Seven

The information Cooper had been expecting arrived at Daniels, Ltd. during Jessica’s Sunday-morning office check. One look told her she wouldn’t be able to store it, file it, download it, or transcribe it. What she could do was offer it a cup of green tea and a chair.

Everything about the “information” was foreign, from her short-cropped black hair, to the exotic tilt of her eyes, to her gray cotton pants and tunic, to the Chinese characters on the sheaf of documents she carried in a padded cloth folder. Everything about her was also very beautiful.

Her name was Cao Bo. Her eyes were a luminous amber-almond color and her skin a delicate golden hue. She spoke barely a word of English, but the few she had mastered were clear in their meaning. She had come for the Dragon, Cooper Daniels, for him alone, and she would not leave, or budge an inch, or say another word, until she had delivered her message.

After deciphering the woman’s purpose and gauging the strength of her conviction, Jessica smiled politely and retreated to the sanctuary of Cooper’s office. She wasn’t up to another wait-and-see match with a beautiful Oriental woman, who undoubtedly knew more about Cooper’s whereabouts than Jessica did.

His itinerary showed his arrival time as eleven-thirty that night. If there had been a change, and he’d informed Ms. Cao and not herself . . . well, he was under no obligation to keep her informed of his every move. He’d only kissed her. That was all.

Jessica walked across the carpet to his desk, deliberately skirting the golden dragon writhing in flight over most of the floor. Her foot did squash down on the tip of the dragon’s nose, but it was an accident.

He’d only kissed her. He’d only made it explicitly clear that he intended to do it again. He had said he wasn’t interested in other women, that he was only interested in her, but men said the most self-serving things at times.

Of course, he had given her the key to his private office, which worked so much better than her bobby pins ever had. He’d also given her his on-line passwords, and while they’d been in the air over the Atlantic, he had spent an extensive amount of time explaining the use of international public-forum bulletin boards for exchanging information and holding cryptic computer conversations with his network of informants. Crime, he’d assured her, was as computerized as the next business.

She moved behind Cooper’s desk and checked his fax machine. It was empty of a change in itinerary, as was the answering machine for the telephone. Her next step was to call his hotel; she was told he’d already checked out.

Jessica hung up the phone and tapped her fingers on the desk top. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted him to kiss her again. She didn’t think she had the strength for it. She also didn’t think she had the strength to refuse him. Physically, he had a startling effect on her. When he’d been kissing her, she hadn’t wanted it to end. His kiss had set off sensory fireworks, and he’d tasted good. So good, she’d spent too much of the last two nights wondering how the rest of him would taste, and wondering just how far she’d go to find out.

She knew she was heading for trouble, and now she had Ms. Cao Bo to worry about.

Unfortunately, neither of those problems was big enough to outweigh her worrying over Cooper. She simultaneously prayed for the week to end and dreaded the termination of her contract. She had nothing to offer a man like him, but she didn’t completely trust herself to remember that. Her security lay in believing he was as certain as she that they were mismatched. He’d been way out of line with his kiss, and she’d been way out of line returning it with an eagerness that still astonished her. They needed to get a few things straight, and she wouldn’t be able to do that if he got hurt.

If he came home injured, she’d worry and be angry, and she’d wonder how in the hell she’d gotten her hormones and her heart all tangled up with his. Being attracted to him was bad, but it was containable, controllable. Caring about him, though, would mean she was up to her ears in trouble.

* * *

At noon, Jessica sent out for two lunches to be delivered. She and Cao Bo ate in relative silence punctuated by smiles and small gestures of politeness—“Did Ms. Cao want more chips? Coleslaw? Tea?”

All offers were declined, and all told, Ms. Cao ate barely more than a nibble. Jessica’s maternal instincts had been buzzing throughout the morning, noting the younger woman’s unease that seemed a mixture of fear and nervousness, the almost unnatural brightness of her eyes, and her refusal to release her hold on the padded folder she held even while she played at eating. The lack of appetite was a final clue Jessica couldn’t ignore.

“Are you sick?” she asked, leaning across the small table they shared in the reception area and lightly touching Ms. Cao’s arm. Her hand immediately tightened. The young woman was burning up.

Jessica rephrased her question, putting even more concern in her voice. “How sick are you? Do you need a doctor?”

The woman shook her head in the negative, but her eyes told a different story.

“I think I should take you to the emergency room,” Jessica said, realizing she’d let her other worries occupy her to the point of negligence. What she’d interpreted as nervousness was at least partially fever and physical discomfort, maybe even pain.

“No,” the woman said, her voice tinged with desperation. “No hospitals, no doctors, please. I am only tired.”

Jessica gave her an inquisitive look, her hand still gentle on the woman’s arm. Either Cao Bo’s pronunciation was improving with the increase in her temperature, or she spoke better English than she’d led Jessica to believe.

“To a hotel, then. You need bed rest and probably a couple of aspirin every four hours. And liquids. Lots of liquids.”

“No hotel. I will wait here for the Dragon,” Ms. Cao insisted.

“The Dragon—” Jessica caught herself and made the correction. “I mean, Mr. Daniels, might not be here until very late. You can’t stay here for the rest of the day, not in your condition.”

“I will wait.”

“But I won’t, and you can’t stay here without me. That is against the Dragon’s very strict rules.” Jessica was making up the rules as she went, but that was what she got paid for—thinking on her feet. “I can take you over to a hotel very near here and leave a message for the Dragon. He can contact you when he arrives.”

“No.” Ms. Cao shook her head again, her eyes downcast. “No hotel. I have no papers.”

Actually, she had lots of papers, right there in her folder, but Jessica understood what she meant, much to her chagrin.

“You don’t need a passport to get a hotel room,” she said, then wondered if she had just broken an immigration law by aiding and abetting an illegal alien. Cooper Daniels was going to be the death of her reputation, and she doubted if it would take him all week to accomplish the deed.

“No,” the younger woman said again .

Jessica had to admit that Ms. Cao had that particular word down pat, with just the right amount of stubbornness to give it validity. “Okay,” she said, continuing to think on her feet. Cooper wouldn’t be too pleased if she let his “information” deteriorate into life-threatening illness, so she did the reasonable thing. “I’ll take you home with me for a few hours, and when the Dragon arrives, he can come and get you.”

When Cao Bo nodded in agreement, Jessica took the victory with a sigh of relief and went back into Cooper’s office to leave a message.

As a matter of course, she checked the fax and Cooper’s E-mail. Nothing had come in, but as she turned to leave, the phone rang. She’d had a few calls during the day, so it didn’t seem unusual, until she answered it and heard the hoarsely spoken words. “Help. Coop . . .”

The line went dead before any more words could be spoken. Her first thought was that it was Cooper, and her heart plummeted.

* * *

Cooper found Jessica’s message in his office a little after midnight, and within five minutes he was back in his car and heading for her house in the suburbs. He’d called first to tell her he was coming, but had deliberately kept the conversation short. She’d taken an operative into her home, and he was torn between blaming himself for the screw-up or blaming fate. He knew there wasn’t anybody else.

The first thing Leeds had told him on the phone last Friday morning in London was to get rid of Jessie Langston. She didn’t belong in his game, George had said. George had been right. There was no way for Cooper to warn her about every possible danger, not in the short time they had, and not considering the job they had to do in that short time.

The yard was dark when he arrived, but as he got out of his car the front porch lights came on, a beacon at the end of a long tunnel of night-darkened greenery.

She was waiting for him at the door, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. Her hand was raised to her chest, her gaze searching him from head to toe, looking for the damage her note had said she feared had befallen him. He didn’t miss the close scrutiny she gave his bad leg, as if she thought the weakest part of him would be the first to go.

Once on her porch, he stood closer to her than was necessary, looking down at her in silence, forcing her to meet his gaze. She looked up, flustered.

“Mr. Dani—” He lowered his mouth to cover hers before she could finish saying his name.

“Cooper,” he said roughly when he lifted his head to look into her startled eyes. After the concern he’d read in her message, he figured they were solidly on a first-name basis. She drew in a small breath, her hands pressing against his chest, and he took the opportunity to kiss her again, warming her mouth with his until she opened for him.

The gentle, insistent stroking of his tongue along hers had an immediate effect on him and a desirable effect on her. The pressure of her palms lessened, and her hands slowly slid up over his collarbone, then his shoulders, and finally around his neck. She was softer and sweeter than he remembered. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her tight.

“I thought you were hurt, maybe captured,” she murmured when he kissed her cheek. “I’m so relieved you’re okay. It’s been hell since lunch, and I want you to know you—”

Jessica pulled herself up short when she realized she was babbling. When the first tear spilled over, she got angry and pushed herself away from him. “Damn you.”

“Yeah. I’ve had days like that too. But I didn’t have enough balls to cry about them. Where’s the woman?”

He could make a life out of shocking her, Jessica decided. “She’s in Tony’s room.”

“Alone, I hope.” He gave her a wry glance.

She ignored him. “She’s ill, feverish. It could just be exhaustion. I wanted to call a doctor and have her looked at, but the idea upset her so badly, I decided against it.”

“Good. She’s justifiably paranoid if she’s fresh off the boat. If she’s been in Chinatown long enough to meet the kind of people who usually feed me information, she’s got even more reason to remain as anonymous as possible.”

Cooper followed Jessica up the stairs to her brother’s room. He didn’t tell her he wished like hell she hadn’t brought the woman home. No matter where Cao Bo came from, someone was bound to have followed her, making sure she did her job, and that someone had been led to Jessica’s house. It was all he could do to keep from hitting the wall with his fist.

They looked in on the young woman, keeping their voices low and their intrusion short. She was sleeping peacefully, and Jessica wouldn’t allow him to wake her for questioning. A few more hours, she told him, wouldn’t make any difference.

Cooper knew she was wrong, but he let her have her way, because he wanted to talk to her more than he wanted to talk to the mysterious Cao Bo.

“Can I use your phone?” he asked, following Jessica back downstairs to the living room. He had noticed the first time he was there that Paul Signorelli had a preference for animalistic furniture and accessories. One wooden table looked like a cheetah, a wrought-iron chair resembled a sleeping flamingo, and they both resided in a jungle of greenery that was not outdone by the landscaping of the yard. Cooper wouldn’t have been surprised if it had started raining in the living room.

“The phone’s in the kitchen,” she said, and led the way.

“I know it’s late, but would it be too much to ask for a cup of coffee?”

“No. Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Yes, but I don’t expect you to cook.”

“Tony’s the cook,” she informed him, walking over to the refrigerator. “And you’re in luck. We’ve got an incredible pasta salad, cold crab, sourdough bread, and some indecent chocolate thing Alaina made for dessert.”

“That would be great,” he said. “But if it’s too much trouble, I can have something brought over.”

His wording was deliberate, and it didn’t slip by her.

She looked over her shoulder at him, her hand on the refrigerator door. “You make it sound like you’re not leaving for a while.”

“I’m not.”

“If it’s the kiss, you misunderstood,” she said calmly, but he noticed her grip tighten on the door.

“I wish it was the kiss, but it’s not. You’ve got a woman upstairs who you shouldn’t have brought home, and I can’t leave until I know there aren’t going to be any consequences.”

“Consequences.” She repeated the word dully, and he could see the full impact of the situation register on her face. She was frozen in place for a heartbeat before she half walked, half ran toward another part of the house.

When she returned a few minutes later, the panic was erased from her face, replaced by a steely determination.

“How are the kids?” he asked, guessing where she’d gone.

“Fine. Help yourself to dinner. I’ll be back.”

He watched her take a ring of keys from her purse and head for the basement. He could tell by the faint jingle and clanging noise coming up the stairs that she was opening a metal cabinet. Having a pretty good idea of what was probably in a locked metal cabinet in a basement—namely guns—he decided right then and there to call Elise Crabb in the morning and apologize for his doubts about the angelfish in silk.

After relocking the gun cabinet, Jessica came upstairs in time to catch the tail end of Cooper’s telephone conversation.

“ . . . for tonight at least. Bring what you need and call your cousin Yuxi. I want two men here.”

She set a handgun on the kitchen counter, within easy reach, and started to make a pot of coffee. The .357-caliber Magnum had been the ninth and last wedding anniversary present from her ex-husband. She’d thought it was an odd present, and had only realized later that it had been a big clue that he wasn’t going to be around much from then on, especially at night. He’d replaced the security of his presence with the security of a gun so he could go his roving way with a clear conscience. She’d been furious with herself for being so blind back then, and she was furious with herself now, though for a different reason.

“I don’t really think it’s as bad as I made it sound,” Cooper said behind her after he’d hung up the phone. “I just don’t want to take any chances.”

“I don’t either,” she said, tight-lipped. She finished pouring water into the coffee machine, and when it spilled, she swore softly and grabbed a towel to mop up. “Who did you call?”

“My houseboy, John Liu, Dr. Liu’s brother.”

“Your houseboy does double duty as a security guard?” She hated the tremor in her voice. Dammit, she wasn’t naive. She knew the score when it came to the good guys and the bad guys. It was a game she’d grown up in, and one she’d married into.

“It’s more like my security guard doing double duty as a houseboy.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Good Lord, Cooper. What kind of life do you lead?”

He was silent for a small eternity before he said, “Not an easy one since Jackson died.”

The edge in his voice caused her to turn around and look at him, the damp towel still in her hand. He was rumpled, and tired, and gorgeous. She shouldn’t care, she told herself. There was nothing in him except trouble and danger—and an anger born of pain.

“You can blame me for this problem,” he said, running his hand through his hair, his eyes closing out of sheer weariness.

“I could,” she agreed, setting the towel aside and wiping her hands on the front of her jeans. “But then I’d only be half-right.”

His eyes opened, capturing her gaze. “If I’d been straight with you from the beginning, you would have made a different decision.”

“Probably.”

“There’s no reason to blame yourself,” he said, seeming determined to give her an out.

She didn’t need him handing her absolution, and it was time she told him. “Yes, there is,” she said, turning aside and punching the brew button. “If I had been thinking with my head instead of my ego, I would have walked out the first time you fired me. And for the record, I won’t relinquish the responsibility for my decisions to anybody.”

“I can respect that.”

“You’d better.”

They were at a Mexican standoff, and Cooper was too tired not to blink.

“I think I already know the answer,” he said, “but just in case I’m wrong, do you know how to use that gun on the counter?”

“My dad was a cop for thirty years,” she answered. “My ex-husband is a PI and I have two uncles and two brothers currently employed by the San Francisco Police Department, one as a martial-arts instructor. There isn’t a Signorelli in a two-hundred-mile radius who doesn’t know how to break down, clean, put back together, safely store, and fire that gun on the counter.”

That’s what Cooper had thought.

Eight

Jessica woke with a start, her heart pounding, her senses alert in the darkness.

“Shh.” The comforting sound was whispered close to her ear. “It’s just John making tea in the kitchen.”

John, Jessica repeated in her mind. John was Dr. Liu’s brother, Cooper’s security guard and houseboy. He was also a warrior. She had felt the power of his body in his handshake and in the finely focused energy of his dark gaze.

The voice whispering to her was equally easy to identify and recall. Cooper was a warrior too. He was also incredibly close, lying behind her on the couch, his body pressed against the length of hers. His hand moved on her waist, caressing her through the light cotton of her T-shirt. With effort, she resisted the impulse to lift into his touch.

“You haven’t been asleep very long,” he murmured, his breath warm and soft on the back of her neck. “Why don’t you try to get more rest. Your brothers have gone to bed. John and Yuxi have everything under control.”

Everything except you, she thought, and wondered how they had gotten into such a compromising position. She remembered meeting the other two men and settling on the couch to wait out the dawn. She didn’t remember Cooper joining her.

He should have had more sense.

“Yuxi is checking the outside perimeters of the house and yard, and I just checked the children.” His hand stroked over her hip and back down to her waist. The movement was gentle and caring, intimate and sensual.

She groaned to herself and covered her face with one hand. He wasn’t the only one who needed more sense. She’d been divorced for three years, and her sex life had disappeared long before the divorce. She had missed sex, but she hadn’t been compelled to search it out at any and all costs, not by any stretch of the imagination. She was a mother, a woman with responsibilities.

Now Cooper Daniels was touching her, his hand on her waist, his breath on her nape, his chest warm and solid against her back, and all she could remember was that she was a woman. It was nerve-racking, unsettling, and sinfully exciting.

His hand slid up the curve of her hip again, and she bit down on her lower lip to keep from making any sound. He had her trapped between his body and the back of the couch, surrounding her with his maleness and weaving a spell with his caress. She had to get up.

“Excuse me,” she said so quietly she barely heard herself. Regardless of her abruptness, she hoped he would take the hint and move.

He didn’t. His hand tightened and held her steady as he shifted his weight more fully against her. She caught her breath on a soft gasp, stunned by what she felt. He was aroused, the hard length of him pressed against her buttocks.

“You’re so damn nice to hold,” he said huskily.

“You—you can’t do that here.” Good Lord. They were in her brother’s house, in the forest of the living room—yet despite the obvious constraints, she was on the receiving end of a quiet, inexorable seduction.

“I know,” he whispered just before his mouth came down, warm, wet, and open on her neck.

Melting heat swept through her body. She groaned aloud, and his breathing grew ragged.

He gnawed on her delicate skin, running his tongue across her neck to soothe the love bites he gave. He was both rough in communicating his needs and gentle in eliciting her response, kissing her and shifting her in his arms until he could claim her mouth. When she was beneath him, he covered her completely, his size and weight controlling her with a tantalizing tenderness.

He felt like heaven, moving over her, using his body to tease and incite. His hand was under her T-shirt, cupping her breast and sending a wave of desire to pool in her loins. She’d forgotten how hot a man’s hand could be. She’d forgotten how erotic it was to be wanted, how a man’s needs could act as a catalyst to awaken long-lost passions. He rocked against her in the most primal of rhythms, and she wanted nothing more than to open herself to him, to welcome him into her core.

She grasped his shoulders, her fingers digging into his shirt, and he angled his mouth over hers for a deeper kiss.

It wasn’t enough. It would never be enough as long as it was just a kiss. Cooper kept himself on the edge of no return, knowing there was no way on Earth he was going to get too much closer to what he wanted.

He wanted her. He wanted her with an ache he could feel right down through the center of his body, with the heaviest ache between his legs. He was hard . . . and she was so damn soft.

