The Dragon and the Dove

Tara Janzen

E-Book Copyright Tara Janzen, 2012

E-Book Published by Tara Janzen at Smashwords, 2012

Cover Design by Hot Damn Designs, 2012

E-Book Format by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

Excerpt for Dragon’s Eden

Excerpt for Stevie Lee

Dear Reader ,

Welcome to the Tara Janzen line of classic romances! New York Times Bestselling author, Tara Janzen, is the creator of the lightning-fast paced and super sexy CRAZY HOT and CRAZY COOL Steele Street series of romantic suspense novels. But before she fell in love with the hot cars, bad boys, big guns, and wild women of Steele Street, she wrote steamy romances for the Loveswept line under the name Glenna McReynolds. All thirteen of these much-loved classic romances are now available as eBooks.

Writing as both Glenna McReynolds and Tara Janzen, this national bestselling author has won numerous awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America, and nine 4 ½ TOP PICKS from Romantic Times magazine. Two of her books are on the Romantic Times ALL-TIME FAVORITES list – RIVER OF EDEN and SHAMELESS . LOOSE AND EASY, a Steele Street novel, is one of Amazon’s TOP TEN ROMANCES for 2008 .

She is also the author of an epic medieval fantasy trilogy, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, DREAM STONE, and PRINCE OF TIME.

Titles

Classic Romances

Scout’s Honor

Thieves In The Night

Stevie Lee

Dateline: Kydd and Rios

Blue Dalton

Outlaw Carson

Moonlight and Shadows

A Piece of Heaven

Shameless

The Courting Cowboy

Avenging Angel

The Dragon and the Dove

Dragon’s Eden

Medieval Fantasy Trilogy

“A stunning epic of romantic fantasy.” Affaire de Coeur, five-star review

The Chalice and the Blade

Dream Stone

Prince of Time

River of Eden – “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! Glenna McReynolds has created an instant adventure classic.” Romantic Times – 2002 BEST ROMANTIC SUSPENSE AWARD WINNER

Steele Street Series – “Hang on to your seat for the ride of your life…thrilling…sexy. Tara Janzen has outdone herself.” Fresh Fiction

Crazy Hot

Crazy Cool

Crazy Wild

Crazy Kisses

Crazy Love

Crazy Sweet

On the Loose

Cutting Loose

Loose and Easy

Breaking Loose

Loose Ends

SEAL Of My Dreams Anthology

All proceeds from the sale of SEAL Of My Dreams are pledged to Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit foundation supporting veterans medical research.

Panama Jack, by Tara Janzen

For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/mSstpd; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen.

One

It was a shame, really, Jessica Langston thought, that anyone besides herself had their days held hostage by her eccentric employer. She cast another surreptitious glance over her desk at the Oriental woman waiting in the reception area of Daniels, Ltd. Two hours earlier the woman had given her a card identifying herself as Dr. Sharon Liu and had said she was there to see Cooper Daniels. When Jessica politely explained the futility of such an endeavor, the woman had only smiled and sat down to wait in the richly appointed office, sinking her elegant form into a wingback chair and balancing her slippers on the cinnabar-colored carpet.

Jessica could have told her again that she was wasting her time, but she had already implied as much twice since their initial conversation. Her employer did not see people without an appointment. For that matter, her employer did not see people with an appointment. Truly, she doubted if her employer saw people in any capacity. Jessica had worked for Cooper Daniels for two weeks and he had not seen her.

She hadn’t seen him either—unless she counted the dusty oil painting stuck up on the wall in the darkest corner of the office.

Crotchety old man, she thought, giving the picture a bored glance. The artist certainly hadn’t been paid to glamorize her employer. Cooper Daniels looked stern, unforgiving, wrinkled up, dried out, and like he could kick off at any moment.

Squelching a sigh of irritation, she went back to flipping through The Wall Street Journal. She hadn’t gone for an MBA on top of an undergraduate degree in accounting and subjected herself to six weeks of intensive testing and interviewing by a gray-haired harridan of a headhunter named Mrs. Crabb to spend her days reading. She was supposed to be Cooper Daniels’s assistant, not his receptionist.

She shouldn’t complain, Jessica told herself. She was certainly getting paid as if she were assisting the owner and founder of Daniels, Ltd. in his Pacific Rim wheeling and dealing, as if she were tracking high-end real estate investment opportunities, which she’d been educated to do.

Dr. Liu rose from her chair and walked over to the large oak-framed windows overlooking Powell Street and the Bay, drawing Jessica’s attention away from her newspaper. An olive-colored silk pantsuit with designer origins hugged the woman’s slender figure; her hair was drawn back in a severe but regal chignon. Jessica wondered how long she would wait before she finally gave up and left. The other woman’s patience made her think Dr. Liu knew something she didn’t, and that unnerved her. Any normal person would have taken her hints and left an hour ago. But that was the pot calling the kettle black. Any normal person wouldn’t have spent the last two weeks working for a man whose very existence was becoming doubtful. Sometimes she wondered if he’d died and nobody had remembered to tell her.

“Ms. Langston, Cooper Daniels here. Please send Dr. Liu in.”

The blue band of light blinking on her intercom and the accompanying masculine voice catapulted Jessica’s pulse into overdrive and paralyzed her from the neck down. A barrage of questions spilled into her mind, adding to the general confusion: How had he gotten into his office without her seeing him? How long had he been in his office? What was she supposed to do?

Respond, came the answer. Regrouping quickly, she leaned forward and pressed the response panel on the intercom.

“Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in.” She turned to the woman standing at the window. “Dr. Liu? Mr. Daniels will see you now.”

Jessica waited for Dr. Liu to retrieve her medical bag, then with as much grace as she could manage, considering her heart was pounding a mile a minute, she rose and stepped over to the ornate doors leading to Cooper Daniels’s private office. Dragons with fangs bared and claws showing, wings spread and flames rolling, faced each other in frozen flight on the carved wooden panels. Surprisingly, the doors opened when she turned the handles. They never had before when she’d tried them, and she’d tried them many, many times—even going so far as to put her shoulder to the job and wiggle a bobby pin or two in the lock.

“Thank you.” The Oriental woman slipped by her with a small smile that suggested, “I told you so.”

Jessica responded with a tight little smile of her own, conceding defeat. The woman had known something she hadn’t known. Dr. Liu had known Cooper Daniels was alive and well and in residence.

Before closing the doors, Jessica glanced into the office, intending to give the old man a nod of acknowledgment. He wasn’t anywhere in sight. The only indication of his presence was the sound of running water coming from an open door off to the left, the sound of a lot of running water, as if someone was taking a shower.

After spending so many days looking at Cooper Daniels’s portrait, she refused to dwell on the picture her last thought brought to mind, let alone take the time to imagine what Dr. Liu was doing there. Instead she made a quick study of the rest of the office, noting an ancient private elevator against the south wall—which answered one of her questions—the massive desk commandeering the north wall, and the elaborate arrangement of flowers and foliage cascading over a large, low table that anchored a circle of chairs.

She had turned to leave when a glimmer of gold caught her eye. She looked down and her next heartbeat caught for a second, captured by the dragon woven into the carpet. A hundred shades of bronze, yellow, copper, and brown edged the scales that began at the tail, where she stood with her feet perfectly placed in the heart-shaped point. Startled, she moved off the creature and looked up toward its head. Fierce emerald-green eyes warmed in the late-afternoon sunshine. Blue smoke curled out of the winged beast’s nostrils. Flames of red and orange danced upon its tongue.

Fascinated and strangely wary, she let her gaze travel up the reptilian profile and down the crested rows of gilt scales. The animal was the essence of power, a force to be reckoned with, snaking across the cinnabar carpet and through a bank of white clouds in all its golden glory. And it was chained, collared at the neck by a broad iron band.

Dr. Liu discreetly cleared her throat, and Jessica’s eyes flicked up. She knew she either had to leave or have a reason to stay. With the other woman moving about the large room with more familiarity than Jessica could claim, leaving was the only sensible option. When the shower was turned off in the adjoining room, leaving became the preferable option.

With one last intrigued look at the dragon, she closed the doors and walked back to her desk. She felt like she’d passed a horrendously complicated test of nerves and composure, something along the lines of “Can a person sit in a room by herself for two weeks and not have a heart attack when the intercom suddenly comes to life?”

Her smile returned in triumph. She’d passed with flying colors. Her “Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll send her right in,” had been delivered with unruffled efficiency, despite sweating palms and a still-jumping pulse. As soon as Dr. Sharon Liu left, she and Mr. Daniels were going to have to straighten a few things out. Outrageous salary or not, she wasn’t going to spend her whole career waiting to say “Yes, Mr. Daniels” once a month.

An hour later her pulse had slowed to a near-comatose rate, she’d memorized a full quarter page of stock prices, and she’d decided she was leaving Daniels, Ltd. no matter what Cooper Daniels came up with as an explanation for his unorthodox behavior. She’d earned the right to be more than some old man’s glorified secretary.

Besides, there wasn’t any irreplaceable prestige in working for a company and a man no one had ever heard of, especially if the company was on the skids—which, given her work load and despite her salary, she was beginning to suspect. If Daniels was going to go bankrupt, he’d have to do it without her. She needed her outrageous paycheck, every penny of it.

Her MBA from Stanford University had not come cheap, emotionally or financially, but it had been the best chance she’d had of getting off the bottom rung of the corporate ladder. Stanford had been a chance to pull her life together after a dismal divorce, a chance to come home to San Francisco with her children.

Now she owed a bundle to Stanford and the government, and to her family for all their help. She couldn’t afford to take a chance with Daniels, Ltd.

Before she left, though, she was going to ask her employer about the chained dragon. A man didn’t have something like that splashed all over his carpet without its having some significance. What that significance might be, she couldn’t begin to guess. But it meant something, something powerful. She knew it. She’d felt it.

“Ms. Langston? Cooper Daniels. I’d like to see you in my office.” His surprisingly strong voice sounded on the intercom again without warning, startling her into another minor stroke.

Damn the man. She pressed a hand to her chest for a few seconds to calm her heart before pushing the response panel.

“Yes, Mr. Daniels,” she said, silently swearing it would be the last time the words passed her lips. “I’ll be right in.”

She didn’t know what to expect, but she knew what he expected. Mrs. Crabb had been very explicit about the high level of professionalism and creative intelligence required by Cooper Daniels, about the value of thinking on one’s feet and being able to roll with the punches. Jessica had never doubted her supply of any of those attributes—until she stood outside the dragon-carved doors and prepared to meet the man who had kept her cooling her heels for ten-and-three-quarters working days.

The instant she stepped inside his office she realized she hadn’t done nearly enough preparation. On the other hand, she consoled herself, nothing could have prepared her for the sight of a man who was young, healthy . . . and naked.

And that, she realized, was why most of her classmates at Stanford had opted for jobs with Fortune 500 companies or on Wall Street. At certain levels of success, people tended to take a bit more care with their appearance, most of them being dressed to impress—the operative word being “dressed.”

Dr. Liu ignored her presence and continued working her hands down the warmly bronzed expanse of back bared to the California sunshine. The man was lying on a massage table that had been set up beneath the windows. His head was buried in his arms with nothing showing except an unruly mop of sun-streaked light brown hair. A discreetly placed sheet covered him from waist to thigh, but Jessica didn’t have any doubts that he was naked underneath it—and she was mesmerized despite herself.

“There are two leather folders on my desk, Ms. Langston,” the man said without lifting his head, confirming his identity as Cooper Daniels. His voice was unmistakably the one she’d just heard on her intercom. “The green one is mine. The red one is yours. Please familiarize yourself with the information in the red folder.”

Jessica nodded in agreement, but made no move to comply, her gaze fixed on the sleek, powerful lines of his body. He was beautiful, like a sated animal in repose, oblivious to watching eyes and social decorum.

The curves of muscle in his arms flowed down from strong, broad shoulders to square, masculine hands. Dr. Liu moved to massage his legs, and Jessica’s gaze followed as the other woman’s long, slender fingers kneaded and soothed his well-muscled thighs.

Jessica swallowed softly, suddenly feeling overly warm. The Cooper Daniels in the painting was obviously a much older relative of the man in Dr. Sharon Liu’s inestimable care.

“There is a stock offering on a company in Jakarta,” her employer said. “They’re trying to buy themselves into a major building project, a resort. I want you to find out the names of everyone involved in the project and then get me a rundown of their other financial investments.”

She nodded again, embarrassingly dumbstruck, but able to rouse herself enough to step over to the desk. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she became immediately aware that she was walking on the dragon. She made an unconscious move to keep from putting her foot into its fiery mouth. Another sidestep kept her from pressing into the iron-gray band around its neck. It was then that she noticed the words inscribed on the collar. Still heading toward the desk, she turned in a half circle to get the golden letters upright in her line of vision.

By Love Alone, she read, her eyebrows drawing together in disbelief as she came to a stop beside the desk. She read the words again to make sure she’d gotten them right. Then her gaze moved onward, to the golden chain attached to the collar. The gilt links wound their way through silver-lined clouds, until they broke free and found the dragon’s master.

Her first thought was that not even love would enable such a delicate creature to hold the beast at the other end of the chain.

Behind her, Cooper Daniels groaned, a soft sound rumbling up from deep in his chest, and Jessica felt a disconcerting flush of heat sweep through her body. By Love Alone. She looked away from the white dove holding the chain in its beak and returned her gaze to the man stretched out on the table. He changed positions with languorous grace, drawing one knee up and turning his head to the other side with a deep sigh. Using a subtle move, Dr. Liu unfolded another length of the sheet before any really interesting part of him could be exposed. When he was covered, she continued to work her magic down his thighs to the backs of his knees.

“You have my most humble gratitude, lao pengyou,” he said to the doctor. His voice had grown gravelly with pleasure, sparking another wave of heat through Jessica’s midsection. The impropriety of him having a massage in her presence was nothing compared with the wild imaginings filling her mind.

He was the dragon—she had no doubts—but who was the dove? Not Dr. Liu, she knew. Despite the physical intimacy of the massage, Sharon Liu appeared to be professionally detached. She worked Cooper Daniels’s body with skill and care, but not with love or tenderness. Not with the uncomfortable awareness Jessica felt while watching him.

She was out of line, way out of line, and for the life of her, she couldn’t understand why he was having such a sexual effect on her. She had four brothers, an ex-husband, and a son. The male anatomy held no mysteries for her. The possibility of attraction was ludicrous. She’d been harboring a grudge against him for weeks, and she hadn’t even seen his face.

He lifted his head then, and Jessica realized she was in deep trouble.

Cooper Daniels ran a hand back through his silky fine hair and narrowed his drowsy gaze on her. “Who are you?” he asked, the sultry pitch of pleasure in his voice replaced by a hint of confusion.

