo—yet the resemblance was much more than skin-deep. The quality of the smile, if not the smile itself, was an exact match. There was an indefinable similarity about the eyes of both women, and despite the difference in the length of their hair, their hairlines were carbon copies of each other. The same delicate widow’s peak added a sense of drama to both faces. The same graceful curve outlined each face from brow to temple to ear.
Jessica suddenly knew whom she was looking at, and her hand started to tremble. She loosened her hold and stepped back, letting the photograph flutter to the floor.
From the balcony doorway, Cooper only saw the stricken expression on her face, and in three strides he was at her side.
“Jessie.” He grasped her upper arms and pulled her around to face him. “What’s wrong?”
She stared up at him, her eyes wide, her skin paler than normal. “We’re in trouble, Cooper, big, huge, unbelievable trouble.”
He absorbed the seriousness of her statement and came up with only one conclusion. “It’s your fertile time of the month, isn’t it,” he said, resigned to the facts. If a man loved a woman, certain things came along with it. Personally, Cooper loved most of those things. Women had cycles, like the moon, and the tides, and seasons like the Earth herself. Women were so . . . so connected. “Well, we’ll wait this out, and the next time we’ll use industrial-strength condoms instead of just the regular ones.”
He loved making her blush, really loved it. “Cooper, I am not talking about babies,” she sputtered. “At least not my babies, or your babies.”
“Then whose babies are we talking about?” he asked in confusion.
“Fang Baolian’s babies.”
Jessica watched the news settle on him, then he shook his head in denial.
“Fang Baolian doesn’t have any babies,” he said.
“She’s got one, Cooper, one about eighteen years old, five feet three inches tall, less than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. Trust me.”
“Cao Bo?” he asked, h
is face grim.
“Cao Bo.”
His gaze locked on hers, and an unholy gleam came to life in his eyes, glittering green and ruthless. “I guess that gives us the point, the game, and the match.”
“You can’t hurt her, Cooper.”
“No,” he agreed, not sounding at all reliable. “But I can use her.”
Fourteen
Word had gone out, leaked through a hundred sources who had spread it through a thousand Southeast Asian waterways and alleys: The Dragon had captured the Dragon Lady’s hatchling.
Ripples were immediately felt in Manila, where a customer ready to pay two hundred thousand dollars U.S. for a ship he’d picked out to be pirated in the Bay, was told the price had suddenly gone to three hundred thousand cash before delivery.
On the docks in Singapore, a shipment of motorcycles was hijacked after the owner had already paid protection money. In Jakarta, the financing for a new international resort, hotel, and convention complex was suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn.
Fang Baolian was consolidating her resources for war. Every dollar she squeezed out of the black market was proof of the worth of Cao Bo. Every dollar was an obstacle for Jessica to overcome.
Cooper had called in his favors from Seattle to San Diego and Cabo San Lucas. The ports were being watched. The borders were being patrolled. He couldn’t believe his luck.
He had been grinning for three days.
Jessica did not find the expression reassuring or pleasant, and she certainly did not find it humorous.
He’d offered her a bonus for working the weekend and staying on as a private consultant throughout the next week. She’d politely told him where he could put his bonus. She no longer wanted his money, originally the main impetus for her being in her present mess. She wanted him.
She looked up from her desk and checked the clock. Cooper had gone downtown hours ago. He’d been contacted by a man with information to sell on the Grand Cayman banker. She was supposed to meet him at the office before they went to dinner. After spending most of the day with her nose buried in numbers, transactions, and a host of foreign names, she was glad it was finally time for her to leave.
Despite the ocean view and the panoramic vistas, his home was beginning to feel like a prison with all the hours she’d spent in the makeshift office, especially with everyone else gone. Within minutes after Cooper had realized who Bo was, he’d decided to put her in hiding. Arrangements had been finalized in less than an hour, and John and Yuxi had taken her across the Bay.
Bo had shown little reluctance to go with them, partially, Jessica thought, because of John. He was the type of man who inspired confidence, and Bo seemed to have responded to him instinctively. Jessica had seen a number of shy glances pass from Bo to the quietly serious dark-haired warrior-houseboy. John had been more discreet, but no less interested. A fact proved by his choice of a safe house, an upscale suburban home in Oakland, where Bo would be chaperoned by his mother and sister, and protected by himself, Yuxi, and a brother trained in the ancient defensive arts of Shaolin monks.
No good could come of it, Jessica was certain, not any of it. Fang Baolian had murdered Jackson Daniels, and now her daughter was a willing hostage of the murdered man’s brother. Not even John had been able to get Bo to explain why she’d given her mother’s secrets to a man sure to use them against her.
The mystery didn’t sit right, rife as it was with potential for unforeseen disaster. Cooper knew the dangers, but was pushing forward, undaunted, with his plan. Jessica hoped she wouldn’t be left alone to pick up the pieces.
With a last glance at the clock, she pushed out of her chair and reached for her purse. A few papers slid off the desk when she failed to lift the purse clear of her workpile. She bent to retrieve the loose documents, and one of them caught her eye. It was the message she’d left Cooper the night he had returned from Hawaii, the one telling him about the aborted phone call and how worried she was about him.
Cooper hadn’t made much of the call. He had dismissed it by saying it could have been any one of a hundred people he knew who were invariably down on their luck or in their cups, but it still bothered her.