He broke off the kiss with a muttered curse.

His labored breathing filled the space between them, making him feel like a fool. He should have known she would go to his head like a fine wine cut with grain alcohol. He swore again, looking down into the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. They were languorous and confused, wanting what he wanted, but she had the same damn reasons for stopping that he had.

“Do I have a chance in hell of getting into your pants tonight?” He’d had to ask. He knew he’d put it crudely, but that was his only defense against the sure rejection.

She shook her head, and he could see tears forming in those beautiful, cinnamon-colored eyes. Women.

He wasn’t angry with her. He was angry with himself.

“I don’t suppose you’d like to get in mine for about five minutes?”

“And do what?” she asked, obviously shocked, her eyes widening with surprise.

The ingenuousness of her question brought a much-needed grin to his mouth. At least she wasn’t going to cry now.

“You’re a smart lady, Jessie. I bet if you give it a little thought, you’ll come up with something.”

She blushed, and his grin broadened.

His smile was short-lived, though, lasting no longer than it took him to feel her next breath bring them closer. He rolled off her before he forgot he had a few rules of his own when it came to women. He’d kissed her three times, and when he thought about it, he realized she’d either cried or been on the verge of tears all three times. That told him something he ought not forget.

He understood how sex might be considered physically threatening by a woman. He even understood how it could be emotionally threatening. In truth, he understood the emotional threat better than the physical threat, having experienced it himself. He did not understand why kissing would make a woman cry, and he wondered how many times he’d have to kiss her before he found out.

“Would you like some tea?” he asked, keeping his distance by walking to the other side of the cheetah table.

“No,” she said, and he could hear her straightening her clothes as she stood up. “I think I’ll go sleep in Christina’s room.”

He turned and watched her as she left, her silhouette making a shadow in the doorway in the instant before she was gone. It was a sensible plan, he thought. She’d be safe in there, safe from him.

* * *

They both looked like hell, like two people who hadn’t gotten much sleep, and there wasn’t a person milling around the kitchen who didn’t have something to say about one or the other of them.

“You kinda look like a raccoon, Mom,” Eric said, “with that dark smudge sitting under your eyeballs.” He tilted his head back and gave her a scrunched-up scrutinizing. “It’s neat.”

“Thank you, honey. Eat your granola.” Jessica sighed and continued rummaging through her purse, looking for the extra-strength aspirin she kept there. Children were so beautifully, simply, painfully honest. A mother’s self-esteem didn’t stand a chance.

Shoving aside her key ring with a small flashlight attachment and the paperback she always kept handy in case she got caught in traffic, she finally found the plastic bottle she was looking for.

“The woman is out back on the patio, Cooper,” John Liu said, referring to Cao Bo. “She seems recovered from her ordeal. If you think you’re up to it, we could talk to her now.” A mischievous wryness shaded his voice. Cooper gave him a drop-dead dragon glare.

Jessica didn’t bother to hide a tired grin at his expense. His irritability was the only solace available for her wounded ego. They’d gone further than a kiss in the night, and she was trying to figure out why. She was a mother, and mothers didn’t neck on couches.

He and John refilled their coffee cups on their way out the door, with Cooper taking an extra cup for the messenger.

Jessica got up from the table and warmed her own cup, watching the two men walk across the first patio and drop down a couple of steps to the second level. Ms. Cao awaited them there under the shade of a tan-oak tree. Cooper really did look like hell. His hair was sticking up from all the times he’d plowed his fingers through it. Beard stubble darkened his jaw, and his clothes were wrinkled.

“Looks like he had a rough night,” Tony said conversationally, coming up behind her and pouring himself a cup of coffee.

Jessica made a noncommittal reply.

“Hmm.” Tony took his first sip, then said, “You don’t look so good yourself.”

“Thank you.”

“I guess you should know Paul set him straight this morning,” her brother said, reaching over her head for a cereal bowl.

She shot him a wary glance. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry. He did it nicely.”

“Did what?” She hardly dared to ask.

“Told him about Ian.”

Great, Jessica thought, not bothering to sputter out her indignation. Now her humiliation was perfectly complete. Someday Paul would grow up and realize that being the oldest man living in the house did not make him the oldest, most responsible person living in the house. He was her little brother, not her father. Macho posturing had its unbearable moments, and this was one of them.

“I don’t know why he bothered,” Tony continued, rustling around in the cupboard for his favorite cereal. “Looks to me like you and Cooper have it all figured out.”

Jessica had no idea what he meant, and even though she was dying to ask for an explanation, she didn’t have enough courage to listen to his answer. She kept her reply short and off the subject.

“Eric has the granola on the table.”

“Oh.” Tony looked over his shoulder toward his nephew. “Thanks. Hey, shortstuff, you better go get your school clothes on. Tell Christina we’re leaving here in ten minutes.”

“Okay, Uncle Tony.” Eric got up from the table, his last piece of jelly toast in his hand, and ran over to wrap himself around his mother’s legs. “I missed you, when you were gone, Mom.”

Jessica leaned down and kissed his honey-blond head. “I missed you too, sweetheart. We’ll do something fun together on Saturday, just you and me, so think up some ideas. Okay?”

“Okay, Mom.” He raised his face to give her a toast-crumb-and-jelly kiss on the cheek.

After he’d left the kitchen, she looked over and caught Tony’s eye.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she said.

He shrugged. “Not as sorry as your boss will be if anything happens to you or one of the kids because of his business problems.”

“I should have known better than to bring the woman home.”

“I’m not sure you had much choice, Jessie. She was sick, exhausted, and she wouldn’t go anyplace else. Sometimes we have to make decisions we’d rather not have to make. This one should turn out okay. When I called Luke last night, he started a quiet investigation to have Cao Bo checked out from Immigration to Chinatown. If anything turns up, he’ll be on it.”

Jessica nodded her thanks. Their oldest brother, Luke, was a detective with the San Francisco Police Department, with enough years behind him to have a net of connections stretching across the Pacific Rim. If Cao Bo had brought trouble with her, Luke would find out about it.

“I’ll call him later to see if he’s come up with anything,” she said.

“Okay, Jess. There’s one other thing.”

“Yes?”

“About John Liu and Yuxi. Why did you have Cooper bring them in? You know nothing could happen around here that you and I and Paul can’t handle.”

“I know. I just thought we’d all be safer with another line of defense in the house.”

“We,” he asked, “as in you, me, Paul, and the kids? Or we as in Cooper Daniels?”

Jessica took a sip of coffee, hiding behind her cup and wondering if she had any secrets left at all.

“Well, Jess?” Tony pushed for an answer to his question.

“He’s in trouble,” she admitted. “He needs help, and I’m not the only one who thinks so.”

“I would hate to see you get hurt,” Tony said, his voice growing soft and his eyes looking wiser than their years.

“Me, too.”

“Do you care that much?”

“I shouldn’t,” she said, lowering her gaze.

She heard him rise from the table and walk across the kitchen floor. He stopped and gave her a quick hug on his way out, but she couldn’t tell if he was giving her support or consolation.

She definitely felt like she needed both. Cooper had done nothing but aggravate her and set her off from the first moment they’d met, and drive her crazy with illicit imaginings. She could hardly look at him without thinking about the way she’d first seen him—naked—and thinking about him naked made her think of a whole lot of other things.

With a subdued sigh, she tore off a paper towel and used it to wipe the jelly off her cheek. One look at her legs confirmed that she would need to wash her jeans to get the fruit and butter off them.

It was Monday morning, and despite a near-irresistible urge to crawl into bed and not surface for a week, she downed the last of her coffee and braced herself to meet the day.

Nine

By the time Jessica got herself to work, it was well after noon. She closed the Daniels, Ltd. door behind her and was immediately aware of the sound of the shower running in Cooper’s private office. Calming herself with a deep breath, she walked over to turn on her desk lamp. The morning’s sunshine had been consumed by a heavy bank of fog rolling in from the Pacific. She had been the last one out of the house, and was apparently the last one to arrive at the office.

Cooper was in there naked again. She set her purse on the floor and lowered her face into her hands, shaking her head. What was she going to do with him?

Hand him a towel?

Offer to soap his back?

Beg him to please not take his clothes off in the office anymore, because her heart couldn’t take it? She was overreacting. She always overreacted when he was naked, or when he kissed her. She needed to get a grip.

Dragging her head up with a sigh, she walked to the dragon doors and closed them in the name of discretion and normal blood pressure. He could come out when he was decent.

When she turned back to her desk, she realized she wasn’t alone.

“Hello.” A man was sitting in the wingback chair by the window, his voice deep and calm, with a faint Scottish burr.

Startled by his presence, she barely managed a reply. “Hello.”

“George didn’t do you justice,” the man said, rising from the chair. He was dressed in an impeccable gray suit, which he wore with the air of a man whose clothes were always tailored to perfection and of the highest quality. His dark blond hair was neatly trimmed. His demeanor was one of perfect control.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Forgive me,” he said with a half smile of apology. “I’m Andrew Strachan. We were supposed to have met in London, and no doubt would have if Cooper hadn’t gotten overly possessive.”

“Oh, Mr. Strachan, of course.” She stepped forward and offered her hand.

“Cooper and I have some unfinished business related to the Hawaiian fiasco. I hope he’s not planning on bathing the rest of the afternoon.”

Andrew Strachan was very smooth and self-assured, but underneath his calm exterior and easy smile, she sensed a wealth of displeasure.

“Fiasco?”

“Pablo Lopez,” he said. “The deal you contracted with George. Cooper didn’t come through. I’m here to find out why.”

She was stymied for an answer. When she’d asked Cooper about Hawaii, he’d told her everything had gone according to plan. Obviously, his plan had been different from the one he’d asked her to negotiate.

It would have been nice if he’d told her the truth, she thought. Then she wouldn’t look like such a fool to Andrew Strachan.

“I’m sure Mr. Daniels will have an explanation. If you would care to be seated, I’ll let him know you’re here.”

“Don’t bother. Cooper has a sixth sense when it comes to me and his women.” Strachan’s smile curled higher. “Believe me, he’s probably already figured out that I’m here.”

Stymied again, and flustered at being referred to as Cooper’s woman, she did the one thing she’d sworn she would never do again the rest of her life: She asked a professional equal if she could get him a cup of coffee.

“That won’t be necessary,” a familiar voice said behind her, before Mr. Strachan could decide for himself.

“Cooper.” Strachan gave a short nod.

Jessica half turned, not knowing what to expect, and found her boss practically dressed. His plaid shirt was still mostly open while he worked the buttons, but his jeans were zipped, and he was wearing shoes.

“Andrew.” Cooper finished with the buttons and began tucking the tails of his shirt into his pants. That’s when she noticed the jeans weren’t snapped, and that his belt wasn’t buckled. With his hair wet and slicked back off his face, he made an enticingly provocative picture of a man fresh from his shower. She couldn’t look at him without remembering how close they’d been and what they’d done on her couch. Color rose in her cheeks, embarrassing her even further.

“My men told me Lopez wasn’t where he was supposed to be yesterday,” Strachan said. “Did we have a misunderstanding? Or did he make you a better deal?”

“He got away.” Cooper shrugged, finishing with his pants, and walked over to the coffee machine set up on an antique credenza next to Jessica’s desk. “You got some of your merchandise back. That’s more than you usually get.”

“Not much merchandise,” Strachan countered, then added, “I’ll take mine black.”

Cooper poured three cups and offered them all around. “I looked in the warehouse where Lopez had it all stockpiled. There must have been at least fifty tons of the Callander’s cargo still in salable condition.”

“Minus your commission, of course.”

“Of course.”

Strachan sighed and pulled a thin cigar out of the breast pocket of his suit. “Do you mind?” he asked Jessica. When she shook her head, he turned back to Cooper. “What am I going to do with you, Cooper?” His tone made his disappointment clear.

“Pay me.”

Glancing at Cooper, Jessica saw he wasn’t the least bit concerned with Andrew Strachan’s disappointments.

“It’s a possibility,” Strachan said, then bent his head and lit the cigar he’d put in his mouth. After drawing deeply and exhaling a cloud of smoke, the Scots wolf met her boss’s unwavering gaze.

“‘Possibility’ covers too many options, Andrew,” Cooper said. “You only have one. Eight percent.”

Strachan smiled, a wolfish grin conceding defeat. “Three percent.”

“Five.”

“That’s only a fraction of what Somerset agreed to pay you for Lopez,” Strachan pointed out. “Why did you let him go?”

When her boss didn’t reply, Strachan spoke again. “I’m worried about you, Cooper. I think you’re going to get yourself hurt, and Jackson wouldn’t have wanted that to happen.”

“Your bank knows where to send the money. I’ll give you a week to make the deposit.”

“Whatever Lopez traded you for his life is going to be what gets you killed.”

“You should have more faith in me, Andrew.”

Jessica felt the confrontation come to an uncomfortable draw, with Strachan being the first to lose control of his temper.

“Baolian isn’t some simple bitch with nothing better to do than kill off bounty hunters.” The cigar left a trail of smoke in the air from Strachan’s abrupt hand gesture. “The word out says she wants the Daniels name wiped off the face of the earth. Why? What did you do to her, Cooper?”

“That’s between me and Baolian,” he said.

“I warned you not to get personally involved,” Strachan said, his voice low and serious. “I warned you what she was like.”

“We were never personally involved.” Cooper’s jaw grew tight with anger. “She wanted Jackson, and when Jackson didn’t want her, she wanted him dead. Well, she got what she wanted, and it’s going to cost her more than she’s willing to pay.”

With a disgusted snort, Strachan stepped forward to the desk and crushed his cigar into a pristine cloisonné ashtray. “You’ll never hurt her badly enough to make up for what she did.” He lifted his head and looked directly at Jessica. “Reason with him. I’d rather not lose two close friends in the same year.”

* * *

“Crown jewel,” Jessica muttered, flipping through the computer printouts and notes she’d been compiling for three days. With Cooper’s weeks of intensive research and years of knowledge, and Cao Bo’s new information—which included all of Fang’s Western Hemisphere properties, businesses that were so deeply hidden, it would have taken Jessica two years to find them—Jessica had an extensive list of Fang Baolian’s holdings. But she had not been able to find anything even remotely resembling a crown jewel.

Neither had she been able to reason with Cooper. Strachan’s warnings had not fallen completely on deaf ears. She’d heard every word and taken them to heart. But nothing was going to stop Cooper in his quest for revenge.

She had discovered that Baolian’s favorite port was Manila, but the pirate actually did more business out of Hong Kong. She knew the Dragon Lady lived on a phantom ship now named Sea Cloud, a floating palace that plowed the waters of the South China Sea. She did not know what it would take to entice the pirate off her ill-gotten home and into Cooper Daniels’s clutches, or what he would do to Baolian once he had her. She didn’t want to know.

Laughter from Cooper’s office stopped her in the middle of flipping a page. Cao Bo had not gone away, or home, or back to whatever boat had brought her to California’s shores. She had gone to Cooper’s house.

Straightening her shoulders, Jessica forced her thoughts back to the work at hand. Cao Bo wasn’t her concern. Lots of people lived at Cooper’s house, John Liu for one, Yuxi for another.

And Cooper.

And Cao Bo.

“Damn,” she whispered, turning back a page to pick up where her thoughts had trailed off.

He was being nice. The same way she had been nice to the young woman. It was the least Ms. Cao deserved. Without her information, Jessica wouldn’t have half of the facts she’d been working with all morning. Without Cao Bo, she wouldn’t have known of Baolian’s connections to a small herb shop in San Francisco’s Chinatown. With assets well under ten thousand dollars, it was a virtual nonentity in the pirate’s portfolio, which only increased its importance.

What was a multimillionaire doing with a tiny herb shop in the States? That was the question Jessica was trying to answer. That and what in the world did she think she was doing hunting pirates. She liked to tell herself it was a good-paying job, but her conscience wouldn’t accept the lie. She was in up to her ears with tankers, freighters, and merchant vessels, because Cooper Daniels had kissed her.

The deep laughter came again, and she gave up the pretense of work. She couldn’t concentrate with the two of them in there laughing. Cooper had never laughed with her about anything.

Standing, she smoothed her skirt and checked her watch. It was lunchtime, the perfect excuse for finding out what was going on in his office.

There were a few things she questioned about Ms. Cao, not the least of which was her most opportune appearance. Luke had yet to come up with anything suspicious beyond Bo’s illegal status, but Jessica still felt uncomfortable with the younger woman. She wasn’t alone in her feelings; Bo herself was uneasy with everyone. Her discomfort showed in her silent alertness and the way she always kept a certain distance between herself and other people in a room, as if she was afraid someone might try to grab her.

They didn’t know where she’d come from or who had sent her, or what her motives were for giving them so much information. That she was in someone’s employ was a reasonable assumption. That her employer continued to remain anonymous was unsettling. A loose end of such profound proportions could prove to be dangerous. They had expected Bo’s employer to show his hand by now, to request a favor in payment for the information. Jessica hoped granting that favor wouldn’t be the final burden to crush Daniels, Ltd., or get Cooper killed.

She knew Cooper also felt the inherent, blind obligation in accepting Bo’s help, but he was more than willing to take a risk if it could get him what he wanted.

She stood before the closed office doors, suddenly reluctant to open them and face Cooper. He should never have kissed her, especially to the point of combustion. And he most certainly should never have stopped kissing her. For the first two weeks she’d worked there, nary a soul had shown up at Daniels, Ltd. Since the dragon had taken up residence, the office had turned into Grand Central Station. They hadn’t had one quiet moment together since Sunday night on her couch. Even those rare times when the stars had aligned to give them quiet and a moment, Bo was always there, or John, or Yuxi, or any number of other less savory characters who came in to sell information.

He was driving her crazy. Her situation was untenable. She didn’t know how she was going to walk away from him, and the mess he was in, on Friday, but she had to find a way.

Until then, she had a responsibility to do her job, and her job included finding out what in the hell they were giggling about in the next room.

After a perfunctory knock, she opened the dragon doors, hardly giving the fierce beasts a second glance. Cooper and Bo were not alone as she’d thought, and it wasn’t Cooper laughing with the young woman. John and Yuxi must have arrived via the private elevator, because they were in the room, setting out lunch and talking to each other in what Jessica now recognized as Cantonese. Both men were laughing, but John was looking at Bo with a teasing expression. He spoke again, his voice soft and imploring, and his effort elicited a shy response.