“Jessica Langston.” She barely got the words out around the lump growing in her throat. She felt foolishly uninformed. Throughout her application and interviewing process, she’d never been led to expect anything like Cooper Daniels in the flesh.

The uncompromising angles and hard sensuality of his face emanated a wildness she’d never seen in any boardroom, a raw combination of threat and promise underscored by the greenest eyes she’d ever seen, eyes the color of emeralds, the color of the dragon’s. His hair was longer than she’d thought, the straight fall of it brushed haphazardly off his face. He was unshaven, with beard stubble darkening his jaw.

“Try again.” The words were delivered as a command, with all the confusion erased from his tone.

“Jessica Langston,” she repeated, holding her ground and wondering if the line of questioning was another sign of his unorthodox behavior, or another test of her nerves. She didn’t appreciate either, but knew now was not the time to call his bluff, not unless she was ready to lose. Her employer looked more than capable of eating her for lunch and needing seconds.

“I was very explicit about what I required in an assistant,” he said coldly. “You are not it. Elise Crabb assured me Jessica Langston was.”

She sensed his arrogance was as much a part of him as his breath, but he was in error. According to what Mrs. Crabb had told her, she met all of his requirements. If anything, she was overqualified for the job.

“If you will check my resume and personnel file, Mr. Daniels, you will find I am more than capable of handling the job.” She was also capable of her own arrogance, though she preferred to think of it as well-placed confidence. He wouldn’t find many Stanford MBAs with four years of experience in the Far Eastern real estate division of a major insurance company. That her experience had been gained as a glorified secretary was irrelevant given her new degree.

“No, Ms. Langston,” he said, acknowledging only her identity. “You are not capable of handling the job. What you are is a fatal error in judgment that Elise Crabb will find quite costly.”

Jessica blanched, but managed to keep her gaze steady. A fatal error in judgment? She’d never been so insulted in her life.

She was the cream of the crop, the best. The only reason she’d accepted the Daniels, Ltd. offer was because of the salary and the location. A compelling combination, she admitted, but he was still lucky to have her, and if this was a test, she’d be damned if she failed, especially in front of an audience. Dr. Liu had stepped away from the table at the first sign of dissension and was looking out the window, but there was no way for her not to hear the argument in progress.

“You are dismissed,” Cooper Daniels said after a tense silence.

“On what grounds, may I ask?” With effort, Jessica held her rising anger in check and maintained at least a veneer of professionalism. If this was a game to him, he’d gone too far. If it wasn’t, she deserved a full explanation before she threw his job back in his face.

He once again took his time in answering. But this wait was accompanied by a slow, scorching perusal of her body, from the toes of her black pumps, up the length of her black suit, to the V-neck of her cream-colored silk blouse. His gaze deliberately lingered there until she blushed. She felt touched, indecently so, which she knew beyond doubt had been his intention.

“Innocence,” he finally said, his impossibly green eyes meeting hers with all the force of a head-on collision.

The last of Jessica’s composure crumbled under the impact.

“I beg your pardon?” she finally managed to say.

“Innocence,” he repeated. “You’ve got it, and I don’t want it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, surprised into candor.

“It’s also the truth,” he said without apology. “You are dismissed.” He settled himself back down on the table, turning his head away from her and cradling it in his arms. Dr. Liu returned to his side and began massaging the soles of his feet.

The hell she was dismissed, Jessica thought. She’d never heard such drivel. Innocent? Her? She was the single mother of two children, who had been dumped by her husband when he had needed to “find himself,” apparently in the arms of another woman.

“As your assistant, Mr. Daniels,” she said firmly, refusing to concede anything at this point, “I have to counsel against such an unfounded, judgmental, highly subjective statement. It could cost you millions in court.”

“Not if you want a reference,” he said, then muttered a curse when Dr. Liu moved away again.

“I think you’ve underestimated my integrity.”

“And I think you’ve underestimated my authority.”

Since there was no reasonable way to counter his statement, she let it slide and chose an alternate approach.

“We have a legally binding contract, which promises a twenty-day grace period from any decision of termination unless agreed to by both parties.” She’d been tossed out on her backside once, and the experience had taught her the necessity of working with a net. The special clause was her version of a parachute. It was far from golden, but it was there.

“You’ve had your twenty days,” was his reply.

“The contract states twenty working days,” she said without hesitation, sensing victory. So help her, she would have the satisfaction of quitting. “You owe me nine days, ten if you include the rest of today.”

“I’ll give you a hundred dollars for each of them.”

She stiffened her shoulders and glared at the unseeing man who was treating her future and her integrity with such nonchalance. She couldn’t be bought off, and certainly not for a measly thousand dollars.

“Five hundred,” he said when she didn’t answer. After another long silence, he swore softly and raised himself to his elbows. He cast a long-suffering look in her direction. “Ten thousand dollars, flat severance with excellent reference.” An arrogant smile graced his mouth. “Take it, Ms. Langston. It is my final offer.”

She had not graduated at the top of her class by being either passive or pliable—or innocent, for that matter.

“I want my ten days,” she said, fully aware that she’d just had a cataclysmic change of mind. She would walk out in ten days, gladly, but she’d be damned if she let him throw her out.

Cooper respected tenacity and stubbornness. One or the other, and sometimes both, had been the only things between him and death at times. There was something to be said for being too damn stubborn to let go of a job . . . or to let go of life. He respected integrity, too, though by necessity it was usually one of the first things to go in his business, right after innocence.

He let his gaze travel the length of Jessica Langston again. She was attractive, decidedly so, but not beautiful in a classically California way. Her curves were too rounded, her mouth too determined, her posture too severe, yet there was a dangerous softness about her. She was not what he’d been led to expect. She was not what he wanted.

He was going up against the she-devil of the South China Sea, a woman without shame or fear. He needed somebody by his side who could hold her own in bad company, somebody who didn’t hesitate to win at any cost.

He’d asked for a female shark with a finely honed instinct for the jugular, and the most renowned headhunter on the West Coast had sent him an angelfish in silk. The pricey material draped Jessica Langston’s breasts, caressing their fullness. Her thick auburn hair was cut short in front, but hugged the back of her neck almost to her shoulders. The softness he refused to be responsible for appeared not in the set of her mouth, but in its generous shape.

She looked kissable, a thought so untenable that it made him smile. Cooper needed an assistant. For reasons that had everything to do with mental acuity and nothing to do with physical attributes, he wanted a woman. He did not have to hire one with great legs, pale, pretty skin, and auburn hair. He would not hire one who even remotely made him think of sex, and when he looked at Jessica Langston, the thought was far from remote.

“Ten days,” he agreed, meeting her cinnamon-colored eyes, his decision made. “You’ll spend five of them in London. Take the green folder, leave the red. It’s a long flight, Ms. Langston, and it leaves at six o’clock tomorrow morning. I suggest you go home and pack.”

Jessica nodded slightly, hoping to hide her shock. Her mind raced ahead to the hundred and one details she would have needed to take care of before she could go out to dinner and a movie, let alone cross a continent and an ocean. She was a mother, for crying out loud. A fact he would know, if he’d taken the time to check her file.

Damn the man.

She turned on her heel and picked up the green folder. She had no idea what awaited her in London, and she wasn’t about to ask Cooper Daniels. He’d never seen “think on your feet” the way she was going to deliver it. So help her, when she got back, he’d be begging her to stay—which would give her the ultimate satisfaction of saying no. She’d bet everything she owned that he didn’t hear that word nearly often enough from the female of the species.

* * *

After she’d gone, Cooper reached over to the desk and picked up the phone. He punched in a call to London without bothering to check the time. George Leeds would talk to him no matter what time it was.

Jessica Langston wouldn’t last ten days. She wouldn’t last the five on her round-trip ticket to

London. Cooper figured she would last exactly as long as it took her to study the green folder, deplane at Heathrow, take one look at George Leeds, and get back on a plane to the States with her resignation in hand. He was sure the finer points of negotiating bounty on maritime pirates with men like Leeds hadn’t been covered in the curriculum at Stanford.

“Leeds,” he said when a man answered the phone. After receiving confirmation, he continued. “I’m sending someone in my place. Her name is Jessica Langston. Any offer you wanted to take up with me, you can discuss with her, if she sticks around long enough to hear it. And, Leeds—” He paused until the man responded again. “Spread the word that she’s under my protection. No interference will be tolerated. She’s a business associate and I want her back looking as fresh and wide-eyed as she did when she walked out of here. When she leaves, I’ll come and we’ll finish.”

He hung up and stretched again under the soothing magic of Sharon’s hands. She was working on his left leg, his bad leg.

“You’re healing nicely,” she said.

“It hurts like hell.”

“Would you like me to prescribe something?” she asked, her fingers gently probing the scar tissue that ran the length of his thigh.

In answer, Cooper gave a short, sardonic laugh. Sharon knew as well as he that there was nothing in her magical bag of herbs and acupuncture needles to stop his pain. There was only retaliation against the woman who’d had him maimed and left him to die. There was only revenge against the woman who had killed his brother.

He lowered his head and closed his eyes. He’d relived the scene a thousand times, and every time Jackson fell, Cooper found himself turning too slowly to protect his brother, or to protect himself from his brother’s murderer. An explosion of gunfire sounded and a cutlass slashed him open from hip to knee before the dragon lady’s henchman fell under his knife. All of it too damn late to save Jackson.

Jessica Langston didn’t belong in his world. George Leeds was a peach compared with most of the people Cooper dealt with. He only hoped Leeds was enough of his usual self to offend her lovely sensibilities. Cooper didn’t have time for a lawsuit, and he didn’t have time for her, and he was surprised that he wished he did.

Damn surprised.

Two

In Jessica’s book, jet-propelled takeoffs before dawn could only be rivaled by the first trimester of pregnancy for nausea potential. The added smell of congealed omelets should have had her stumbling toward the bathroom. Something more compelling, however, than both kept her glued to her first class seat—the surprising contents of the green folder.

She’d meant to look the folder over the previous night. She’d even cracked it open once or twice, in between wrestling with school schedules, transportation schedules, and baby-sitting schedules. The children’s schedules and the children themselves, however, had kept demanding and winning her attention. She’d also assumed the green folder would hold information similar to the Jakarta stock offering in the red folder. If she’d had any idea of what Cooper Daniels expected of her, any inkling of what a low-down, conniving heel he really was, she would have made darn sure to take the time to study the contents of the green folder. She could have saved herself a plane trip.

As it was, the only thing that galled her more than what she’d been reading for the last fifteen minutes was the smirk that must be on Cooper Daniels’s face as he lay in his warm bed, looking out at the fog-filled skies above the Bay, knowing he’d set her up.

The man was no world-class, upper-crust San Francisco nabob and financier. He was a bounty hunter, and he’d taken one of Stanford’s finest and sent her to negotiate the price on a pirate’s head, a Mr. Pablo Lopez from the Philippines, who had a penchant for ships of the Somerset Shipping Federation.

Jessica could hardly believe her situation or the nerve of the man who’d put her in it.

With a muttered curse, she flipped through the green folder again. Ship’s manifests, oceanographical maps, sworn statements, and pages of handwritten notes all testified to large-scale acts of piracy on the high seas. Cooper Daniels was no run-of-the-mill bounty hunter. He went after men who stole the cargoes from hundred-thousand-ton oil tankers and eighty-thousand-ton container ships. The information explained a lot about the man himself. He didn’t look like he belonged in a boardroom, because he didn’t.

The question, though, was if she belonged on a plane bound for London and a man named George Leeds, the representative for the Somerset Shipping Federation. It was obvious that Cooper Daniels had hoped to get rid of her by putting her in over her head and letting her sink like lead weight.

He was mistaken in his assumptions, of course, as mistaken as she had been in hers. Given enough facts, she could negotiate the lease on a quarter section of an aircraft carrier’s landing deck. Business ran on the laws of supply and demand. All she had to do was determine the tangible and intangible costs involved and set a fair price for the services offered.

That was all.

Damn him. She ought to get off the plane in Newark and take the first flight back to California. She should not let the problem intrigue her. She should not take up his challenge.

“Pirates,” she muttered. Who would have thought there were men like Cooper Daniels out tracking down pirates and bringing them in?

She cast her eyes heavenward and blew out a sigh. Who would have thought there were men like Cooper Daniels, period? She certainly hadn’t.

With an absent gesture, she turned one page, then another, stopping when she came to his handwritten notes. He had a strong style, bold and none too neat. He also had a very high opinion of his services, if the figures at the bottom of the page were any indication.

If she didn’t want to be taken for a fool, she needed to do some research when she reached London. She could check the magazine and newspaper data bases on a couple of industry supported on-line services for anything that had been written about piracy in the last few years. Also, she could use her connections in the insurance industry to get actual figures on claims, losses, and premiums.

A small smirk curved her lips. She was perfect for the job, more perfect than Cooper Daniels realized or expected. By the time she returned from London, she would probably be able to teach him a few things about negotiating bounty. If she was going to London.

The decision to show him up couldn’t be based on pride alone. She was too mature to let her ego rule her rationality. Well, almost too mature. There were other things to consider, like her wonderfully outrageous salary, her résumé, and that damned niggling issue of her self-esteem. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but she could more easily handle being dismissed as a business associate by Cooper Daniels than she could handle being dismissed as a woman.

It wasn’t like her to want a man to notice her, but Cooper had noticed her. The way he’d looked at her, and where he’d looked at her, hadn’t left room for doubts on that score. His heated gaze had sparked to life a purely feminine reaction, a reaction she thought had died with her divorce.

Logically, but against her better judgment, she had to admit to being intrigued by the man. Given the nature of their one and only meeting, with him being gloriously naked, stretched out like some sacrificial offering to Eros, it wasn’t surprising that her mind tended to wander into forbidden territory when she thought of him.

The practical thing to do, of course, was to continue on to London and do the job she was being paid to do. Now that the initial shock had worn thin, if not entirely off; now that she’d looked things over and given the information some thought, she knew she could do the job, which left her little choice in the matter. That’s what she told herself. Her ego, her pride, and her feminine responses had nothing to do with it.

She reached for her carry-on bag and unzipped the side pocket. After a quick search, she found a credit card and her address book. She used both to place a phone call to her old boss in New York. By the time she landed in Heathrow, she should be on her way to understanding the financial loss caused by modern-day pirates, the relative worth of maritime bounty hunters, and the needs of the shipping companies they both preyed on.

While she was waiting for her connection the flight attendant approached her with a tidily wrapped, congealed omelet in hand. Jessica blanched, but managed a wan smile before waving her on. Once the attendant had the offensive meal out of view, Jessica settled back into the comfort of her seat. Now that she knew what she needed to accomplish, the London trip should go smoothly, if not exactly pleasantly. There shouldn’t be any more surprises.

