Authors: Elizabeth Lowell
The way it was growing now.
Even at a distance of twenty feet, the suit looked the same as Wen’s. It looked like it was made of plaques of imperial jade, not softer serpentine. Darker on the head, flowing to a pale, creamy green across the torso, deepening to moss on the feet. Gold thread winked everywhere, especially on the sections that covered the face and chest. There the thread was so thick it was like embroidery, a
careful series of Xs crisscrossing and outlining each separate plate of jade.
It can’t be the same suit.
Without knowing it, Lianne stood and leaned closer to the stage. She wasn’t the only one. People in the audience were coming to their feet like corks out of champagne bottles. There was a restless shifting, then a concerted rush toward the stage.
Lianne didn’t notice. She was staring at the patterns of jade and gold stitching on Farmer’s prize. From where she stood, they were identical with her memories of Wen’s suit.
Her throat closed around air that was too thick to breathe. She didn’t know which would be worse: being mistaken in identifying the blade and the burial suit, or being right. She tried to get past Kyle, but there was no room.
“Let me by,” she demanded urgently. “I have to see it close up.”
“You and every other jade lover. I wouldn’t mind taking a good look myself. But we’re too late. There’s a crowd six-deep heading for it right now.”
“No, you don’t understand. I must examine that suit. Get out of my way!”
He looked sideways at her. Her face was pale, strained, and her body was vibrating with the intensity that had her nails buried in his callused palm. She was tugging and pushing, trying to get past him in the tightly packed crowd of people.
“Why?” he asked.
Lianne shook her head and said starkly, “Let me by!”
“Stay close. I’ll break trail for you.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Farmer said loudly. “Please sit down. The suit will be on display for the opening of my Museum of Asian Jade. It will remain on display thereafter. Everyone who wishes will have ample time to see the burial shroud.”
Perhaps half the people heading for the stage hesitated.
The rest just kept on going. Hard-faced guards wearing tuxedos materialized near Farmer.
Towing Lianne behind him, Kyle made for the side of the room. He ignored the startled curses and outraged looks from people whose feet happened to be in his way. Then he saw the guards form a ring around Farmer, who was yelling at them to protect the suit, not him. Soon the guards would become a solid barrier across the stage.
Kyle turned to Lianne. “Faint,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“If you want to get close to that burial suit,
faint.
”
Lianne crumpled.
Kyle grabbed her, lifted her in his arms, and began shoving roughly through the crowd.
“Get out of my way,” he shouted. “She needs air. Clear a path!”
Quickly Kyle forced a way up on the stage, which was the only place in the auction room that wasn’t crowded. Several guards started toward him, saw the utterly limp woman in his arms, and turned back to control the people who were still on their feet. The curtain thumped down behind Kyle’s back, tangling the most eager members of the crowd in a combination of soft velvet folds and guards whose hands were a good deal harder.
“Stay away from the jade,” a guard snarled at Kyle.
“Screw the jade. She has to have air.”
Before the guard could decide whether to go after Kyle, one of the mainland China contingent staggered out from under the curtain. While the guard was trying to do a little hands-on, cross-cultural exchange, Kyle slipped around behind the coffin-sized pedestal that supported the jade suit.
“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” Kyle said in Lianne’s ear. “You’ve got maybe thirty seconds before a guard spots us. Ten seconds after that, we’ll be out on our ear.”
Lianne didn’t need a second invitation. She twisted in Kyle’s arms until she was facing the shroud.
It was barely two feet away, illuminated by a spotlight so intense that it seemed like a solid column of white.
Gold threads twisted and glittered as though alive, but it was only Lianne who was alive, straining toward the immortal jade with an urgency that made her quiver.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing!” yelled a guard.
“Take it easy,” Kyle said. “This is the only decent air in the room.”
“Take her outside,” the guard said curtly, running across the stage. “Move!”
“We’re bounced,” Kyle murmured, heading for the exit.
Lianne didn’t complain. She had seen enough. Too much. Dick Farmer’s beautiful jade prize had once belonged to Wen Zhi Tang.
The certainty of it stunned her.
Belatedly she realized that Kyle was still carrying her. “Put me down.”
“In a minute.”
“But—where are we going?”
“Outside.”
“Why? Is the guard still after us?”
“No, but I want to see if anyone else is. Got any objections?”
If Lianne did, she didn’t have time to voice them. Kyle put her down and then hustled her through an outside door so fast her feet barely touched the floor. He kept going until they were beyond the well-lighted building and down a side walkway. Soon they were hidden in the shadows leading to the hotel’s underground garage.
Kyle stopped and held Lianne motionless against his chest. Over her head he watched the empty walkway they had just hurried down.
“What are you—” she began.
“Be still,” he whispered.
Shivering in the chill, she waited quietly, watching his eyes for any sign that they were being followed. All she saw was a faint gleam of reflected moonlight in a face that was uncompromising, chiseled out of shadow and ice.
He looked barbaric, cruel, an ancient Viking wolf dressed as a civilized modern lamb.
The part of Lianne’s mind that wasn’t shell-shocked over the jade suit told her that she must be out of her mind to trust Kyle Donovan.
She must be out of her mind, period. She would have to be crazy to believe that Wen had parted with the very core of his treasury—a jade burial suit, the only such artifact in private hands.
