“In any case,” Kyle said, “if the lady was looking at me rather than you, we can be sure of one thing.”
“What?”
“It’s a setup.”
Archer blinked. “I’m having trouble following you.”
“Take it one word at a time. In the last two weeks you and I have gone to three jade previews together.”
“Five.”
“Two were so lousy they don’t count. If Lianne saw past you to me, then it’s because the Tang Consortium figures that I’m an easier nut to crack than you.”
“You don’t think it’s possible that Lianne prefers blondes?”
Kyle shrugged. “Anything is possible, but the last time a woman passed up a tall, dark, and handsome type for me, I nearly got killed before I figured out exactly what kind of screwing was on her mind. That kind of lesson sticks with a man.”
For a moment Archer didn’t know what to say. Kyle was certain that the only thing women wanted was to use him and lose him. It hadn’t been like that before last year.
At times Archer missed the old Kyle, the one who laughed easily, the golden boy touched by the sun. But Archer never would have asked that golden boy to do anything more serious than match wines with meals.
“Maybe it’s a setup,” Archer agreed. “And maybe there’s a different game. That’s up to you to find out. If you want to.”
“And if I don’t?”
Archer shrugged. “I’ll put off my trip to Japan and take a run at the Tangs myself.”
“What about Justin? He’s blonde. Kind of.”
“Justin and Lawe are ass deep in their own alligators, trying to get a line on a new emerald strike in Brazil. Besides, they’re too young.”
“They’re older than I am,” Kyle pointed out.
“Not since Marju.”
Kyle smiled. It wasn’t an open, sunny kind of smile. It was like Archer’s, more teeth than comfort.
“I’m in,” Kyle said. “When and where does the game begin?”
“Tonight. Seattle. Wear a tux.”
“I don’t have one.”
“You will.”
Lianne Blakely sat in her mother’s elegant Kirkland condominium and watched Lake Washington’s gray surface being teased by cat’s-paws of wind. Never quite still, never predictable in its changes, the lake licked slyly at the neat lawns and sidewalks that crowded its urban shores. In balcony planters and along streets, tree branches were just beginning to shimmer with the kind of green that was more hope than actual announcement of spring’s return. The bravest of the daffodils were already in bloom, lifting their cheerful faces to the cloud-buried sun.
“Do you want green, jasmine, or oolong?” Anna Blakely called from the open kitchen.
“Oolong, please, Mom. It’s going to be a marathon tonight. I’ll need all the help I can get.”
And all the courage, Lianne acknowledged silently, wryly. She had promised herself that if Kyle Donovan was at the ball tonight, she would pick him up. Or try to.
Putting off the encounter hadn’t made it any easier, so she had decided to just get it over with. If she failed, she failed, and her father would just have to chalk up one more disappointment from his bastard daughter. In truth, she knew she didn’t have the kind of recklessness or innate female confidence to approach a good-looking stranger with the idea of getting acquainted for business purposes, much less for sexual ones.
But Lianne was definitely the kind to repay a favor or keep a promise. Engineering a meeting with Kyle Donovan was both.
Her stomach hitched at the thought. She tried to calm herself by saying that Kyle wouldn’t be at the ball tonight. He had no patience for that kind of arts-and-culture crush and no need to siphon money from society’s cream.
Lucky him.
“Nervous?” her mother asked from the kitchen.
Lianne barely prevented herself from jumping up and pacing the room. “Of course I’m nervous. I chose every single piece of the Jade Trader’s display myself. Wen Zhi Tang never gave me that much responsibility before.”
“Wen’s eyes are going. Besides, the crafty old bastard wanted goods that would appeal to the Americans as well as to overseas Chinese.”
“And his bastard granddaughter is as close as he can come to American taste, is that it?” Lianne retorted.
The sound of a teaspoon hitting the granite countertop made her wince, but she didn’t apologize for her bluntness. She had spent thirty years pretending that she was the legitimate daughter of a widow, while knowing full well that Johnny Tang was her father and Wen was her grandfather.
