Jade Island

by Elizabeth Lowell

  “You’ll get lines if you keep that up,” Kyle said after a time.

  “Only Americans are obsessed with youth,” she said, not looking away from the jade.

  “And Chinese are obsessed with age.”

  “Obsession is cross-cultural. Human. The object of obsession is cultural.” As Lianne spoke, she walked around the case, viewing the jade from all angles.

  “Thinking of bidding?” Kyle asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I hope you or your client is wealthy. That’s a very fine piece of Neolithic jade. The sort of thing that might be found in an emperor’s grave.”

  Lianne barely heard Kyle’s words. She was already mentally rearranging the contents of her checking and money-market accounts. She could cover the probable cost of the jade. Barely. If the rattle in her car turned into a problem, she would have to max out her credit cards. Either way, she would have to give up the exquisite Eastern Zhou pendant she had had her eye on, at least for the time being. Once she had solved the mystery of the Neolithic blade, she could sell it and balance her books again. Unfortunately, by then the lovely pendant would be sold.

  With an unconscious sigh, Lianne said good-bye to the twenty-five-hundred-year-old bit of jade she had promised herself for her thirtieth birthday.

  “You don’t look happy,” Kyle said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Most collectors hot on the scent of a new acquisition look tight, glassy-eyed, panting to get their hands on whatever their obsession is. Sort of like Seng looking at you.”

  Lianne shot Kyle a sideways glance from eyes the color of very old whiskey. It didn’t take her long to decide she would rather talk about Seng than about the Neolithic blade that she was almost certain belonged to her grandfather.

  Or had. The card in front of the blade stated that it was owned by SunCo and had been donated for the auction.

  “Mr. Han—”

  “Seng to his friends,” Kyle interrupted dryly, “and he wants to be your friend. A close one. Real close.”

  “Mr. Han,” Lianne repeated, “has a variety of enthusiasms. For the moment, I appear to be one of them. It won’t last. But while it does, I wouldn’t mind having an escort of a certain type while I attend jade events.”

  “A certain type?”

  “Large. Like you.”

  “Ah, we’re back to the stuffed elephant.”

  “Your words, not mine.”

  Kyle examined Lianne as though she was a piece of jade that was on the market. “You’re serious.”

  “About needing you? Yes.”

  “What do I get out of it?”

  “The satisfaction of being a white knight,” she shot back, embarrassed by the certainty that there was a flush climbing her cheeks.

  “Sorry, but I traded in my metal underwear for good old cotton.”

  Lianne hoped her professional smile concealed her irritation. And her disappointment. “Understandable. I’m sure chain mail chafes something fierce. Excuse me, I have a lot of jade to see. Nice meeting you, Mr. Donovan.”

  For an instant Kyle was too surprised by Lianne’s cool, swift withdrawal to do anything but stare. Before he had time to think it over, he was moving, cutting off her escape.

  Lianne came to an abrupt stop. It was that or walk headfirst into Kyle Donovan. Automatically she stepped to the right. He stepped to his side, cutting her off again. She moved to the other side. So did he.

  “The dance is after the auction,” she said in a clipped tone.

  Kyle smiled. He liked the spark and snap of anger in her eyes much better than the blank, remote politeness that had been there when she brushed him off like dandruff.

  “I have a suggestion,” he began.

  “Lovely. Get out of my way and I’ll find someone who cares.”

  “My suggestion has to do with trading favors.”

  Lianne’s eyelids lowered, concealing the dark whiskey blaze of her eyes. “Such as?”

  “Every hour I’m a stuffed elephant for you, you’ll give me an hour and teach me what you see when you look at various kinds of jade.”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, dark centers expanding. “What?”

  “I have a fair working knowledge of ancient and archaic jades, but I could learn a lot from listening to the thought processes of an expert like you.”

  “I’m hardly that expert.”

  Kyle managed not to laugh out loud. If Wen Zhi Tang had an apprentice, it was Lianne Blakely. And when it came to jade, Wen was as expert as God.

  “Then it’s an even trade,” he said easily. “I’m not an expert escort.”

