Jade by Jill Marie Landis
Can a mysterious beauty win the heart of the most eligible bachelor in San Francisco in this passionate western romance?
Jade Douglas is a determined young woman who risks all to travel to San Francisco in the late 1800’s to learn the truth about her father’s mysterious death.
J.T. Harrington is a handsome, rugged rancher who has just inherited a vast estate. When he finds the radiant beauty on his doorstep, he is tempted to ignore his vow never to love again and offer Jade both his name and his heart.
Before their scandalous wedding can unveil the secrets of the past, J.T. and Jade find themselves torn apart by a dangerous deception, but brought together again by a desire too powerful for either one of them to deny . . .
Praise for Jade and Jill Marie Landis
“Guaranteed to enthrall . . . a fast-paced love story with the sensuality of a red silk robe.”
—Romantic Times
“Sizzling romance, mystery, and intrigue . . . a keeper you’ll want to read over and over!”
—Rendezvous
“Jill Marie Landis is fabulous!”
—New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller
“A gifted writer . . . able to enthrall readers and touch their deepest emotions.”
—Romantic Times
“If you love historical romance, you’ll adore Jill Marie Landis.”
—New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah
“Historical romance at its very best!”
—Publishers Weekly
Other Titles by
Jill Marie Landis
from Bell Bridge Books
Historical Romance
Glass Beach
Magnolia Creek
Past Promises
Jade
Until Tomorrow
The Orchid Hunter
Romantic Suspense
Lover’s Lane
Heat Wave
Mysteries
Mai Tai One On
Two to Mango
Three to Get Lei’d
Too Hot Four Hula
Hawaii Five Uh-Oh
Jade
by
Jill Marie Landis
Bell Bridge Books
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.
Bell Bridge Books
PO BOX 300921
Memphis, TN 38130
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-813-4
Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-776-2
Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.
Copyright © 1991 by Jill Marie Landis.
Published in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
A mass market edition of this book was published by Amber House Books in 1991
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Cover design: Debra Dixon
Interior design: Hank Smith
Photo/Art credits:
Woman (manipulated) © Konradbak | Dreamstime.com
Background (manipulated) © Melkor3d | Dreamstime.com
:Ejhu:01:
Gold is worth nothing much . . .
Peace and happiness are priceless.
Prologue
Man cannot stir one inch . . .
without the push of Heaven’s finger.
China
1874
NEITHER LIGHT OF day nor the heat of the summer sun penetrated the interior of Li Po’s cave. Tin oil lamps hung suspended from slender lengths of chain imbedded in the rock; their smoke stained the ceiling of the cave with ever-widening, black circles of soot. The cloying scent of incense weighed heavy on the air, yet even it was unable to disguise the odor of must and time.
An age-old, slate-topped table banked the back wall of the cave; a work space covered with blue and white porcelain jars, clay pots, and glass vessels filled with the grains and powders essential to an alchemist’s work. Granular cinnabar, fine-dusted gold, slivers of jade and silver lay beside pieces of bark and snippets of pine tree boughs, baskets of peach pits, and dried cuttings from the divine herb, chih. A weathered basket with an unraveled rim housed a dozen or more eggs of tortoise and crane, ingredients vital in the mixing of medicinal elixirs.
A bulbous glass still with a triad of extended arms took precedence beside the instruments of weights and measures on the worktable. Hot coals burned brightly in a brazier, blinking like the glowing red eyes of a demon against the shadowed walls of the cave.
Everything stood in readiness. The hushed sound of footsteps sliding over the earthen floor and a soft mumbling and grumbling grew louder as an ancient alchemist, stooped and white haired, entered his shadowed realm. Li Po paused for a moment inside the large room in the earth’s interior and surveyed his worktable. His eyes, shaped like midnight black almonds, shone with inner light; they were quick to note that all was exactly as he had anticipated. The pine in the brazier had burned low until it was reduced to the fiery ash he needed to heat the still.
Stray white whiskers grew from the corners of the old man’s mouth and chin like long blades of dried grass. They formed a pointed beard that Li Po repeatedly stroked as he whispered to himself in the flickering light of the cave. The villagers thought him a wizard. Indeed, his fame was renowned throughout the countryside. For generation upon generation Li Po’s ancestors had been alchemists. His father’s father had once served the emperor.
Only Li Po knew the truth.
He was no more a wizard than the humblest village beggar. He was a charlatan, a fake who had held the people enthralled with little more than explosions of sulfur and simple predictions for which he carefully orchestrated the outcomes. Whatever valuable secrets his ancestors had possessed had long since been lost to time. Had his father or his father’s father truly been wizards they would still walk among the living—for it was well known that true alchemists possessed the very secret of life itself.