Lianne was tired of the charade, just as she was tired of watching her mother treated like an unwelcome stranger by the Tang family. As far as Lianne was concerned, bastards were made, not born.
And the Tang family had made more than its share of them.
Anna Blakely walked into the room carrying a lacquered tea tray that held a pale bone china teapot and two elegant, handleless cups. She wore a scarlet brocaded silk jacket, slim black silk pants, and low sandals. Pearls gleamed at her neck and wrists, along with a Rolex. On her right hand she wore a diamond and ruby ring that was worth more than half a million dollars. Except for her height and glorious blonde hair, she was the picture of a prosperous Hong Kong wife.
But Lianne’s mother was neither prosperous nor Chinese nor a wife. She had built her life around being mistress to a married man for whom family, legitimate family, was the most important thing in life; a man whose Chinese family referred to Anna only as Johnny’s round-eye concubine, a woman who didn’t even know who her parents were, much less her ancestors. Yet no matter how often Anna came in at the bottom of her lover’s list of family obligations, she didn’t complain.
Watching her mother’s quiet elegance as she poured tea, Lianne loved her but didn’t understand the choices the older woman had made. And still made.
Bitterness stirred, a bitterness that was as old as Lianne’s realization that she would never be forgiven for not being one hundred percent Chinese. She was too much an American to understand why any circumstance of birth, blood, or sex should make her inferior.
It had taken Lianne years to accept that she would never be accepted, much less loved, by her father’s family. But she had vowed she would be respected by them. Someday Wen Zhi would look past her wide whiskey eyes and thin nose and see a granddaughter rather than the unfortunate result of his son’s lust for an Anglo concubine.
“Is Johnny coming by later tonight?” Lianne asked.
She never called her mother’s lover by anything other than his given name. Certainly not Father or Dad or Daddy or Pop. Not even Uncle.
“Probably not,” Anna said, sitting down. “Apparently there’s a family get-together after the charity ball.”
Lianne went still. A family get-together.
And she, who had spent three months of her free time preparing the Tang Consortium’s display, wasn’t even invited.
It shouldn’t have hurt. She should be used to it by now.
Yet it did hurt and she would never be used to it. She longed to be part of a family: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins and grandparents, family memories and celebrations stretching back through the years. Except for her mother, the Tangs were Lianne’s family, her only family.
But she wasn’t theirs.
Without realizing what she was doing, Lianne ran her fingers over the jade bangle she wore on her left wrist. Emerald green, translucent, of the finest Burmese jade, the bracelet was worth three hundred thousand dollars. The long, single strand necklace of fine Burmese beads she wore was worth twice that.
She owned neither piece of jewelry. Tonight she was merely an animated display case for the Tang family’s Jade Trader goods. As a sales tactic it was effective. Resting against the white silk of her simple dress and the pale gold of her skin, the jewelry glowed with a mysterious inner light that would act like a beacon to jade lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors.
Lianne’s own jewe
lry was less costly, though no less fine to someone knowledgeable about jade. She chose her personal pieces with an eye toward her own desires rather than worth at auction. The trio of hairpicks that kept her dark hair in a swirl on top of her head were modern shafts of Burmese jade carved in a style four thousand years old. When she wore them, she felt connected to the Chinese half of her heritage, the half she had spent her whole life trying to be part of.
Distantly, Lianne wondered if she would have been invited to the party if Kyle Donovan was her date. Johnny, Number Three Son in the Tang dynasty, was hell-bent on getting entree into Donovan International. He had pressured Lianne to get acquainted with Kyle: Come on. Don’t go all modest and fake Chinese on me. You’re as American as your mother. Just do what the other girls do. Go up and introduce yourself. That’s how I met Anna.
The memory of her father’s words went down Lianne’s spine like cold water. She couldn’t help wondering if Johnny figured that what was good for the mother was good enough for the daughter: a life of guaranteed second-best in a man’s affections.
