Jade Island (4 page)

“Beautiful merchandise,” she said evenly, “is one of many Chinese euphemisms for a whore.”

“Sorry. Want to begin all over? Third time’s the charm and all that.”

A quick smile changed the aloof lines of Lianne’s face. “Let’s keep the third time in reserve.”

“You see worse misunderstandings ahead for us?”

“Life has taught me always to have something in reserve.”

“You must have an interesting life.”

“Not as interesting as this Warring States buckle.” Lianne turned back to the exhibit she had been examining before Kyle approached her.

He hesitated at the transparent change of subject, then shrugged and decided to play it Lianne’s way for a time. He stepped closer and looked over her shoulder into the case. Over the top of her head, actually. She didn’t even come up to his chin. When he breathed in, a scent like rain and lilies came to him. When he breathed out, tendrils of hair which had escaped from the jade picks stirred against her ear. Then another breath and it was rain and lilies all over again, only warmer, because he was leaning
so close now that he could feel the subtle heat of her body. And the unsubtle heat of his own.

With a silent, bitter curse at his hormones, Kyle stepped aside and focused on the very old jade ornament instead of on Lianne’s fragrant flesh. The S-shaped dragon design was still vibrant and crisp after more than two thousand years of existence.

“Beautiful,” Kyle agreed, yet he was looking away even as he spoke. “But it can’t touch the sheer power of the ceremonial blade in the next case.”

When Lianne glanced at the chisel-shaped jade that had captured Kyle’s attention, she almost smiled. The long, narrow, nearly rectangular form of the blade was familiar to her from many hours spent listening to Wen talk about the aesthetics and ritual purpose of various Neolithic ceremonial objects.

“You sound like Wen Tang,” she said. “He’s quite passionate about his archaic jades.”

“Are you talking about Wen Zhi Tang?” Kyle asked, though he knew very well she was.

Lianne nodded but didn’t look away from the case holding the ancient blade. With a soft sound she leaned closer, so close that her breath clouded the glass surface of the case. Impatiently she backed up a bit and waited for the glass to clear.

“What is it?” Kyle asked.

Lianne didn’t answer. She was holding her breath, examining the five-thousand-year-old jade object as closely as she could behind its glass barrier.

“Incredible,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes. “Size I could understand. Color I could accept. Design, no problem. But to have similar burial stains in similar places?”

Frowning, she stared intently at the ceremonial blade.

“You’ll get lines if you keep that up,” Kyle said after a time.

“Only Americans are obsessed with youth,” she said, not looking away from the jade.

“And Chinese are obsessed with age.”

“Obsession is cross-cultural. Human. The object of obsession is cultural.” As Lianne spoke, she walked around the case, viewing the jade from all angles.

“Thinking of bidding?” Kyle asked.

“Yes.”

“Then I hope you or your client is wealthy. That’s a very fine piece of Neolithic jade. The sort of thing that might be found in an emperor’s grave.”

Lianne barely heard Kyle’s words. She was already mentally rearranging the contents of her checking and money-market accounts. She could cover the probable cost of the jade. Barely. If the rattle in her car turned into a problem, she would have to max out her credit cards. Either way, she would have to give up the exquisite Eastern Zhou pendant she had had her eye on, at least for the time being. Once she had solved the mystery of the Neolithic blade, she could sell it and balance her books again. Unfortunately, by then the lovely pendant would be sold.

With an unconscious sigh, Lianne said good-bye to the twenty-five-hundred-year-old bit of jade she had promised herself for her thirtieth birthday.

“You don’t look happy,” Kyle said.

“Excuse me?”

“Most collectors hot on the scent of a new acquisition look tight, glassy-eyed, panting to get their hands on whatever their obsession is. Sort of like Seng looking at you.”

Lianne shot Kyle a sideways glance from eyes the color of very old whiskey. It didn’t take her long to decide she would rather talk about Seng than about the Neolithic blade that she was almost certain belonged to her grandfather.

Or had. The card in front of the blade stated that it was owned by SunCo and had been donated for the auction.

“Mr. Han—”

“Seng to his friends,” Kyle interrupted dryly, “and he wants to be your friend. A close one. Real close.”

