Dragon and the Dove (15 page)

In an act of pure self-defense, she forced
her gaze back to John and the lunch. Cooper Daniels was not for
her. She couldn’t make the facts any plainer to herself. Green-eyed
dragons living on the edge of danger did not make suitable
companions for mothers of growing children, no matter how
incredibly they kissed.

John set a delicate porcelain teapot on the
low table next to a bottle of chilled white wine and pulled silk
cushions out from underneath, arranging them to make comfortable
seating. Next came two sets of finely made chopsticks with their
tiny porcelain rests.

Jessica watched the careful preparations
with growing dismay.

Silk cushions and privacy automatically, and
much to her embarrassment, made her think of sex, or at least of
kissing. Cooper Daniels had given her a one-track mind.

When the last dish was set out, John rose
from the floor and went over to speak privately with Cooper. With
Cooper’s quiet dismissal, they all left, and Jessica noticed that
neither John, nor Yuxi, nor Bo stepped on the dragon, not so much
as an accidental tweak of an ear or a shoe scraping against a
bronze scale.

Taking their carefulness as a sure sign that
there was an ancient Chinese proverb detailing the ills that befell
those who trampled dragons, she was glad she’d always been equally
careful—except for that once when her foot may have skimmed the
dragon’s nose.

The dragon posing the more immediate danger
stepped away from the window then, drawing her attention back to
the problem at hand: eating lunch with Cooper Daniels while
lounging on a pile of silk cushions and keeping her hands to
herself.

“Have you come up with anything?” he asked,
circling behind his desk with a lazy grace at odds with the
grimness of his expression. His limp was still present in his walk,
but it was far overshadowed by the deliberateness of his movements.
Every muscle in his body was responding as if on cue, fluid and
charged with energy.

He was on the prowl. She felt it as surely
as she was standing there. She watched him pick up an envelope and
glance at the return address before tossing it aside. In the next
heartbeat, she was captured and held by his glittering gaze.

“Well?” he asked, his voice devoid of any
polite modulation. He was angry and tense, and neither state was
hidden. Unlike herself, she realized, the man did not have kissing
on his mind.

She knew what he wanted—the same impossible
thing he’d wanted her to give him all along, the edge on Fang
Baolian. No pirate hunter had ever succeeded in getting close to
the dragon lady. No one had ever gotten the best of her.

“There’s a small business, an herb shop on
Grant Street,” she said, “that doesn’t fit her portfolio. It’s not
big enough to launder a significant amount of cash, but she could
be running some money through it.” She knew it wasn’t much, but it
was all she had to offer.

“What about Singapore? Jakarta? Hong Kong?
Manila?” he asked, naming Baolian’s bases of operation.

“She doesn’t have a big enough piece of the
Jakarta project for it to be a crown jewel. As far as anything else
in the Far East is concerned, I think there’s too much risk for too
little chance of success on her home ground, unless you’re willing
to spend a year or more getting someone inside her organization. At
that point, your options would be limitless. You could run your own
investigation into her underground financial structure, and could
probably get any number of governments interested in commandeering
a fair share. You could sabotage her pirating runs, or embezzle her
into bankruptcy. Extortion might work, providing there is anything
such as honor among thieves. I, of—”

“There is,” he assured her, interrupting as
he came around the side of his desk.

“I, of course,” she continued, “will not be
involved in those decisions.”

She watched as he picked up a folder from
his desk and crossed his office. His footsteps stair-stepped the
crenellations of the dragon’s back with impunity. He walked on and
over the snapping furl of the dragon’s tail and stopped on the
cream-and-gilt-encrusted breast scales that would have covered the
dragon’s heart, if such a beast had a heart.

“There’s a name in here,” he said, handing
her the folder. “The man is a banker on Grand Cayman. It’s what
saved Pablo Lopez’s life.”

“I’ll see what I can find out.” She accepted
the folder with only the slightest hesitation.

“Do you believe in what I’m doing?” he
asked.

“I understand revenge. I’m not sure I
sanction it.”