A mistress.
As Lianne drank tea from ancient, unimaginably fine china, she told herself that Johnny only wanted her to meet Kyle, not to bed him for the sake of Tang family business.
“Lianne?”
She swallowed the bracing tea and realized that her mother had asked a question. Quickly, Lianne replayed the last few minutes in her mind.
“No,” Lianne said. “I won’t be staying for the ball. Why would I?”
“You might meet some nice young man and—”
“I have work piled up,” Lianne interrupted. “I’ve spent too much time on Tang business already.”
“Johnny appreciates it. He’s so proud of you.”
Lianne drank tea and said nothing at all. Disturbing her mother’s comfortable fantasy would only lead to the kind of argument that everybody lost.
“Thanks for the tea, Mom. I’d better get going. Parking will be a bitch.”
“Didn’t Johnny give you one of the Jade Trader passes?”
“No.”
“He must have forgotten,” Anna said, frowning. “He has been worried about something a lot lately, but he won’t tell me what.”
Lianne made a sound that could have been sympathy. Careful not to jerk the handle, she closed the door of her mother’s condo behind her and headed out into the gusty night.
The benefit ball for Pacific Rim Asian Charities was one of the big social events of the season in Seattle. Invitations were reserved for the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the fabulously beautiful. Normally, Kyle and Archer wouldn’t have bothered attending this kind of show-and-tell in the name of charity and social climbing.
“At least the tux fits,” Kyle muttered.
“I told you we were the same size, runt.”
Kyle didn’t say anything. He was still surprised that he fit into Archer’s long-legged, wide-shouldered clothes. No matter how old Kyle got, part of him was still the youngest of the four Donovan brothers, the butt of too many brotherly jokes, the runt of the litter always fighting to prove that he was as good as his bigger brothers in everything from fishing to karate to exploring the face of the earth for gems.
“You see her?” Kyle asked, looking past the herd of limousines to the glittery crowd filing toward Seattle’s newest hotel.
“Not yet.”
“Not ever. I didn’t know this many people owned tuxes. Not to mention stones.” He whistled softly as a matron walked past wearing a diamond necklace whose central feature was a pendant the size and color of a canary. “Did you see that rock? It should be in a museum.”
Archer flicked a glance at the woman and then looked away. “You want to talk museum pieces, try the companions of the Taiwanese industrialists who just walked in. Especially the woman in red.”
Kyle glanced past his brother. The red silk sheath—and the body beneath it—was an eye-popper, yet it was the woman’s headdress that sent murmurs of appreciation and greed through the crowd: a lacework cap of pearls encased her gleaming black hair. Teardrop pearls as big as a man’s thumb shimmered and swayed around her face. A triple strand of matched teardrop pearls the size of grapes fell from the back of the cap down to the cleft in the woman’s rhythmically swinging ass.
“Companion, huh? As in mistress for the moment?” Kyle said.
“It’s common enough. Most of the Asian men leave their wives at home with the in-laws when they come to the States.”
“Afraid their little women will bolt to greener pastures if they get the chance?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be fenced like that in the first place. Let’s try the atrium. That’s where the Jade Trader has its display. SunCo’s stuff will be there, too. Ever since China took over Hong Kong, the Sun clan has been whittling away at the Tangs.”
Archer smiled slightly. “Been doing some research?”
“If I had to research in order to name the competition, I wouldn’t be much good to Donovan International, would I?”
“You’re really serious about dragging Donovan Inc. into the jade trade, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been serious about it ever since I held my first five-thousand-year-old jade pi,” Kyle said simply. “I’ll never know why the piece was carved, but someone back then was like me. He loved the smooth weight of jade. Otherwise he never would have tackled a stone that hard with little more than rawhide, sticks, and grit.”
When Kyle turned and started toward the atrium, Archer put a hand on his arm, stopping him.
“There’s only a limited market for Neolithic jade artifacts,” Archer said neutrally.