* * *

Cooper stood outside the Boarshead Tavern, looking up at the signboard swinging in the wild English wind. Rain had soaked him near through, and he still had not found Jessica Langston and George Leeds. Ms. Langston had not taken one look at the green folder and his London associate and turned tail as she was supposed to have. Leeds had not taken one look at the woman and sent her packing. Rather, the two of them had hit it off and, according to Leeds’s associate, Mr. Zhao, were even now carousing around the seedier dockside pubs of London.

The Boarshead was the worst of the lot. Cooper had saved it for last because it was the last place he would have expected to find his Ms. MBA-from-Stanford assistant. If she didn’t belong in his San Francisco office, she most certainly did not belong in the Boarshead with the likes of George Leeds.

A fresh gust of wind blew up the river, snapping his coat around his legs, and Cooper pushed on into the familiar pub. He wasn’t known for misjudging people. He found it particularly hard to believe he’d misjudged Ms. Langston. But her surprising affinity for pints and Leeds wasn’t what had made him pay Concorde prices to get to England before the dawn of another day.

The Boarshead was dimly lit inside, with a few men leaning against the bar. The tavern’s other patrons were scattered about a maze of booths and tables. Cooper’s gaze skimmed over the seamen and bawds, looking for a woman who didn’t fit in with the rest of the clientele. She should have stuck out like a sore thumb or, more accurately, like a hothouse hybrid in an untended garden. She didn’t.

“Damn,” he muttered. He was about to admit that sending her to London had been a bad idea when a woman’s laughter captured his attention. He needed no other clue to locate the reason for his inopportune international flight. He turned toward the clear, fresh sound and began walking down the length of the pub to its farthest, darkest corner. He hadn’t heard her laughter before, but he recognized it with the same certainty that he’d have recognized his own heartbeat. He wasn’t pleased with the knowledge.

He’d waited two days for her to do her transatlantic flip-flop and show up with her resignation. The least he’d expected was the courtesy of an irate phone call. All he’d gotten was a fax Wednesday afternoon: Negotiations with Mr. George Leeds, representing the Somerset Shipping Federation, will extend beyond the projected date. We are awaiting the arrival of Mr. Andrew Strachan from the North Star Line.

George Leeds had his unsavory moments, but there were lines he never crossed when it came to women. Andrew Strachan had his noble traits, but none of them applied when it came to women, especially beautiful women.

Cooper had gotten on the plane because, as Jessica’s employer, he had responsibilities for her well-being. She was out of her area of expertise when it came to dealing with Strachan. He’d also felt an uncomfortable measure of guilt for sending her off so ill-prepared. Of course, that had been the whole idea behind his decision, for her to be ill-prepared for a man like Leeds. That he’d thought about her more often than he’d liked over the last few days had been a minor consideration.

It had also been as compelling as hell.

She was sitting in the last booth with her back to the wall, and he wondered if the precaution was instinctive or learned. He knew Leeds wouldn’t have allowed her to accidentally take his preferred spot. She had to have maneuvered herself into it, and for reasons all too obvious from Cooper’s point of view, Leeds didn’t seem to mind.

Light from an overhead glass globe cast soft shadows over her face and played with the highlights in her hair, giving her an air of mystery she had not had when he’d seen her standing in his office all wide-eyed and staring. Her iridescent blue dress was slightly disarrayed, baring one satiny shoulder. Unwillingly, Cooper followed the naked curve with his eyes. It was a sweet sight, but arousal and assistants were mutually exclusive by his rules.

Or they were supposed to be. Dammit.

He lifted his gaze to her face. She looked consummately at ease in the dreary surroundings, her smile flashing every few moments at what Leeds was saying, her hands embellishing her own words with graceful movements. She had pinned her hair up, and a few tendrils had fallen back down to curl against her neck. She was more than attractive, lounging in a buttoned and rolled Boarshead booth. She was beautiful.

She was also drunk. The lineup of empty pint glasses on the table didn’t leave him a doubt. He’d never expected the woman to be so much trouble, or so damned tenacious—or so damned intriguing. Anyone else would have quit.

But not Ms. Langston, he thought with a grudging, wry grin. She looked ready to give everything right down to her virtue for the good of the company, and Cooper knew Leeds would be glad to take whatever was offered. Strachan, on the other hand, had never been known to wait for an offer. Fortunately, Cooper had arrived in time to save her from the Scots wolf.

He stepped closer to the booth, drawing her attention, and he knew he’d once again misjudged her. She wasn’t drunk, not by a long shot. The look she gave him was lucid and piercing, with an element of surprise she quickly hid. As he took his final steps her gaze dropped to his bad leg and his limp. Her eyes softened, then she hid that emotion too.

“Leeds,” he said, startling the other man into spilling his beer.

Leeds looked over his shoulder and immediately stumbled to his feet, his pockmarked face stark with surprise. “Coop, hell, man. I didn’t—I mean, I didn’t expect, or, uh, do anything. Nothing. I swear. Hell, look at her.” He swung one brawny arm wide, encompassing half the bar before sweeping past Jessica Langston. The action upset his equilibrium and sent him tumbling back into the booth. Once his head got lower than his heart, the rest was history. Leeds slid under the table in a state of blissful unconsciousness.

Cooper didn’t believe what he’d just seen any more than he believed what Leeds was wearing. The reprobate had on a suit coat with matching pants. He was even wearing a tie and, of all things, a collar bar, a gold one to match the ring in his ear. The man had gone all out to impress someone. When Cooper looked up, he found that someone scooting out of the booth, a concerned frown on her face.

“Now look what you’ve done,” she said accusingly, pulling up the tight skirt of her dress so she could kneel beside Leeds’s supine body. “You’ve completely unnerved the man.”

“No, I didn’t,” Cooper said, his gaze riveted to her rising hemline. “I couldn’t unnerve George Leeds on my best day.”

“He was fine until you showed up .” She tucked loose strands of George’s gray-streaked hair into his ponytail and smoothed her fingers over his brow. “Dammit. He’s out cold, and I was just this far away from closing the deal.” She lifted her hand, her thumb and index finger barely half an inch apart.

“I thought you were waiting for Strachan.” By his estimation, her legs went on forever.

“I came to the conclusion,” she said tightly, “that it would be better for Daniels, Ltd. if I worked out the initial deal with Leeds. Then, if Strachan wanted to sweeten the pot, fine, and if he didn’t, I would already have Somerset Shipping on board at our price. I did not expect you to show up from out of nowhere and frighten my client half to death.”

She kept touching George, checking his pulse, loosening his tie, removing the ridiculous collar bar, and Cooper wished like hell that she would quit. He didn’t like her fussing over the other man.

He felt his jaw tighten in irritation when she went so far as to unbutton the first two buttons of George’s white shirt. Leeds had never worn a suit in his life. Never. His normal attire tended toward mix and match and cheap and serviceable, with a little leather thrown in for good measure. He usually had two or three earrings in his ear, not a single, discreet gold ring.

“What made you think Leeds would be more agreeable than Strachan?” he asked, as if the truth of the matter wasn’t lying at her feet in a drunken stupor. Over the years he and Leeds had swilled enough gin and beer to float an oil tanker, and he’d never seen the old man flat on his back—until now.

“I checked Strachan out,” she said, finally rising to her feet. “He doesn’t have a reputation for taking women seriously.” She smoothed her dress, and Cooper did his best not to follow the movements of her hands as she straightened her neckline. After her shoulder had been covered, he looked down just in time to catch the slight shimmy she gave her hips to shake her hemline back down to her knees.

“You checked him out?” he asked around the growing lump in his throat.

“I made some phone calls. Half of what I paid Stanford for was good connections. It’s about a tenth of what you pay me for.”

“What are the other nine tenths?” he asked. She’d finished rearranging her dress, which still didn’t cure his staring problem. They were closer than they’d been in his office, and he couldn’t help but notice things he’d missed then, like her scent, and the pale dusting of freckles on her chest and across the bridge of her nose. She looked sun-kissed, sweet, and sultry. It was a deadly combination.

He hadn’t eaten much on the plane, and nothing since his arrival. He could only hope that was his problem. He did not want his problem to be her mouth and what looking at it made him want to do. That was trouble he didn’t need.

He shouldn’t have sent her to London. He should have sent her back to Elise Crabb and demanded a refund.

She met his eyes squarely and said, “One tenth is for my accounting degree, two tenths for my MBA, and two tenths for my natural intelligence.”

“That’s six.” Damn, he thought. It was her mouth and not his empty stomach. He could tell by the effect watching her talk had on his groin.

She waited a moment before answering, and under her unwavering gaze, he felt sized up and measured from the inside out. He only hoped she wasn’t able to read his mind.

“The other four tenths,” she said, “are for not turning around and walking out when I realized that counseling you on your potential Pacific Rim investments wasn’t going to take up nearly as much of my time as brokering your rather questionable skills.”

“My skills are not questionable,” he said, irritated with himself and her, and with all the reasons his body was coming up with for wanting to take her to bed. All he’d really wanted to do was fire her. He shouldn’t have let his practical business side or his sense of responsibility get the better of him. He shouldn’t have followed her to London.

“Your skills are not questionable in degree,” she agreed, “but most definitely in form. I have serious doubts about working for a maritime bounty hunter, which I have surmised is the correct term for your line of business.”

She was a cool one. He had to give her that much credit.

“You have six days left on your contract,” he said. “I’ll still give you a thousand dollars for each of them.”

She ignored his offer. “I haven’t figured out why you wanted an assistant of my caliber at all. An executive secretary could have met your needs for a lot less money. Right now I’m planning on counseling you to replace me with someone who can manage your office, and for you to do your own contract negotiating when the occasion arises, which Leeds explained isn’t very often. You’re usually on your own, bringing in the pirates for a price that was set without any input from you.”

Cooper wasn’t prepared to discuss any of her chosen conversational topics with her, especially in the Boarshead.

“Have you ever heard of anyone being too smart for their own good?” he asked, one eyebrow raised in warning, his implication hopefully clear.

She arched one eyebrow back at him, her implication crystal clear, and Cooper wondered where in the hell he’d gotten his first impression of innocence. The woman had the cojones of a rhinoceros, and she’d drunk George Leeds under the table.

Maybe Mrs. Crabb had been right. Maybe Jessica Langston was exactly what he needed.

God, he hoped not.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm. “Let’s get you out of here before something happens we’ll both regret.”

Jessica would have balked on principle alone, but the strength of the hand on her elbow gave her no choice but to comply.

“What about Mr. Leeds?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at the man they’d left lying on the floor.

“I’ll take care of Leeds after I’ve taken care of you,” Cooper said.

“This really isn’t necessary, you know,” she said, struggling to keep up with him despite his limp. “I can take care of myself.”

“So I’ve noticed,” he said wryly.

She would have liked to argue with him, but their headlong retreat out of the Boarshead was having an unhappy effect on her equilibrium, and she didn’t want to end up like George, especially in front of Cooper Daniels.

“Could we slow down, please?” she asked, inadvertently leaning into him. “The room is starting to spin a little to the left.”

He came to a sudden halt and pinned her with a green glare. “You are drunk.”

“No,” she said, grabbing onto him for support. “No, I’m not. But I do have a limit when it comes to alcohol consumption, and I have reached it.”

He swore, succinctly, looking right at her. That his words were spoken in a Chinese dialect did not confuse her in the least. She understood him perfectly.

“An apt sentiment, I’m sure,” she said. “But I’d still appreciate it if you would slow down.”

Cooper did, holding her close to his side to keep her from slipping to the floor, and holding on to his anger by the thinnest of threads. It was bad enough to have found her in the Boarshead with her companion inebriated to the point of unconsciousness. It was worse to realize what situation she would have found herself in if he hadn’t shown up. He didn’t have to look around to know how many men were staring at them. Half of them had probably been waiting for Leeds to pass out so they could move in on her.

Actually, he knew there was no probably about it, a fact quickly proved when a sailor still smelling of the sea stepped in front of them. The man was big and barrel-chested, with short-cropped hair. He wore a tight T-shirt that showed off a pair of sizable biceps.

“No need to call it a night, luv.” He spoke directly to Jessica, ignoring Cooper. “Just because the old man weren’t up to snuff don’t mean you have to leave. Billy Ellen’ll be glad to see you home, after we finish a couple more of the Boarshead’s own.”

“No, thank you,” Jessica said with all politeness, giving Cooper a discreet push to direct him around the man. Cooper leveled a scowl at her. He didn’t need her telling him what to do. Drunken sailors were his specialty.

“Forget the gimp, luv,” the sailor said, moving in front of them again. “Stay and have a good time with Billy boy.”

“Billy boy” was a wall of immovable chest and palpable aggression standing in Cooper’s way and silently daring him to fight.

Cooper didn’t need the added incentive of the dare. He was only too happy to oblige the oaf who had called him a gimp. In his present mood, he had neither the time nor the patience to suffer fools, so he flexed the muscles in his left hand and took a deep breath. The giant fell while he was still inhaling, before he’d had a chance to balance the tension in his muscles, let alone strike his blow.

The woman at his side brushed her hands together and straightened her neckline again. “I think you’re right, Mr. Daniels. We should leave.”

She’d tripped the bastard, put him to the floor, and she’d done it half-drunk. Cooper had seen it, but he hardly believed it.

Jessica slipped her arm through her employer’s and ushered him toward the door before the man on the floor could clear the confusion out of his head. She’d had the advantage of surprise. She often did. She didn’t look particularly athletic, she didn’t look like a martial-arts disciple, and she certainly didn’t look as dangerous as her employer. The sailor had made a wise choice in watching Cooper Daniels instead of her. It just happened to have been the wrong choice.

Once outside, she hailed a cab, and Cooper let her. The woman amazed him, and provoked him, and fascinated him. He remembered the look on her face when she’d seen him limping toward her across the pub, and he had an idea why she’d taken the initiative in dispatching the sailor. The thought that she might be pitying him, or that she believed he needed her protection, was damned aggravating and damned intriguing.

He needed somebody he could trust at his back. That somebody had always been Jackson, but Jackson was gone. The realization never came without an accompanying sense of loss, but it would never have occurred to him in a million years that the kind of protection and loyalty he’d received from his younger brother could be replaced, or that it could be replaced by a woman.

Jessica Langston had been hired to track the financial investments of Fang Baolian and to thereby bring down the dragon lady. He’d tried to fire her because he’d thought she wasn’t up to the job. He’d thought she wasn’t tough enough, or seasoned enough, or that the angelfish even knew where the jugular was on a man-eating shark.

He watched her flag down a taxi and lean inside to give directions. She knew what she was about. The last half hour had proven that much to him. A long conversation with Elise Crabb two days earlier had assured him that Jessica knew at least as much about the money game as she did about handling herself in the Boarshead.

That only left him with one problem—her legs, and her face, and her mouth, and the indefinable something that attracted him to all three. He had no business wanting her, but he did.

