Dragon and the Dove (20 page)

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.”

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.