“The market is expanding every day. Even New York has caught on. Besides, there’s a lot more to jade than Neolithic artifacts.”
“Do you feel expert enough to advise us on the full spectrum of jade, to go one-on-one with the Pacific Rim’s best?”
“Not yet. But Lianne Blakely is. Or didn’t your contact mention that?”
“He didn’t make a point of it. He just said she was a kind of back door into the closed world of the Tang Consortium.”
“So let’s go see if I can learn more from sweet Lianne than she can learn from me before she’s finished using me for whatever old man Wen Zhi Tang has in mind.”
Archer blinked. “That’s scary.”
“What?”
“I understood you.”
Kyle forged a way through the crowd with Archer at his side. Once inside the atrium, the crush of people broke into clots centered around various exhibits of corporations that were donating pieces to the midnight auction.
“Forget it,” Kyle said, pulling Archer away from a Mikimoto pearl exhibit. “Lianne Blakely is into jade, remember?”
“Any harm in looking at something else?”
“You’re as bad as Faith when it comes to pearls.”
“As bad as you and jade?”
“Worse,” Kyle said, looking around.
Against the towering greenery-and-glass backdrop of the atrium, people from three continents and several island nations revolved around the central fountain, creating a kaleidoscope of languages and fashion. The fountain itself was striking: a clear, cantilevered glass sculpture of rectangles and rhomboids where light and water danced with a grace that people could only envy. The sweet music of the water blended with the languages of Hong Kong, Japan, and several regions of China, as well as English accented by countries as distant as Australia and Britain and as close as Canada.
“The jade must be on the other side of the atrium,” Kyle said.
“Why?”
“Most of the Anglos are right here, crowded around the rubies and sapphires from Burma or the Colombian emeralds or African diamonds. Jade is a more subtle, civilized taste.”
“Crap,” Archer said mildly. “Civilization has nothing to do with it. Jade was available in ancient China. Diamonds weren’t. Same goes for Europeans. Clear gemstones were more available than jade. T
radition is created from the materials at hand.”
Kyle and Archer continued arguing about culture, civilization, and gems while they circled around the fountain. On the way they passed museum-quality pre-Columbian jade artifacts from Mexico, Central, and South America that were displayed on slabs of hand-hewn stone. Fright masks of gold and turquoise grinned or snarled, scaring off demons whose names were known only by people thousands of years dead. Mixed in among the artifacts were modern examples of gold and jade art.
Everything—ancient and modern—had a card in front of it naming the corporation that owned the object. Corporate displays of support for the arts were as much the purpose of the evening as the charity auction that would precede the ball.
By the time the two brothers came to the section reserved for offshore Chinese exhibits, Kyle was wishing he was aboard the Tomorrow, sharpening hooks and tying leaders for a dawn fishing raid. He snagged a glass of wine from a passing waiter, sipped, and grimaced. At a function like this he had expected higher quality.
“Bingo,” Archer said softly.
Kyle forgot the mediocre wine. “Where?”
“To the left of SunCo’s jade dragon screens, near the Sikh in the jeweled turban.”
Though they were less than ten feet away, Kyle at first didn’t see any woman. Then the Indian Sikh stepped aside.
Kyle stared. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Damn.”
Kyle didn’t know what he had been expecting, but he knew Lianne Blakely wasn’t it. With a combination of skepticism, disgust, and grudging male interest, he watched the sleek, petite young woman who supposedly was so smitten with him that she had been watching him from afar for two weeks.
Yeah. Right. He was standing close enough to see that she had on real silk stockings and her patrician little nose was buried in an exhibit of Warring States jade ornaments as though he didn’t exist.
Then Lianne turned and for an instant looked right at Kyle. Her wide tilted eyes were the color of cognac. She hesitated as though recognizing him. But if she had, she wasn’t going to do anything about it. She went back to studying jade as though no one else in the room existed, certainly not a man she was interested in meeting.
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