Three

Jessica sat stiffly in a high-backed chair, squinting against the early-morning light and watching Cooper Daniels prowl around the enormous sitting room of his suite. He was talking on the phone to George Leeds, his voice calm and low as they discussed the finer points of the deal she’d made for the capture of Pablo Lopez, the notorious Filipino pirate who was making a career out of stealing cargoes belonging to members of the Somerset Shipping Federation. Two weeks earlier Mr. Lopez had not bothered with unloading the cargo. He’d simply helped himself to the whole ship and put the Callander’s crew overboard. The Somerset people had decided to put a bounty on the brigand and to call in a bounty hunter. They had asked Leeds to contact the one bounty hunter they had all agreed could bring Mr. Lopez in alive—Cooper Daniels.

He was good. He was the best. One of the articles she’d printed off the data bases had mentioned an American company run by two brothers that was building a reputation for hunting down pirates. The article was five years old and had been published in a European shipping-trade magazine. A more recent article in an American business publication had referred to a West Coast company working with London’s International Maritime Bureau to clean up the coast off West Africa. Neither of the articles had mentioned Cooper or Daniels, Ltd. by name. They hadn’t needed to. If she’d had any doubts about whom they were talking about—and she hadn’t—George Leeds had made it clear why the bounty figures Cooper had scribbled in his notes were considered a fair price by the Somerset people.

Her employer walked toward the windows, and Jessica let him wander out of sight. Her pounding head wasn’t up to dealing with the rare London sunshine streaming through the glass. When he walked back into her line of vision, he turned and faced her, and her cheeks suffused with color. She lowered her gaze, intent on smoothing nonexistent wrinkles out of her skirt.

She had been ready to show him up all right, she thought, to show him “think on your feet” and “roll with the punches.” All she’d actually shown him was how well she could hold her liquor and how to execute a classic self-defense move. She was sure he hadn’t been impressed. Businessmen did not pay Stanford prices for skills easily mastered by an eighteen-year-old with a sturdy constitution.

On the other hand, her last lingering perception of Cooper Daniels as a businessman had vanished about five minutes after meeting George Leeds. She’d taken one look at the man’s salt-and-pepper ponytail, the multitude of earrings in his ear, and had thought she was dealing with an aging hippy. Then, as they had shaken hands, she noticed the snake head tattooed on the back of his wrist. When she’d looked farther, she’d seen where the snake’s tail came out of his collarless shirt and wrapped around his neck.

Despite her decision to handle these negotiations and figuratively wipe the smirk off Daniels’s face, she would have turned and run on the spot, but George had had too strong a grip on her. Spread sheets and bond yields, stock prices and bottom lines were her milieu, not dragons and snakes. When he’d released her, she still would have run, if her hand hadn’t immediately been taken up by another man. She’d been so overwhelmed by George Leeds, she hadn’t noticed his companion. When she’d turned to the quiet, impeccably dressed Oriental man, much of her initial panic had dissipated. Mr. Zhao Ping, as he had been introduced, was more the type of person she had expected to be dealing with—professional, polite, well-spoken, and without earrings and tattoos.

“Ms. Langston,” Cooper Daniels said, drawing her attention back to the present. He held the telephone receiver out to her. “George would like to speak with you . . . personally.”

The inflection he gave the last word wasn’t lost on her, and she wished George hadn’t asked to talk with her. The two of them had gotten into enough trouble.

She stood to take the phone. “Good morning, Mr. Leeds,” she said, maintaining a verbal distance and resisting the urge to turn her back on Cooper for added privacy.

“Good mornin’, Jessie. He weren’t too hard on you, was he? I never expected him to come after us in the Boarshead or we would’ve stayed someplace more respectable.”

“I appreciate your concern,” she said.

“Of course, if we’d only stayed in the respectable places, you wouldn’t have seen what you wanted to see.”

“Of course,” she said, uncomfortably aware of her employer’s nearness. She’d asked George to take her to the places Cooper usually went. It was professional curiosity, she’d told herself. The man was as inscrutable as they came, and she could do her job better if she understood him better, even if the job only lasted another six days. Her request, she’d assured herself, had nothing to do with green eyes, sex, or dragons. Mothers didn’t think about such things. She was simply curious.

“I heard you decked a sailor in the Boarshead,” George went on, a noticeable chuckle in his voice.

“Yes, well . . .” was all she could manage before George laughed out loud.

“You tell Coop he’s got himself one dandy little helper.”

“I’ll be sure and do that, George,” she said, her voice drier than day-old toast. Going from “a fatal error in judgment” to “a dandy little helper” wasn’t the sort of promotion she’d been aspiring for.

“Right, luv.” George laughed again, proving he was well aware of her sarcasm. After a short pause, he turned the conversation to a more serious vein. “There were a few things I didn’t get around to telling you last night. Things you ought to know.”

“Such as?” she prompted when he hesitated again. She hoped he wasn’t about to renege on the terms they’d hammered out over the last two days. The line she was treading between the law and criminality was already too damn thin to suit her. Despite her research, she wasn’t sure under what circumstances extradition might become kidnapping, or if either applied to the deal she’d struck. She wasn’t sure what the exact parameters were for the laws of bounty hunting, and the more information she got, the less sure she became. She did know that pirates were legally hostis humani generis—“enemies of all mankind”—and therefore under no nation’s protection, which precluded the legal climate necessary for extradition.

That seemed to leave only kidnapping, and only because the Somerset Shipping Federation had decided against simply having Mr. Lopez killed, a small consolation Jessica was holding on to for dear life. She couldn’t sanction murder. She could only do her damndest to prove to herself and Cooper Daniels that she was capable of handling any job anybody threw at her.

“Such as,” George said, “you ought to go home when you’re done here. You’re a sweet bird, Jessie. You don’t want to get messed up with Cooper and his like. I know the business don’t look too bad from London, and it probably looks real good from Coop’s San Francisco office, but just about the time you get into the middle of the Malacca or forty leagues south of Singapore, a lot of bad things can happen.”

Actually, Jessica thought the maritime bounty-hunting business was looking more appalling every day, even from the relatively safe environs of London. She had every intention of going home after this contract was signed. She had also had every intention of quitting Daniels, Ltd. when she got there, until those phone calls to her Stanford connections had given her reason to think otherwise. Besides checking up on Andrew Strachan, she’d discreetly checked out other employment opportunities. Her options weren’t as varied as she’d hoped. California’s economic slump was starting to reach even the upper echelons of the financial district, and Daniels was already paying her more than most of her colleagues were getting. Awful as it was, the pirate business was booming.

“Under normal circumstances, don’t you see, I’d say you’d be fine,” George went on. “But things ain’t been atall normal with Cooper the last couple of months. It was a bad business, Jackson getting killed like that—out and out murdered, really—and I think it kind of put Coop about half a bubble off. He ain’t been himself. I don’t think he could take care of a ship’s skillet right now, and I don’t think he can take care of you, or that he’d even be inclined.”

“I see,” Jessica said, forcing her voice to a respectable blandness, working hard to hide her shock. Murder! George was right. The pirate business was no place for a sweet bird like her. Two days with the old man still hadn’t inured her to the bombshells of information he was given to dropping. She turned sideways, giving her back to Cooper before giving in to her curiosity and whispering, “Who was Jackson?”

The action didn’t do her any good. Even as she asked the question she felt the hairs rise on the nape of her neck. She was well aware of the cause. Knowing she couldn’t very well hide herself or her conversation from the man staring a hole through her back, she casually turned around to face him.

The look he was giving her was anything but casual, and it should have prepared her for George’s answer. It didn’t.

“Jackson were Coop’s younger brother,” George said. “But Coop don’t like to talk about him, so don’t go mentioning me mentioning him, if you please.”

Jessica blanched, her gaze instinctively dropping away from the anguish and anger reflected in Cooper Daniels’s eyes. His brother had been killed, and he knew she’d just been told that. She wished she’d done anything except ask her last question.

Regret washed through her and left an awful feeling in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know where George thought Cooper might have gone that he wasn’t listening to every word she was saying. She silently damned the man for not giving her a warning before she’d spoken Jackson’s name.

“George, I—” She needed to get off the phone, but George didn’t give her a chance. He kept talking, burying her in information, none of it what she would have expected to hear about the enigmatic man she’d seen warming his body in a pool of sunlight half a world away.

“It’s a quid to a bloater that Coop will be dead before the New Year too. He’s takin’ chances, takin’ on bigger people than he can chew, if you know what I mean.”

She had an idea, a damn good idea. She swore under her breath. The conversation was quickly going from bad to worse.

She glanced at her employer, unable to stop herself, and found his anguish replaced by something less pained. In self-defense, she turned away, wishing George had told her these few things a damn sight earlier. If he had, she might have been long gone, instead of standing in a hotel suite, enduring the cold regard of a man whose reasons for disliking her were multiplying at an alarming rate. Enigmas never appreciated having their personal tragedies revealed to strangers.

“He was there when Jackson got it,” George continued, dragging her in deeper. Despite the lines of courtesy she was crossing, despite Cooper’s presence not ten feet from her, she didn’t even hint that he should stop. She was already accused and condemned. She wanted the whole story. “I think seeing his brother cut down in the prime of life loosened a few screws. Coop’s not playing smart like he used to. He’s sold a couple of properties he shouldn’t have at fire-sale prices when there weren’t no fire. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”

Jessica understood the last piece of information perfectly. For all the impression he gave of being a bum, George Leeds was the consummate businessman who knew within a centimeter on any deal where profit turned to loss. He’d obviously been the fire-sale buyer.

“And I’m not complaining about the twenty thousand pounds he’s borrowed either. It won’t be me who cuts his throat if he don’t pay up. But I’m not the only one he’s into, Jessie. If I was to give you any advice besides leaving, it would be not to hold on to your paycheck too long.”

Jessica swore silently again and closed her eyes, lifting her hand to rub her brow. She was beginning to get the picture George was laboring so hard to draw. She was working for a partially deranged, grief-stricken bounty hunter bent on revenge, who was willing to dismantle his whole company to accomplish a goal she did not even begin to comprehend, and her check was going to bounce.

“Who else and how much?” she asked.

The phone went dead before she got her answer. She opened her eyes to find Cooper standing next to her, his finger holding down the receiver button.

Her head barely reached his shoulder despite the heels she was wearing, but it wasn’t his towering, overwhelming nearness so much as his stillness that unsettled her to her core. She’d never heard him move. She felt like a mouse who was surprised to find her tail trapped under the cat’s paw.

Thick lashes shadowed his eyes as he took the phone out of her hand. The brief contact sent a slow wave of awareness up her arm, catching her off guard. Chagrined by her response, she admitted that his nearness had its disadvantages.

“Anything you want to know, ask me,” he said coolly.

There were a million things she wanted to know about him and not one she dared ask about. Because in a completely different way, she already knew too much. She knew that the slope of his nose with its slight tilt on the end intrigued her more than it should, as did the texture of his skin and the smile creases in his cheeks—though she’d never seen him smile. She knew the smudges of weariness beneath his eyes concerned her, when they were really none of her concern.

He was close enough for her to see the pulse in his neck, to detect the tightness in the muscles of his jaw. He’d swept back his silky sun-streaked hair as he’d paced the suite, but a swath insisted on falling forward across his brow. Tension and energy radiated off him. He was alive and dangerously male, a predator’s predator.

She knew enough about him to know she should stay away from him.

“Don’t worry about the severance offer,” she said, making her absolutely final decision before she could change her mind. There must be a hundred jobs in San Francisco that could meet her money requirements. She just needed to look for them. She took a step back. “My, uh, salary for the three weeks will be fine.”

He placed the receiver in the cradle of the phone and lifted his gaze to hers. She was struck once again by the color of his eyes. They were mesmerizingly green, the hue of a shallow, sunlit sea. But traces of pain lingered in their depths, pulling on parts of her that had no place in a business arrangement.

“I think we’re going to need more than three weeks,” he said, watching her with an intensity she felt to the marrow of her bones.

She backed off another step, hoping she had heard him wrong. He couldn’t possibly be asking her to stay on after she’d offered him an easy way out of their contract.

“We’ll leave for the airport in an hour,” he continued. “I’ll fill you in on the details of your new project during the flight.”

She stopped in her tracks, a sense of inevitable disaster coming over her. “What new project?”

“The one you were hired for.”

“I thought you wanted to fire me.” She was definitely getting in over her head this time. She could feel the water lapping at her chin. The job market might be tight, but Cooper Daniels’s past was shady, his present no less so, and his future was bleak. She was smarter than to get involved with him.

“I did want to fire you,” he said. “But last night you proved something to me I wouldn’t have believed three days ago.”

“What?” she asked incredulously. She couldn’t imagine that holding her beer had impressed him enough to change his mind. He did not appear to be a man who changed his mind or his opinions easily, and he’d made his opinion of her quite clear.

“Underneath all your innocence, you’ve got courage, integrity, and tenacity. I need all three.” He paused before adding in a quieter tone, “I need you.”

She barely heard his last words, but they echoed more resoundingly than any of the others he’d spoken.

Every brain cell she had told her to turn around and walk away, and every instinct she possessed told her to stay and help. She knew how good she was. She knew she was an unqualified asset no matter how many leagues south of Singapore he got.

. . . quid to a bloater Coop’ll be dead too . . . Maybe she was the edge he needed.

Maybe he was more than she could handle.

Damn.

She looked up at him and forced herself to hold his gaze. He met her challenge head-on, one eyebrow raised in a silent dare, allowing her to see whatever she might. They both endured the probing intimacy of her visual search, until heat raced across her cheeks and she had to look away.

George had been right, she thought. Cooper Daniels was a man on the edge, willing to risk everything. He hadn’t hidden his pain or his desire; he not only needed her, he wanted her. The mixture was potent and devastating.

“I . . . uh, don’t think so, Mr. Daniels,” she stammered, turning to gather her briefcase off the hall table.

“You aren’t dismissed, Ms. Langston,” he said in a tone that stopped her in her tracks—for a nanosecond.

She picked up her briefcase in defiance.

“You owe me six days,” he said behind her, and her hand stilled in its movement. “I want them .”

Jessica knew she was caught. Her mouth tightened. Six days, she thought, mentally bracing herself. What could possibly happen in six days?

Nothing worth the cost of a lawyer, she decided. She would hang tough and wait it out. That left her with just one small problem to clear up with him.

She took her time, deliberately laying her briefcase back on the table before she faced him. She met his gaze straight on so there would be no misunderstanding. “No matter what you think, Mr. Daniels, I am not innocent, nor am I easily manipulated. It’s my job to know the score, and I am very good at my job.”

The smile she hadn’t seen before came in a wry curve, deepening the lines on either side of his mouth and putting a teasing light in his eyes. His brows shifted subtly upward.

