Dragon and the Dove (11 page)

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

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

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

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

“No. I was with Jackson.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

But she did care.

He turned to face her, and their gazes
locked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.