Jessica could tell by the color blooming on Bo’s cheeks that she thought Chinese-American men were very forward.

“Ms. Langston,” John greeted her as she entered. “Your and Cooper’s lunch will be ready in a moment. Yuxi and I will be taking Ms. Cao out to eat.”

The man knew how to get a startling amount of information across in very few words. She and Cooper were having a private lunch together, an important lunch if he was relinquishing the responsibility for Ms. Cao’s safety. Not that John Liu didn’t look more than capable of handling anyone who tried to grab the woman.

She looked over at Cooper and caught his eye just as he turned away. He was standing by the large window overlooking Powell Street and the Bay beyond. Sunlight illuminated his profile and cast golden highlights in his hair and along the curve of his cheekbone. His mouth was grim, his jaw tight, and Jessica suddenly felt selfish for resenting the thought of his laughing with another woman. If she was smart, and she was beginning to have her doubts that she was, he’d be doing a lot more than laughing with another woman. He needed some sort of comfort, some easing away of the stress drawing lines in his face. He needed a soothing touch, and more and more, she wanted to be the one to give it.

In an act of pure self-defense, she forced her gaze back to John and the lunch. Cooper Daniels was not for her. She couldn’t make the facts any plainer to herself. Green-eyed dragons living on the edge of danger did not make suitable companions for mothers of growing children, no matter how incredibly they kissed.

John set a delicate porcelain teapot on the low table next to a bottle of chilled white wine and pulled silk cushions out from underneath, arranging them to make comfortable seating. Next came two sets of finely made chopsticks with their tiny porcelain rests.

Jessica watched the careful preparations with growing dismay.

Silk cushions and privacy automatically, and much to her embarrassment, made her think of sex, or at least of kissing. Cooper Daniels had given her a one-track mind.

When the last dish was set out, John rose from the floor and went over to speak privately with Cooper. With Cooper’s quiet dismissal, they all left, and Jessica noticed that neither John, nor Yuxi, nor Bo stepped on the dragon, not so much as an accidental tweak of an ear or a shoe scraping against a bronze scale.

Taking their carefulness as a sure sign that there was an ancient Chinese proverb detailing the ills that befell those who trampled dragons, she was glad she’d always been equally careful—except for that once when her foot may have skimmed the dragon’s nose.

The dragon posing the more immediate danger stepped away from the window then, drawing her attention back to the problem at hand: eating lunch with Cooper Daniels while lounging on a pile of silk cushions and keeping her hands to herself.

“Have you come up with anything?” he asked, circling behind his desk with a lazy grace at odds with the grimness of his expression. His limp was still present in his walk, but it was far overshadowed by the deliberateness of his movements. Every muscle in his body was responding as if on cue, fluid and charged with energy.

He was on the prowl. She felt it as surely as she was standing there. She watched him pick up an envelope and glance at the return address before tossing it aside. In the next heartbeat, she was captured and held by his glittering gaze.

“Well?” he asked, his voice devoid of any polite modulation. He was angry and tense, and neither state was hidden. Unlike herself, she realized, the man did not have kissing on his mind.

She knew what he wanted—the same impossible thing he’d wanted her to give him all along, the edge on Fang Baolian. No pirate hunter had ever succeeded in getting close to the dragon lady. No one had ever gotten the best of her.

“There’s a small business, an herb shop on Grant Street,” she said, “that doesn’t fit her portfolio. It’s not big enough to launder a significant amount of cash, but she could be running some money through it.” She knew it wasn’t much, but it was all she had to offer.

“What about Singapore? Jakarta? Hong Kong? Manila?” he asked, naming Baolian’s bases of operation.

“She doesn’t have a big enough piece of the Jakarta project for it to be a crown jewel. As far as anything else in the Far East is concerned, I think there’s too much risk for too little chance of success on her home ground, unless you’re willing to spend a year or more getting someone inside her organization. At that point, your options would be limitless. You could run your own investigation into her underground financial structure, and could probably get any number of governments interested in commandeering a fair share. You could sabotage her pirating runs, or embezzle her into bankruptcy. Extortion might work, providing there is anything such as honor among thieves. I, of—”

“There is,” he assured her, interrupting as he came around the side of his desk.

“I, of course,” she continued, “will not be involved in those decisions.”

She watched as he picked up a folder from his desk and crossed his office. His footsteps stair-stepped the crenellations of the dragon’s back with impunity. He walked on and over the snapping furl of the dragon’s tail and stopped on the cream-and-gilt-encrusted breast scales that would have covered the dragon’s heart, if such a beast had a heart.

“There’s a name in here,” he said, handing her the folder. “The man is a banker on Grand Cayman. It’s what saved Pablo Lopez’s life.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.” She accepted the folder with only the slightest hesitation.

“Do you believe in what I’m doing?” he asked.

“I understand revenge. I’m not sure I sanction it.”

“Do you think I’m going to get revenge?” One dark eyebrow lifted as he spoke, adding the dragon’s own edge to his question. After a moment of her silence he moved closer, bringing a wash of tension with him across the room. He stopped near enough for her to see the streaks of turquoise darkening the subtler green of his eyes.

“You’re going to get something,” she said, measuring her words against the sudden quickening of her pulse. “Maybe revenge. Maybe yourself killed. I’m not sure which.”

“Will you miss me when I’m gone?”

“That’s a terrible question.”

He lowered his lashes for a second, as if agreeing with her, then his gaze was back on hers, intense and inquiring, and his voice softened.

“Will you kiss me?”

His question was straightforward. Her reaction was a maelstrom.

Her palms dampened and her mouth went dry. A curling sensation wound down through her stomach, heightening her awareness of her body and the closeness of his. Warmth radiated off him along with tension, acting like a magnet to draw her nearer. She closed her hands into fists, resisting the urge to reach for him, to give him the caress he’d asked for.

“Please?” His voice was husky as he moved a step closer. His hand came up to stroke her cheek. “Chow Sheng was right. You have beautiful skin.”

His gaze trailed over her face like a touch, making a path for his fingertips to follow. This was the soothing he needed, the soothing she longed to give—a kiss, a caress. He lowered his head close to hers, resting his cheek on hers before sliding his mouth down the side of her neck. He came back up the same way with exquisite slowness, making every moment last. His breath blew against her skin as he spoke.

“Open your mouth for me, Jessie . . . kiss me.” He stopped just short of the deed, making it unbearably easy for her to rise on her toes and turn her face a bare inch to find his lips. She was lost.

She tasted him with her tongue, a tentative foray beginning at the corner of his mouth and following the full curve of his lower lip. A sigh of satisfaction rumbled up from deep in his chest, but he did no more than tighten his arm around her waist and pull her against his pelvis. The kiss was hers to initiate, a task that became easier and easier with the increase in contact between their bodies. Where they touched, there was heat. Where he moved against her, there was meltdown.

His anger hadn’t abated. It had been changed, refocused, been transformed into need.

Her eyes closed on a soft exhalation, and her arms slid up his chest and around his neck. She wanted to savor him, explore him. She touched her mouth to his and felt his breathing slow. Her lips parted and pleasure suffused her senses.

This was the kiss Cooper had wanted. Her tongue laving the inside of his mouth and filling him with a hunger for more. Her giving instead of just accepting, a kiss without tears.

She molded herself to him, and the soft crush of her breasts against his chest made his gut tighten. He slanted his mouth over hers to deepen the kiss and take them both higher. She was his. She felt so right, too right not to be his. He rubbed himself against her and groaned with the pleasure the simple act gave.

The timing was dead wrong, but his feelings were undeniable. He wanted to make love to her, sink himself inside her and lose himself in the sweet mystery of her. She was beautifully female, all giving softness with a seductive power he didn’t even attempt to resist. He wanted her to take him.

With that goal in mind, he slid his hands down her hips and began inching up her skirt. He got the hemline up about an inch and a half before her hands covered his and stopped his little adventure.

“This is going to happen,” he murmured against her mouth.

She didn’t deny him; she only kissed him and kept kissing him. The skirt came up another inch.

“Damn.” He stopped himself, then swore again. “But it isn’t going to happen here, and it isn’t going to happen now. How in the hell do you do it?”

“Do what?” she asked, her voice breathless in a way that made him wish something was going to happen.

“Make me into the gentleman I most certainly am not,” he said, thoroughly disgusted with his attack of virtue.

He pulled back far enough to see her eyes, and she did the damndest thing. She grinned at him. He would have laughed at the sheer audacity of it, if he’d been in any condition to laugh.

Ten

Lunch was strained, and Jessica knew Cooper was making darn sure she knew why. She’d grinned at him with pure satisfied delight, enjoying her backhanded victory over him—and she’d been paying the price ever since.

“Have you ever made love on a pile of silk pillows spread out on top of a dragon?” he asked, reaching for another shrimp-and-coconut delicacy. His gaze flicked over her. “You can take that any way you want.”

“No. I have not, in any way.” She watched him pick up the crustacean with his chopsticks, refusing to meet his eyes. She had progressed far beyond blushing. She didn’t think anything more he said could shock her.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear, and her face warmed to a rosy hue.

“You’re scandalous and . . . and . . .” She gave up in frustration. She didn’t know what else he was, so she busied herself with moving food around on her plate. The lunch was haute cuisine, but she hadn’t put anything in her mouth yet that was even close to tasting as good as he had tasted. If he hadn’t stopped of his own accord, the silk-and-dragon issue would have been a done deal, and they both knew it.

The kiss had hit her like a bolt of lightning. She still hadn’t recovered her equilibrium, which was why he was getting away with his outrageous conversation. He’d turned physical foreplay into verbal foreplay. She was incapable of resisting either.

“Wanting to take your clothes off is hardly scandalous, Jessie. You’re driving me crazy and have been ever since you walked in my door,” he said, not sounding any too happy about the fact.

She’d seldom heard anyone talk so seriously and openly about sex. He wasn’t teasing her, and he sure as hell wasn’t flirting. He meant every word he was saying, but no matter what he said, wanting to see how far he could get taking her clothes off with his mouth was scandalous.

“You were angry when I walked through your door,” she corrected him.

“I was naked.”

Her blush deepened. She was floundering. He was more than she could handle—physically, emotionally, or verbally. “That wasn’t my fault either.”

“I’d be happy to give you a shot at making my nakedness your fault.” He helped himself to noodles and gave her a quick, sardonic grin she pretended not to see. “Every time you kiss me, I get the idea you’d know just how to go about it, and as we’ve already ascertained, I’ve got a hundred ways I’d like to do it to you.”

It was impossible for her blush to deepen, so it spread. Jessica knew she was supposed to like her body—every feminist said so—and she was proud of the two children she’d borne and nurtured, but getting naked with Cooper Daniels would be a tricky move if she wanted to keep her ego intact.

“We’re not really . . . uh, right for each other.” She hadn’t wanted to voice the obvious, but somebody had to keep things in perspective.

“I know,” he said, cocking his head and giving her a wry look. “But that doesn’t seem to be making a hell of a lot of difference in how I feel.”

She knew exactly what he meant, and she knew it meant trouble.

“I’ll be gone in two days,” she said.

“If I thought it would change your mind about what we should do with the afternoon, I’d fire you right after lunch. But I don’t think our job association is the only barrier between me, you, and a pair of damp sheets.”

“You’re crude.”

“I’m honest, and I want you.”

No one had ever said that to her. Such honesty could be flustering, and darkly thrilling.

“I’m no expert,” she said, trying to regain her perspective. “But don’t most men use a more subtle approach?”

He laughed and turned back to his plate. “I’m not sure I’ve got enough time to do this subtly.”

Alarmed, she looked over at him and found him gazing at her.

“If Baolian wanted you dead, she wouldn’t be trying to buy you off,” she said with conviction, as much for her own peace of mind as for his.

“Yeah,” he agreed, his face sobering. “But I’m not going to be bought.”

She went back to her lunch, though her appetite was long gone.

“So men don’t come on to you?”

Of all the things he could have come up with to continue the conversation, nothing could have been better designed to exasperate her—and get her mind off his very serious situation.

“No, Cooper. Men don’t come on to me.” She faced him and lifted her bangs. “Can’t you see the ‘wife’ and ‘mother’ signs branded on my forehead?”

“You’re not married.”

“No, but I was for long enough for the label to stick.” She gave him a look that said the conversation was over, but he didn’t take the hint.

“Lots of men find that especially attractive in a woman, her being married to someone else.”

“In my experience, it’s the other way around, with women finding other people’s husbands especially attractive.”

“Paul told me about Ian,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about him with you.” She set her chopsticks down and prepared herself for getting up and leaving. They had already crossed the bounds of propriety and professionalism, and if they talked about her ex-husband, they were going to cross the bounds of civility.

Cooper’s hand on her arm stopped her getaway before she had a chance to move.

“If he’s part of the barrier, he’s going to get talked about.”

“Don’t try to analyze me, Cooper.” The edge in her voice gave away more of her feelings than she had intended, but it was too late for a flippant reply.

A heavy silence fell between them, and she could swear she heard his jaw clench.

“I don’t want to analyze you,” he finally said. “I want to make love with you, and believe me, I wouldn’t be telling you that if I didn’t have a damn good reason for thinking you wanted the same thing. I’m not a fool. I don’t go around setting myself up for rejection, and I sure as hell don’t make a pass at every woman who catches my eye. But you—” He stopped, frustration getting the better of him. He was silent for a long moment, and when he continued, his voice had softened to a pained whisper. “But you make me forget, Jessie, and I want more.”

She was frozen in place by his words, her heartbeat slowing to a dull throb. She ached for him, for what he’d lost.

He swore, one succinct obscenity, and rolled to his feet. Walking away, he swore again, the same harsh sound. She turned on her pillow to follow him with her eyes. He stopped in front of the window and raked his hands through his hair. The sun-streaked layers slipped through his fingers like falling silk, making her want to do the same, to touch him and feel the life of him in her hands.

“We’ve only known each other a week,” she said, her voice as unsure as she suddenly felt.

He looked over his shoulder at her, and there was a resignation on his face, a sadness that reached out and quietly broke her heart.

“It’s been a hell of a week,” he said, and turned back to the view.

He needed love, physical love, but despite the yearning she felt, Jessica knew she couldn’t be the one to give it to him. The sacrifice was too great, the cost too high. He would go on and either triumph over his nemesis or be killed, and the odds were very high on him getting killed.

“You’re right,” she said. “It’s been a hell of a week. I’ll do what I can with the Grand Cayman banker and write up my recommendation.”

Cooper heard her move behind him, and with a certainty that forced him into action, he knew he wasn’t ready to let her go.

She finished rising from the floor and brushed off her skirt. It was a floral cotton thing, kind of full, but elegant rather than casual with its black background and overblown cinnabar peonies. The matching blouse had a stand-up collar and buttoned down one side. It was the loops around the buttons that had made him think of taking her clothes off with his mouth.

She was beautiful. She’d kissed him with warmth and passion, and talking with her about making love had smothered his last polite instinct.

She began walking toward the door, and he swiftly crossed the room to cut her off.

“I think you should concentrate your efforts on the herb shop,” he said. “The Chinese are very particular about their herbs.”

“There’s not much there to concentrate on.”

They both stopped at the door. Cooper put his hand on the knob and wondered just how far he’d go to keep her with him awhile longer. “I’ll send John this afternoon to check it out.”

“Okay.” Her lashes lowered. He could tell by the hesitation in her movements that she wanted to say something else.

“What, Jessie?”

“Maybe when all this is over . . .” She paused for a deep breath and lifted her eyes to meet his gaze. “Maybe then we could see each other.”

“Why?” He asked the question softly, feeling a rush of hope surge into his bloodstream. Quickly on hope’s heels came another dose of frustration. He didn’t want to wait until anything was over. When everything was over, he’d probably be over too. God, if Baolian didn’t get him, another cutthroat probably would. He’d pushed himself so far out on a limb, he couldn’t even see the damn tree anymore. He’d called in favors and twisted arms that were used to doing the twisting. He’d all but put his soul in hock to people who wouldn’t hesitate to claim it if he didn’t come through for them.

She faltered for a second, obviously caught off guard by his directness. Then she surprised him.

“Because you fascinate me,” she answered, “and every time you kiss me, I feel something I’ve never felt before. I want to find out what it is.”

He hadn’t expected such honesty.

“Part of it is lust,” he said, feeling compelled to match her honesty with his own.

“And the rest of it?” she asked.

“Part loneliness,” he admitted, knowing that particular truth didn’t put either of them in a very noble light.

“There’s still something more.” She sounded convinced, and he didn’t dissuade her. He believed it too.

“Yes. There’s something more, and I’m no more sure of what it is than you are. But I—”

He was interrupted by someone’s noisy entrance into the reception area. Their eyes held for a second, then he moved a panel hidden in the elaborate carving of the dragon door and looked through a secret peephole.

“Chow Sheng has arrived with two of his guards,” he told her. “Stay here until he leaves. I don’t want him getting any more ideas about you.”

Jessica stepped back and watched him leave, realizing she’d just made a fatal error. She’d told him the truth about her feelings. The enormity of her stupidity made her groan.

* * *

Jessica kept a vigil at the dragon door for over half an hour before she left her post to put together a snack off their lunch table and to pull a chair to the door so she could get off her feet. The conversation had alternated between English and Cantonese, with enough of her mother tongue used for her to have learned the reason for Chow’s imperious disregard for Cooper’s privacy and time.

Cooper owed him money. Lots of money. Chow had come to suggest Cooper reconsider Baolian’s offer, using the threat of calling his loan as an incentive for Cooper’s cooperation.

Cooper had countered with a threat of his own: to tell Fang Baolian that her lackey dog had given money to the enemy, to pad the enemy’s war chest against his mistress.

Chow had blanched at Cooper’s words, and made it very clear that he and Baolian were nothing more than business associates, for only a mad monkey-dog would enter the jade gate of a dragon whore, which, it was said, had more teeth than a jackal. Chow had said all of this in English, wanting to make sure, Jessica surmised, that Cooper understood every single word.

As to Cooper’s threat, Chow had been unimpressed. Fang Baolian preferred her business associates to have power over her enemies, he’d told Cooper, and it had been such a worthless amount of money. Even Cooper must be able to see that Chow had not endangered the empress of the South China Sea. If anything, he had done her a favor by indenturing her enemy to himself with the loan.

