Dragon and the Dove (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I appreciate your concern,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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