Jessica belatedly realized they weren’t talking about the same kind of innocence. She also, on a deep instinctive level, realized that she’d been warned. She was playing with fire, the dragon’s fire, and even more than she, he understood the allure . . . and the danger.

Four

Cooper Daniels slept through the takeoff from Heathrow. Jessica had never seen anybody fall asleep before takeoff and stay asleep through the G-forces and engine whining. Not that he didn’t look as if he needed sleep. She certainly needed sleep, but she hadn’t succumbed. No, not her. She was wide-awake, breathing deep to keep her stomach calm and trying not to smell the tidily wrapped lunches stockpiled in the galley.

When the plane reached its cruising altitude, she was able to relax enough to pull some files out of her briefcase. There were a number of articles she’d printed out at the hotel that she hadn’t had time to read. One of them estimated yearly losses to the shipping industry from piracy at a hundred million dollars; another guessed the losses were closer to two hundred and fifty million dollars a year. Her insurance connection had quoted a number closer to the hundred-million-dollar mark, but he’d also advised her that most acts of piracy weren’t reported. Shipping lines did not want to get a reputation for not being secure.

George Leeds had also been a storehouse of information, especially about the seedier sides of piracy: the syndicates running out of Singapore and Hong Kong, the underground banking network able to transfer millions of dollars in a matter of hours, the kingpins with their harems of mistresses, the gambling, the drinking, the drugs.

Whatever Cooper Daniels’s new project turned out to be, she was drawing the line at mistresses, gambling, drinking, and drugs. Money was her forte, not vice.

She shuffled the top article to the bottom of the pile and started in on the next, one printed in the London Times. She found little new information in the four-column spread until she reached the second-to-last paragraph. There was enough information there to make her sit up in her seat and take notice.

She carefully read the long paragraph twice before letting the article drop back on the pile in her lap. No one in the shipping industry liked to publicize piracy, so most thefts and hijackings were not reported by the news media. The Times article was no different in that respect, but to illustrate a point, it did summarize a story about a shipping line started in San Francisco in the 1880s that had gone bankrupt in the 1970s because of repeated pirate attacks. The line had been the Daniels American Line, more commonly known as the DanAm Line, and even more commonly known as the Damn Line.

The story made her realize two things: She’d been remiss in her original research into Daniels, Ltd. when she’d accepted it as the five-year-old international investment firm it purported to be. She also realized that even when sitting across a pub table from George Leeds, listening to all his wild stories, she’d underestimated her employer’s ties to piracy.

“Damn Line,” she murmured, skimming the article again and shaking her head.

“The old man loved that name,” Cooper said around a yawn, his voice bringing her head around. “He thought it made him sound invincible.”

He dragged his hands through his hair, and she watched the silky fall of it slip back into place, brown strands and blond finger-combed together.

“Ship with Daniels,” he continued, grinning wryly. “Best Damn Line in the Pacific.” He turned his head and leveled his gaze on her. “It wasn’t, of course. Matson was the best damn line in the Pacific, and it galled the hell out of the old man.”

“Your father?” she asked.

Cooper shrugged, relaxing back in his seat. “He preferred to be called Mr. Daniels, or sir. Mostly I just called him the bastard.”

Jessica let the information sink in before she hazarded a guess about the painting in the San Francisco office. “You don’t look much like him.”

His grin returned, wryer and broader than before. “If I wasn’t already overpaying you, that would get you a raise, Ms. Langston.”

“You’re not overpaying me by that much,” she said in her own defense, then added, “If you didn’t get along all that well with him, why do you keep his portrait in the office?”

“To keep his memory sharp and clear in my mind. It never pays to forget your enemies, Ms. Langston, not in my business.”

“You considered your father an enemy?” she asked, not quite believing anyone’s paternal relationship could be so bitter.

“Don’t sound surprised, please,” he said drolly, glancing over at her. “God, you are an innocent.”

He had an infuriating way of delivering an insult.

“You make innocence sound like the kiss of death,” she said, not bothering to hide her irritation.

To her surprise, he laughed. The sound wasn’t sardonic, sarcastic, or wry, but a true laugh, a transforming sound that melted the weariness from his face and made her realize he was younger than she’d thought—younger and even more intriguing.

When he was finished chuckling, he looked at her again, his eyes alight with mischief. “Just so you know, Ms. Langston. A ‘kiss of death’ is something a sailor buys from a prostitute on the streets of Bangkok and it’s about as far from innocent as you can get.”

“Oh,” she said, trying to maintain her dignity while her face turned a hundred shades of crimson.

“Not to change the subject—”

Thank God, she thought. He was going to change the subject.

“—but I’d like to spend some time familiarizing you with a lady named Fang Baolian.”

“A friend of yours?” she asked, trying to keep the conversation going in the new direction. A kiss of death. She could just imagine what it was—barely. Maybe. She cast a glance at him, wondering if he’d ever had one. Then she chastised herself for prurient curiosity.

“No,” he said, leaning forward to get his briefcase. “Not a friend. A pirate, the worst of the lot.”

“Is she someone you’re after . . . in a professional sense?” She ought to be ashamed of herself, and she was, but she was also curious. What kind of man was he, anyway? she wondered.

He snapped open the briefcase and removed a batch of files. “Until I get her,” he said, “she’s the only one I’m after.”

“What about Pablo Lopez?”

“He’s a stepping-stone to Baolian. He used to be her man in Manila before he decided to go out on his own. He should have stuck with Baolian. She never hits the same line or shipping federation twice in the same year, not anymore. By concentrating on Somerset, Lopez has made himself known and notorious. Somebody has to take him out.”

The phrase, and the way he said it, set off all of Jessica’s warning bells. Masking her alarm with a casual tone, she asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘take him out’?”

“Don’t worry, Ms. Langston,” he drawled. “I didn’t hire you for the dirty work.”

Somehow, she didn’t take much comfort in his answer. She was tempted to ask him what he thought negotiating the price on a man’s freedom was, if not dirty work. Instead she asked something else she’d been wondering about. “What did you hire me for?”

He spent some time organizing the files before he replied. “You mentioned a lot of the reasons yourself, last night.”

“But not all the reasons?”

“The rest of it is a little hard to explain. I guess you could call it a last-ditch effort.”

She hadn’t thought she could slip any lower than a fatal error in judgment or a dandy little helper. She’d been wrong. Being hired as a “last-ditch effort” took the prize.

“A hundred men have died trying to bring Baolian to her knees,” he continued. “I want her stopped. I think a woman can help me do it.”

“A woman?” She didn’t like the sound of that. She also wondered if his brother was one of the hundred men.

“Strictly behind the scenes,” he assured her, looking uneasy for the first time since she’d met him. It was the only crack she’d seen in his armor of arrogance, and like his laughter, she found it remarkably appealing.

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” she said.

He was quiet for a moment, his unease obviously increasing. “Women . . . well, women are different from men. They see things where men see nothing, and they respond to what they see. I can’t get at Baolian by playing a man’s game of strength. It’s too obvious. She’ll never let herself be outgunned.”

“Smart woman,” Jessica said while she wondered what it was he thought women saw that men didn’t.

“She is that,” he agreed. “But according to your transcripts and Elise Crabb, so are you—very, very intelligent. I’m gambling that if I give you enough information, you can tell me something about Baolian I never would have figured out on my own.”

He was full of surprises. From what she’d seen of him so far, she wouldn’t have taken him to be a closet feminist. Personally, she doubted if his theory about women knowing women would hold even an ounce of water, but she wasn’t sure if she should tell him or not.

“I see,” was all she said. She’d wait until she had a better understanding of what he wanted, if that was possible, considering the vagueness of his description.

“There’s a million-dollar bounty on Baolian’s head,” he said, “partly because the people who are putting it up don’t believe anyone will ever collect. No one from the West has ever seen her. Nobody has a photograph, or so much as a bad copy of any government identification. She works mostly through her associates, which all conspires to make her damn near impossible to track, but I still think she can be captured and brought to justice. People have weaknesses. Baolian’s aren’t manpower or firepower, or financial. But there has to be something she wants badly enough to come off her phantom ship to get. If I can get my hands on that, she’ll have to come to me. The other possibility is that of all the pies she has her fingers in, one is more important than all the others. If I can find out which one, I can concentrate my resources on taking it away.”

“Phantom ship?” she asked. Her questions about his resources, or the lack thereof, would come later.

“A stolen ship with false registration papers and a new paint job on the funnels. Every few months the papers and the name change, over and over, until they get caught fencing a cargo they acquired through fraud.”

“Shippers don’t check the registration’s authenticity before they put their goods on board?” she asked, a little incredulously.

“Not enough of the time for phantom ships not to be profitable.” He handed her an aerial photograph from out of the top file. “This is Baolian’s ship. The photograph was taken four months ago, when the ship was known as the Chin-lien. It’s as close as anyone has ever gotten.”

Jessica looked at the small oval of what appeared to be a big ship floating on an expanse of gray water. “They didn’t get very close.”

He handed her another set of papers. “This is what I’ve been working on for the last two months, an inventory of all of Baolian’s holdings, legal and illegal. Next to that is a list I’ve made of her business associates—”

“Legal and illegal,” she interrupted.

“Yes. I want you to run down their holdings and cross-reference the two. I know at least two of the people she’s done business with in the past are involved in the Jakarta resort. If that’s going to be her crown jewel, then I need to get in. With enough leverage, I can push her out. Baolian doesn’t like being pushed. She’ll come after me before she risks losing face.”

“And if her crown jewel turns out to be something else?”

“Then we’ll go after whatever it is.”

Jessica slowly nodded in agreement, more out of politeness than conviction. She was tempted to ask him if he’d ever heard of the proverbial needle in the haystack. She didn’t, though. She was being well paid to go on his wild-goose chase, and she only had to keep the chase alive for a week. Then she’d be pounding the pavement, looking for another job with a more secure paycheck. Unless, of course, they could find a way to collect the cool million on Fang Baolian. A percentage bonus on that kind of take could smooth over many of her problems with Cooper Daniels.

The thought no sooner crossed her mind than she retracted it. Pirate hunting was not an appropriate career for a Stanford MBA, or for a single mother.

Or was it?

No. No, it wasn’t. She was sure. Besides, working for a man she found devastatingly attractive was a package with doom written all over it.

Damn. She should have known the job was too good to be true. It was discouraging to hit a brick wall when she’d thought she’d made all the right moves.

“Mrs. Crabb never said anything about maritime bounty hunting,” she said, trying not to sound too disappointed, or too bitchy. “Not in the whole six weeks she spent running me through the wringer, making sure I was good enough for you.”

“The wringer, huh?”

She nodded. “She had a list of requirements as long as my arm and went on and on about how only the best was good enough for Mr. Daniels. She’s either been misinformed about the nature of your work, or she’s sweet on you.”

He laughed again. “You wouldn’t think she was sweet on me if you’d heard what she said when I called her and told her I wanted my money back .”

“You asked for your money back?” Jessica turned on him, her pride plummeting another five notches. She couldn’t believe it. He’d tried to return her like a bargain-basement sale item.

“I told Mrs. Crabb to hire me a man-eating shark,” he said, a sinful smile curving his mouth and darkening his eyes. “She sent me you. I wasn’t sure what to do with you . . . not professionally at least.”

There was a compliment in there somewhere, but Jessica didn’t think she dared to untangle it from the blatant insult.

“I also asked for brilliant and practical,” he continued. “She told me you were both, in spades.” A small laugh escaped him as he turned away and rested his head on the back of the seat. “I didn’t ask for beautiful, but I’m learning to live with it.”

Without any noticeable effort, he’d shocked her again. Another round of warmth crept into her cheeks.

“Mothers have to be practical,” she said, becoming suddenly busy with shuffling papers around in her lap.

“I’m sure that comes in real handy.”

She didn’t need to look up at him to know he was grinning a mile wide, damnably cocksure of his ability to fluster her out of both her practicality and her brilliance.

* * *

Fourteen hours later they arrived in San Francisco, having left London at ten A.M. Friday morning and, by the miracle of time zones, reaching the West Coast at four P.M. of the same day. Jessica figured she only had five working days left to get through, and knowing she deserved at least one of them to sleep in order to recover from the trip, she revised her calculation down to four days.

Four days. Nothing of the magnitude he wanted could happen in four days. She was safe. And if on the off chance he talked her into the full five days, she would be okay. She was sure of it.

Stifling a yawn, she maneuvered through the other passengers crowding around the luggage carousel. She felt like a truck had hit her and not bothered to put on the brakes. Her back ached and her head was pounding from the hours spent in the air. She positioned herself to retrieve her suitcase, but before she could grab it, Cooper wrapped his hand around the handle and swung it to the floor.

“Let’s go,” he said, readjusting his grip and balancing the weight with his own suitcase and carry-on bag. “I’ve got my car here, so I’ll take you home. It will give us a chance to continue our discussion.”

Jessica groaned. They’d talked nothing but business since he’d handed her the files on Fang Baolian. She was all talked out. What he wanted to do was impossibly daunting. Despite the sizable amount of liquid assets he’d compiled over the last few weeks—selling off many Far Eastern properties he and his brother had acquired—she doubted he had the monetary clout to walk into any boardroom and force Fang Baolian out. She was sure what he wanted was crazy, but she wasn’t going to tell him. No, she was going to keep the secret to herself. She was going to keep her mouth shut and her eyes fixed on the future—instead of on him, where they had a tendency to wander.

He fascinated her. He wasn’t an easy man to look at, but she had surprisingly little trouble doing just that. In truth, during one of his naps on the flight, she’d memorized every angle and curve of his face, from the differing falls of his hair to the bare impression of a cleft in his chin. Most people didn’t hold up too well under such close scrutiny. Cooper Daniels had done fine, much to her dismay. Admittedly, she wouldn’t have had time to memorize anything if he’d been awake. Then he would have looked back, and the perceptiveness of his gaze was what made him hard to look at in the first place. That and the edgy emotion underlying his facade of calm. The laughter he’d shared at the beginning of their flight had become more remote with every minute spent discussing Fang Baolian.

“I have to make a phone call,” she said when they came upon a bank of phones. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

She watched him walk away with a sense of relief. She didn’t want to think about pirates anymore, especially one named Fang Baolian, and she needed a break from thinking about her soon-to-be ex-employer. The physical attraction she felt, had felt from the first moment she’d seen him, was embarrassing. It was probably perfectly normal, but even though she’d never felt another attraction as strongly or as suddenly, she was sure it was the type that made people do foolish things they later regretted.

To date, her ex-husband had failed to regret his plunge into adulterous lust, but she was sure Ian was the exception. She wasn’t a prude, but she liked to think she had the maturity to make wise decisions.