Jessica’s heart and hopes had sunk with every revelation. Cooper’s ship was taking on water at an alarming rate. He was sure to go down.

But he hadn’t taken Chow’s offer. Baolian had doubled her payoff, and still Cooper had held firm. Jessica had always thought she admired men with principles, but she was afraid watching a man die for his principles would greatly change her appreciation for the art of compromise.

“Damn you, Cooper.” She picked up a shrimp, then let it fall back onto her plate when the phone rang, startling her. Before she could make a move to answer it, the ringing stopped. She checked the outer office and saw Cooper speaking into the receiver.

Thinking how awkward it might be for him if the caller was delivering vital information, she debated if she should get on the other line, then decided he could handle the situation without her resorting to possible rudeness. She reached for the shrimp again. Again she returned it to the plate. Her stomach was growling, but it was in a tangle of knots that precluded eating.

Tucking her feet under her on the chair, she leaned on the padded arm and looked back through the peephole, only to discover things had changed in the other room—dramatically. Her body stiffened and the plate slipped to the floor unnoticed.

John Liu and Cao Bo were just returning, and their entrance sent instantaneous shock waves through the reception area. A moment’s more dallying with the shrimp, and Jessica would have missed the most important exchange she’d seen since she started working for Daniels, Ltd.

If Chow Sheng had blanched at the mention of Baolian as his mistress, he turned absolutely bloodless when Cao Bo walked into the room. His dark, slanted eyes widened into perfect O’s, and his long-nailed fingers fluttered over his heart, as if he could contain the shock that organ had just received. As quickly as he’d fallen apart, he pulled himself together, turning his face aside and speaking to one of his guards.

For her part, Cao Bo dropped her cloak of shy insecurity. When she saw whom she’d walked in on, her immediate reaction of fear was eclipsed by defiance. Her slight shoulders drew back and a challenge glittered in her amber eyes.

The whole exchange happened within the space of a breath, before Cooper could turn from the telephone, before John got all the way in the door, but the impact of it stunned Jessica. She swore softly, a word she’d never used but appreciated now for its earthiness.

In the reception area, much dissembling was taking place. Chow Sheng sedately informed his adversary of a prior appointment, assuring Cooper that their negotiations would be continued at a later date. No introductions were made, but John had drawn Bo close, as if she were a girl he was seeing and happened to bring with him to drop in on his boss. Yuxi inconspicuously placed himself in front of the couple and spoke in rapid-fire Cantonese, drawing all the attention in the room to himself.

Cooper looked disgusted with the unexpected turn of events and did his best to smooth things over and get Chow out of his office. The older man did not need any encouraging. He left in a flurry of silk robes and bodyguards, as if he hoped a speedy escape would absolve him of any repercussions from the chance meeting. That was the way Jessica read the situation, and she considered herself damn good at reading situations.

Her questions about Cao Bo tripled in the time it took for the outer doors to close behind the last bodyguard. Jessica understood the young woman’s initial fear. The defiance was a different animal altogether. Defiance implied enmity, and enmity implied acquaintance. Chow Sheng and Cao Bo knew each other, and while Cao Bo may have been afraid of every other person she’d met in the last few days, she was not afraid of Chow Sheng. Quite the opposite, in fact. Chow Sheng was afraid of the young woman.

He was also afraid of Fang Baolian. The coincidence was not lost on Jessica.

Eleven

The minute Chow Sheng was out the door, Jessica went into action. She ducked her head into the reception area and started giving orders.

“Yuxi, lock the door, please. John, will you come and secure the elevator? Make sure it won’t move, then come back here to wait with Yuxi and Bo. Cooper, I need to see you in your office—alone.” She ducked her head back behind the dragon doors, then popped it out again with a last question. “Does anybody have a firearm?”

All three men had turned toward her, and they nodded in unison. It was more backup than Jessica had expected, especially in the office. When Bo added her hesitant nod, she didn’t know whether to feel additional relief or to give in to a stronger surge of dismay.

Dismay won. A glance at Cooper showed him having the same reaction. John was quicker than both of them, swinging the woman around and flattening her against the wall for a brief but thorough frisking. He came up with the handgun out of her tunic and gave Cooper an apologetic smile tinged with self-recrimination.

“Pretty women,” he said with a shrug, as if there was no understanding them and he should have known better than to trust one.

Cooper agreed with both sentiments with a slight lifting of his brows.

Yuxi stayed with Bo as the rest of them went into Cooper’s office. After securing the elevator, John returned to the reception area, leaving the two of them alone.

“General Langston, I presume?” Cooper said dryly, striding toward the table and the half-empty wineglass he’d left there.

Jessica ignored the sarcasm. She was too concerned with how to approach him with what she thought she knew.

“Nice little disaster we just had out there,” he said, the idleness of the comment belied by the tightness of his jaw. He picked up his glass and tossed off the contents in one swallow.

“That wasn’t a disaster, Cooper. That was a godsend,” she said.

His gaze narrowed on her. “You’ve never struck me as the overly optimistic type. Do you want to explain your definition of a godsend?”

She wasn’t sure just yet, and her uncertainty showed in her hesitation. “First I want . . . no. First I need to know what you’re going to do with Fang Baolian.”

“I thought that was apparent. I’m going to destroy her.”

“Do you want to explain your definition of destroy?” she asked, throwing his question back at him.

He looked at her for a long moment, unnerving her with the intensity of his gaze. When he spoke, his voice was dangerously quiet.

“What do you know, Jessie?”

“I’m not sure.”

“You were sure enough two minutes ago to cordon off the area and do a weapons check,” he said, correctly interpreting her intent and her actions. “I want to know what was behind your decision.”

She’d started the discussion. She was going to have to finish it, but she didn’t have to give her knowledge away. “I need some guarantees.”

Cooper stared at her. “Aren’t you forgetting whose interests you are being well paid to keep in mind?”

“This isn’t about money.” She nervously clasped her hands together near her waist.

“What is it about, then, Jessie?”

“A woman’s life,” she said, then blurted out, “I don’t want her killed. I don’t want you to kill her.” Jessica hadn’t even known how important that truth was to her, until she’d realized she might hold the power to bring Baolian to her knees at Cooper’s feet.

“Killing is her game, not mine,” he said, lowering his gaze as he placed his empty glass back on the table.

“I don’t believe you.” She’d seen him with Chow Sheng. She remembered the way he’d looked the first time she’d seen him—wild and capable of anything.

Anger darkened the eyes he slowly lifted to meet hers. “Fair enough,” he said, not denying her accusation.

“You can ruin her financially, play any game you want with her assets, take her to the cleaners. I just don’t want you to kill her.” And that, she suddenly understood, was her bottom line. Her concern wasn’t so much for Baolian’s life as it was for Cooper’s soul. With that flash of insight, Jessica knew she’d gone past the edge of lust, loneliness, and caring into—God, help her—love. It was the worst news she’d had all day.

“You’re asking a hell of a lot,” he said. “Are you sure what you’ve got is worth it?” The subtle warning in his tone told her she could push him too far.

“No,” she said clearly, having no doubts that her answer was a shove in the wrong direction. But the stakes had gotten very high very quickly, and she couldn’t afford to be anything less than honest with him.

Cooper felt all the tension of the afternoon go out of him in one moment of pure incredulity. She was fearless. There was no other explanation for her rash treatment of him and her total disregard for his suggestion of caution. He wasn’t in the mood to be trifled with, yet she trifled with him at her leisure—and at her risk.

“I’m beginning to understand why I find you so damnably attractive,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a compliment, and he could tell by her reaction that she took the statement with the same ambivalence with which he’d given it.

“Tell me you won’t kill her,” she insisted once more.

“I won’t kill her.” The remark was deliberately offhand, deliberately devoid of sincerity. She was going to have to take a chance on him, because—so help him, God—he’d been taking an incredible chance with her. She’d gotten under his skin where he hadn’t wanted anyone to be. She shook his carefully controlled sense of balance. She made him want, and he’d figured out within a week of Jackson’s death that wanting was the precursor to pain. The more you wanted, the more pain you were setting yourself up to take.

“Okay,” she said, letting out a long breath, apparently satisfied with his nonchalant guarantee. “I haven’t got it all figured out yet, but something astounding just happened out in reception and I think it’s the bait we’ve been looking for.”

Cooper kept his silence and waited, still stewing over her high-handed approach.

“Did you feel anything happen when John and Bo walked in?” she asked.

Feel?

He thought for a moment, then said the only thing he could come up with. “No. I didn’t feel anything happen. I felt anger, both at myself and at John for not being more careful.”

“Well, I felt something happen.”

“You were behind a solid oak door,” he reminded her, letting his skepticism show. “You weren’t even in the room.”

“I still felt it.”

Okay, he thought, I’ll bite. “Felt what?”

“Chow Sheng shaking in his boots.”

“Slippers,” he corrected.

“Whatever. He was the one who got caught in your office, not Cao Bo, and it scared him. She scared him.”

“She scares me,” he admitted, not seeing the problem.

“No, she doesn’t, Cooper.” She started toward the table, taking a quick sidestep around one of the clawed feet of the dragon woven into the rug. The movement was so subtle, so unconscious, Cooper doubted if she was even aware she’d done it.

Stopping next to one of the chairs, she rested her hip on the arm. Her voice took on an earnestness as she leaned forward. “What or who she might represent scares you, but she doesn’t scare you. With Chow it’s personal. She actually frightens him.”

Cooper wasn’t buying it. There were too many facts lined up on the other side. “Chow Sheng had two bodyguards with him, and Cao Bo probably doesn’t weigh in at more than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. I’m not convinced, Jessie.”

“I’m not talking about on-the-spot physical violence,” she said, sounding thoroughly exasperated.

“Blackmail?” he asked, though he wasn’t sure how being seen in his office would provide anyone with leverage against Chow Sheng. When Cooper was in residence, many people came through his office, most of them with no pretense of friendship as their motive. People did show up to shake his hand every now and then and conduct a little business, and some people showed up simply to shake him down.

“No,” she said, drawing the word out as she seemed to search for another. “Blackmail isn’t quite right. It was more as if Bo had given him something he didn’t want, something dangerous, like a scorpion nestled on a bowl of hibiscus.”

She was inscrutable, Cooper thought impatiently, totally inscrutable—like Fang Baolian. The subtleness of Jessica’s reasoning finally hit home, and his senses did an immediate shift from uninterested confusion to full alert.

“Who do you think she is?” he asked.

Jessica recognized the change in his attitude. He was taking her seriously. “I don’t know, but my guess is that she’s very important to Baolian, and part of what frightened Chow was knowing she was in the enemy’s hands. He’s going to try to take her.”

She was right, and Cooper knew it down to his bones.

“Then the quicker we get her out of here, the better. Gather up any data you’re going to need for the next couple of days.” He strode toward the dragon doors. “We won’t be coming back.”

* * *

An hour later Jessica stood on a balcony overlooking the rugged coastline and stretch of beach between Cooper’s house and the Pacific Ocean. The house itself was not what she had expected as they’d driven north out of San Francisco. She’d expected redwood and glass, something with two or three stories, craggy and masculine. She’d gotten an oasis of white pine, wood floors, and stark simplicity all on one level and no larger than two thousand square feet.

An apartment over the detached garage belonged to John, while the house was built closer to the sea, with steps leading down to the beach. The cries of gulls filled the air, a strident avian backdrop to the more primal sound made by the ocean and the melody of the chimes hanging from the porch roof.

A gust of wind swept in from the sea and ruffled her hair. She absently pushed the strands back off her face and turned to go inside. Cooper hadn’t brought her to his home to admire the view. They had work to do.

She headed toward the north wing of the house, where she could hear John and Cooper setting up the equipment they’d brought. On her way, she passed an open door and her steps slowed, her curiosity aroused.

Unlike the quiet sophistication of the rest of the house, the room looked like it belonged to someone who didn’t know how to stop moving. Every sport she could imagine was represented by the appropriate equipment, from skiing—cross-country and downhill—to snorkeling and scuba diving. There were surfboards, tennis rackets, racquetball rackets, a hockey stick, old baseball mitts, a basketball, a mountaineering pack, and lengths of neatly coiled climbing rope next to a chalk bag. Underneath all the clutter was a futon, a television with a VCR, and a large wicker dresser. The stereo system was everywhere, with speakers placed in all four corners.

Jessica knew it was Jackson’s room. The rest of the house was elegant, like the office where she worked. This room was exuberance and energy running amok, but it looked untouched, painfully quiet. The evidence of a life lived hard and to the fullest, but finished, made her all the more sad for Cooper. The place was a testament to what he’d lost, to the vitality that was no more.

Her gaze traveled the length of the room once again, taking in all the recreational equipment, a couple of guitars and assorted electronic gizmos stacked here and there, and another realization struck her, startling her. Her brow furrowed as she stepped inside. Looking again with a more discerning eye, she walked around the room, carefully touching the things she discovered.

Her fingertips grazed a poster of a heavy-metal band. A matching T-shirt proclaiming their world tour lay on the wicker dresser. From the characters on the shirt, she surmised the concert had been heard in Japan.

An odd clay sculpture stood in one corner of the room and was being used as a hat rack. It was half tree, half man and poorly done. She knelt by the base and ran her fingers over the name etched into the glazed surface—Jackson. The accompanying date was less than a year earlier. A few feet away was another sculpture of exquisite quality and the same half-tree design, but with a woman’s face and body. The name on it was Olivia.

On a wrought-iron bench pushed against the far wall were a number of photographs. One was of Cooper as she had never seen him, laughing wildly, with a glint of pure mischief in his eyes as he held a large half-eaten fish from a gaff. Next to him was a boy holding a somewhat smaller fish. But the smaller fish had the other half of Cooper’s hanging out of its mouth. The boy’s smile was pure innocence, all cocky pride and artless guile set off by a sly wink and a dark, silky ponytail.

The boy appeared again, a few years older, hair a little longer, in a number of the other photographs. One was a high-school graduation picture taken with Cooper by his side. Another, in which he had even longer hair, was with a young woman. She was tall and blond and willowy, dressed in a sequin-spangled minidress. He was in a tuxedo. The picture was signed: To Jackson with love. Don’t forget. Martha.

Jessica picked up the photograph and brought it closer. This, then, was Jackson, she thought, not quite believing what she saw. He had been beautiful. No one could deny the appeal of the clean, sculpted lines of his face, or of his rakish smile, or the sensuality of the ebony hair falling nearly to his waist.

The pictures proved what she had suspected. Jackson had been much younger than Cooper, young enough for Jessica finally to realize just how far Cooper would go to destroy the woman who had killed him.

Jackson had been more of a son to Cooper than a brother, or rather a half brother. The dark hair, a higher angle on his cheekbones, the deep rich green of his eyes, and the warm color of his skin bespoke a mixed heritage.

Jackson could actually have been Cooper’s son, for all she knew. Cooper certainly had a penchant for beautiful Oriental women, and one way or another, he seemed to come in contact with quite a few.

She set the photograph down and let out a heavy sigh. If Jackson had been his son, she knew nothing would stop Cooper from exacting revenge, nothing short of his own death. For his sake, she hoped it wasn’t so.

A change in the air, rather than any sound, warned her she was no longer alone. Her intuition told her who was watching. She’d been caught again.

Resigned to his anger, she turned around and was surprised and concerned to find his expression much more difficult to read. His face was a mask of stone, utterly blank.

“We’re all set up and ready to go,” he said. “I want you to research the name Pablo Lopez gave me, the man on Grand Cayman. Start with the banks. If you get a trace to anything in the U.S.A. that he’s siphoning money back into, then we’re in business. If Baolian has put a sizable portion of her assets in the States, it’s because she’s looking for a stable government and a capitalistic economy. If we find it, we’ve found her nest egg, her crown jewel.”

He turned to leave, but her voice stopped him.

“Was he your son, Cooper?”

“No,” he said gruffly, without moving to face her. “He was the son of Sun Yi and my mother.”

“Who was Sun Yi?”

Even from across the room, she saw the telltale twitch of a muscle in his jaw, the cracking of his facade of indifference.

“Sun Yi was the man who loved my mother, but couldn’t save her. He was also a pirate, running the biggest syndicate out of Hong Kong until he died and left it all to Fang Baolian.”

Twelve

Dusk was edging across the eastern horizon and falling into the ocean before Jessica pushed away from her computer. She stretched her arms above her head and rolled her shoulders, easing the strain of too many hours without moving. The room she was working in encompassed the whole north end of the house, giving her both the landward view and the beauty of the sunset in the west.

She’d been alone for at least an hour, maybe longer. Cooper had left so quietly, she hadn’t known for sure when he’d gone. She hadn’t seen John, Bo, or Yuxi since shortly after they’d all arrived. Cooper had given the men instructions concerning the security of the house and they’d gone, taking the woman with them.

Checking her watch, she decided it was time for her to go too. She made a quick phone call home and talked to the children and Tony. Paul was out for the evening, but her youngest brother had everything in hand. Jessica knew she had a lot to be grateful for when it came to the men she lived with. They felt their family responsibilities keenly and had welcomed her and the children with open arms. Arguments were inevitable, and more than once schedules had clashed and promises had been forgotten. After a tough first year, though, they had managed to find ways to air resentments and stay out of one another’s space when privacy was more important than teamwork. The five of them now functioned more as a family than many regular families. Genuine love had grown between her children and their uncles, the kind of love that only came from sacrificing and putting work into a relationship.

Jessica was ever aware of what she owed her brothers, including—but not limited to—a lot of back rent and baby-sitting overtime. Her school loans were just coming due, and she still owed money on her divorce. In an amazing feat of legal sleight of hand, her adulterous ex-husband had fixed it so she actually owed him money on the property settlement. Debt wasn’t crushing her, but only because Paul and Tony were holding the roof up over her and her children’s heads.

The rest of her family had been able to offer moral support, but not much else. Her parents were retired and living on their pensions, and her other brothers had families of their own to raise.

Yawning, she pushed out of her chair and walked over to the oceanside windows. After a minute of watching the waves come in, she opened the glass doors leading to the balcony and stepped outside. The wind had dropped. The chimes were quiet.

