Dragon and the Dove (6 page)

“Who else and how much?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The one you were hired for.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe he was more than she could handle.

Damn.

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

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

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

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

She picked up her briefcase in defiance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your father?” she asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had an infuriating way of delivering an
insult.

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

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

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

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

“Not to change the subject—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What about Pablo Lopez?”

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

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

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

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

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

“But not all the reasons?”

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

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

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