  When Lianne hesitated, Kyle smiled lazily down at her. He had been told that he had a disarming smile, so he used it when being underestimated was a real benefit. In this atrium swirling with Asian and Caucasian sharks, he figured he needed all the help he could get. Six months of immersion in the study of Chinese jade artifacts didn’t make up for a lifetime spent climbing over the face of the earth looking for minerals.

  Lianne didn’t relax as much under his smile as Kyle had hoped. If anything, she withdrew even more.

  “Sort of you scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours?” she suggested.

  His smile widened. “Close enough. You game?”

  “As long as all I’m scratching is your jade itch,” she said bluntly. “How much do you want to know about jade?”

  “I’ll tell you if I get bored.”

  Lianne tilted her head to one side and looked up at Kyle. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” she asked, echoing his earlier remark.

  “Yeah. I hate being bored.”

  She took a breath and thought of all the reasons she should turn and walk away from the man with the easy smile and beautiful, measuring eyes.

  “All right,” she said faintly. Then, more firmly: “It’s a deal.”

  For the first time since Kyle had seen Lianne, his gut relaxed. He didn’t know why it was important for him to stay close to her. He only knew that it was. In a woman, what he felt would have been called feminine intuition. In a man, it was called reasoning, experience, deduction, or, at worst, a hunch.

  Kyle’s hunch said there was more to this deal than a pretty lady asking a big male to keep the Seng wolf at bay.

  “Where do you want to start?” Lianne asked.

  “At the beginning, of course. The Neolithic blade.”

  Kyle was intensely curious about the jade artifact that had made her stare and then stare again, until finally something that looked like fear drained color from her face. But he didn’t say anything aloud about the subject of fear. At this point their alliance was too fragile to take any kind of strain.

  For an instant Kyle wondered what he had gotten himself into. Then Lianne stepped past him to the display case and he breathed in the heady, delicate fragrance of lilies and rain. It went through him like a combination of peace and adrenaline, soothing his mind and revving his body.

  “This blade,” Lianne said, “which many Chinese would refer to as a shovel—”

  “Why?” he interrupted.

  “Wen says that in ancient times people used digging sticks with an edge like that. Some academics say that it’s more an adze than a shovel. In any case, we all agree that objects like this are modeled after a blade of some kind, an artifact that was important enough to the culture to be included in rituals.”

  Kyle nodded.

  “This blade,” Lianne continued, gesturing toward the case, “is pih, one of the eight traditional categories of jade colors.”

  “Green?”

  “Moss green. Some might call it spinach. In any case, this blade is an excellent example of buried jade.”

  “Grave goods.”

  “Exactly. They have always been valued by Europeans. Among the overseas Chinese, the old mainland prejudice against collecting grave goods is almost gone. The stains on this blade are the result of thousands of years spent in a tomb. The Chinese have a long and exacting aesthet
ic tradition with regard to weathered jade.”

  The reverence in her tone when she said “stains” made Kyle’s eyebrows lift. “Stains, huh? Aren’t they valued simply as an indicator of age?”

  “In some cases. For a Chinese collector, the true importance of these particular stains would be that they enhance rather than diminish the impact of the totemic patterns carved into the blade itself.”

  “So I’ve been told. But I have to say, that’s one of the aspects of jade appreciation that eludes me.”

  “Why?” Lianne asked, looking up at him.

  “The jade was selected, carved, polished, and buried by human hands. The stains just came along randomly, a byproduct of being stuck in wet earth near a corpse.”

  Lianne’s eyes gleamed behind her thick black lashes as she smiled. “A very Western point of view.”

  “That’s me, born and raised.”

  “Me, too. Wen has lectured me many times about my lack of subtlety in jade appreciation. The placement of accidental stains is one of the things I had difficulty with.”

  “Had?”

  “Now I think of the stains in the same way the carver thought of the stone before he went to work.”

  Kyle looked from the blade to Lianne. “I don’t understand.”

  “Every piece of jade is different. It’s the carver’s duty and joy to reveal the object hidden within the stone.”