She scanned the beach, looking for what she knew not until she saw him rising out of the darkening sea in a black wet suit. Water sloughed off his shoulders and streamed down his body, glistening and catching the colors of the sun. His face shone with the differing shades of the sky—gold where the light rimmed his profile, a darker bronze smudged to copper in the shadows.

Waves broke against his legs, foaming up his strong thighs and pushing him forward. The wet suit necessary to swim the north coast clung to him, accentuating the hard lines of his body. For all Jackson’s exotic mystery, the younger brother had been no more beautiful than the man she watched. She reached for the balcony railing and closed her fingers around the weathered wood. Her breathing grew quiet and soft, and her pulse slowed, as if she’d come upon a wild creature easily frightened back into the liquid wilderness.

He slicked his hands back through his hair, pushing it off his face as he limped across the cooling sand. The tension that was so much a part of him seemed momentarily subdued, washed away by an elemental sea. Light and shadow played across the muscles in his arms, outlining the hard, rounded curves of his biceps and the corded strength flowing from shoulder to wrist.

Halfway to the stairs, he looked up and unerringly met her eyes. No smile graced his mouth. No acknowledgment was made other than the eternity that he held her gaze. Then he broke their silent contact and continued his walk to the house.

A shiver coursed down her spine, as if the wind had suddenly come back up. But there was no wind. There was only Cooper, mounting the stairs and coming for her. The truth hit her as strongly as it was unexpected and undeniable.

For a while she’d lost herself in her work. For a while she’d forgotten all the different ways he’d told her he wanted her.

He, she knew, had forgotten nothing. Every moment of his kisses flooded back through her senses and she felt an overwhelming urge to run. Yet she held her ground, allowing herself to remember, even though she knew her downfall would be in recalling how he made her feel.

Their lunch conversation returned to her mind verbatim, and heat burned through her. No man had ever taken so much as a bra strap off her with his teeth. It was definitely time to run, before he made it all the way to the balcony.

Still she didn’t move, and she wasn’t sure if it was politeness, fear, or anticipation that held her captive at the rail. If her decision had been based purely on desire, she probably would have slept with him on the massage table in his office approximately five minutes after she’d seen him, just long enough not to bother to say hello. The force of her attraction had been that strong.

Desire, however, wasn’t enough to overcome her trepidation. She didn’t want to get hurt, and she sure as hell didn’t want to get used.

“Hi,” he said when he reached the top stair, and Jessica realized she hadn’t moved so much as an inch in any direction.

“Hi. How was the water?” Her voice sounded stilted. Her body was frozen in place.

“Cold, but nice.” A slow smile curved his mouth as he unzipped his wet suit. “Welcoming. Safe.” He lifted a towel off the rail and used it to dry his arms and face. “Salty but sweet.” A lambent light warmed his eyes when he looked up. “Cradling. Heavy with love for me . . . the way you could be.”

The breath she’d been holding went out of her and her heart melted. He offered nothing more than the truth that he wanted her with a need he wasn’t going to hide.

Moving closer, he lifted her hand in his and brought it to his mouth. He stroked his tongue across her palm before kissing her there, then placed her hand over his heart. His eyes came back to hers, and he waited.

His skin was cool where she touched him, his heartbeat a strong and steady rhythm echoing her pulse. A thousand reasons to say no fell over each other in her mind, and her body had a response for every one of them. She wanted to make love. But God, it was hard to let go.

She closed her eyes on a troubled sigh, hoping to come up with an answer. But no answer was needed, for he kissed her then, his mouth covering hers in a gentle but irrevocable act that claimed her for his own.

He slipped his tongue in her mouth with a soft groan and ran his hands down her body, cupping her buttocks and pulling her close. When she was pressed against him, feeling the dampness of his wet suit seep through to her skin, he slid his hands up under her arms and guided them around his neck.

She offered no resistance. Every move he made was too heavenly to resist, and deep down inside she knew the die had already been cast. They would make love. She would feel him on top of her, inside of her, infusing every pore of her being with his essence. She wanted nothing more. She would accept nothing less for the chance she was taking.

So she returned his kiss in full measure and let her hands explore the breadth of his shoulders and the sleek muscles of his chest.

“Don’t stop there, Jessie,” he said between kisses on her face. “Touch me.”

She hesitated, then moved her hand lower, and he rolled his hips against her, and his voice whispered against her skin . . . yes.

She was totally seduced by his reaction and the feel of him sliding into her palm. There was a sensuality about him she’d never experienced with a man, a silent, compelling confession of needs, and the equally compelling admission that only she could meet them. The grace in his movements put pleasure above domination. Or so she thought until she felt her skirt fall to the deck. She’d been so consumed by his kisses, so fascinated with his arousal, the hardness and the responsiveness of him, she’d been unaware of where his hands had been or what they’d been doing.

She was still decent in her slip, but Cooper wasn’t stopping with her skirt. His hands were already sliding up her blouse, unbuttoning her from the bottom up.

“Cooper . . . Cooper, what if the others—”

His fingertips grazing over the peaks of her breasts silenced her more effectively than a kiss. Sweet pleasure stole her breath and weakened her knees. He caught her to him with one arm around her waist, but his other hand continued to tease and tantalize, stroking her softly and slowly.

“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “No one is going to come within fifty yards of this house unless we’re under fire.” He kissed the side of her neck and bit the lobe of her ear. “John has Bo under benign house arrest at his apartment, and I sent Yuxi to your house.”

That got her attention despite the sensual haze he was conjuring up.

“Why?”

She felt the muscles in his shoulder bunch and give with his shrug. “I wanted to get rid of him, and that seemed to be the place he could do the most good. I’ll pick him up when I take you home.” His hand tilted her chin so he could steal kisses off her lips. “Unless you’ll stay here with me all night long”—he kissed her again—“and wake up with me in the morning?”

“I can’t do that,” she whispered, suddenly feeling unsure of what she was doing. She wanted to make love with him. She wanted to explore his body and partake of the pleasure he offered. But every time he spoke, his words told her he wanted more, and giving him more was exactly what she was afraid of.

“They’ll be okay,” he said, surprising her with the depth of his empathy, even though he’d misinterpreted her main concern. “I really did send Yuxi just to get him out of the house, but he was a police sergeant in Hong Kong before he immigrated. Nothing gets by him.”

“I still can’t spend the night,” she said.

“I know. But you’re spending the next hour making love with me. If I get lucky, maybe you’ll spend two, and that’s what I need most.” He grew silent as he cupped her face in his palms and rested his forehead on hers. Silky-fine hair slipped over his brow and brushed against her cheek. With utter concentration, like a cat licking cream, he flicked his tongue over her mouth and lit her on fire.

She took the exquisite torture, until she was gasping and wondering what was coming over her. She’d never gasped from a kiss before. Then again, she’d never been simply licked before.

“Lord, I love how you smell, the way you taste,” he murmured against her lips.

With no more than that, no more than the turn of a phrase and another soul-deep kiss, he made her reality disappear.

She slipped her hand farther into his wet suit and felt the powerful surge of his body’s response. He swore softly, ever so softly, his hands tightening on her.

“Come with me, please,” he said huskily, grasping her wrist and pulling her hand free. He twined his fingers with hers and, holding her tight, led the way to his room at the other end of the balcony.

A light headland breeze billowed the floor-length curtains covering the open doorway to his bedroom, the sheer pale material reflecting shades of the sunset. Inside, the air was warmer than outside, warm and inviting, like his bed with its plump white comforter draped partway on the floor, as if he’d only gotten out of the bed to bring her back into it.

“Let me undress you,” he said, pulling her into the room and letting the curtains fall behind them.

“How?” she asked, somewhat wary and somewhat curious, remembering again what he’d whispered to her at lunch.

A quick grin teased his lips. “Not like that,” he said, pulling her closer and reaching for the next button on her blouse. “That’s a game for longtime lovers. Later we can work our way through the books, but the first time we make love isn’t for playing around. Everything is too new. We’re nervous.”

“You’re nervous?” she asked, her wariness decreasing.

His grin broadened, and the last of her buttons slipped free of its loop. “No,” he admitted sheepishly. “You’re nervous. I’m excited. But it amounts to the same thing. I’ve been thinking about you a lot, thinking about how it would feel to do this.” He opened her blouse and carefully pushed it off her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. “And this.” His hands came back to her slip straps, his fingers sliding underneath and lifting them. He started to pull them down, but her hands came up to her breasts, stopping the aqua lingerie from going anywhere.

He quirked an eyebrow at her. “We’re going a lot further than this, Jessie.”

“Maybe.” The word was a breath, her eyes wide and unsure.

Cooper had drawn some conclusions from the things Paul had told him about her marriage, and he had an idea of what the problem probably was. She hadn’t been with a man in a long time, and as much as she wanted him, she had a lot of doubts, especially since the last man she had been with had been unfaithful to her. Adultery was hell on a person’s self-worth and sexuality.

He hadn’t been with a woman in a long time either, though his celibacy had more to do with dissatisfaction with casual sex than with any hurt he’d received. He had arrived at a time in his life where he only wanted one special woman. He hadn’t been able to find her, until the totally inappropriate Ms. Jessica Langston had walked into his office. He didn’t have any doubts with her.

Her importance to him didn’t make sense in either the short run or the long run. She was a divorced mother living in the suburbs. She needed stability, commitment. He was a man living close to the edge of oblivion, and he needed her. Only her.

“I want to be careful with you,” he murmured, smoothing his hands over her bare shoulders. “I don’t want to push you too fast, or make you uncomfortable—but I also want to take your clothes off and lie down with you on my bed.”

“Okay,” she said, not sounding at all okay.

He took her at her word, giving her credit for knowing what she wanted even if she wasn’t sure of how to go about getting it.

“You’re very beautiful, Jessie.” He traced the lace edge of her slip across the upper curves of her breasts and felt her quiver under his touch. A pleased smile curved his mouth. “You’re voluptuous and soft, and I find that very erotic.”

His hands skimmed lower, over her breasts and down her belly. Bunching her slip in one hand, he brought the material up above her hips and used his other hand to work her hose and underwear down. She grew very, very still.

“Don’t stop breathing, darlin’,” he drawled, “or this isn’t going to be nearly as much fun as I thought.”

“Don’t tease me, Cooper. I’m a nervous wreck.”

“If we can get all these clothes off, I think we can get beyond the nervous part pretty damn quick.”

In silent agreement, she moved to help him, but balked again when it came to her slip.

“Not yet,” she whispered.

“Then when?”

“I’m not sure!” A soft blush colored her cheeks.

Unable to resist, he kissed the warmed skin. “All right, Jessie. I’ve got a plan. I’m going to take off my wet suit”—and he did, peeling it off his body with sure grace—“and take off your slip”—he did that too—“and then I’m going to put my hands all over you.”

Without preamble or warning, he started with her most secret place, tunneling his fingers down through the triangle of soft curls between her legs. His eyes drifted closed on a ragged breath. God, she felt so good. He stroked her, feeling her woman’s moisture dampen his fingertips and make his erection even stiffer. Whether she was unsure or not, her body was welcoming him, preparing to receive him.

“Lord, Jessie,” he groaned. “You must have the willpower of a saint to be this wet and still say no. Either that or you’re more innocent than I would have believed for a mother of two.”

“Cooper?” she said breathlessly.

“Yes?”

“Let’s not talk about the kids.”

Thirteen

Cooper took her suggestion to heart and stopped talking altogether, except to murmur encouragement. They stretched out on the bed, his body darkly golden and angular against her pale curves. He cupped her breast in one hand and massaged her nipple to a turgid peak while he kissed her, full of wonder at the beauty of her and the sweetness of her response. Her fingers combed languidly through his hair, and her breathing grew short and shallow, telling him of her pleasure.

When he lowered his head and took her in his mouth, her muscles tensed for a moment, then gave way completely in a melting surrender. She sighed his name and the sound went through him like a searing bolt of heat.

He kissed her everywhere, touched her everywhere, and with every kiss, every touch, his need for her grew. She offered oblivion, a focus and a driving need hot enough to consume him. He ached from wanting to be inside her, but the taste of her on his tongue compelled him to explore her feminine curves, to linger in soft, secret places made for the caress of his mouth.

When his brain started sending out warning signals, he moved up her body, blazing a trail of wet kisses, kisses meant to imprint her shape and the satiny texture of her skin on his mind. He kissed her where the sun had kissed her before, on her chest and shoulders and across the bridge of her nose, where a dusting of freckles graced her, and as he kissed her she began her own exploration.

She ran her foot up the back of his leg and down over his buttocks, teasing him, stroking him. Simultaneously she slid her hand down his chest and past his abdomen, tracing a double fuse line to his groin—then she lit it with her closing fist and a stronger stroking of his shaft.

Jessica felt his response build with every inch she traveled, until his body trembled with the need for control. When she reached her destination, he groaned and let her bring his arousal to a peak. Then he surged against her, swearing softly and making a crude request sound like an act of divine salvation. His breathing ragged, he nuzzled his head into the crook of her neck and whispered his request again. They were dark words, laden with primal fecundity, words meant to lure the innocent across the threshold of polite sex into a realm of pure, transcendent sensuality.

He pushed against her, breaching her silken sheath and sliding deep. Any illusions she’d had about what he wanted from her were shattered by the reality of his first thrust. He was gentle but unrelenting, burying himself to the hilt and then waiting as the exquisite pressure grew. His arousal throbbed deep inside her, heightening her excitement and bringing her closer to the edge of climax. He bent his head and licked her breasts before drawing a nipple into his mouth to suck and fondle with his tongue.

A gasp was wrung from her, and she clung to him, tangling her hands through his hair and holding him to her breast. Still he didn’t thrust again.

She spoke his name, urging him on, near pleading with him, but he only brought his mouth to hers and whispered his request against her lips .

Dragons were a dangerous business, she realized. They were aggressive and demanding, and showed little sympathy for the faint of heart.

But they were also seductive, sensual creatures, ready and willing to push the envelope of her experience. He finally began a slow withdrawal, and her body convulsed around him.

“Cooper, no . . . don’t.” He pushed back inside, and her words changed to a soft moan. “Yes.”

Her eyes fluttered closed and she raised her hips to meet him, taking the initiative, doing what he’d asked. She drew his head down to hers and opened her mouth to receive him. Matching him stroke for stroke, she was slowly engulfed in the sensual haze they created out of thin air and two bodies touching, skin to skin, and heart to heart.

She kept nothing for herself, no protection from the sweet lavings of his tongue, no inhibitions to hide behind. Her instincts were to cherish, to show him with her hands and mouth, and the welcoming gesture of her spread legs, how much she wanted him, how much he meant to her—Lord, what he was doing to her.

Cooper recognized every gift she gave, and he was awed that she gave so much. Her acquiescence was a haven, a safe place to let go of anger and forget guilt, a place of oblivion and succor. Her pleasure was a source of endless erotic stimulation. With every soft sound she took him higher. With every pelvic thrust she taught him a new and enthralling sensation. He couldn’t get enough of her.

He levered himself up on his arms and gazed at the woman lying beneath him. Just looking at her made him feel tighter, harder. Her dark auburn hair was a tumble of soft strands across his pillow. The lines and curves of her body were an inspiration for the act of love, from the smoothness of her shoulders and arms to the gentle roundness of her belly. She was lithe and curvaceous like a female creature made to nurture. She was a woman and lovely, and he wanted her to have everything.

“Jessie, give me your hand.” His voice was rough with strain. He hadn’t meant to ask, he’d meant to do the deed and hope she’d follow his lead.

He had asked, though, and when she complied, lifting her hand with languorous grace, he smiled his pleasure. He was still embedded deeply within her, but the only movement he made was to bring her hand to his mouth and dampen her fingers. He swirled his tongue down over the sensitive tips and across her knuckles, and he felt her trembling contraction on his hard maleness.

With effort, he held his response in check. He was after more than release within her, and he was suddenly very sure he could get what he wanted.

When her fingers were wet, he slid her hand down over her belly and into the thatch of auburn curls between her legs.

“Touch yourself for me, Jessie,” he murmured, guiding her in the act and watching the gentle gliding motion she made. Her thigh muscles tensed and her hips tilted higher. Her breathing grew labored. “You are so soft and sweet there. Let me—Jessie . . .” Her silken sheath tightened around him with agonizing pleasure, leaving him breathless.

He pumped into her, looking down and watching himself fill her again and again. She was coming apart in his bed, in his arms, and he wanted it to last forever. Even as the thought of forever came to life, a firestorm began building in his loins.

Jessica grasped the sheets with both hands, straining. Her legs came up around his waist, her ankles locking behind his back. Dragons were lovers. The strength of him overwhelmed her, the slickness of his movements and the heat of his skin. He was fire and energy, and he was taking her where she’d never been.

Cooper felt every muscle in his body coil in upon itself. He held off, knowing once he crossed a certain line there would be no control, no retreat, only the driving force of his body taking him to completion.

Her low moan and the surging of her body against him was the last thing he knew before the inevitability of climax claimed him. Her delicate contractions were made exquisitely powerful by the sensitivity of the shaft they milked. She convulsed around him, her inner walls rippling in counterpoint to the jetting of his lifestream. His back arched and he jerked against her, making it last, and last, until the final shudder ripped through him, leaving him dazed and struggling to find a steady breath.

He slowly lowered himself and cradled her in his arms, taking in a great gulp of air as he rolled her to his side. He’d known she’d be the death of him, but he sure as hell hadn’t expected her to kill him in bed.

* * *

Sated, Jessica curled against her green-eyed dragon, inhaling the musky scent of man and the tang of the sea. He kissed her forehead and stroked her hair back off her face, touching her and soothing her still-trembling body. She wasn’t sure what she and Ian had been doing all those years, but she’d never felt anything like what Cooper had given her . Luxuriating in the aftermath of his intensely beautiful lovemaking, she was ready to commit to him for life.

“You’re dangerous,” he said, his voice hoarse.

“Moi?”

“Toi.”

She looked up at him and he flashed her a wry grin. She hid her own smile against his chest.

“Are you sure you have to go home?”

She could tell by his tone that his grin had faded. “Yes, I do,” she said, tilting her head back to see him. “I’m sorry, Cooper.”

Darkness had fallen since they’d first walked into his bedroom, but it wasn’t dark enough to hide his disappointment.