Cooper Daniels was not a wise decision, and he wanted the impossible. He wanted her to follow a laundered money trail through an international labyrinth on a seek-and-destroy mission. He wanted to use his small financial empire to bring about the demise of a much larger one, even though his empire was crumbling. He wanted revenge.

Jessica wanted sleep. Not for the first time she wished she’d been thinking with more than her checkbook and her heart when she’d chosen Cooper Daniels’s company over the ones from the East and the Midwest that had made her offers. She would never stoop so low as to go back to New York, the scene of her marital humiliation, but Chicago wouldn’t have been so terrible. It wouldn’t have been home, but it would have been bearable.

When a phone opened up, she stumbled forward, weary to the bone. She let her carry-on bag slip off her shoulder to the floor, then dug the necessary coins out of her purse and fed them into the telephone. Before anyone answered, Cooper was back at her side with a luggage cart. She gave him a quick glance and a halfhearted smile, a smile that turned genuine when a sweet voice spoke into her ear.

“Hello. Langston and Signorelli residence. Christina Langston speaking.”

“Hi, sweetheart. I’m home.”

Cooper saw the sudden beatific curve of Jessica’s mouth, the soft glow in her eyes, and knew beyond doubt that neither of them was meant for him. They belonged to “sweetheart.”

A pang of jealousy he hadn’t expected tightened his chest. He had been without a woman’s love for a long time, and Jessica Langston made him feel that lack with a surprising intensity. At another time, under different circumstances, he would have welcomed her into his life. He would have taken a chance with her, this woman who acted on his emotions and made him want to rediscover tenderness.

Hoping his jealousy was completely unfounded, he took a guess as to who her “sweetheart” might be—her nine-year-old daughter, Christina, or her seven-year-old son, Eric. He’d finally read her personnel file. He knew she had two children and was divorced from a private investigator in New York. He knew she was thirty-three years old. He did not know if she was seeing a man.

“Oh, Christina . . . yes, honey.” She laughed, paused again, then murmured a reply into the phone. Cooper tried to remember the last time a woman had talked so sweetly to him. It had been a while. He could remember his mother talking in a similar way to Jackson—a green-eyed, dark-haired terror, the kind of wild child only a mother could love.

But that was a long time ago, and they were both gone now, his mother for more than half his lifetime and Jackson seemingly only yesterday.

Cooper felt the muscles in his jaw tighten. The pain never left him, the pain and the guilt. Jackson had been protecting Cooper’s back when he’d died, and Cooper was supposed to have been protecting Jackson. He had failed, and that failure had left him devoid of any tenderness, any love. He had nothing to offer a woman. Nothing.

He swore silently to himself and gave Jessica an impatient look, motioning with his head. He was ready to leave. He’d been moving fast for the last two months, trying to outrun his feelings. Now was not the time to stop, not when he was bone-tired, and his emotions were seeping through mental and physical barriers thinned by exhaustion.

She said her good-byes and picked up her carry-on bag, which he transferred to the cart.

“Sorry,” she apologized around another yawn. “But it’s the deal I’ve got with them. I always call from the airport to give them a chance to whip the house into shape. Paul hates for me to think he can’t handle the kids when I’m gone.”

Paul? Cooper didn’t remember anybody named Paul in her file.

“And Tony hates being taken by surprise,” she continued. “He’s always got something going on he’d rather I didn’t know about.”

And Tony. Cooper gave her a sharp glance. Even if she was seeing one man, she couldn’t possibly be seeing two, living with two. The thought of one man was aggravating enough. He couldn’t have misjudged—

He drew his thoughts to a sudden halt, realizing he had already misjudged just about everything else about her. He’d seen some pretty loose relationships in San Francisco, situations that would have easily accommodated a simple ménage à trois. One more mistaken opinion about Jessica Langston shouldn’t surprise him.

It did, though. It surprised the hell out of him. He’d have bet money on her playing for keeps in the love department. Privately, he admitted that was part of her appeal to him. He liked to think there was someone left in the world a person could count on when things got tough. And things always got tough.

“I’d like to stop by the office for a minute,” he said. “Will that be okay with you?” They had a job to do, he reminded himself. Nothing could get in the way of bringing Baolian down, least of all his hormonal response to the auburn-haired beauty who was his assistant.

“Sure,” she said, sounding like she was past the point of caring about details.

“Fine.”

More preoccupied with his new knowledge of her than he would have admitted to anyone, he led the way out to his car. Jessica Langston’s living arrangements and her lovers weren’t his business. Her employment was his business, and that should be uppermost in his mind. He needed her skills and her instincts, not her personal attention.

But he had liked having her personal attention all day. He’d liked sitting next to her, listening to her soft voice talking about his goals and questioning his assets. Her fragrance had eased him, her nearness had soothed him. Maybe he’d liked it all too much.

Jessica wasn’t sure what she’d done to sidetrack him, but Cooper hardly spoke a word on their way to his car. His sudden quietness was a welcome respite from the information overload she’d been getting. Once they were under way, she stretched out in the warm and comfortable luxury sedan and let the subdued hum of the engine and the quietly playing classical music lull her into a state of relaxation.

“For the remainder of your stay at Daniels, Ltd., you’ll be working under a strict operating procedure,” he said from out of nowhere, startling her back into awareness.

She’d really thought they were done for the night. Sighing, she turned her head so she could see him. “Operating procedure?” she repeated.

“Any requests for information will be done in the company’s name. You’ve been sitting at the receptionist’s desk for a couple of weeks. There’s no reason for anybody to know you are anything except my receptionist.”

She came more fully awake, her instincts telling her this was not an idle fancy of his.

“Why?” she asked.

“Precautionary measure.”

For someone who had talked her ear off across most of the Atlantic and North America, he’d done an amazing regression into taciturnity.

“Precaution against what?”

He briefly met her gaze, his eyes assessing her with cool briskness. “Involvement,” he finally said, returning his attention to the road. “Since you’re not sticking around for very long, there’s no reason for anyone to know you’re involved. If everything turns out the way we want, great. You can put Daniels, Ltd. on your résumé and go straight to the top of another organization.”

“And if things go bad?”

“Then you’re well out of it.” He ran his hand through his hair and shot her another glance. “You can tell people as much or as little as you like. I’ll back you up.”

He had a generous nature, she thought, which shouldn’t have surprised her—considering the salary he was paying.

Given his show of support, she felt she should be more up-front with him. “I have to tell you, Mr. Daniels, that I don’t think too much is going to happen in one week.” She tilted her head in his direction to gauge his reaction. There was none—except for a slight narrowing of his eyes. She pushed ahead. “The kind of investigation you want can take months. The kind of information I’ll need can be very hard to track down. Then there’s the time involved in determining the best course of action once we have the information.”

She didn’t consider her statements a concession of defeat before the game had even gotten started. She had more confidence in herself than that. But there were realities they both needed to take into consideration, and she hoped he was considering them.

“Call me Cooper,” was all he said, checking the traffic before changing lanes to pass a car, giving a good impression of a man who hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

Oh-kay , she thought, drawing the word out in her mind. If he didn’t want to take her seriously, that was fine with her. But now they’d both been warned. She just hoped he realized it.

Five

Cooper took her up to the office in the private elevator. It was a throwback, he explained, to when the building had been owned by one of the old San Francisco shipping magnates who had gone head-to-head with the Damn Line and lost. Given the ancient workings and grumbling and groanings of the contraption, Jessica could only wonder in which century the battle had been waged.

The doors opened with a grinding noise, making each inch seem hard won. She waited, foot tiredly tapping, her chin down and her eyes lowered. When freedom was a few grinding seconds away, Cooper pulled her back from the door and stepped in front of her.

The rudeness of the action left her speechless. She hadn’t burned her bras. She was entitled to a little consideration, and she wanted out of his ancient cage of an elevator.

“Excuse me,” she said with soft sarcasm.

He had the audacity to flash her a grin over his shoulder. “We’ve got company.”

She looked past him and realized he’d spoken with typical understatement. A number of Oriental men were crowded into his office, sitting around his table, standing against his walls, and walking all over his dragon. Most of them were dressed like businessmen in suits and ties, but one was not. He was dressed like a Mandarin overlord, complete with arrogant demeanor and haughty composure. It took her less than a minute to realize the businessmen were actually the overlord’s bodyguards.

“Remember, I’m paying you to think on your feet,” Cooper said before stepping out of the elevator, his brief smile replaced by a more somber expression.

Those were the last words she understood for quite a while. Cooper greeted the silk-clad gentleman in a Chinese dialect and with great deference, an attitude she would have thought too alien to his nature for him to pull off convincingly. He proved otherwise with his low bow and his silent acceptance of the invasion of his domain.

During the introductions, she did manage to determine that the man’s name was Chow Sheng. After a short bow that she performed without conscious intent, she settled into one of the chairs flanking the large, low table in the middle of Cooper’s office.

She sat quietly, absorbing the nuances of the conversation if not its actual meaning, not quite believing she’d bowed to the imperious old goat.

With a clap of Chow Sheng’s hands, tea was served by two of the bodyguards. She could tell there was a discussion as to whether or not she should be included. At Cooper’s indication that she should be served, a cup was offered with only a modicum of hesitation, just enough to put her in her place as a woman of little or no rank. She was appropriately offended, but didn’t let her feelings show.

The amenities, if they could be called that, lasted twenty minutes by Jessica’s watch, which she checked discreetly but often. Then, with no more warning than a shift of inflection in Chow Sheng’s voice, the atmosphere became charged with tension.

Cooper stiffened beside her, and every bodyguard in the place responded with a not-so-subtle shift in his stance. All the awareness in the room was focused on the three people sitting around the table. The tension was palpable, hostile, and Jessica suddenly understood that she and Cooper were not at a tea party given by friends.

Under the table, she felt his foot nudge hers. She picked up her teacup and took a swallow, instinctively understanding she was not supposed to react to the new dynamics. She also understood the other implications of his action: He was aware of her; he was considering her presence and her safety. Or at least that’s what she thought before he spoke, this time in English.

“I was not aware, Chow Sheng, of your new status as a lackey dog for the dragon whore.”

Jessica choked despite her best efforts not to. They were fighting words if she’d ever heard them, and he was outnumbered. She quickly decided her wisest game plan would be to play dumb, defenseless, and inculpable, good guy to his bad guy.

“Fang Baolian’s offer is most generous,” Chow Sheng replied in perfect, unruffled English, pushing himself out of the deep comfort of the chair. “Five hundred thousand Hong Kong dollars to forget the unpleasantness between your house and hers.”

“Tell her I’ll see her in hell.”

The Oriental man smiled blandly. “A certain rashness is required for your business, but of the two brothers, I always thought you were the more practical. Baolian’s offer will be available for one week. Send someone if you change your mind.” He walked around the table toward Jessica’s end, his smile directed at Cooper as he said something else in Chinese.

Cooper responded in the same language.

Chow stopped next to Jessica’s chair and spoke again, a soft questioning in his voice, his hand moving gracefully to her shoulder.

In an instant Cooper was on his feet with the old man’s wrist manacled in his fist. Total mayhem would have broken out if Chow hadn’t immediately raised his other hand to quiet the bodyguards.

Chow spoke again in Chinese. Cooper replied in the same language, his voice tight and threatening. When the older man acknowledged what had been said—by the barest gesture of his free hand—Cooper released him.

Studiously ignoring her presence, Chow clapped his hands twice, and he and his entourage exited through the reception area, leaving empty teacups and a surfeit of tension in their wake.

Jessica slowly rose to her feet and took a deep breath. She didn’t know which was more disturbing: that Cooper had risen to her defense, or that she’d needed defending in the first place. From what, she wasn’t sure, but she hadn’t liked Chow Sheng touching her.

She should have listened to George, she thought, her heart continuing to pound too rapidly for comfort. Smart money would have her typing out her resignation before she left that night, it wasn’t too late to jump ship. Now that she’d seen exactly what she’d gotten herself into, she should get out. Piece of cake.

She reached for her tea and took a hesitant sip, her hand shaking. It was obvious what she had to do . . . walk away. It was so simple.

“Damn,” she whispered to herself, rattling the teacup against the saucer as she set it down. Nothing was simple. She wasn’t walking away or jumping anything, and she knew it.

She had agreed to fulfill her contract, and she wasn’t going to be frightened off by a little “big boy” pushing and shoving. With four brothers, she’d had years of hands-on training in dealing with macho posturing.

Of course, what had looked like an intimidating bluff on the part of the bodyguards had looked remarkably like a sincere promise of damage from Cooper Daniels. His willingness to protect her struck a responsive chord deep in her psyche, one she was sure she should have outgrown. It should have galled her to think she needed a man’s protection.

But in a man’s world, playing a man’s game, having a man ready and able to protect her virtue didn’t seem like a bad thing at all, even if it was macho posturing.

Not when the man was Cooper Daniels.

“What did Mr. Chow say that got us into so much trouble?” she asked when Cooper returned from locking the doors behind Chow and his gang. If she was in the game, and she was, then she needed to know all the facts.

He looked at her before walking behind his desk. At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her question, but then he spoke.

“The most honorable Mr. Chow,” he said, seemingly disinterested as he checked his fax machine, “thought you looked too old to be a virgin, but noticed with great pleasure that your skin was beautiful, like white jade.” He read the fax message, then turned and flipped a switch on his computer. The actions were automatic, casual, but the tension in the room didn’t drop by so much as a degree.

“And?” Shocked as she was by the revelation, she knew there was more.

“He wondered if you would disrobe. If he dismissed his bodyguards, of course.” His fingers moved over the keyboard, punching in commands.

“Disrobe?” Her voice was a hoarse croak of disbelief.

The typing stopped, and she could see the working of the finer muscles in his jaw. A perfectly silent moment passed before he shifted his gaze up to meet hers.

“I told him you would not disrobe under any circumstances.”

She was grateful, but she sensed anything she might say would be inadequate, or worse, embarrassing.

“And that last bit of conversation?” she asked instead, even though she was afraid of what he might say. It seemed nothing was beyond Chow Sheng.

His eyes held hers across the length of the room, level and compellingly green, the irises still bright with the adrenaline rush caused by the confrontation. “When he accepted that you wouldn’t disrobe in my office like a Chinese slave girl, he wanted to buy you for the night.”

She’d been right. No atrocity was beyond Chow Sheng. His request was shocking and abhorrent. It was also curious and archaic. But curious begat curiosity, and much to her perplexity, she found herself asking the most awful of questions.

“How much?”

“Two thousand Hong Kong.”

She did some quick figuring, and embarrassment blossomed full-blown. “Isn’t that a little on the cheap side?” She should have had more pride than to ask, but a part of her hoped she’d made a mistake in her figuring.

A smile curved the corners of his mouth, and the brightness of adrenaline in his eyes was replaced by a glint of pure mischief.