Now that he was stooped with age, he could see the doubt in the young men’s eyes when they watched him. He could feel their disbelief when he tried to hold onto his power over them. Even the high-soled shoes he had ordered made in Canton so that he might appear taller than any man in the village failed to bring him proper respect anymore. He often heard the young ones laughing whenever he passed by.
For years he had tried to discover the elixir of immortality supposedly known to the ancients. Today he would try again, and hope that he would succeed before death claimed him.
The old man had taken great care with his appearance this day so that he might please the goddess of the stove. He had followed every prescribed precaution in order to insure success. On his head he wore a tall, nearly square black hat. The headdress was covered with gold and red beads. He had donned the sacred crimson alchemist’s robe handed down from generation to generation. Unlike Li Po, whose wrinkled body showed all of his eighty-nine years, the robe had not aged, though it was hundreds of years old. The silk fabric, as red as bloo
d, was emblazoned with dragons and tigers, lions and cranes. Stars, crescent moons, and images of the sun were worked in threads of spun gold.
Mingled with the images were symbols, characters of an archaic form of Chinese long since forgotten by most. He was happy the robe was red, for it insured success. Red was the color of the female deity of the stove, the goddess who blessed all those who transmuted metals, brewed medicines, or merely prepared meals.
Li Po’s father had failed to rediscover the exact proportions of the magic life-extending elixir, but he had passed on one important clue to Li Po. On his deathbed, the father of Li Po whispered the same words his father before him had whispered with his dying breath: “The robe itself is magic, it is part of the transmutation.”
After years of futility, Li Po had nearly given up, but then, a month ago, after his last miserable attempt to transform himself into a youth, he realized where he had gone wrong. As he had cursed himself, his forefathers, and then the sacred robe, he suddenly stopped in mid-sentence. He slipped off the robe and ran his long fingernails over the symbols. He stared at the ancient script, at the lions, tigers, cranes and dragons, and a revelation came to him.
Merely wearing the robe and mixing his own elixir would not insure success. The secret formula itself had been carefully embroidered on the robe in gilded threads. As he looked closer, even his faded vision could not miss the fact that the robe, which had been in his family for generations, was as new as the day it had been made.
The magic had kept the robe from aging.
It had taken Li Po almost a month to transcribe the ancient symbols into a formula that made any sense to him at all. Now he was ready to proceed. Not only had Li Po fasted as ancient custom dictated, but he had purified himself with jasmine perfume and burned incense at a shrine outside of the village. He knew as well as any that one must enter the mountains to produce efficacious medicines. And so he had come to his cave deep in the heart of the mountain outside of Sin Ngan Hien.
This night, even the stars were aligned in his favor. All he needed to do was believe. Disbelief assured failure.
With an iron ladle he measured the white-hot ash into the bed below the still. His blue-veined hands were steady and sure. Li Po thought of the many years he had conducted the tan, the search for the secret formula that would produce the life-extending elixir. He chuckled to himself when he realized what a cruel trick fate had placed on his ancestors. The correct proportions of gold and mercury that would assure his immortality had always been within their grasp. They were emblazoned on the robe. He reminded himself to hurry. Time was of the essence.
He was fast becoming a very old man.
Li Po sifted the cinnabar and then gold dust into the still while he repeatedly whispered the words of an incantation that had also been handed down to him.
“Gold, you will not rot or decay. You are the most precious of all things on earth. Make me a lusty youth. Help me escape the perils of life and pain of death. Let me live to be as old as the universe itself. I pray that once I have ingested the elixir of life that I will regain my lost years and live forever. Change me as easily as the wind changes direction before a storm. As I say these words aloud, make them so.”
Li Po chuckled to himself—a rasping, choking sound—each time he repeated the line about the lusty youth. He alternately smiled and frowned as he bent stoop-shouldered over his worktable, sifting and measuring, mumbling and mixing. Soon now, thought Li Po, I will achieve the status of True Man and live forever. Far past eternity will I walk the earth as I have these many, many moons. I will watch the stars rotate through the heavens again and again.
And just as the philosopher Lao Tzu practiced magic, so too did Li Po.
Carefully he continued to sift ingredients into the glass crucible that topped the still as he chanted and chuckled over the words of his prayer. The old man’s mind was so attuned to the moment at hand, his concentration so focused, that he failed to hear the muffled sound of hushed whispers or the scuffling feet of the half-dozen men who crept stealthily toward him through the shadows.
They were upon him before he was aware of their presence.
Li Po turned, his withered, parchmentlike skin bleached with shock until it was as white as his whiskers. The fire behind his eyes blazed bright with anger. He recognized these men; they were the bearded foreigners who rode the tall-masted sailing ships.