“Then let me just hold you for a few minutes,” he said, drawing her closer and tucking her head under his chin.

She sank against him, feeling his heartbeat under her palm and the strength of his arms around her. He twined their legs together. A heavy breath escaped him, sounding like a sigh of resignation, but he said no more. He only held her, letting the quietness fall and deepen.

When he knew he could keep her no longer, Cooper eased his arm from underneath her and helped her to her feet. He gave her a kiss before he let her go, but not the ravenous, sexual kisses he’d given her during their lovemaking. Tenderness and appreciation were his goals when he brushed his mouth over hers, gently rubbing her lips.

“I don’t know how to tell you what happened to me when we made love,” he said, still holding her close. “But I want more.” He kissed her again and released her. “I’ll get your skirt.”

Jessica watched him leave, walking naked across the room and out through the door. The curtains blew around him for an instant before he disappeared.

She wanted more too, much more. For her sake even more than for his, she wished she could stay.

She wanted to wake up in his arms, without any time apart for her doubts to surface.

* * *

Jessica hadn’t planned on being back at Cooper’s house ready to go to work before he’d even gotten out of bed, but that’s what happened.

John answered the door and let her in, and within minutes after she’d reopened her files in the makeshift office, he brought in a tea tray with croissants and fresh fruit.

An hour later Cooper still had not surfaced. Tempted as she was to go to his bedroom, Jessica refrained. John and Bo both had the run of the place, and she didn’t want to be found in an unprofessional, compromising position with her boss. She very much wanted to be in an unprofessional, compromising position with her boss. She just didn’t want to get caught in one.

Her doubts about what had happened between them had surfaced in spades, just as she’d expected. She’d forgotten to be embarrassed and shy the moment he had touched her, but she’d had the rest of the night and all of the morning to make up for lost mortification.

“Jessie?”

The sound of his voice brought her head around. He was standing in the doorway in a pair of plaid boxer shorts, his hair all tousled from sleep, his eyes drowsy with invitation, and his mouth curved in a purely wicked grin.

“Come on.” He turned sideways in the door and held his hand out for her, beckoning. When she didn’t move, he arched his brow.

It was the last bit of coercion he had to use the rest of the morning.

* * *

One and a half more days to survive, Jessica told herself that afternoon, then she could get a grip. She turned on her computer and tried to focus on the job at hand. She got as far as opening a file before a dreamy smile came over her, physically, emotionally, and mentally.

She’d made love with Cooper Daniels and left part of her heart in his bed, a bigger part than she could afford to lose. She wasn’t an affair-type person, yet she’d made love with a man she barely knew—twice, maybe even more. She wasn’t sure how a person counted the things she and Cooper had done. She did know the climaxes that had once been so rare in her life were starting to run together in her mind.

On a less rational side she felt as if she knew him very well indeed, like her own heartbeat. A ridiculous, romantic fantasy, she told herself, but the feeling persisted. She knew he would protect her with his life, that his courage could be counted on. She knew what had brought him his pain and that the loss was consuming him, guiding him down a path of certain destruction. If he lost against Baolian, he would lose all of the trappings of his life and maybe his life itself. If he won against the Dragon Lady, he would lose something else, something less easy to name but surely as important. And if he killed Baolian, he would kill part of himself.

She didn’t think he understood the price his revenge would exact, and his lack of understanding compelled her to protect him. She was a mother. She knew the value of life, the preciousness of it, the miracle of it, the strength needed to bring it forth and the care needed to sustain it.

With a worried sigh, she forced her attention back to her work. She’d traced the Grand Cayman banker to a number of stateside businesses, but all of them were perfectly legitimate and had nothing to do with Fang Baolian. She doubted if the two of them were in league on anything other than the banker providing his professional services to a customer with an inordinate amount of cash.

The running of the fax machine brought her head around, and she pushed away from her desk to go over and see what was coming in. The first page was a hastily scrawled note: Hello, luv—Tell Cooper he owes me another eight hundred pounds. Original sent by courier. George.

The second page of the transmission was a photograph. At first glance, and despite the lack of clarity, Jessica thought it was a picture of Cao Bo, and she was a little irritated. The information wasn’t worth eight hundred pounds. It wasn’t worth two pounds. They already knew what Cao Bo looked like. What they needed to know was where she’d come from, who she represented, why in the world she’d searched Cooper out at exactly the right time with exactly the right information.

Bo had given them the world on a platter and asked for nothing except protection. George Leeds sent a useless photograph and asked for eight hundred pounds. No wonder Cooper’s financial base was dissolving like so many sand castles in a deluge. His friends were a greedy lot.

Jessica picked up the picture when the transmission was finished and carried it back to her desk. Bo had once had much longer hair, she noted with interest, and wondered when the young woman had had herself shorn.

She stopped by her chair and rested her hand on its back, her gaze fastened on the photograph. After a moment’s perusal, her brows drew together in bewilderment. Something about the nose wasn’t quite right. She couldn’t decide what was different, but something was. The same held true for the mouth, and the shape of the face. As a matter of fact, the longer she looked at the picture, the less it looked like Bo—yet the resemblance was much more than skin-deep. The quality of the smile, if not the smile itself, was an exact match. There was an indefinable similarity about the eyes of both women, and despite the difference in the length of their hair, their hairlines were carbon copies of each other. The same delicate widow’s peak added a sense of drama to both faces. The same graceful curve outlined each face from brow to temple to ear.

Jessica suddenly knew whom she was looking at, and her hand started to tremble. She loosened her hold and stepped back, letting the photograph flutter to the floor.

From the balcony doorway, Cooper only saw the stricken expression on her face, and in three strides he was at her side.

“Jessie.” He grasped her upper arms and pulled her around to face him. “What’s wrong?”

She stared up at him, her eyes wide, her skin paler than normal. “We’re in trouble, Cooper, big, huge, unbelievable trouble.”

He absorbed the seriousness of her statement and came up with only one conclusion. “It’s your fertile time of the month, isn’t it,” he said, resigned to the facts. If a man loved a woman, certain things came along with it. Personally, Cooper loved most of those things. Women had cycles, like the moon, and the tides, and seasons like the Earth herself. Women were so . . . so connected. “Well, we’ll wait this out, and the next time we’ll use industrial-strength condoms instead of just the regular ones.”

He loved making her blush, really loved it. “Cooper, I am not talking about babies,” she sputtered. “At least not my babies, or your babies.”

“Then whose babies are we talking about?” he asked in confusion.

“Fang Baolian’s babies.”

Jessica watched the news settle on him, then he shook his head in denial.

“Fang Baolian doesn’t have any babies,” he said.

“She’s got one, Cooper, one about eighteen years old, five feet three inches tall, less than a hundred and five pounds soaking wet. Trust me.”

“Cao Bo?” he asked, his face grim.

“Cao Bo.”

His gaze locked on hers, and an unholy gleam came to life in his eyes, glittering green and ruthless. “I guess that gives us the point, the game, and the match.”

“You can’t hurt her, Cooper.”

“No,” he agreed, not sounding at all reliable. “But I can use her.”

Fourteen

Word had gone out, leaked through a hundred sources who had spread it through a thousand Southeast Asian waterways and alleys: The Dragon had captured the Dragon Lady’s hatchling.

Ripples were immediately felt in Manila, where a customer ready to pay two hundred thousand dollars U.S. for a ship he’d picked out to be pirated in the Bay, was told the price had suddenly gone to three hundred thousand cash before delivery.

On the docks in Singapore, a shipment of motorcycles was hijacked after the owner had already paid protection money. In Jakarta, the financing for a new international resort, hotel, and convention complex was suddenly and inexplicably withdrawn.

Fang Baolian was consolidating her resources for war. Every dollar she squeezed out of the black market was proof of the worth of Cao Bo. Every dollar was an obstacle for Jessica to overcome.

Cooper had called in his favors from Seattle to San Diego and Cabo San Lucas. The ports were being watched. The borders were being patrolled. He couldn’t believe his luck.

He had been grinning for three days.

Jessica did not find the expression reassuring or pleasant, and she certainly did not find it humorous.

He’d offered her a bonus for working the weekend and staying on as a private consultant throughout the next week. She’d politely told him where he could put his bonus. She no longer wanted his money, originally the main impetus for her being in her present mess. She wanted him.

She looked up from her desk and checked the clock. Cooper had gone downtown hours ago. He’d been contacted by a man with information to sell on the Grand Cayman banker. She was supposed to meet him at the office before they went to dinner. After spending most of the day with her nose buried in numbers, transactions, and a host of foreign names, she was glad it was finally time for her to leave.

Despite the ocean view and the panoramic vistas, his home was beginning to feel like a prison with all the hours she’d spent in the makeshift office, especially with everyone else gone. Within minutes after Cooper had realized who Bo was, he’d decided to put her in hiding. Arrangements had been finalized in less than an hour, and John and Yuxi had taken her across the Bay.

Bo had shown little reluctance to go with them, partially, Jessica thought, because of John. He was the type of man who inspired confidence, and Bo seemed to have responded to him instinctively. Jessica had seen a number of shy glances pass from Bo to the quietly serious dark-haired warrior-houseboy. John had been more discreet, but no less interested. A fact proved by his choice of a safe house, an upscale suburban home in Oakland, where Bo would be chaperoned by his mother and sister, and protected by himself, Yuxi, and a brother trained in the ancient defensive arts of Shaolin monks.

No good could come of it, Jessica was certain, not any of it. Fang Baolian had murdered Jackson Daniels, and now her daughter was a willing hostage of the murdered man’s brother. Not even John had been able to get Bo to explain why she’d given her mother’s secrets to a man sure to use them against her.

The mystery didn’t sit right, rife as it was with potential for unforeseen disaster. Cooper knew the dangers, but was pushing forward, undaunted, with his plan. Jessica hoped she wouldn’t be left alone to pick up the pieces.

With a last glance at the clock, she pushed out of her chair and reached for her purse. A few papers slid off the desk when she failed to lift the purse clear of her workpile. She bent to retrieve the loose documents, and one of them caught her eye. It was the message she’d left Cooper the night he had returned from Hawaii, the one telling him about the aborted phone call and how worried she was about him.

Cooper hadn’t made much of the call. He had dismissed it by saying it could have been any one of a hundred people he knew who were invariably down on their luck or in their cups, but it still bothered her.

She saw it as another loose end in a situation that was getting damn tangled up with loose ends.

There wasn’t anything she could do about it that night. She had a dinner to eat and a noose to tighten. Locking up, she let herself out of the house.

Paul was baby-sitting and having an at-home date with the owner of a greenhouse. Jessica had promised herself and the children that she’d make up for all the time they’d missed in the last two weeks before she looked for another job. And she was determined to look for another job.

She refused to work for a man she was in love with, and she’d fallen in love with Cooper Daniels. At least that’s what she was afraid had happened. She was mature enough to realize the emotional boundaries of her maternal instincts were broader than they should be, easily broad enough to include a man felled by grief, especially if that man was green-eyed, gorgeous, and made love like no one she’d ever heard about, let alone experienced.

She realized her lack of sexual experience with anyone other than Ian made her susceptible to overestimating the importance of the astounding physical pleasure Cooper gave her. And to over-romanticizing the profound emotional pleasure she felt when he held her afterward and whispered to her of his own satisfaction and his appreciation of her as his lover.

She’d never been anyone’s lover before. She’d been Ian’s wife and the mother of his children first and foremost. Their personal and family relationships had seemed perfectly normal to her at the time, a lot of give and a little take, with her being responsible for everyone’s happiness except her own, because sacrificing herself was the noblest achievement a woman could aspire to.

In retrospect, her marriage looked like a bad movie, complete with an all-too-familiar and predictable ending, but only distance and time had given her that clearer perspective. She’d always considered herself liberated, unfettered by tradition. She’d had the best education money could buy and dedicated parents could provide. Her self-esteem had always been healthy. But thousands of years of male-dominated culture were hard to ignore, and she had ended up in a comfortable but dangerous rut of dependency, and the even stranger rut of being dependent upon her family’s dependency on her.

The situation with Cooper was completely different. It was novel, and intriguing, and full of potential for heartbreak, but with little potential for dependency. It was difficult, if not downright impossible, to become dependent on a man who probably wouldn’t live through the next week.

Damn him.

Even staying married to Ian for as long as she had looked smart compared with giving her heart to a bounty hunter.

* * *

The lights in the Daniels, Ltd. offices were on when Jessica made her first pass. By the time she found a parking place, they were off,

She peeked up through her windshield and tried hard not to be irritated. They’d agreed to meet at the office, and it looked like he’d already left, or maybe he was on his way down .

Her fingers idly tapped the steering wheel, and she expelled a heavy breath, waiting to see if he came out the front door, or if she’d missed him. One minute passed, then two, then three and four, and still he didn’t show up. Five minutes seemed like a lifetime, six and seven were nearly unbearable, and by eight minutes her fingers were reaching for the ignition.

The front door opened, and her fingers stopped in midtwist. Cooper wasn’t alone. Four men were with him, one in front and one in back, and one on each side of him, appearing to be holding him up, or restraining him.

The four men had a lot in common. They all wore dark slacks and light loose shirts without the tails tucked in. They all wore plain white tennis shoes — and they were all Chinese.

Fang Baolian had made her move.

Jessica forced herself to breathe and to think beyond the fear threatening to overwhelm her. She searched Cooper for signs of distress, and found enough to make her whole body stiffen with tension. He wasn’t holding his head straight. His knees were bent, his legs not moving as fast as he was, proving he was being carried. They’d either drugged him or beaten him. Both possibilities filled her with a potent mixture of fear and rage.

They stuffed him into a waiting car, which pulled away from the curb with a squeal of tires almost before the last man’s foot had left the sidewalk. The white sedan disappeared over the hill while Jessica was still fumbling with her keys. She didn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She just reacted.

Tearing off with her own tires squealing, her compact caught some air on the first downslope, enough to scare the hell out of her and make her quickly reevaluate her priorities. She couldn’t save Cooper if she totaled her car, and saving Cooper was her single, compelling priority. She wouldn’t let him be hurt, not while there was a breath left in her body. The desperation she felt was palpable.

She held her car to the road, and when she spotted the white sedan up ahead of her, she slowed to a reasonable distance. She didn’t have to follow the car for long. Three turns brought them into the heart of Chinatown, and two more blocks brought them to the herb shop on Grant Street. Any doubts she’d had about who had abducted Cooper dissipated.

After Baolian’s photograph had come in, the herb shop had taken a backseat to other details. Now, Jessica would have given anything to have continued her research into it. She wished John Liu had come down and checked the layout of the store. She wished she had a car phone to call the San Francisco Police Department and a big brother or two.

She wished she could find a parking space. The white sedan had gotten away with double parking until its passengers were unloaded. While she was still inching along, praying for a miracle, it cruised off into the night.

Chinatown was alive with neon and exotic smells, and crowds of people searching out a bargain and a meal. All of them were in her way, frustrating her effort to see Cooper and the men dragging him down the street and into the alley running next to the herb shop. When she lost sight of him for more than fifteen seconds, she muttered a foul curse and threw the compact into its parking gear in the middle of the street. A horn honked behind her. She ignored it, concentrating her efforts on pulling her driver’s license out of her wallet and jamming it into the clip on the driver’s-side sun visor. Signorelli was listed as her middle name, making her license a calling card guaranteed to get someone’s attention down at headquarters.

She checked three of her doors to be sure they were locked before she pocketed her .357 in her suit coat. Lights blinked and glowed in an abstract pattern of red-and-gold characters reflected in her windshield and on the hood of her car. Next to the Chinese characters the words were lit in blue and written in pinyin and English: ZHONGYI—CHINESE MEDICINE.

With her purse slung over her shoulder, she unsnapped her ring of keys from the one in the ignition, got out, and locked the driver’s-side door with the car still running . More honking greeted her traffic-jam stunt. She only hoped one of the irate drivers called the cops.

* * *

Cooper’s arms were bound behind him and his legs had turned to rubber. Every time he tried to stand up or catch up, they refused to cooperate. He was having a hell of a time focusing, too, and he knew his condition had a lot to do with a recent head wound. Very recent, like less than an hour old. Ditto for the nausea. Head wounds always made him nauseous.

He’d been royally shanghaied, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except try to keep himself from getting killed. A niggling in his brain told him the survival trick was going to be harder to pull off than it had ever been before. He knew who had him, and he knew his luck had run out.

The smells on the street told him they were in Chinatown. A minute later the smells told him they were in a Chinatown alley. They were as distinct and unpleasant as those in any downtown alley, but with a fragrant backdrop of dim sum and moxibustion herbs sneaking through the rot and the garbage.

It took a few more minutes and the enveloping darkness of a narrow stairwell filled with a thousand scents of dried plants and the muskier smell of desiccated animal parts before he made the connection with the Grant Street herb shop.

Jessie had incredible instincts, he realized with more than a bit of admiration and awe. She’d been right about the shop and she’d been right about Cao Bo, and the two of them together were how she would finally be the death of him. Without her unerring intuition to guide him, he would have wandered through a labyrinth of possibilities without ever getting this close to getting himself killed.

He’d known a woman could succeed where a hundred men had failed. He’d counted on a woman being the key, staked his reputation and his last dime on a woman—and she’d been worth every penny, though the ironic relationship between her success and his demise wasn’t lost on him.

The muted light at the bottom of the stairs spread and grew nominally brighter as they descended, until they reached the bottom and a room barred like a cell door. Inside, a wizened old man sat on a pile of shabby pillows, drawing on a pipe and watching the world through opium-glazed eyes. His queue was unbraided in places, with lank strands of gray hair sticking out at odd angles like a broken spiderweb against his black tunic. A pot of tea steamed on a low table next to the pillows.

The room was no bigger than six feet by six feet, paneled in teak and set with tarnished brass like the captain’s quarters of an ill-kept ship, but Cooper could have imagined worse places to be incarcerated.

He was pushed down next to the old man, who gave him a toothless grin and blew smoke in his face. He tried to turn away, but there was no escaping the sickly-sweet smell.

Three of the guards came into the room and began stripping off their shirts while the fourth man disappeared back up the stairs. There were hooks along one wall, each holding a black tunic with a red insignia on the shoulder. Crates were stacked haphazardly against two of the other walls, along with various bolts of cloth and a few cases of Chinese and German beer.