  He nodded. “I get that part of it. Applied human skill and intelligence.”

  “And the stains,” Lianne said softly, “are the condensations of time, as much a part of the jade today as the original stone or the carver’s skill. If time blurs the design or breaks the stone, the value of the whole is diminished. If time enhances the object, the result is a magnificent, multilevel piece of art, like the one you can’t keep your eyes off for more than ten seconds.”

  Almost guiltily, Kyle looked back at Lianne. Her smile turned her eyes the color of dark honey.

  “I wasn’t complaining,” she said. “I love seeing someone who is genuinely fascinated by jade, rather than just collecting it to impress other people or because it’s the latest investing craze.”

  “Even though I prefer unstained jade?”

  She laughed. “Just remember that the placement of stains on buried jade is very important to the Chinese collector.”

  “What about Americans? Don’t their preferences count?”

  “They can love or hate stains on buried jade, but it doesn’t change the fact that stains which add to the aesthetic power of a piece drive up the price, especially in a mixed Asian-Caucasian auction such as this.”

  “I see a plush future for the Pacific Rim Asian Charities,” Kyle said dryly. “But I can’t imagine a collector letting go of this Neolithic blade for anything short of disaster or death. It has to be one of a kind. Or is that just my relative inexperience talking?”

  Broodingly, Lianne studied the extraordinary blade lying within the case. Stone, yet so infused with time and reverence that the jade fairly glowed.

  “No, I can’t imagine Wen letting go of it,” she said softly, not knowing she had spoken aloud.

  A feeling like winter slid down her spine. She wondered what calamity had struck the Tang family, what disaster was so great that Wen Zhi Tang had been forced to sell a piece of the jade collection that had been in the family since the time of the Ming dynasty.

  No wonder her father had been too distracted to remember details like a parking voucher for her. No wonder that he was pushing her to provide an opening for the Tang family with Donovan International. If he just would have told her what was going on, she wouldn’t have dragged her feet about approaching Kyle. The Tangs might not like admitting it to her, but they were family.

  Her family.

  “Lianne?”

  She realized that Kyle had been speaking to her, but even when she tried, she couldn’t remember anything he had said. Her thoughts were a turmoil of speculation and unease.

  “Excuse me,” Lianne said. “I was thinking about…jade.”

  And fear.

  It wasn’t impatience she had seen in her father’s eyes when he talked about the need to contact Kyle Donovan. It was fear.

  Chapter 4

  The Sung dynasty jade bowl collected admirers like a magnet sucking up bright metal pins. Asian and Caucasian, collector and collected alike crowded around the single high display case and whispered in mingled awe and avarice.

  Carved from a single piece of highly translucent white jade, with hints of pale green in the curves, the bowl was as simple as it was spectacular. It glowed like a dawn moon against the dark velvet of the case. The discreet card said two things: the jade belonged to Richard Farmer, and it was not for sale.

  “Normally I don’t care for Sung pieces,” Kyle said, staring over the heads of several people at the case. “This one might rearrange my prejudices. Just as well it isn’t for sale. It would take pockets as deep as Dick Farmer’s to buy it. Is he one of your clients?”

  “I’ve never dealt directly with him,” Lianne said.

  Kyle wondered if she was being intentionally evasive. Farmer could be a client of hers and still never have seen her face-to-face. A self-made multibillionaire in the gray world of international technology resale, Farmer had legions of people sweating with eagerness to take care of his business for him. And his billions.

  “Do you know who acquired this bowl for Farmer?” Kyle asked.

  “Chang Wo Sun would be my guess.”

  “Never heard of him. Is he a jade player?”

  “No. He’s a facilitator for SunCo.”

  “I didn’t know SunCo had any deals going with Farmer.”

  “They don’t. Yet. I suspect the bowl is part of a rather complex and very Chinese courtship ritual.”

  As Lianne spoke, she stood on tiptoe and tried to look over two men to see the Sung bowl. When her view was cut off by a casual shift of shoulders, she made a frustrated sound.