She saw it as another loose end in a situation that was getting damn tangled up with loose ends.
There wasn’t anything she could do about it that night. She had a dinner to eat and a noose to tighten. Locking up, she let herself out of the house.
Paul was baby-sitting and having an at-home date with the owner of a greenhouse. Jessica had promised herself and the children that she’d make up for all the time they’d missed in the last two weeks before she looked for another job. And she was determined to look for another job.
She refused to work for a man she was in love with, and she’d fallen in love with Cooper Daniels. At least that’s what she was afraid had happened. She was mature enough to realize the emotional boundaries of her maternal instincts were broader than they should be, easily broad enough to include a man felled by grief, especially if that man was green-eyed, gorgeous, and made love like no one she’d ever heard about, let alone experienced.
She realized her lack of sexual experience with anyone other than Ian made her susceptible to overestimating the importance of the astounding physical pleasure Cooper gave her. And to over-romanticizing the profound emotional pleasure she felt when he held her afterward and whispered to her of his own satisfaction and his appreciation of her as his lover.
She’d never been anyone’s lover before. She’d been Ian’s wife and the mother of his children first and foremost. Their personal and family relationships had seemed perfectly normal to her at the time, a lot of give and a little take, with her being responsible for everyone’s happiness except her own, because sacrificing herself was the noblest achievement a woman could aspire to.
In retrospect, her marriage looked like a bad movie, complete with an all-too-familiar and predictable ending, but only distance and time had given her that clearer perspective. She’d always considered herself liberated, unfettered by tradition. She’d had the best education money could buy and dedicated parents could provide. Her self-esteem had always been healthy. But thousands of years of male-dominated culture were hard to ignore, and she had ended up in a comfortable but dangerous rut of dependency, and the even stranger rut of being dependent upon her family’s dependency on her.
The situation with Cooper was completely different. It was novel, and intriguing, and full of potential for heartbreak, but with little potential for dependency. It was difficult, if not downright impossible, to become dependent on a man who probably wouldn’t live through the next week.
Damn him.
Even staying married to Ian for as long as she had looked smart compared with giving her heart to a bounty hunter.
* * *
The lights in the Daniels, Ltd. offices were on when Jessica made her first pass. By the time she found a parking place, they were off,
She peeked up through her windshield and tried hard not to be irritated. They’d agreed to meet at the office, and it looked like he’d already left, or maybe he was on his way down .
Her fingers idly tapped the steering wheel, and she expelled a heavy breath, waiting to see if he came out the front door, or if she’d missed him. One minute passed, then two, then three and four, and still he didn’t show up. Five minutes seemed like a lifetime, six and seven were nearly unbearable, and by eight minutes her fingers were reaching for the ignition.
The front door opened, and her fingers stopped in midtwist. Cooper wasn’t alone. Four men were with him, one in front and one in back, and one on each side of him, appearing to be holding him up, or restraining him.
The four men had a lot in common. They all wore dark slacks and light loose shirts without the tails tucked in. They all wore plain white tennis shoes — and they were all Chinese.
Fang Baolian had made her move.
Jessica forced herself to breathe and to think beyond the fear threatening to overwhelm he
r. She searched Cooper for signs of distress, and found enough to make her whole body stiffen with tension. He wasn’t holding his head straight. His knees were bent, his legs not moving as fast as he was, proving he was being carried. They’d either drugged him or beaten him. Both possibilities filled her with a potent mixture of fear and rage.
They stuffed him into a waiting car, which pulled away from the curb with a squeal of tires almost before the last man’s foot had left the sidewalk. The white sedan disappeared over the hill while Jessica was still fumbling with her keys. She didn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She just reacted.
Tearing off with her own tires squealing, her compact caught some air on the first downslope, enough to scare the hell out of her and make her quickly reevaluate her priorities. She couldn’t save Cooper if she totaled her car, and saving Cooper was her single, compelling priority. She wouldn’t let him be hurt, not while there was a breath left in her body. The desperation she felt was palpable.
She held her car to the road, and when she spotted the white sedan up ahead of her, she slowed to a reasonable distance. She didn’t have to follow the car for long. Three turns brought them into the heart of Chinatown, and two more blocks brought them to the herb shop on Grant Street. Any doubts she’d had about who had abducted Cooper dissipated.
After Baolian’s photograph had come in, the herb shop had taken a backseat to other details. Now, Jessica would have given anything to have continued her research into it. She wished John Liu had come down and checked the layout of the store. She wished she had a car phone to call the San Francisco Police Department and a big brother or two.
She wished she could find a parking space. The white sedan had gotten away with double parking until its passengers were unloaded. While she was still inching along, praying for a miracle, it cruised off into the night.
Chinatown was alive with neon and exotic smells, and crowds of people searching out a bargain and a meal. All of them were in her way, frustrating her effort to see Cooper and the men dragging him down the street and into the alley running next to the herb shop. When she lost sight of him for more than fifteen seconds, she muttered a foul curse and threw the compact into its parking gear in the middle of the street. A horn honked behind her. She ignored it, concentrating her efforts on pulling her driver’s license out of her wallet and jamming it into the clip on the driver’s-side sun visor. Signorelli was listed as her middle name, making her license a calling card guaranteed to get someone’s attention down at headquarters.