“Mr. Han,” Lianne repeated, “has a variety of enthusiasms. For the moment, I appear to be one of them. It
won’t last. But while it does, I wouldn’t mind having an escort of a certain type while I attend jade events.”

“A certain type?”

“Large. Like you.”

“Ah, we’re back to the stuffed elephant.”

“Your words, not mine.”

Kyle examined Lianne as though she was a piece of jade that was on the market. “You’re serious.”

“About needing you? Yes.”

“What do I get out of it?”

“The satisfaction of being a white knight,” she shot back, embarrassed by the certainty that there was a flush climbing her cheeks.

“Sorry, but I traded in my metal underwear for good old cotton.”

Lianne hoped her professional smile concealed her irritation. And her disappointment. “Understandable. I’m sure chain mail chafes something fierce. Excuse me, I have a lot of jade to see. Nice meeting you, Mr. Donovan.”

For an instant Kyle was too surprised by Lianne’s cool, swift withdrawal to do anything but stare. Before he had time to think it over, he was moving, cutting off her escape.

Lianne came to an abrupt stop. It was that or walk headfirst into Kyle Donovan. Automatically she stepped to the right. He stepped to his side, cutting her off again. She moved to the other side. So did he.

“The dance is after the auction,” she said in a clipped tone.

Kyle smiled. He liked the spark and snap of anger in her eyes much better than the blank, remote politeness that had been there when she brushed him off like dandruff.

“I have a suggestion,” he began.

“Lovely. Get out of my way and I’ll find someone who cares.”

“My suggestion has to do with trading favors.”

Lianne’s eyelids lowered, concealing the dark whiskey blaze of her eyes. “Such as?”

“Every hour I’m a stuffed elephant for you, you’ll give me an hour and teach me what you see when you look at various kinds of jade.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, dark centers expanding. “What?”

“I have a fair working knowledge of ancient and archaic jades, but I could learn a lot from listening to the thought processes of an expert like you.”

“I’m hardly
that
expert.”

Kyle managed not to laugh out loud. If Wen Zhi Tang had an apprentice, it was Lianne Blakely. And when it came to jade, Wen was as expert as God.

“Then it’s an even trade,” he said easily. “I’m not an expert escort.”

When Lianne hesitated, Kyle smiled lazily down at her. He had been told that he had a disarming smile, so he used it when being underestimated was a real benefit. In this atrium swirling with Asian and Caucasian sharks, he figured he needed all the help he could get. Six months of immersion in the study of Chinese jade artifacts didn’t make up for a lifetime spent climbing over the face of the earth looking for minerals.

Lianne didn’t relax as much under his smile as Kyle had hoped. If anything, she withdrew even more.

“Sort of you scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours?” she suggested.

His smile widened. “Close enough. You game?”

“As long as all I’m scratching is your jade itch,” she said bluntly. “How much do you want to know about jade?”

“I’ll tell you if I get bored.”

Lianne tilted her head to one side and looked up at Kyle. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” she asked, echoing his earlier remark.

“Yeah. I hate being bored.”

She took a breath and thought of all the reasons she should turn and walk away from the man with the easy smile and beautiful, measuring eyes.

“All right,” she said faintly. Then, more firmly: “It’s a deal.”

For the first time since Kyle had seen Lianne, his gut relaxed. He didn’t know why it was important for him to stay close to her. He only knew that it was. In a woman, what he felt would have been called feminine intuition. In a man, it was called reasoning, experience, deduction, or, at worst, a hunch.

Kyle’s hunch said there was more to this deal than a pretty lady asking a big male to keep the Seng wolf at bay.

“Where do you want to start?” Lianne asked.

“At the beginning, of course. The Neolithic blade.”

Kyle was intensely curious about the jade artifact that had made her stare and then stare again, until finally something that looked like fear drained color from her face. But he didn’t say anything aloud about the subject of fear. At this point their alliance was too fragile to take any kind of strain.

For an instant Kyle wondered what he had gotten himself into. Then Lianne stepped past him to the display case and he breathed in the heady, delicate fragrance of lilies and rain. It went through him like a combination of peace and adrenaline, soothing his mind and revving his body.