  Then she made a startled one as the floor dropped beneath her feet until she was head and shoulders above the crowd, suspended between Kyle’s big hands.

  “Better view?” he asked blandly.

  “Much. Um, thanks.”

  “All part of the stuffed-elephant service.”

  Lianne laughed even as she wondered if he felt the sudden drumming of her heart the way she felt the warmth of his hands locked around her ribs. She hoped he would assume that the sudden speeding of her heart came from surprise, rather than from a simple feminine response to the heat and strength of the man holding her.

  After the first few breaths, Lianne decided that she liked the view very well indeed. Just below her, a woman’s intricate hair ornament dipped and swayed like a pearl ballerina as the woman tilted her head from side to side, studying the elegant Sung bowl. Just over her shoulder, a man’s head revealed a bald spot on top, a natural tonsure he tried to conceal by combing hair over it. A delegation from mainland China stood to one side of the case. In defiance of Seattle civic law, they had cigarette smoke like a permanent fog over their heads.

  And when Lianne looked over her shoulder, she saw that the same man who had followed her in lockstep from her car was still behind her. He was trying quietly, quickly, urgently to fade out of her newly enhanced line of sight.

  Gotcha.

  Lianne smiled with grim pleasure even as anxiety prickled hot and cold over her skin. No doubt the man had thought keeping track of her discreetly would be easy—just follow the tall Anglo, and short, little old Lianne would never be far away.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t drop you,” Kyle said, feeling the sudden tension in Lianne’s body. “I’ve carried packs heavier than you over high mountain passes.”

  “I’m not worried about you.”

  The man who had succeeded in pulling the crowd around him like a multicolored fog was another thing entirely. He worried Lianne. She stared at the people behind her for a minute longer, but didn’t see him again. He had vanished as thoug
h he was no more than a product of her imagination.

  And maybe he was. Maybe she was just jumpy about wearing nearly a million dollars in jade jewelry that wasn’t hers.

  “Thanks, I’ve seen enough,” Lianne said.

  Kyle lowered her to the floor, leaned down, and asked against her ear, “Did you recognize him?”

  The flinch of surprise that she couldn’t conceal told Kyle that he was right: her attention hadn’t been on jade.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Lianne said.

  Disappointment and impatience flared in Kyle. Apparently the little lady thought he was as stupid as a stuffed elephant.

  “Right,” he said, opening a path away from the Sung bowl. “What’s next on your jade agenda?”

  “The auction won’t begin for two hours. What exhibits haven’t you seen?”

  “The buffet,” Kyle said bluntly. “Or did you eat dinner before you came?”

  “No. I was too nervous,” she admitted.

  “About what?” he asked casually, leading her out of the atrium toward the buffet that had been set up in the ballroom.

  “The Jade Trader exhibit,” she said, only half the truth. But she wasn’t about to admit to Kyle that the thought of having to approach him had tied her stomach in knots. “It was my responsibility to choose the jades.”

  “I thought the patriarch would have done that.”

  “Wen?”

  “Last time I checked, he was the grand old man of the Tang clan.”

  “He is. It’s just that he’s…awfully busy.” Lianne finished weakly.

  Kyle gave her a sideways look that said he wasn’t buying that one, either.

  She told herself that Wen’s health was an open secret, one that Kyle would be sharing as soon as she introduced him into the Tang family.

  “Wait,” she said, pressing against Kyle’s arm. Standing on tiptoe, she leaned close enough to speak without being overheard. “Wen’s eyesight is very bad. Even his touch isn’t reliable anymore. Arthritis, I guess, but no one speaks of it. Yet he still took part in the exhibit. Joe passed Wen’s suggestions on to Harry or Johnny, who gave them to me.”

  Kyle tried not to let Lianne’s unique scent distract him from the main point: one of the world’s wealthiest trading families was undergoing a quiet change in leadership. Following the shock of Hong Kong’s reversion to mainland China, Wen’s increasing frailty must have had the many branches of the Tang family scrambling and clawing to see who would lead the clan through the profitable minefields of the twenty-first century.