Dragon and the Dove (7 page)

“A woman?” She didn’t like the sound of
that. She also wondered if his brother was one of the hundred
men.

“Strictly behind the scenes,” he assured
her, looking uneasy for the first time since she’d met him. It was
the only crack she’d seen in his armor of arrogance, and like his
laughter, she found it remarkably appealing.

“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” she
said.

He was quiet for a moment, his unease
obviously increasing. “Women . . . well, women are different from
men. They see things where men see nothing, and they respond to
what they see. I can’t get at Baolian by playing a man’s game of
strength. It’s too obvious. She’ll never let herself be
outgunned.”

“Smart woman,” Jessica said while she
wondered what it was he thought women saw that men didn’t.

“She is that,” he agreed. “But according to
your transcripts and Elise Crabb, so are you—very, very
intelligent. I’m gambling that if I give you enough information,
you can tell me something about Baolian I never would have figured
out on my own.”

He was full of surprises. From what she’d
seen of him so far, she wouldn’t have taken him to be a closet
feminist. Personally, she doubted if his theory about women knowing
women would hold even an ounce of water, but she wasn’t sure if she
should tell him or not.

“I see,” was all she said. She’d wait until
she had a better understanding of what he wanted, if that was
possible, considering the vagueness of his description.

“There’s a million-dollar bounty on
Baolian’s head,” he said, “partly because the people who are
putting it up don’t believe anyone will ever collect. No
one
from the West has ever seen her. Nobody has a photograph, or so
much as a bad copy of any government identification. She works
mostly through her associates, which all conspires to make her damn
near impossible to track, but I still think she can be captured and
brought to justice. People have weaknesses. Baolian’s aren’t
manpower or firepower, or financial. But there has to be
something she wants badly enough to
come off her phantom ship to get. If I can get my hands on that,
she’ll have to come to me. The other possibility is that of all the
pies she has her fingers in, one is more important than all the
others. If I can find out which one, I can concentrate my resources
on taking it away.”

“Phantom ship?” she asked. Her questions
about his resources, or the lack thereof, would come later.

“A stolen ship with false registration
papers and a new paint job on the funnels. Every few months the
papers and the name change, over and over, until they get caught
fencing a cargo they acquired through fraud.”

“Shippers don’t check the registration’s
authenticity before they put their goods on board?” she asked, a
little incredulously.

“Not enough of the time for phantom ships
not to be profitable.” He handed her an aerial photograph from out
of the top file. “This is Baolian’s ship. The photograph was taken
four months ago, when the ship was known as the
Chin-lien
.
It’s as close as anyone has ever gotten.”

Jessica looked at the small oval of what
appeared to be a big ship floating on an expanse of gray water.
“They didn’t get very close.”

He handed her another set of papers. “This
is what I’ve been working on for the last two months, an inventory
of all of Baolian’s holdings, legal and illegal. Next to that is a
list I’ve made of her business associates—”

“Legal and illegal,” she interrupted.

“Yes. I want you to run down their holdings
and cross-reference the two. I know at least two of the people
she’s done business with in the past are involved in the Jakarta
resort. If that’s going to be her crown jewel, then I need to get
in. With enough leverage, I can push her out. Baolian doesn’t like
being pushed. She’ll come after me before she risks losing
face.”

“And if her crown jewel turns out to be
something else?”

“Then we’ll go after whatever it is.”

Jessica slowly nodded in agreement, more out
of politeness than conviction. She was tempted to ask him if he’d
ever heard of the proverbial needle in the haystack. She didn’t,
though. She was being well paid to go on his wild-goose chase, and
she only had to keep the chase alive for a week. Then she’d be
pounding the pavement, looking for another job with a more secure
paycheck. Unless, of course, they could find a way to collect the
cool million on Fang Baolian. A percentage bonus on that kind of
take could smooth over many of her problems with Cooper
Daniels.

The thought no sooner crossed her mind than
she retracted it. Pirate hunting was not an appropriate career for
a Stanford MBA, or for a single mother.