“Do you think I’m going to get revenge?” One
dark eyebrow lifted as he spoke, adding the dragon’s own edge to
his question. After a moment of her silence he moved closer,
bringing a wash of tension with him across the room. He stopped
near enough for her to see the streaks of turquoise darkening the
subtler green of his eyes.

“You’re going to get something,” she said,
measuring her words against the sudden quickening of her pulse.
“Maybe revenge. Maybe yourself killed. I’m not sure which.”

“Will you miss me when I’m gone?”

“That’s a terrible question.”

He lowered his lashes for a second, as if
agreeing with her, then his gaze was back on hers, intense and
inquiring, and his voice softened.

“Will you kiss me?”

His question was straightforward. Her
reaction was a maelstrom.

Her palms dampened and her mouth went dry. A
curling sensation wound down through her stomach, heightening her
awareness of her body and the closeness of his. Warmth radiated off
him along with tension, acting like a magnet to draw her nearer.
She closed her hands into fists, resisting the urge to reach for
him, to give him the caress he’d asked for.

“Please?” His voice was husky as he moved a
step closer. His hand came up to stroke her cheek. “Chow Sheng was
right. You have beautiful skin.”

His gaze trailed over her face like a touch,
making a path for his fingertips to follow. This was the soothing
he needed, the soothing she longed to give—a kiss, a caress. He
lowered his head close to hers, resting his cheek on hers before
sliding his mouth down the side of her neck. He came back up the
same way with exquisite slowness, making every moment last. His
breath blew against her skin as he spoke.

“Open your mouth for me, Jessie . . . kiss
me.” He stopped just short of the deed, making it unbearably easy
for her to rise on her toes and turn her face a bare inch to find
his lips. She was lost.

She tasted him with her tongue, a tentative
foray beginning at the corner of his mouth and following the full
curve of his lower lip. A sigh of satisfaction rumbled up from deep
in his chest, but he did no more than tighten his arm around her
waist and pull her against his pelvis. The kiss was hers to
initiate, a task that became easier and easier with the increase in
contact between their bodies. Where they touched, there was heat.
Where he moved against her, there was meltdown.

His anger hadn’t abated. It had been
changed, refocused, been transformed into need.

Her eyes closed on a soft exhalation, and
her arms slid up his chest and around his neck. She wanted to savor
him, explore him. She touched her mouth to his and felt his
breathing slow. Her lips parted and pleasure suffused her
senses.

This was the kiss Cooper had wanted. Her
tongue laving the inside of his mouth and filling him with a hunger
for more. Her giving instead of just accepting, a kiss without
tears.

She molded herself to him, and the soft
crush of her breasts against his chest made his gut tighten. He
slanted his mouth over hers to deepen the kiss and take them both
higher. She was his. She felt so right, too right not to be his. He
rubbed himself against her and groaned with the pleasure the simple
act gave.

The timing was dead wrong, but his feelings
were undeniable. He wanted to make love to her, sink himself inside
her and lose himself in the sweet mystery of her. She was
beautifully female, all giving softness with a seductive power he
didn’t even attempt to resist. He wanted her to take him.

With that goal in mind, he slid his hands
down her hips and began inching up her skirt. He got the hemline up
about an inch and a half before her hands covered his and stopped
his little adventure.

“This is going to happen,” he murmured
against her mouth.

She didn’t deny him; she only kissed him and
kept kissing him. The skirt came up another inch.

“Damn.” He stopped himself, then swore
again. “But it isn’t going to happen here, and it isn’t going to
happen now. How in the hell do you do it?”

“Do what?” she asked, her voice breathless
in a way that made him wish something was going to happen.

“Make me into the gentleman I most certainly
am not,” he said, thoroughly disgusted with his attack of
virtue.

He pulled back far enough to see her eyes,
and she did the damndest thing. She grinned at him. He would have
laughed at the sheer audacity of it, if he’d been in any condition
to laugh.

Lunch was strained, and Jessica knew Cooper
was making darn sure she knew why. She’d grinned at him with pure
satisfied delight, enjoying her backhanded victory over him—and
she’d been paying the price ever since.