Quickly, he turned and lifted the vial of elixir that had simmered above the still. He swirled it, made a great show of holding it to the light and watched it shimmer. It pulsated with life and glowed iridescent in the darkness.
He had to stall these intruders while the liquid cooled, for to drink it now would surely scald his throat beyond healing.
One of the men started to creep toward Li Po.
With the elixir clutched in one hand, he raised his arms high in a dramatic gesture of power. The wide sleeves of the royal red robe fanned out to give him the appearance of a huge bat ready to swoop down upon them. The golden animals on the robe shimmered in the lamp light, moving and swaying within the garment’s folds.
In unison, the men fell back a step.
Good, Li Po thought. Let the spineless creatures quiver! He reached down with one hand, scooped up a few grains of sulfur, and tossed them on the brazier.
They exploded with a shower of light and an ominous hiss.
The men scurried farther away.
For good measure, Li Po waved his arms and shouted curses at them.
Fiercely he stared at the burly fon kwei, the foreign devils who dared surround him in the inner sanctuary of his cave. They were certainly thieves of the lowest sort, for their clothes were strange and rough, tattered and filthy. Their faces were covered with thick, shaggy beards. One man wore an eye patch; another was missing his front teeth. Typical of other Caucasian devils he had seen, they reeked of grease, liquor, and unwashed flesh.
When Li Po spoke again, the strength in his tone belied his age. The words sounded clear and true against the walls of stone. “Be gone, devils! Take what you will and be gone!”
He glanced at the vial. It was still glowing, but the steam had died down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a shadow move; one of the men had ventured away from the others and was steadily creeping toward him. Slowly Li Po carried the glass vial to his lips, and just as he did, another man shouted and rushed forward.
In the struggle that followed, the vial fell from Li Po’s hand. It fell to the ground, where it shattered into hundreds of tiny shards. The precious elixir mingled with the broken glass on the floor of the cave. The liquid seemed to pulsate. As if it were a live thing, the liquid danced. Its iridescence flared, wavered, and then died.
Before Li Po knew what was happening, the foreigners moved forward in a pack. Someone grabbed his arms, twisted them behind his back, and bound his wrists together.
Li Po began shouting, commanding, summoning the gods for help. But when the first devil remained unharmed, the others failed to heed him.
Helpless now, he watched while they threw all of his precious items into baskets and cursed him in their harsh foreign tongue.
Li Po hung his head in resignation. If he had only swallowed this latest elixir, he would now be immortal. Fit and youthful, he would have been able to fight the devils off.
As the men prodded him out of the cave and along the crooked path that wound down the mountain, Li Po realized with aching clarity that unless he could retain possession of the robe and escape his captors, he would remain a captive, powerless old man doomed to meet the fate of all mortals.
Chapter One
Good deeds stay indoors . . .
Evil deeds travel many miles from home.
San Francisco
1875
ALTHOUGH SHE WAS anxious to see her hostess, Jade Douglas was glad she had arrived before her
old friend had awakened. She needed the time alone to collect her thoughts. Jade stared around her borrowed retreat, studying its overblown opulence. Fall sunlight, diffused by fog, barely lit the second-story room, but even the weak, early morning light could not diminish the shining surfaces of the various gilded frames, polished mirrors, and crystal droplets that adorned the wall sconces. Pausing just inside the door, Jade ran her fingertip over the textured wall covering flocked with gold highlights, and then crossed over to the high, four-poster bed swathed in crushed velvet curtains and spread—a veritable sea of emerald green.
Despite the richness of the room’s appointments, there was a look of untouched perfection about the place that made it lifeless and uninviting. When she set her satchel on the bed, the faded, lopsided bag reminded her of an old tramp that had somehow crept into a place where it definitely did not belong. She quickly moved it to the floor.
The same muted light that filled the room highlighted the golden strands woven within the red of her hair. Within seconds of closing the door behind her, she had released the wild mass from the severely wound knot tied at the slender nape of her neck. Now, as she ran her fingers through the thick, shining tresses, they sprang to life with curl. Jade shook her hair once more, enjoying the way it swayed past her shoulders.
She retrieved her buttonhook from the satchel, then sat on the edge of the bed and slowly unhooked the buttons of her well-worn shoes. Once they were undone, she sighed with relief, and slipped them off of her feet. They fell to the floor, the sound muffled by the thick Persian carpet. After tossing the hook back into the bag, she paused to admire the ornate detail of the rug’s green and gold pattern. She wriggled her stockinged toes, then stretched, arms skyward, and crossed the room to linger before the window. She opened it and leaned out to welcome the chill October air that chased away the stuffiness of the room. Jade stood in silent contemplation, relishing the tangy scent of salt on the air, and stared out at wisps of fog that crept along and eddied about the other homes that lined Powell Street.
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