“Skin like white jade can be a most desirable feature in a woman,” he said. “But the lack of virginity is an irreparable flaw, which, under any circumstances, lowers the value of the goods in question.”

As the goods in question, Jessica showed great face-saving restraint in her reply. “Of course.”

“I probably could have haggled the price higher,” he said, with only a hint of wryness in his tone.

“No,” she said too hurriedly. “No, I think you did the right thing.”

“Personally, I would have offered much, much more for a night with you.”

“Thank you,” she said, somewhat mollified. Then she realized her mistake. “I mean . . . uh no, thank you. Not that I’m not . . . uh—” Oh, hell, she didn’t know what she meant.

* * *

Riding home, she was still embarrassed, but she knew she had only herself to blame. Her last question had been foolish, unconsciously designed to humiliate herself—and it had absolutely changed her relationship with Cooper Daniels.

Once a man has turned down the equivalent of two hundred and fifty dollars for a woman and told her, it was damn hard to keep everything on a professional level.

What a day, she thought, and thank goodness they were finally heading home.

“Is this your exit coming up?” he asked, directing her attention to the freeway sign up ahead.

“Yes,” she said, and spent the next quarter hour giving him directions through suburbia. Shortly before dark, they pulled up in front of a two-story house nearly overrun by a lush forest of trees interspersed with shrubbery, flowering plants, and ground cover.

And just about anything else a person could name, Cooper thought. There didn’t seem to be a single species of flora missing from the mélange. A dry creek bed wound its way through gently sloping man-made hills, doing its best to anchor the profusion of green and growing things. A beautifully carved bridge straddled the creek on a brick path leading to the front door.

His first impression was of a jungle experiment that had gone haywire or been overdosed with fertilizer and California sunshine. As he looked longer, though, he began to see the hints of a design underlying the arrangement. The plants were also exceptionally well tended. Compared with most other yards, hers looked like a botanical health club.

“My brother is a landscape architect,” she said, “working on what he likes to call a modified chaos theory. He’s trying to find the bifurcation points of competing indigenous flora in an optimal but natural environment.”

“I think they all won,” Cooper said dryly, hazarding a guess about what she was talking about.

“That’s what Paul is hoping will happen.”

“Paul is your brother?” He turned to find her watching him, something she did a lot, though mostly when she thought he wouldn’t notice.

“My next to youngest,” she said, shifting her gaze back to the yard.

Her awareness of him lingered in the confines of the car, filling the space between them. He’d felt her gaze upon him many times during their long day of travel and even more so since the fiasco in his office. But then, as now, she was always careful to look away quickly. He hoped it wasn’t because she saw too much. Her appeal to him wasn’t something he could afford to explore, but it was strong, intriguing, and had damn near gotten him killed when he’d grabbed Chow Sheng. Rash didn’t begin to cover what he’d done.

Reminding himself one more time to forget having a personal relationship with her, he shrugged off the recriminations for misplaced gallantry and opened the driver’s door.

He knew they needed more than a week to accomplish his goal, even with Baolian already starting to cry uncle—the offer she’d sent via Chow proved that—and he was counting on Jessica staying on after her contract was fulfilled. He needed help, and he hadn’t overstated her attributes. He was paying himself into bankruptcy to get those attributes.

He heard her door open as he pulled her suitcase and carry-on out of the trunk, then he heard her sigh. The soft sound drew his gaze, despite his better judgment and his common sense.

She was balancing against the car door, lifting each foot in turn to remove her high heels. Her auburn hair had been finger-combed into disarray in the front, while the longer strands in back fell forward across her shoulders, skimming the delicate line of her jaw and emphasizing the fairness of her skin. Her blouse was partially untucked from her black skirt, making a white wing against the darker material. She was lovely, supple, and female, and her mere presence touched him.

Watching her, he was glad he’d stopped Chow from caressing her face, from feeling the skin he’d admired. She might be more stranger than friend, but Cooper felt a connection with her, one he was thankful he hadn’t allowed to be sullied.

A part of him wanted to put her far away from the mess he was in. He’d requested a highly specialized accountant from Elise Grubb, a person versed in finance and the Far East, and she’d sent him someone he was thinking of more as a woman, as a mother, a human being. It was damned distracting. He’d wanted everything cut-and-dried, and all business. He didn’t want any personal involvement. A robot who could think like a woman would have suited him fine.

“This is his house, Paul’s,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him and continuing her thoughts. “The kids and I share it with him and another of our brothers.”

“Tony is your brother too?” he asked, wondering what idiocy had made him assume differently about her ménage à trois. Jealousy, probably, and that was hardly a comforting thought.

“The youngest,” she said. “I have two more who are older than me.”

He didn’t know whether to be relieved or resigned.

His life would have been easier if she’d been seeing someone else, or two someone elses. He didn’t want her to be available. His best bet was to get her suitcase to the door and make a quick escape.

“Hey, Jessie!” A deep voice called to her from somewhere in the jungle of the yard.

Cooper turned toward the sound, feeling a distinct but strangely displaced sense of recognition. When a young man broke through the foliage, Cooper froze. For an instant sunlight and shadow played tricks with the man’s broad grin and the impish gleam in his dark eyes. For an instant Cooper thought he saw someone else.

“Jessie!” the young man hollered. He bounded down a hill to scoop her up into his arms and swing her around, making her squeal. A white daisy dangled precariously over one of his ears, held in place by straight dark hair that added to the painful illusion of familiarity.

“Tony Signorelli, you put me down.” Jessica laughed and bopped her not-so-little brother on the shoulder with her shoe. “And what’s this?” She reached for his flower. “Don’t tell me you’re playing—”

“Jessie,” he warned, threatening to drop her.

“Tarzan and Jane.” She squealed again as he let her fall a foot before he caught her.

Cooper was damned surprised at the playfulness of his Ms. MBA assistant, but it was the man who held his unwavering attention. Tony Signorelli was all energy and enthusiasm, and he was teasing his sister with a smile Cooper had last seen in the South China Sea.

It was Jackson’s smile, an uncanny duplication of an expression Cooper had coaxed out of childish tantrums and endured through adolescent arrogance. He’d seen Jackson’s smile quell dangerous men and seduce temperate women. Once, the woman had been Cooper’s, or so he’d thought until Jackson had shown up and lured her away with his easy charm.

The reunion at the edge of the jungle was interrupted by the appearance of “Jane,” a petite young woman with generous curves, short blond hair, and a warm smile. Her face had an elfin quality despite her plumpness.

“Hi,” she said to Jessica, then lifted her hand in a wave to include Cooper where he stood by the car. “Hi.”

Tony released Jessica and stepped aside to put his arm around the other woman in a gesture of obvious affection. His smile and his resemblance to Jackson faded into a more serious expression. “I’d like you to meet Alaina Fairchild. Alaina, this is my sister, Jessie.”

“Nice to meet you,” Alaina said. “Tony has told me a lot about you.”

“Nice meeting you too,” Jessica replied. With a lift of her hand, she also included Cooper. “This is my boss, Cooper Daniels. Mr. Daniels, my brother Tony Signorelli, and his friend Alaina Fairchild.”

Cooper stepped forward and shook hands all around.

“Alaina is an accounting senior at Berkeley,” Tony explained. “So I’ve told her a lot about you, Jess. Nice to meet you, Mr. Daniels.”

Cooper nodded, silently agreeing that it was damn nice to meet everyone.

“Here, let me help you with those,” Tony said, reaching for his sister’s luggage. “We’re all just sitting down to supper. You ought to stay, Mr. Daniels. I’m sous chef at Balay, and I cooked, so it’s not like you have to eat that stuff Jessie comes up with, and Alaina made dessert.”

Cooper opened his mouth to decline the invitation, even though he knew Balay was a good restaurant, but before the words could get out of his mouth, another scream filled the air.

“Mom!” A young girl, all legs and flying dark hair, launched herself at his assistant, along with a smaller but sturdier-looking bundle of boy. Cooper reached out a hand to steady Jessica and found himself accidentally tangled up in the melee of hugs. It unnerved the hell out of him.

“Jessie!” yet another voice hollered, and Cooper started feeling like he’d brought home the Holy Grail. The newcomer had to be Paul, of course. There wasn’t anyone else left. At least he didn’t think so.

“Lime cheesecake with raspberry sauce. It’s one of her specialties,” Tony was explaining to Jessica even as she hugged her other brother.

“Mr. Daniels,” a small voice spoke to him from about waist height.

Cooper looked down to see an equally small hand extended. He shook it. He didn’t know what else to do.

“I’m Eric Langston.”

“Hello, Eric.”

“You’re not my father.”

“I know.” Cooper felt like he’d just landed on an unexplored planet.

“I’m Christina,” another voice addressed him.

Cooper turned and shook a slightly larger, but infinitely more delicate hand. “Cooper Daniels,” he said. Christina Langston looked like her mother, all wide cinnamon-colored eyes and pale skin with a dusting of freckles across her cheeks.

He turned hack to Jessica to say good-bye and to ask her to do a little work for him over the weekend, but he got waylaid by another introduction to yet another tall, dark-haired man, her brother Paul, who shook his hand, but then didn’t quite let it go. The dinner invitation was repeated a bit more firmly. Paul said something about wanting to get to know his sister’s boss better, especially since the boss was showing a tendency to whisk her off to faraway places.

Cooper got the impression he was being sized up and analyzed by a man about ten years his junior, and a gardener no less. He would have laughed, if laughter had been at all appropriate. The strength of the younger man’s handshake told him it wasn’t. Cooper Daniels was invited to dinner.

He could have declined. He wasn’t a stranger to power plays, winning through intimidation, or outright rudeness, and he wasn’t averse to using whatever method met his needs. But the Signorelli brothers were trying to be nice, and they were doing it out of concern for their sister. Cooper could do worse than to ease their worries about him. He knew he’d have to put on his best face and work at being sociable. It would be an imposition on his naturally antisocial—even surly—inclinations. But he could do it. Prove to them he was a good guy, and maybe they would influence their sister to stay on the job until the job was done.

Charm and affability. He hadn’t used either in so long, he should have a ready supply.

Six

“He’s not what I expected,” Paul said, handing Jessica another double shot of espresso for her to mix with hot milk. Everyone else was lingering over Alaina’s dessert on the back patio, leaving the two of them in the kitchen with a second round of coffee duty.

“Who?” she asked, though she knew perfectly well who he meant. She couldn’t believe Cooper had allowed himself to be coerced into a dinner-with-interrogation by her brother. She knew for a fact that he had enough arrogance to have delivered a flat refusal without a shred of guilt. She wished he had. Instead, he’d turned on more charm than she’d thought he possessed.

All she’d wanted to do was have a snack, be with her children, and go to bed. Instead, Tony had pulled out all the stops. Coupled with Christina and Eric’s loving and excitement, she’d gotten an unwelcome second wind. She probably wouldn’t fall asleep until four in the morning.

“The guy on his second piece of cheesecake,” her brother replied, giving her a wry look. “The guy who sent you overseas with less than a day’s notice. The man who made you miss Christina’s piano recital. The one I haven’t been real impressed with so far.”

“Oh. You mean the one who fired me five minutes after meeting me and is now practically blackmailing me into staying?” She grinned.

Paul grinned back at her. “Yeah. That one.”

“He’s not so bad, really.”

“I know,” her brother said. “That’s why he’s not what I expected. He’s been pretty high-handed with you. I guess I thought he’d be a real stuffed shirt.”

“He’s had a hard time of it lately.” She poured the last of the hot milk into the espresso cups, yawning. Maybe her second wind was winding down. She could only hope. Because of the guy on his second piece of cheesecake, she’d had a hard time of it lately too.

She had not had a private moment to tell her brother what she’d learned in London about her boss’s financial situation and recent family history, but had decided the news could wait until morning. She didn’t want to take a chance of Cooper hearing her talking about his murdered brother again. The awfulness of it still had her shaken.

“Nice guy or not,” Paul said, “you don’t need somebody else to take care of, a wounded dove.”

“He’s not a dove, he’s a dragon,” she said perfectly deadpan.

Her brother gave her a look of pure skepticism, and she rephrased her answer.

“Believe me, Paul. Cooper Daniels can take care of himself.” And me, she silently added. George had been right to tell her to get out while the getting was good, but he’d been wrong about Cooper’s inclinations to take care of her. Those were up and running in full working order.

“Maybe,” her brother answered, still looking doubtful. “But he sure spends a lot of time looking at you as if he’d like you to take care of him, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, turning aside as much to put the filled latte cups on a tray as to hide her sudden blush. “He’s been nothing except rude and demanding. Hardly the actions of a man trying to impress a woman.”

Paul shrugged. “I know a guy on the make when I see one, little sister, and your boss couldn’t keep his eyes off you all through dinner.”

“You’re overprotective.”

“I’m realistic.”

“You’re barely kicking thirty in the back, and I’m over the hill. Therefore I am not your little sister,” she said, reminding him of her four-year age advantage.

He only grinned down at her from his seven-inch height advantage and said, “Oh, yeah?”

* * *

It was time for him to leave. It had been time for him to leave an hour ago, but Cooper still hadn’t managed to extricate himself from the Langstons, the Signorellis, and Alaina Fairchild. At dusk, Paul had turned on the lights hidden in the trees and along the paths leading through the yard. The effect was exotic, reminding Cooper of the finer places he’d been to in Southeast Asia, places where the very air evoked mystery and sensuality.

His gaze drifted to Jessica. She wasn’t what she was supposed to have been, and the disparities were going to be his undoing. She’d made a quick change of clothes before supper, doing away with her business suit in favor of a long blouse and leggings with a blue-and-white seashell pattern. She’d worked her hair up again, which was becoming his favorite style for her. It exposed the exquisite nape of her neck, a place he wanted very much to put his mouth to and taste with his tongue.

He felt a tightening in his groin and swore silently as he shifted in his chair. She was going to be the death of him. In four days of working for him, she hadn’t made a false move—except for shaking his concentration and somehow making him care, making him want her.

He forced his attention back to his wineglass, lifting it to drain its contents. He knew better than to do what he was considering but he didn’t think that was going to be enough to stop him.

“More wine, Mr. Daniels?” Tony asked.

Cooper looked over at the younger man and shook his head. “No, thank you.”

Jessica’s brother was a nice kid, nothing at all like Jackson, except in his smile, his exuberance, and his appreciation of the gentler sex. Alaina Fairchild was glowing under all his attention. Tony’s basic body build and the darkness of his hair were the same as Jackson’s, but without the smile to transform them, the resemblance was purely superficial. Thank God.

After dessert had been served, Paul had turned off the brighter patio lights, leaving Cooper with a sense of being cocooned in a rainforest night filled with stars. The lush landscaping extended along both sides of the house and overwhelmed the backyard with the same undiminished vigor it displayed in the front yard. The smells were wonderful, rich and earthy with a hint of flowers.