“Have you ever made love on a pile of silk
pillows spread out on top of a dragon?” he asked, reaching for
another shrimp-and-coconut delicacy. His gaze flicked over her.
“You can take that any way you want.”

“No. I have not, in any way.” She watched
him pick up the crustacean with his chopsticks, refusing to meet
his eyes. She had progressed far beyond blushing. She didn’t think
anything more he said could shock her.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear, and
her face warmed to a rosy hue.

“You’re scandalous and . . . and . . .” She
gave up in frustration. She didn’t know what else he was, so she
busied herself with moving food around on her plate. The lunch was
haute cuisine, but she hadn’t put anything in her mouth yet that
was even close to tasting as good as he had tasted. If he hadn’t
stopped of his own accord, the silk-and-dragon issue would have
been a done deal, and they both knew it.

The kiss had hit her like a bolt of
lightning. She still hadn’t recovered her equilibrium, which was
why he was getting away with his outrageous conversation. He’d
turned physical foreplay into verbal foreplay. She was incapable of
resisting either.

“Wanting to take your clothes off is hardly
scandalous, Jessie. You’re driving me crazy and have been ever
since you walked in my door,” he said, not sounding any too happy
about the fact.

She’d seldom heard anyone talk so seriously
and openly about sex. He wasn’t teasing her, and he sure as hell
wasn’t flirting. He meant every word he was saying, but no matter
what he said, wanting to see how far he could get taking her
clothes off with his mouth was scandalous.

“You were angry when I walked through your
door,” she corrected him.

“I was naked.”

Her blush deepened. She was floundering. He
was more than she could handle—physically, emotionally, or
verbally. “That wasn’t my fault either.”

“I’d be happy to give you a shot at making
my nakedness your fault.” He helped himself to noodles and gave her
a quick, sardonic grin she pretended not to see. “Every time you
kiss me, I get the idea you’d know just how to go about it, and as
we’ve already ascertained, I’ve got a hundred ways I’d like to do
it to you.”

It was impossible for her blush to deepen,
so it spread. Jessica knew she was supposed to like her body—every
feminist said so—and she was proud of the two children she’d borne
and nurtured, but getting naked with Cooper Daniels would be a
tricky move if she wanted to keep her ego intact.

“We’re not really . . . uh, right for each
other.” She hadn’t wanted to voice the obvious, but somebody had to
keep things in perspective.

“I know,” he said, cocking his head and
giving her a wry look. “But that doesn’t seem to be making a hell
of a lot of difference in how I feel.”

She knew exactly what he meant, and she knew
it meant trouble.

“I’ll be gone in two days,” she said.

“If I thought it would change your mind
about what we should do with the afternoon, I’d fire you right
after lunch. But I don’t think our job association is the only
barrier between me, you, and a pair of damp sheets.”

“You’re crude.”

“I’m honest, and I want you.”

No one had ever said that to her. Such
honesty could be flustering, and darkly thrilling.

“I’m no expert,” she said, trying to regain
her perspective. “But don’t most men use a more subtle
approach?”

He laughed and turned back to his plate.
“I’m not sure I’ve got enough time to do this subtly.”

Alarmed, she looked over at him and found
him gazing at her.

“If Baolian wanted you dead, she wouldn’t be
trying to buy you off,” she said with conviction, as much for her
own peace of mind as for his.

“Yeah,” he agreed, his face sobering. “But
I’m not going to be bought.”

She went back to her lunch, though her
appetite was long gone.

“So men don’t come on to you?”

Of all the things he could have come up with
to continue the conversation, nothing could have been better
designed to exasperate her—and get her mind off his very serious
situation.

“No, Cooper. Men don’t come on to me.” She
faced him and lifted her bangs. “Can’t you see the ‘wife’ and
‘mother’ signs branded on my forehead?”

“You’re not married.”

“No, but I was for long enough for the label
to stick.” She gave him a look that said the conversation was over,
but he didn’t take the hint.

“Lots of men find that especially attractive
in a woman, her being married to someone else.”