“This blade,” Lianne said, “which many Chinese would refer to as a shovel—”

“Why?” he interrupted.

“Wen says that in ancient times people used digging sticks with an edge like that. Some academics say that it’s more an adze than a shovel. In any case, we all agree that objects like this are modeled after a blade of some kind, an artifact that was important enough to the culture to be included in rituals.”

Kyle nodded.

“This blade,” Lianne continued, gesturing toward the case, “is
pih,
one of the eight traditional categories of jade colors.”

“Green?”

“Moss green. Some might call it spinach. In any case, this blade is an excellent example of buried jade.”

“Grave goods.”

“Exactly. They have always been valued by Europeans. Among the overseas Chinese, the old mainland prejudice against collecting grave goods is almost gone. The stains on this blade are the result of thousands of years spent in a tomb. The Chinese have a long and exacting aesthetic tradition with regard to weathered jade.”

The reverence in her tone when she said “stains” made Kyle’s eyebrows lift. “Stains, huh? Aren’t they valued simply as an indicator of age?”

“In some cases. For a Chinese collector, the true importance of these particular stains would be that they enhance rather than diminish the impact of the totemic patterns carved into the blade itself.”

“So I’ve been told. But I have to say, that’s one of the aspects of jade appreciation that eludes me.”

“Why?” Lianne asked, looking up at him.

“The jade was selected, carved, polished, and buried by human hands. The stains just came along randomly, a byproduct of being stuck in wet earth near a corpse.”

Lianne’s eyes gleamed behind her thick black lashes as she smiled. “A very Western point of view.”

“That’s me, born and raised.”

“Me, too. Wen has lectured me many times about my lack of subtlety in jade appreciation. The placement of accidental stains is one of the things I had difficulty with.”

“Had?”

“Now I think of the stains in the same way the carver thought of the stone before he went to work.”

Kyle looked from the blade to Lianne. “I don’t understand.”

“Every piece of jade is different. It’s the carver’s duty and joy to reveal the object hidden within the stone.”

He nodded. “I get that part of it. Applied human skill and intelligence.”

“And the stains,” Lianne said softly, “are the conden
sations of time, as much a part of the jade today as the original stone or the carver’s skill. If time blurs the design or breaks the stone, the value of the whole is diminished. If time enhances the object, the result is a magnificent, multilevel piece of art, like the one you can’t keep your eyes off for more than ten seconds.”

Almost guiltily, Kyle looked back at Lianne. Her smile turned her eyes the color of dark honey.

“I wasn’t complaining,” she said. “I love seeing someone who is genuinely fascinated by jade, rather than just collecting it to impress other people or because it’s the latest investing craze.”

“Even though I prefer unstained jade?”

She laughed. “Just remember that the placement of stains on buried jade is very important to the Chinese collector.”

“What about Americans? Don’t their preferences count?”

“They can love or hate stains on buried jade, but it doesn’t change the fact that stains which add to the aesthetic power of a piece drive up the price, especially in a mixed Asian-Caucasian auction such as this.”

“I see a plush future for the Pacific Rim Asian Charities,” Kyle said dryly. “But I can’t imagine a collector letting go of this Neolithic blade for anything short of disaster or death. It has to be one of a kind. Or is that just my relative inexperience talking?”

Broodingly, Lianne studied the extraordinary blade lying within the case. Stone, yet so infused with time and reverence that the jade fairly glowed.

“No, I can’t imagine Wen letting go of it,” she said softly, not knowing she had spoken aloud.

A feeling like winter slid down her spine. She wondered what calamity had struck the Tang family, what disaster was so great that Wen Zhi Tang had been forced to sell a piece of the jade collection that had been in the family since the time of the Ming dynasty.

No wonder her father had been too distracted to remem
ber details like a parking voucher for her. No wonder that he was pushing her to provide an opening for the Tang family with Donovan International. If he just would have told her what was going on, she wouldn’t have dragged her feet about approaching Kyle. The Tangs might not like admitting it to her, but they
were
family.

Her family.