His own home smelled of the sea—and of emptiness. He knew that was another reason he’d allowed himself to linger. He had hardly been home in two months, and he still wasn’t ready to face the emptiness. Cooper had friends, but they were all mourning Jackson, and his guilt didn’t allow him that luxury. It was safer to be with strangers, and he wanted to be with Jessica.

When Tony left to walk Alaina to her car, Paul gave Cooper an undisguised signal to leave. “I guess it’s time we all called it an evening,” the younger man said, rising to his feet. “It was nice to meet you, Mr. Daniels. Christina, Eric, this is it. Bedtime. Let’s go.”

The children stood up with their uncle, and Jessica followed suit.

“I’ll see you out,” she said to Cooper, then turned to her children and gave them both big hugs. “I’ll be up in a minute, sweetie pies. We’ll read a story together.”

Rather than going through the house, she literally led him down the garden path. Cooper could have told her it wasn’t necessary. He could have seen himself out. She was tired, and he’d already taken up too much of her time. But he wasn’t ready to let her go. His quick escape had died with the invasion of her family, and he’d resigned himself to breaking a cardinal rule.

“I’ll be going to Honolulu in the morning and staying over the weekend,” he said, stepping aside and letting her precede him into a serpentine bower of latticework and grapevines. The arbor was lit from within by more of the tiny lights, but there weren’t enough of them to do more than hint at the intricacy of their home. “I would appreciate you checking the office in the afternoons while I’m gone. I’m expecting some information on Fang Baolian. It will either come down by modem or over the fax, less likely as a telephone message. Regardless of how it’s delivered, I don’t want it lying around. You can store it, file it, download it, or transcribe it. I just want to make sure it isn’t lost or seen by anyone else.”

“Okay. I’ll check in twice on both Saturday and Sunday,” she said.

It was the kind of dedication he was paying for, and he would have been more surprised if she hadn’t made the offer. Nevertheless, he was grateful.

“Thanks. I’ll be back Sunday night. I’ll leave my itinerary on your desk, in case you need to get in touch with me.”

They walked a few more steps before she asked the question he’d been expecting.

“Do I need to worry about Chow Sheng?”

“No,” he said without hesitation.

“You sound pretty positive,” she said, not sounding at all positive herself.

“I am.” Chow Sheng valued his life too much to trespass where Cooper had warned him not to go, and that was within a mile of Jessica Langston.

She looked up at him as if she expected more of an explanation, but she wasn’t going to get it. Cooper saw no reason to repeat to her what he’d said to Chow. He was in a vengeful mood, he’d told the old man, a terribly vengeful mood. Only a fool would cross him in such a mood, a fool or a man intent on his own death.

“I didn’t realize you spoke Chinese,” she said, resigning herself to his answer with an ease he appreciated.

“I lived in Hong Kong with my mother for a few years, from when I was about seven until I was ten, and Jackson and I went back after she died. Her family is still in the trade and shipping industry there, Burnett and Company.”

“I went to Hong Kong once on a business trip.” She lifted her hand to brush back a hanging leaf. “The city is amazing. It must have been a very exciting place for you as a child.”

“Not nearly as exciting as when the old man came to haul us back to the States,” he said with a humorless laugh. “My mother became involved with another man, a Chinese. As much as my mother’s family loved her, and as much as they hated my father, they couldn’t tolerate adultery when it crossed color lines. They called the old man and told him to come get his estranged wife.” He caught the shocked look Jessica gave him and knew he’d startled her with his revelation.

“How . . . uh, awful for you,” she said. “I know adultery is very hard on—on families and children.” She was floundering, and it took him a moment to figure out why. When he did, he wished he’d phrased his words less bluntly.

“I guess that sort of thing would be hard on kids as sweet as yours. But my mother only had me at the time, and sweetness wasn’t my long suit. At one time I even liked the man.”

“I wasn’t talking about my children,” she said in a flustered tone that made her impossible to believe.

“It’s nothing to feel guilty or be embarrassed about, unless you were the one who strayed.” He didn’t expect her to reply to his veiled question, but neither did he need her reply. He’d done some checking on Ian Langston, enough to know what had caused Jessica’s divorce.

When she didn’t answer, he continued his story, partly to make up for embarrassing her, and partly, for reasons he didn’t fully understand, because he wanted her to know what had happened.

“The fireworks really went off when good old Dad came and dragged her out of Hong Kong. Nobody thought she deserved the abuse he dished out, but once he got her back to San Francisco, nobody could stop him either. She died just before my sixteenth birthday. Physically, he didn’t kill her, but he made her life a living hell. I always thought she just gave up when she couldn’t take any more. I was angry with her for a long time for leaving Jackson and me like that, so angry, I packed us both up and took off for Hong Kong. Her sister took us in.”

“I’m sorry, Cooper. I’m sorry you had to go through so much.” Her voice was full of compassion for him, as if she truly felt and understood his childhood pain and wanted to wish it away.

She was years too late, but that didn’t stop him from being uncomfortably aware of his emotional response to her sympathy. The urge to draw her into his arms and kiss her, to connect with her and offer her the comfort she was offering him, was almost overwhelming.

“It’s always been even money on who raided the Damn Line to death, the Burnetts or my mother’s Chinese lover,” he said, hoping a few hard, cold facts would help him shake off the strange feeling he was having. He could admit to lust. Wanting to give and receive comfort was something else altogether, implying an emotion he hadn’t suffered from in a long time.

He let his gaze drop to where the faint light rimmed the gentle contours of her face and haloed her hair with reddish highlights. He curled his hand into a fist to keep from touching her. Soft, soft, soft. Everything about her was so invitingly soft, making him want to hold her, to feel her in his arms. Her curves were soft, her skin, her voice, her mouth, her heart.

“You make me talk too much,” he said, moving deeper into the arbor, leading her farther from the house. The smell of cedar and ripening grapes melded together in a rich fragrance, adding an intimacy he was all too aware of.

“Is Hawaii business or . . . um, pleasure?” she asked, making an awkward change of subject.

By the slight wince he detected crossing her face, he could tell she wished she’d said something different. Her question had sounded more personal than professional, but that was fine with him. They were going to get a lot more personal before they reached his car, and he appreciated any help, however subtle, she gave him.

“Business. I’m picking up Pablo Lopez.”

Her head came back up. “You know where he is?”

“Everybody knows where he is,” he said, moving aside a trailing vine overhead. She stopped just on the other side of the vine, still well within the bower, her partially illuminated face reflecting her confusion.

“Then what was London all about?” she asked. “If everybody knows where he is, why didn’t they pick him up themselves instead of wasting a lot of my time and contracting to pay you a small fortune?”

He looked down at her, taken back by the extent of her naïveté. He was a bounty hunter. She’d met George Leeds and been in the Boarshead. What did she think? That he spent a lot of time in boardrooms?

“They don’t want to get hurt,” he said, putting it to her as simply as possible. With a gesture of his hand, he suggested they continue walking.

She obliged him, hesitantly, for about three steps, before coming to an abrupt stop at the end of the bower. “And you do?” she asked, the concern in her voice edged with anger .

“I don’t get paid to get hurt,” he said.

“But there’s always a possibility.” It wasn’t a question, because he knew she knew the answer.

“I would like to get started early on Monday morning. If you could be in the office by—”

“Is that what happened to your leg?” she interrupted, showing the same tenacity he’d earlier thought was a virtue. “Did you get hurt trying to bring somebody in?”

“No. I was with Jackson.”

He hadn’t expected to tell her. He didn’t know why he had. Everyone knew, but it wasn’t something he’d admitted out loud, not in the nine long weeks since Jackson had died.

From the shocked look on her face, he shouldn’t have told her .

Damn her for getting to him, and damn her for making him want her so much.

Stunned by his admission, Jessica could hardly breathe, yet she felt the sudden change in him, felt the tension in him escalate, moving another degree closer to the edge. He was unpredictable, dangerous. He was off-limits. Any fool could see it, and she wasn’t any fool.

Moonlight slanted down through the trees, silvering his hair and the hard chiseled planes of his face, and exposing the deep weariness in his gaze .

She shouldn’t care, she told herself. The man was a self-proclaimed bastard.

But she did care.

He turned to face her, and their gazes locked.

“You do make me talk too much,” he said, running his thumb along her cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, instinctively reaching for him, wanting somehow to give him her support .“So very sorry.” My God. He’d been with his brother when Jackson had been killed.

He moved closer, blocking the light. “I don’t want your sympathy. I want your kiss.” His hand slid to the back of her neck and his mouth lowered to hers.

He’d taken away the excuse of surprise. She’d known he was going to kiss her, and she didn’t make a move to stop him. Worse, when his lips touched hers and parted, she instinctively complied with the silent suggestion that she do the same.

Without another preliminary advance, he slipped his tongue in her mouth, deep and sure, and she felt her knees weaken. He caught her with his arm around her back, drawing her closer and more intimately into his embrace.

No battle raged in her heart, no thought of retreat crossed her mind. If she’d had a minute, she might have been able to analyze her complete and unconditional surrender. She didn’t have a minute. He tasted of wine and needed solace - and even in his sadness, he brought pleasure, sweet and satiating pleasure. It infused her senses and lit a flame of long-lost desire in her core. His mouth moved over hers and she clung to him, feeling only his strength and the gentle force of his intentions. When his hand glided down the length of her back and molded her to his body, she melted against him. When she felt his arousal, she melted even more.

Cooper felt the submission of her body, and everything in him tightened with ever greater need. The sweetness of her acquiescence swirled through him like wildfire, touching his chest, and his hands, and his groin . . . where her hips ground so gently against him. Soft. He’d known she’d be soft and giving.

He groaned into her mouth, unable to control the sound. He hadn’t meant to take the kiss so far. He hadn’t meant to let himself get to the point where his mouth was blatantly priming her for the act of love, where his tongue was stroking down the length of hers in a way that left no doubts about what he wanted to do with the rest of his body. He hadn’t meant to get so hard so fast. He’d meant to taste, not to plunder.

But she had flowed against him with the first touch of his mouth on hers. She had responded, opened herself, and totally disarmed him of his planned restraint. A moment ago all he’d wanted was a kiss. Now he wanted to sink himself into her and slide deep. He wanted her softness to consume him, to soothe him and release him.

He’d lied, Jessica thought through a haze. It wasn’t just a kiss. It was the destruction of her expectations. When he kissed, he meant sex, not “hello” or “goodbye,” or “It’s nice to see you.” His kiss didn’t say, “Honey, I’m home.” It said, “I want to take you to bed. Now.”

He desired her, and for a few sweet seconds she let herself revel in the knowledge. Then, of course, it was time to get back to reality—or so she told herself. She wasn’t listening to herself, though. She was listening to him, to the rough sound of his breathing and the seductive noises made by the shifting of their clothing and the shifting of their bodies. She’d missed those things, the sounds of intimacy, since long before her divorce, and now this most inappropriate man was giving them back to her and setting her hormones on fire.

I am a mother, began the hallowed litany of reason, the prime directive, and Jessica latched onto it like a lifeline.

To no avail. As if sensing her attempt at withdrawal, he angled his mouth over hers to deepen the kiss. Her thoughts of motherhood fled before the sensual onslaught. He teased her with his mouth and body, moving in ways that were purely carnal in their intent and their effect.

She knew what all the sensations she was feeling meant, and she knew she had no business feeling them with Cooper Daniels, the fair dragon with the green eyes . . . and the body made of steel. It was a seduction in and of itself, the strength and power of him, the slow contraction of the muscles in his arms as he tightened his hold, the pressure of his groin rubbing against her in a rhythm guaranteed to make her lose her senses.

She moaned and tried to find a shred of inhibition to hold on to. When she did find one, she wished she hadn’t. What was happening was suddenly so clear. Her own husband hadn’t desired her, and she’d been the mother of his children. To a man like Cooper Daniels, she had to be an absolute charity case. He knew she’d been divorced for a long time, and tonight he’d found out she lived with her brothers. He’d decided to have a quick roll in the hay with the poor, man-deprived single mother, knowing he wouldn’t have to work too hard for it. After that, he wouldn’t want her hanging around.

Mortified by her conclusions, she broke off the kiss and pushed away from him. He wasn’t quick enough to waylay her again. He did catch her hand, though, and when she tried to pull free, he made it clear he wasn’t letting go.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his voice husky with frustration and need.

“Let go of my hand.” She meant it despite the weakness of her delivery and the catch in her breath.

“No. If I let go of you, you’re going to run, and I don’t want you running away from me.”

“I ought to bring you up on charges of sexual harassment.” Her voice stiffened enough to sound at least serious, if not exactly threatening. But she was trembling, and she knew that robbed her words of even the slightest substance.

“Right,” he drawled. “And I might do the same to you.”

She blushed and was only grateful he couldn’t see her in the dim light.

“Fine. I confess to kissing you.” She was more than willing to accept guilt if that would help her cut her losses. She desperately needed to get away from him before she did something truly awful, like cry.

“That’s not good enough, Jessie. I know you kissed me. What I want to know is why you stopped.”

He’d called her Jessie. Only her friends and family called her Jessie, except for her ex-husband. Toward the end of their marriage, he’d never called her anything except Jessica, and disorganized, and boring. Cooper Daniels did not qualify as a friend, and he was as far from her family of upstanding citizens as a person could get without being arrested.

“I would rather not say,” she said, putting as much professional distance in her voice as was possible under the circumstances. It was a pitifully inadequate amount.

“I’d appreciate a little consideration here.” He tightened his hold on her. “I’m ready to make love with you, and thirty seconds ago you felt the same way. Now you don’t. I want to know why. I know you’re not a tease, and I know you don’t scare easy.”

He was being generous again; she felt like a tease. Her response to his kiss, to being held by him, shocked her. It had been a long time since she’d been kissed, but she knew that wasn’t the reason he’d short-circuited her common sense. No matter what he must think, she wasn’t that easy.

“Women have a lot of reasons for saying no. You’re old enough to have figured that out.” She hoped her answer would suffice and wished he would let her go so she could run away from him just as he’d predicted. If a person could die from embarrassment, she was in critical condition, and those damn tears were still waiting for a chance to complete her humiliation.

“I’m not interested in other women’s reasons,” he said, his voice softening as he released her hand. “I’m interested in you, and you can take that any way you want. Confession. Understatement. Indecent proposal.”

She didn’t look at him—she couldn’t—but neither did she run. After a moment she heard him sigh, a heavy sound filled with resignation.

“Jessie.” He tilted her chin up with his hand. His eyes met hers, steady and uncomfortably perceptive. “I’m as surprised as you are by what happened, but instead of standing here shaking, I’m standing here praying we can make it happen again. The next time we get this close, remember that. The next time we kiss, remember I want more, a whole lot more.”

Jessica didn’t think it was likely she would forget.