Or was it?

No. No, it wasn’t. She was sure. Besides,
working for a man she found devastatingly attractive was a package
with doom written all over it.

Damn. She should have known the job was too
good to be true. It was discouraging to hit a brick wall when she’d
thought she’d made all the right moves.

“Mrs. Crabb never said anything about
maritime bounty hunting,” she said, trying not to sound too
disappointed, or too bitchy. “Not in the whole six weeks she spent
running me through the wringer, making sure I was good enough for
you.”

“The wringer, huh?”

She nodded. “She had a list of requirements
as long as my arm and went on and on about how only the best was
good enough for Mr. Daniels. She’s either been misinformed about
the nature of your work, or she’s sweet on you.”

He laughed again. “You wouldn’t think she
was sweet on me if you’d heard what she said when I called her and
told her I wanted my money back
.”

“You asked for your money back?” Jessica
turned on him, her pride plummeting another five notches. She
couldn’t believe it. He’d tried to return her like a
bargain-basement sale item.

“I told Mrs. Crabb to hire me a man-eating
shark,” he said, a sinful smile curving his mouth and darkening his
eyes. “She sent me you. I wasn’t sure what to do with you . . . not
professionally at least.”

There was a compliment in there somewhere,
but Jessica didn’t think she dared to untangle it from the blatant
insult.

“I also asked for brilliant and practical,”
he continued. “She told me you were both, in spades.” A small laugh
escaped him as he turned away and rested his head on the back of
the seat. “I didn’t ask for beautiful, but I’m learning to live
with it.”

Without any noticeable effort, he’d shocked
her again. Another round of warmth crept into her cheeks.

“Mothers have to be practical,” she said,
becoming suddenly busy with shuffling papers around in her lap.

“I’m sure that comes in real handy.”

She didn’t need to look up at him to know he
was grinning a mile wide, damnably cocksure of his ability to
fluster her out of both her practicality and her brilliance.

* * *

Fourteen hours later they arrived in San
Francisco, having left London at ten
A.M.
Friday morning and, by the miracle of time zones, reaching the West
Coast at four
P.M
. of the same day.
Jessica figured she only had five working days left to get through,
and knowing she deserved at least one of them to sleep in order to
recover from the trip, she revised her calculation down to four
days.

Four days. Nothing of the magnitude he
wanted could happen in four days. She was safe. And if on the off
chance he talked her into the full five days, she would be okay.
She was sure of it.

Stifling a yawn, she maneuvered through the
other passengers crowding around the luggage carousel. She felt
like a truck had hit her and not bothered to put on the brakes. Her
back ached and her head was pounding from the hours spent in the
air. She positioned herself to retrieve her suitcase, but before
she could grab it, Cooper wrapped his hand around the handle and
swung it to the floor.

“Let’s go,” he said, readjusting his grip
and balancing the weight with his own suitcase and carry-on bag.
“I’ve got my car here, so I’ll take you home. It will give us a
chance to continue our discussion.”

Jessica groaned. They’d talked nothing but
business since he’d handed her the files on Fang Baolian. She was
all talked out. What he wanted to do was impossibly daunting.
Despite the sizable amount of liquid assets he’d compiled over the
last few weeks—selling off many Far Eastern properties he and his
brother had acquired—she doubted he had the monetary clout to walk
into any boardroom and force Fang Baolian out. She was sure what he
wanted was crazy, but she wasn’t going to tell him. No, she was
going to keep the secret to herself. She was going to keep her
mouth shut and her eyes fixed on the future—instead of on him,
where they had a tendency to wander.

He fascinated her. He wasn’t an easy man to
look at, but she had surprisingly little trouble doing just that.
In truth, during one of his naps on the flight, she’d memorized
every angle and curve of his face, from the differing falls of his
hair to the bare impression of a cleft in his chin. Most people
didn’t hold up too well under such close scrutiny. Cooper Daniels
had done fine, much to her dismay. Admittedly, she wouldn’t have
had time to memorize anything if he’d been awake. Then he would
have looked back, and the perceptiveness of his gaze was what made
him hard to look at in the first place. That and the edgy emotion
underlying his facade of calm. The laughter he’d shared at the
beginning of their flight had become more remote with every minute
spent discussing Fang Baolian.