The guards made quick work of changing into the tunics. No motions were wasted. They were all lean and muscled, hardened fighting men. Red headbands with a Chinese character brushstroked across the front were tied on last, completing their uniforms.

Their transformation did plenty to increase Cooper’s apprehensions. He hadn’t been kidnapped by just any old pirates. Fang Baolian’s private honor guard had been sent to capture him.

The man Cooper guessed was in charge, because of the double insignia on his sleeve, spoke in Mandarin to the others, and the men laughed. The old man kept blowing smoke in his face, irritating him and adding to his lethargy at the same time, while the guards all had a beer and chattered much too quickly for him to follow the conversation.

Certain words did register on his pain-fogged brain. None of them eased his growing sense of doom.

One word was “ransom,” which could have had a heartening effect, but the sum mentioned was beyond the resources of anyone who might care enough to pony up the price. It was a price calculated to aggrandize him, giving great honor to his captor, but it also ensured his inevitable death and inevitable loss of face when no one paid. In short, ransom was a lose-lose proposition for him.

The next few words he understood dealt mainly with different methods of killing, some so gruesome as to make him wish he was already dead. Closing his eyes for a moment, he rested his head on a bolt of silk and tried to force some clarity into his jumbled thoughts. The effort was almost beyond the stupor he was beginning to feel, though the old man’s opium hadn’t done enough damage to ease the pain lancing through him from the base of his skull to the small of his back, places where he’d been kicked, chopped, and punched. His lungs hurt with the effort to draw air, and when he lifted his lashes, he thought he might never get his eyes to focus, or his body to stop trembling—trembling like a leaf in a gale, he realized with a surge of panic. He was shaking from head to foot, or rather he was being shook.

He instinctively braced himself between the wall behind him and the case of beer beside him, but it was like trying to brace a cooked noodle. His body wouldn’t cooperate with what little rationality he had left to work with. A distant rumbling, resonating as if it came from deep within the earth, grew in sound and power.

Earthquake.

And the big one, if Cooper knew anything about the rattling and rolling of good old Mother Nature. The other men in the room seemed remarkably unconcerned with the natural disaster preparing to engulf them. Then the shaking stopped with a loud thump.

One of the walls slid to the side, revealing a grate that the leader released and pushed up out of the way. The room was actually a freight elevator, and they’d just gone down, down past any possible sort of building basement. They were at the core of the Earth.

Cooper’s mouth tightened at the sight of the abyss awaiting him outside the teak room. For a minute he wondered if he was still in San Francisco, or if he’d passed out somewhere between Powell Street and the airport and had been taken someplace far away.

An endless array of tunnels snaked out from the elevator, their differing directions marked only by faint smudges of light in the far-reaching darkness. If this was Chinatown, he was at the nerve center. If Fang Baolian had come for her daughter, she was waiting for him here.

The men pushed him forward into the far-left opening. He went without a struggle, because there was no way for him to fight and win—and because he was suddenly very curious about what he would find at the other end of the tunnel.

Fifteen

Jessica stepped into the shop and into another world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of clay and glass jars lined shelf after dusty shelf in the store. The cases holding the shelves were tall and narrow, stacked together with barely enough room between for a person to squeeze through. The only open space in the room was the slightly wider alley leading from the front door to the back counter, where an elaborate brass-and-ivory abacus lay next to an ancient cash register. Long strings of glass beads covered two doorways behind the counter.

Adjusting her purse strap on her shoulder to hold the bag closer to her body, Jessica walked forward slowly, careful not to nudge or bump anything. Her gaze drifted over the many jars, noting the different stoppers of cork and rags, and the occasional metal screw lid. Each jar had two labels, both neatly lettered, the first in Chinese characters and the other an English translation.

Some of the translations inside one locked case gave her a moment’s pause and made her stomach lurch. She’d never thought of dried tiger penis as a medicinal ingredient. Never. Truth be told, she’d never thought of tiger penis at all, let alone dried and packaged for sale.

A quick perusal of the rest of the shelf indicated that she’d found the aphrodisiac section. There were any number of antlers and horns stacked on the shelves, most of them showing some wear where they’d been ground down. She refrained from reading the labels on the more disreputable, animal-part-looking packages, having already discerned what was in them and not actually caring to compare sizes and shapes.

Another case had a display of acupuncture needles, and behind the counter were shelves of books, all old looking, some bound in leather, some rolls of parchment tied with silk cords. A delicate scale for weights and measures sat next to the register, and beside the scale was a small box of papers.

There was no sign of human habitation, but Jessica knew this had to be the place where they’d brought Cooper. By lifting a hinged section of the counter, she let herself get back by the books and the two doors. Her decision of which door to take was a toss-up, until she heard the sound of an even and steady gait coming from the door on the left. Without hesitating, she took the door on the right.

* * *

Cooper had lost track of how many tunnel off-shoots they’d passed, though he’d done his damnedest to remember. Any chance he had of getting out alive would require being able to negotiate the maze of pathways carved out of earth and stone, pathways made even more labyrinthine by the multiple intersections with the city’s electrical and sewer conduits.

He’d never seen anything like it. He’d never smelled anything like it.

He couldn’t imagine that Fang Baolian, Empress of the South China Sea and Dragon Whore Supreme of the aforementioned piece of watery real estate, would leave her luxurious phantom ship to live in a god-rotting hole in the ground. He found it even more difficult to imagine the meticulous Chow Sheng mincing his way down these tunnels to do the dragon whore’s bidding, his silk robes dragging in putrid water and his soft kid slippers sliding through scum.

Rats, lots of rats, scurried hither and yon, squeaking and scuffling. But the rats didn’t bother him nearly as much as the indefinable creatures he heard slapping and slithering around in the fetid pools. Blind fish came to mind, yet the rising hairs on the back of his neck insisted on telling him that what he was hearing wasn’t fish, but something more reptilian, something with bigger teeth, maybe something with coils and fangs and slimy skin, something deformed from its aboveground origins.

In among the slapping and the slithering, if he listened carefully, he could hear an occasional low, plaintive hiss, as if the creatures were in pain, or hungry.

His skin was crawling by the time they came to the end of a tunnel that did not branch off into another four directions. A door built like an air lock was set into stone, the only light being the red glow of an electronic keypad.

The leader of the guards stepped forward to key in the lock combination and turn the wheel. When the door opened with a whoosh, Cooper was pushed forward into a blinding light. His shoes were removed, and he was pushed forward once more, this time to his knees in front of a dais covered in rich folds of pearlized cream silk. The whole room was ornate with gold filigree and rosewood screens, and richly opulent Oriental rugs. The wool was softly alive beneath his hands and a welcome cushion for his knees, colored in shades of richest green to palest peach and cinnabar.

For a moment he was almost comfortable. The rug was beautiful, the air was sweet, no one was dragging him around. Paradise.

Without warning, his head was jerked back by a rough, skilled hand, sending a shaft of pain ricocheting down his spine. Another ounce of force or degree of angle and his neck would have been broken, snapped like a dry twig in a child’s hands. He clenched his teeth to keep from crying out, though any cry would have been strangled in the unnatural arch of his throat.

“Koo-pare Dan-yells.” A melodious voice, soft and seductive, slowly spoke his name, pronouncing each syllable with practiced precision.

He opened his eyes to that voice, to the lure in its sultry promise, in the huskiness of her tone, and what he saw made him wonder what had kept his brother from taking what she’d offered.

She was exquisite, utterly exquisite, beyond compare even with her daughter. Any sign of age was solely in her strangely amber eyes. No flaw marred the perfection of her pale skin. No lines broke the porcelain serenity of her face. There was only beauty, ethereal, mesmerizing beauty, rising out of the dais like a black-sheathed calla lily.

The rounded swells of her breasts, the curves of her hips, the slender length of her legs were all lovingly encased in luminescent ebony silk. Her hair was ebony silk, piled high on her head and held in place with diamond-and-jet pins. Her mouth was made for sex, her lips full and stained the color of pomegranate juice to match her long, daggerlike nails

Cooper felt a stirring in his loins and wondered if he’d lost his mind as well as his control. Fang Baolian was the woman who had murdered his brother. The woman who had ordered his own death and failed.

Even as he went over the facts his eyes traveled the length of her again, accepting that part of his battle with her would be waged within himself. She was dangerously erotic, enticing, a challenge to be met and conquered in the most primal of male-female arenas.

From her hiding place behind a carved openwork screen, Jessica saw the glitter of lust in Cooper’s eyes, and she almost shot him on the spot. She’d practically killed herself trying to find her way through the disgusting maze of tunnels so she could save him. She’d splashed and scraped her way through one fetid corridor after another, and then thrown herself straight into the breach by slipping into this damn room behind the guards, who were all as mesmerized by the little bitch in the black dress as Cooper , damn him. The only thing that saved him was the trace of opium she sniffed in the air. He may have only been beaten before, but he was beaten and drugged now.

“I have waited overlong to meet the brother of Jack Sun,” Baolian purred, and Jessica’s hackles rose. The woman moved like a cat in heat, descending from the dais to curl around and rub against the man being held in a viselike grip.

Her long scarlet-tipped index fingernail scraped along Cooper’s jaw, up his cheek, and into the sun-streaked silkiness of his hair, carefully avoiding the bloody gash Jessica saw at his temple.

“But now we have met, Koo-pare, and I would hope you would have a gift for me. A priceless gift.”

Jessica had a gift for Ms. Fang. She’d wrapped it in the steel chamber of her .357 Magnum.

Baolian’s fingers trailed down behind his ear, and in the next instant Cooper was writhing on the floor, caught in the stranglehold of the Dragon Lady. Jessica saw the slight oozing of blood running from beneath Baolian’s fingernails. The only explanation was nearly unbelievable. The woman’s manicurist did razors.

“Where is she?” Baolian hissed. “You son of a dung-eating slut! Where is my daughter? Tell me or you shall die!”

Jessica had never heard a mother’s love expressed quite so inelegantly, quite so succinctly, and she suddenly understood what had sent Cao Bo into the Dragon’s den.

She had to make her move, before Baolian did something drastic, like cut his jugular. She had to make her move, but she couldn’t get it out of her head that she was a mother, a woman with responsibilities, a woman who had to be careful.

“Damn,” she whispered, well under her breath, but it was enough to make every set of eyes in the place bear down on her.

The only move left to her was to lift and cock her gun, and point it straight at the dragon whore’s heart as she stepped from behind the screen.

“Put your hands up . . . bitch.” It was corny and rude, but the command was also amazingly effective when backed up by a powerful handgun.

Baolian released Cooper and he dropped to the floor in a heap, but her hands rose no farther than to carefully clenched fists at her hips. The metallic slither of a switchblade being opened sounded in the room. Baolian warned the guard off with an acid glare and a low hiss—and every nerve ending Jessica had sizzled in alarm.

The sound wasn’t quite human, and neither was the expression on Baolian’s face. Her cold, hooded eyes raked Jessica from head to toe as if she were sizing up a meal. The woman was no cat. She was a snake, a reptile, a creature of dark power fueled by the light of love for her child.

The dragon whore glided forward, her eyes hypnotically fixated on Jessica’s. Jessica tried to blink and couldn’t. Her inability set off another round of distress signals in her brain. Fight-or-flight responses flared to life in an instant, and just as quickly collided in her muscles, derailing each other and leaving her helpless.

Baolian smiled, a sinister, seductive curve of red-rimmed lips. With a flick of her wrist and a fanning of her fingers, she made the razor tips of her nails flash and wink in the light, sending a straight shot of terror through Jessica from the top of her bangs to the tips of her toes.

It was going to be a bloodbath.

“Hello, Dove,” Baolian purred, raising her other hand and letting those tiny daggers fan out and shine. “You I did not expect today, or I would have prepared a more appropriate welcome.”

Jessica’s arm ached with holding the gun, but she didn’t let it drop.

“Are you Jack Sun’s Dove?” Baolian asked, gliding forward another foot. “Or are you Koo-pare’s Dove? Which Dragon calls you master? The dead or the dying?”

Jessica was going to have to kill her. She was going to have to kill a woman, and she didn’t know if she could.

“Must be Koo-pare’s,” Baolian seemed to decide on a whim. “Jack Sun did not like old women.” Her smile turned sour and a malevolent light flickered in her eyes. “Jack Sun did not like this not-so-old woman, no? It is what caused his death, this aversion and other things. Foolish, foolish man.

“So, Dove, master of the dying Dragon, my child has been lost to me. Do you know where she is?”

It was a mother’s plea from a viper’s mouth. Jessica didn’t answer.

Baolian’s anger rose with every second of silence. “Do you know?” she asked again, tight-lipped. “Have you seen my Shulan? The child of my heart? If you know, you must tell me, or you will die. You all will die. All, Dove. All, Jessssss-ica Yangston.”

The hiss and the emphasis wasn’t lost on Jessica, neither was the use of her name, but the full meaning of Baolian’s words didn’t hit home until she spoke again.

“Which will be worse, do you think, Dove? A child, or maybe two, without their mother? Or a mother without her children?”

“The girl who came to the Dragon was called Cao Bo, not Shulan,” Jessica said, her voice relaying the sudden deep and abiding calm she felt. Baolian had made a mistake by showing her hand and making her threat. If the situation deteriorated to the point of death, it would be Baolian’s death, not Jessica’s children’s.

“Cao Bo?” Baolian scoffed. “Her name is Shulan, Sun Shulan, and she is a princess of the South China Sea. What I have built will be hers. She is my life. Give her to me, and I will give you and your children life.”

It was an offer Jessica would have accepted, except for the man on the floor.

“What about Cooper?” she asked.

Baolian gave her a curious look. “You value a pet as you value your children?”

Pet? Jessica thought. Cooper was in trouble, big, deep, huge trouble. Thinking she was doing the right thing, she tried not to sound overly eager.

“He has value to me.”

“More value than your children?”

The question was impossible, angering, and just about got the dragon whore shot.

“The question, Ms. Fang,” Jessica said in her best Ms. MBA-from-Stanford voice, “is how much you value the return of your child. If you accept such as the basis of our discussion, fine. If not, if you continue to mistake that the discussion is about my children, I’m going to blow a hole in you big enough to float a hundred-and-twenty-thousand-ton tanker. And that, Ms. Fang, is one hell of a hole .”

Baolian hissed halfheartedly and turned to ascend the dais. When she was seated on her throne, she gave Jessica a petulant look. “Tell me what you know.”

The woman gave all the right signs of conceding defeat. The dismissal of the matter as if it weren’t important, the childish expression, the more reasonable, less reptilian tone.

Jessica didn’t buy the act for a minute.

“Shulan is being held across the Bay. When Cooper and I are safely out of here, and I have had a chance to call home, I will give you the address.”

Baolian clapped her hands and spoke to one of the guards in Chinese. The dialect didn’t sound like the Cantonese of Chow Sheng and John Liu. The guard came forward and from out of a silk-lined box brought forth an old-fashioned phone with a very long cord.

“Talk to your children,” Baolian said, gesturing at the phone. “And then I will talk to mine.”

It sounded like a fair plan to Jessica.

She dialed her home phone number, and Paul answered.

“Hi, Paul. It’s Jessie,” she said, amazed at how calm she still sounded. “Are the kids there?”

“Yes, they’re here, and I just want to say what a wonderful time they’re having on my date with the most gorgeous greenhouse owner in the whole Bay Area. I thought I had a pretty good chance with her but then she met Eric, and he did something really goofy, like tell her how pretty she was, and now I think they’re planning to get married after a long engagement.”

Jessica attempted a short laugh, then wished she hadn’t bothered when it came out like a croak. Her arm was shaking from the strain of holding the gun. Her mind was going a hundred miles an hour trying to keep up with watching three guards, one dragon lady, one hurt dragon man, and manage the most important conversation of her life.

“Can I speak with him, please. And get Christina on the other line.”

“Sure, Jess,” he said, the teasing humor going out of his voice. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but come back on after the kids are finished.”

The children came on then, and talked their little hearts out about the pizza Uncle Tony had made them for dinner, and about the neat lady who liked Uncle Paul, and when Mommy was coming home.

When her brother got back on, she didn’t waste words. “I’m in trouble.”

“Where?”

“Underneath Chinatown, and I’m sure that’s all I can tell you.” A nod from Baolian confirmed her suspicion.

Paul told her what he thought of that in one foul word. “What in the hell do you mean underneath Chinatown?”

“Underneath, as in not on top.”

Baolian made a cutting motion across her throat, warning Jessica to say no more.

“Okay, okay,” Paul said. “I believe you. You’re underneath Chinatown. Fine. Great. Now tell me where underneath Chinatown. Give me a clue.”

It was a great idea, really great, and she wished like hell she could think of a clue she could fit into the conversation without setting off Baolian and the three Ninja Turtles waiting to take her head off. But she couldn’t.

“Don’t let the children out of your sight. Call Luke. Luke Signorelli and do just like he says—shoot anybody who tries to cross the threshold and then drag them inside.” It was the best clue she could come up with, emphasizing her maiden name and hoping somebody had called the cops about the crazy lady who had locked a double-parked car in front of an herb shop in Chinatown.

Anything Paul might have wanted to say was cut off by one of the guards disconnecting the phone from the wall. When he plugged it back in, Baolian gestured for her to make her second call.

“Why drag them inside?” she asked while Jessica tried to remember John Liu’s phone number.

“We’re in America. Criminals have rights.” The number was on the tip of her memory bank, right on the tip.

“Maybe I’ll move to America,” Baolian mused aloud.

The look Jessica gave her said, “Maybe not.”

She’d only called out to the Liu house a couple of times. But either fear or grace finally brought the number up in her mind.

“John? Jessie. Put Bo on the line.”

“Hello?” the young woman said a moment later.

Jessica handed the phone over to Baolian, then was chagrined to realize the conversation between mother and daughter was not going to take place in English. She’d been curious about what a throat-cutting, dragon-whore, pirate mother had to say to a daughter who misbehaved.

Remarkably, the throat-cutting, dragon whore, pirate mother sounded a lot like herself, with an appropriate increase in the chastisement quality of her tone of voice, given the seriousness of the daughter’s actions.

After a few minutes Baolian handed the phone back to Jessica. “Please speak with John Liu so that he doesn’t get himself killed trying to keep my child from me.”