“I have to make a phone call,” she said when
they came upon a bank of phones. “I’ll only be a minute.”

“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be
back.”

She watched him walk away with a sense of
relief. She didn’t want to think about pirates anymore, especially
one named Fang Baolian, and she needed a break from thinking about
her soon-to-be ex-employer. The physical attraction she felt, had
felt from the first moment she’d seen him, was embarrassing. It was
probably perfectly normal, but even though she’d never felt another
attraction as strongly or as suddenly, she was sure it was the type
that made people do foolish things they later regretted.

To date, her ex-husband had failed to regret
his plunge into adulterous lust, but she was sure Ian was the
exception. She wasn’t a prude, but she liked to think she had the
maturity to make wise decisions.

Cooper Daniels was not a wise decision, and
he wanted the impossible. He wanted her to follow a laundered money
trail through an international labyrinth on a seek-and-destroy
mission. He wanted to use his small financial empire to bring about
the demise of a much larger one, even though his empire was
crumbling. He wanted revenge.

Jessica wanted sleep. Not for the first time
she wished she’d been thinking with more than her checkbook and her
heart when she’d chosen Cooper Daniels’s company over the ones from
the East and the Midwest that had made her offers. She would never
stoop so low as to go back to New York, the scene of her marital
humiliation, but Chicago wouldn’t have been so terrible. It
wouldn’t have been home, but it would have been bearable.

When a phone opened up, she stumbled
forward, weary to the bone. She let her carry-on bag slip off her
shoulder to the floor, then dug the necessary coins out of her
purse and fed them into the telephone. Before anyone answered,
Cooper was back at her side with a luggage cart. She gave him a
quick glance and a halfhearted smile, a smile that turned genuine
when a sweet voice spoke into her ear.

“Hello. Langston and Signorelli residence.
Christina Langston speaking.”

“Hi, sweetheart. I’m home.”

Cooper saw the sudden beatific curve of
Jessica’s mouth, the soft glow in her eyes, and knew beyond doubt
that neither of them was meant for him. They belonged to
“sweetheart.”

A pang of jealousy he hadn’t expected
tightened his chest. He had been without a woman’s love for a long
time, and Jessica Langston made him feel that lack with a
surprising intensity. At another time, under different
circumstances, he would have welcomed her into his life. He would
have taken a chance with her, this woman who acted on his emotions
and made him want to rediscover tenderness.

Hoping his jealousy was completely
unfounded, he took a guess as to who her “sweetheart” might be—her
nine-year-old daughter, Christina, or her seven-year-old son, Eric.
He’d finally read her personnel file. He knew she had two children
and was divorced from a private investigator in New York. He knew
she was thirty-three years old. He did not know if she was seeing a
man.

“Oh, Christina . . . yes, honey.” She
laughed, paused again, then murmured a reply into the phone. Cooper
tried to remember the last time a woman had talked so sweetly to
him. It had been a while. He could remember his mother talking in a
similar way to Jackson—a green-eyed, dark-haired terror, the kind
of wild child only a mother could love.

But that was a long time ago, and they were
both gone now, his mother for more than half his lifetime and
Jackson seemingly only yesterday.

Cooper felt the muscles in his jaw tighten.
The pain never left him, the pain and the guilt. Jackson had been
protecting Cooper’s back when he’d died, and Cooper was supposed to
have been protecting Jackson. He had failed, and that failure had
left him devoid of any tenderness, any love. He had nothing to
offer a woman. Nothing.

He swore silently to himself and gave
Jessica an impatient look, motioning with his head. He was ready to
leave. He’d been moving fast for the last two months, trying to
outrun his feelings. Now was not the time to stop, not when he was
bone-tired, and his emotions were seeping through mental and
physical barriers thinned by exhaustion.