It was a reasonable request, and Jessica complied.

“John. Cooper and I are in trouble, and it will go a lot easier on us if you let Cao Bo, or rather Sun Shulan, go.”

She got an argument, not much of one, but an argument she didn’t have time for.

“Just a minute, John.” She put her hand over the receiver and asked Baolian a question. “How old is Shulan?”

“Seventeen next week.”

“John,” Jessica went back on the line. “She’s younger than she looks, jail bait. Give her back to her mother.”

The phone was taken from her and returned to its silken box. The tension in the room had dropped considerably, but Jessica still didn’t have any idea of what would happen next, so she kept her gun trained on Baolian.

Cooper groaned, drawing her attention, and in that second she was disarmed by someone from behind.

Baolian smiled. “The only danger here today was for you and your pet,” she said, acknowledging the man who had stepped out from behind the rosewood screen and taken Jessica’s ninth wedding anniversary present out of her hands. “When Shulan is here, maybe you can take your Dragon and go.”

With a clap of her hands, the guards fell into action, picking Cooper up off the floor and grabbing Jessica.

Maybe? she thought, her mouth dry with fear. She struggled against the men holding her, but to no avail. She was caught, without the skills to take on three well-trained men.

Still, she didn’t make it easy for them to drag her out of the plush room and into the darkness of the maze. Cooper came to consciousness once, when a blast of cold air whirled up out of the tunnels and dropped the temperature by twenty degrees in a matter of seconds.

The guards spoke seldom, leaving only the labored breathing of five people and the sound of their footsteps to echo in the silent bowels of the earth. The walls grew clammy about them, and the darkness deepened, until the only light left was from a lantern carried by one of the guards.

Timeless minutes later, most of it spent walking at a downhill slant, she and Cooper were thrown into a dank, fetid cell with no lantern of their own and only rats to keep them company.

Jessica shuddered from the cold and fear and snuggled closer to the man she was sure she was going to die with.

“Cooper?” Her teeth chattered around his name. She shook him. “Cooper?”

“Yes?” he said weakly.

She let out a squeal when something skittered around the edge of her shoe. “Can you get to your feet?” Her voice took on added urgency. “We need to get out of here. Now, as in immediately .”

Cooper opened his eyes to nothing but darkness; he looked around and saw nothing but darkness. He felt like hell, like somebody had tied a noose around his neck, bruising him and rubbing him raw.

“Where are we, Jess?” he mumbled, not quite back with the living yet.

“I don’t know, but if we can’t find a way out, we’re going to die, or be eaten by something.”

Great, he thought.

“What . . . what kind of something?” he asked.

“I don’t know—ahh!” She squealed again. “What was that? Did you feel that?”

“I’m pretty numb, Jess.”

“I’m getting out of here.” Her voice shook, and he wished like hell he was in better shape to help her.

He’d seen the way she’d fought for him, stood up for him when she’d had the chance to walk away. He didn’t know how she’d found him, or why she’d followed him, but he knew he owed her his life.

“What?”

“What?” he asked back, confused.

“What was that noise you made?”

“I didn’t make any noi—”

An eerie, rumbling grunt punctuated the darkness, stunning them both into absolute paralysis. The grunting came again, rising to a high-pitched whine and growing ever louder before dropping off into a long, sibilant hiss.

Cooper cursed and broke into a cold sweat. Jessica clung to him like he was the last log in the ocean, digging her nails into his forearm.

“It’s an animal ,” she whispered, her voice strained and strident with fear.

“I hope,” he said curtly and without an ounce of confidence.

“It’s an animal,” she repeated. “I saw it on my way down.”

“You saw it?”

“Sort of saw it,” she amended. “It’s in a cage in one of the tunnels. There wasn’t much light.”

“You saw that thing, and you kept coming?” His voice rose in disbelief and kept rising. “I thought I hired you for your brains, not to get yourself killed.”

The grunting sound came again, not quite so plaintive and more searching, as if the creature that made it had lifted its snout into the air to detect a trace of prey.

“Cooper?”

“Yes?” They were both whispering.

“I think it can hear us, and…and is following our voices .”

“I thought you said it was caged.”

“It was . . . at least on one side.”

A long stretch of silence fell between them. “A cage with one side is not a cage, Jessie.”

“I know.”

He took her hand in his and slowly got them both to their feet. “But if it can get out, maybe we can too. From what little I remember from the first trip down, this place is riddled with tunnels. I doubt if there’s a secure hole down here.”

“You’re right about the tunnels,” she said. “They’re everywhere and they always seem to run into each other.”

He tightened his hold on her, giving her hand a squeeze. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a flashlight on you ?”

“Just the little security light I keep on my key ring, which is in my pocket,” she said after a short pause . “Cripes, how could I have forgotten that?” The words were no sooner out of her mouth than a tiny light burst into being in her hand.

Even in its dim glow, Cooper could see she was a wreck, a beautiful, disheveled, damned handy wreck.

The two of them used the light to check out their cell, flashing it along the walls and floor and finding nothing but solid rock – and a pile of bones in the far corner.

Beside him, Jessica immediately started hyperventilating. “Coop, Cooper, my God, Cooper.”

“Dammit,” he swore under his breath. He was going to lose her in this damn place. If they couldn’t get out, they’d either die of hunger and thirst, be tortured to death by Fang Baolian’s guards, or so help him God, eaten alive by whatever was on the prowl in the tunnels.

He took the light from her trembling hand and flashed it in the other direction, toward the cell door, and noticed a very curious thing. It was made out of bamboo poles, not steel bars, and the bottom half of the poles were all gnawed on and broken…as if something had bitten and thrashed its way through the flimsy barrier to get at whatever, or whoever, had been in the cell.

Slowly, with growing dread, he swung the light back to the pile of bones in the corner, and a clear picture formed in his mind, a very ugly picture.

“Baby, I hope you’ve got your track shoes on.” There were going to be running for their lives.

Using all the strength he could muster, Cooper ripped a bamboo pole out of the frame and immediately felt more in control. Now they had a weapon.

The two of them scrambled through the gaping hole with Cooper in the lead. He headed to the left, but got no further than ten feet down the tunnel before they both stopped cold.

“My, God,” Jessica whispered, taking a step back. “I’ve never…ever…ever…”

Her words stumbled along, going nowhere, but he understood. She had never, ever, ever smelled anything as putrid and rank as the smell coming out of the left hand tunnel.

Neither had he. My, God, was right.

With a quick about-face, he turned them in the other direction and took off at a halting run, the best he could manage, which he feared was not going to be good enough.

They were rats in a maze, dead-ending, circling back on their trail, sometimes climbing higher and feeling like they had a chance, only to have their hopes dashed when the tunnel they were in angled back down – and always, there was the smell, gaining in strength, seeming to follow them.

Suddenly, Jessica pulled him to a stop.

“What –“ he started, but she hushed him with a short shhh.

After a moment of stillness, she turned to him. “I hear water.”

So did he. It was dripping off the walls and forming puddles at their feet.

“Jessie –“ he started again.

“Running water,” she interrupted. “Coming from that direction, and somehow above us.” She pointed to a tunnel veering off to the right. “And…and it doesn’t smell so bad.”

She was right on both counts. He could hear the water, too, now, oddly above them, and if he held himself very still, he thought he felt a slight draft.

“Let’s go. Stay close.” The last command was unnecessary. She was all but on top of him as they headed deeper into the darkness. After a few steps, the tunnel took a noticeable slant upward, and so did their spirits. They were climbing.

The sound of the water grew faint at times, and sometimes disappeared all together, but they stayed the course, and when they’d round a turn, the sound of rippling water would return. The higher they climbed, the louder and more consistent the sound of the water became, with the air growing fresher with every yard they covered and the darkness easing off.

Thank,God, Cooper thought. They were going to make it out of there.

They came to another sharp turn in the tunnel, and when they rounded it, he got his first solid feeling of hope. The tunnel they’d been following emptied out into a crumbling, ancient pipeline constructed out of brick and mortar and concrete. It was tall enough for a man to stand, with a small stream coursing down it.

Cooper shone the tiny light up and down its length.

“What is this place?” she asked, holding onto him.

“I’m guessing an old sewer tunnel.”

“It doesn’t smell like a sewer.”

And for that, he was very grateful.

“I doubt if it’s been used in over a hundred years,” he said. “With storm water and flood run-off coming through here all the time.”

“It’ll lead us out of here, right?”

He sure as hell hoped so, but he knew it could just as easily dead end with the tunnel collapsed into a pile of impenetrable rubble.

“Right,” he said. “Give me your hand, and I’ll –“ His words were drowned out by an air-cracking grunt that quickly escalated into a rumbling hiss of endless fury.

Every hair on his neck stood straight up at the sound.

They’d been found.

The sewer tunnel was three or four feet below the opening where they stood, and both of them scrambled like mad over the edge, their feet splashing into the stream. A slimy bottom sent Jessica almost instantly to her knees.

“Up, up, up, babe.” Cooper pulled her up and pulled her along, running, slipping, sliding, and doing his darnedest to get her in front of him. Heavy, padding footsteps sounded in the tunnel they’d left, an echoing rhythm of massive weight accompanied by the deep bass of the creature’s rumbling hisses.

Cooper had never more surely heard the sound of death.

“Oh, geez, oh, geez, my God, oh – oh…” Jessica was gasping beside him, slipping, and running, and splashing.

Then came the big splash, one of a huge weight heaving itself into the stream with a scraping thud and a terrible grunt.

This was it, the crystal clear and precise line between life and death. If they did not prevail with speed and one damn bamboo pole, they would die, and be eaten, and never be found. Unless he could hold the beast off, and by some miracle, Jessica found a way out.

“Take the light.” He pressed it into her hand and turned to take a stand, the piece of bamboo his only weapon to protect himself against…

For the barest split second, all he could do was stand and stare and categorize what was coming down the tunnel.

Giant.

Reptile.

Lizard.

Venom.

Claws.

Scales.

And a deeply forked, long, snaking, yellow tongue.

Komodo Dragon. Huge. Coming at him like a heaving, grunting freight train.

“Ladder, ladder, Coop, Cooper, ladder.” The words sounded somewhere in the distance.

He’d have given anything for a 12-gauge loaded with slugs.

Or a ladder out of this place.

Finally, it dawned on him what Jessica was saying, what she was screaming at him.

“Ladder! Cooper! There’s a ladder!”

And he had about five seconds to reach it.

The drugs, the pain, the fear all left him on a surge of pure muscle-pumping, mind-focusing adrenaline.

He moved like a rocket, sprinting up the tunnel and lofting himself onto the ladder. His hands and feet found rungs at the same time, and with half a second to spare, he and Jessica heaved aside a manhole cover at the top of the ladder and burst into a circle of bright light.

 

Sixteen

“Ms. Langston. May I see you in my office, please?”

Jessica leaned forward and pressed the response panel on the intercom. “Yes, Mr. Daniels. I’ll be right in .”

She stopped and poured them both a cup of coffee before she breezed through the dragon doors and walked straight over the top of the dragon on the floor to his desk. The fierce beast with emerald eyes and fire dancing on its tongue had been tamed.

“Thanks, Jessie.” Cooper took the coffee from her and handed her the morning paper. “It’s been a week. I’m surprised we’re still making the front page.”

Jessica skimmed the Chronicle, finally finding an article toward the bottom with the dubious headline of PIRATE BUSTERS SHUT DOWN HERB SHOP. That’s what she’d been reduced to, a pirate buster, she who had graduated at the top of her class.

“I think you’re pretty well all washed up as far as the financial district goes, honey,” Cooper said, not doing a very good job of hiding his grin.

He was right. She’d become notorious practically overnight, when she’d dragged herself out of that Chinatown sewer and into the bright lights of a television crew filming the biggest traffic jam to hit Grant Street since the Chinese New Year. Four squad cars had been on the scene, with Luke Signorelli in the lead of a small platoon of cops looking for the lady who had locked her double-parked car and left it running.

When Cooper had hauled himself out behind her, he, too, had become an instant, if fleeting, celebrity. The media were more interested in a woman bounty hunter than a man. They especially liked that she was a single mother, a super mom, the woman who could do it all—work her sedate job as an investment counselor during the day, bust pirates by night, and tuck the children into bed in between.

They were wrong, of course. She had a brother who did kitchen work for a living. Her children never went hungry or had to settle for fish sticks, because they had an Uncle Tony whose idea of fast food was angelhair pasta. She had another brother who spent all of his free time at home, where he was always available to watch the kids, because the love of his life was finding the bifurcation points of the indigenous species in the yard.

She also had a boss who understood that after nearly a month of working for him, she needed an extended vacation. For a week now she’d come into the office just before lunch, allowed Mr. Daniels to wine her and dine her through the noontime meal, then had gone home to burn cookies for the kids after school.

She got to the end of the article and tossed the paper aside. “So the feds have closed down the shop pending further investigation, and they’re tracing a lead to Grand Cayman. Baolian never surfaced, and we’re assuming she sailed out the Golden Gate with her recalcitrant daughter in tow. Where does that leave us, Cooper? Did we win?”

“There was no way to win, Jess,” he said, his smile fading into an expression that was part resignation, part acceptance. “But we did damn good.”

“Where are we having lunch?” she asked, changing the subject. He was right. There had been no way to win, not from the moment his brother had died on a beach in the South China Sea. She was grateful he’d finally come to that understanding.

“Your choice,” he said. “Better make it someplace nice. I think Daniels, Ltd. is going to be belly-up by the end of the year.” He didn’t sound too distressed by the possibility.

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,” she said, hiding her own grin. “I heard Mr. Daniels hired himself a really hot MBA out of Stanford who can make money just by reading the stock pages. With a little capital investment, the MBA could save the company.”

“Maybe Mr. Daniels ought to take the MBA to lunch instead of the sweet lady he’s been spending so much time with lately.”

“Maybe.” She smiled at him, and was surprised to see him blush. Damn surprised. “Cooper?”

He lowered his lashes, averting his gaze, and began fumbling through his leather coat pockets. “You saved my life, Jessie, and you know what they say, if somebody saves your life, you owe them a life.”

“I’ve heard the expression, but really, Cooper, I’m not planning on getting into any more trouble.”

“Yeah, well, none of us plans on getting into trouble. It just happens.” He finally pulled a small box free of his coat. His blush deepened, fascinating her. “I’ve had to do a lot of thinking these last few days, and a lot of what I’ve been thinking about is you.” He looked up at her. He was very beautiful, her dragon, with his emerald eyes and his sun-streaked hair. “Life is pretty damn tenuous, Jessie. I want you to have whatever is left of mine.”

She accepted the box with trembling hands. “Better be careful, Cooper. A woman could take a statement like that a lot of different ways.”

She opened the velvet-lined box and gasped. The ring inside was gaudy and outrageous. It was gold and big, with a dragon with emerald eyes and a dove with diamonds, locked in either mortal combat or a tender embrace. It said By Love Alone on the inside in a delicately engraved script.

“Take it however you want,” he said. “Indecent proposal, or marriage proposal. For the kids’ sake and mine, though, I’d rather you went for the legally binding contract.”

Jessica brushed at the tears in her eyes, wondering what always made women cry when they were happy. “I’m going for the legal partnership.”

He slipped the ring on her finger, and she couldn’t believe how wild it looked, or how much she loved it. Her conservative image was in serious danger.

“I love you, Jessie,” he said, taking her hand in his and pulling her down onto his lap. “I’m giving you the ring to be my wife. I want you to know your love is safe with me.”

Another wave of tears ran down her cheeks, and she brushed those away too.

“Is there a reason you’re crying that I need to know about?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I’m crying because I’m so happy.”

“Ah,” he said, not sounding the least bit enlightened.

“I think you’re going to have to kiss me, Cooper, to take my mind off how happy I am.”

He didn’t need a second request, but pulled her mouth down to his to softly plunder, taste, and tease, until her tears were replaced by passion.

* * *

Six months later

 

“Cooper?” Jessica came up beside him on the deck of his house and put her arm around his waist. In front of them, the Pacific Ocean stretched all the way to the South China Sea and beyond.

Cooper pulled her to his side and bent down to kiss her lips. Some hurts might never heal, he mused, some people would never be replaced, but the awful emptiness he’d felt since Jackson’s death was slowly being filled with love—Jessie’s love with her motherly quirks, and all the wanton love she gave him in bed. The children liked him enough for a good relationship to grow, and he was fascinated by them. Christina was so delicate and strong, so like her mother. Eric’s biggest disappointment was that the Dragon didn’t have an actual dragon tattooed on his body somewhere. Cooper had told them there had once been a dragon with a tattoo. That dragon had been Jackson, and it was time to put his memory in a place of rest instead of a place of pain.

“This just arrived by courier,” she said when the sweet kiss was over, holding up an ancient-looking envelope.

The chop set in wax on the back made his spine stiffen.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Baolian. It’s her chop.” He took the envelope and broke the seal, his moment of contentment gone. With quick movements, he snapped open the letter, not knowing what to expect, but somehow expecting something different than the few words she’d written.

He swore softly and handed the letter to Jessica. She read it aloud. “Shulan tells me I must tell you I am most sorry for Jack Sun. She says this will help us, all of us.”

She folded the letter back into its envelope and set it on a deck chair. Then she took his hand in hers. “Come on.” She pulled him toward the bedroom.

“Are the kids asleep?” For her sake he forced a smile.

“Like a couple of rocks.”

He wanted her, he always wanted her, but he couldn’t hold the smile in place. “Jessie, I know what you’re doing, but you can’t make all the hurt go away with love.”

She looked up at him, and what he saw in her eyes made a liar out of him.

“Oh, yes you can, Cooper. Love is an amazing thing.”

He believed her enough to go with her, and it didn’t take much faith to continue believing her while she was in his arms. By the time the deepest part of the night had fallen, he was a convert.

He woke later, restless, and eased out of bed, careful not to wake her. Fog had slipped in over the coast while they’d slept. The deck was a netherworld of muted sounds and skyless night. With a soft tread, he went back to where they’d stood and bent to pick the letter up off the chair where they’d left it. His fingers encountered only the wooden slats of the chair. The letter was gone, blown by the wind into the sea, where all earthly life had been created.

Cooper waited for the sense of loss to come, but the only thing that came to him was Jessie, to wrap her warmth around him.