“Don’t look so worried,” Kyle said, his voice a bare thread of sound. “I won’t let anyone get to you.”
Lianne almost laughed out loud.
Don’t worry.
The only way she could do that was to shove all thought of Wen and stolen jade into a corner of her mind. She would worry about it later, when she was calmer. It would make sense then, when she knew more.
It would be all right.
Gradually Lianne’s body became less tense as she fell into old patterns of handling trouble. The ability to divide her mind and then get on with the needs of the moment was something she had developed as a girl, when the hurt of not being accepted by her father threatened to tear her apart. She had honed the ability, and her self-respect, with karate, mental and physical control combined.
Yet even years of training couldn’t prevent the shiver that rippled through Lianne a few minutes later. She told herself it was the cool wind or leftover nerves, but she knew it was the slow, slow journey of Kyle’s fingertips down her spine. Each time he touched a new indentation or slight ridge, his hand lingered as though memorizing it.
“Cold?” he asked quietly.
“You try standing around out here in silk underwear in March,” she said under her breath. “Of course I’m cold.”
“Underwear? I didn’t—” Kyle stopped abruptly. He doubted Lianne would enjoy being told that he hadn’t felt anything under his fingertips but a thin layer of silk and a much warmer layer of woman. “Sorry. I didn’t think
about the temperature. We’ll go back in soon. It doesn’t look like he took the bait anyway.”
“Maybe there was no one to take the bait. Maybe I was just imagining things earlier and you were imagining things now.”
“Maybe,” Kyle said. But the watchfulness of his eyes said otherwise.
“What makes you so sure we’re not imagining things?” Lianne murmured, her voice as low and secretive as his.
“My gut.”
“Your gut?”
“Yeah. It’s restless.”
“Have you tried antacids?”
He laughed softly, shaking his head just a bit. Then he went completely still.
“What—” She couldn’t finish the question. Her mouth was smack up against the black cloth of his tuxedo.
“Quiet,” Kyle breathed.
Holding both of them motionless in the shadows, he watched the figure that came out of the side door and stepped immediately to the left. A man. Medium height. Black tux. No way to see how it fit him.
Light flared, then snuffed out. The match had been shielded in such a way that Kyle saw only a brief glow against the man’s jaw. No beard. No mustache. The burning pinpoint of a cigarette went from red to gold to red again as the man sucked in smoke. He took several more quick drags, flicked the cigarette into some shrubbery, and went back inside.
Kyle waited until he was certain that the man wasn’t coming back.
“Okay,” he said quietly, releasing Lianne. “Let’s go in before you freeze to death.”
“Suffocate.”
“What?”
“I would have suffocated before I froze. Do you have any idea what raw tuxedo tastes like?”
“Nope.” Kyle smiled and barely caught himself before
he smoothed his hand down Lianne’s back all the way to her sleek, tempting butt. “I always have mine well done,” he explained, leading her back onto the lighted path.
“Was he trying to follow us?” she asked, ignoring Kyle’s teasing tone.
“Hard to say. He could have raced out to see where we were going, or he could just have been desperate for a nicotine fix.”
“So we’re back where we started.”
“Not quite. You haven’t told me why I bid too much on that blade.”
“Auction fever.”
“Try again.”
“Ignorance.”
Kyle’s hand closed more firmly around her arm. “Again.”
“I’m not a mind reader.”
“Even your own? You wanted that blade, Lianne, and you wanted it bad. Why?”
Lianne’s only answer was the eloquent angle of her chin. She wasn’t going to say a word.
At a speed that forced her to stretch her legs, Kyle headed for the front door of the hotel rather than the side. “I can understand why you were climbing walls to get a look at the burial suit,” he said, “but why was that Neolithic blade so important to you?”
“No,” she said curtly.
“Are you telling me it isn’t important?”
“I’m telling you it’s none of your business.”
He pulled her to a stop just outside the hotel entrance. “Does that blade have anything to do with the man who’s following you?”
“What makes you think that?” Lianne asked, surprised.
“You’ve looked frightened over three things tonight. One was the man following you. The other was the blade.”
She didn’t need to ask what the third thing was.
“There’s no connection,” she said hurriedly, not wanting to talk about the jade shroud in any way at all.
“How can you be so sure?”
“The Neolithic blade is Tang family business. The man is Caucasian. No connection whatsoever.”
“There’s you.”
Lianne’s only answer was silence.
Kyle’s gut kicked into overdrive. He didn’t know what was wrong, but he had no doubt that something was. His next thought was that, despite the tuxedo, he was underdressed for the occasion. The area under his left armpit was buck naked.
Without a word he grabbed Lianne and headed for his car.
D
riving skillfully, Kyle shifted his glance between the car’s various mirrors and the mire of Seattle traffic. The snarl didn’t compare with those in cities like Manhattan, L.A., or even Vancouver, British Columbia, but a simple repair of one lane on First Avenue had backed up cars for six blocks. He looked in the mirror again, yanked on the wheel, and made an illegal left turn in the middle of the block. He shot through a half-full parking lot, went the wrong way down a one-lane alley, and popped out on a side street.
Nobody made the turn after him.
He would have felt better if his gut wasn’t telling him that this was the calm before the storm. And it would be a hell of a storm if what Archer had said was true.
The Chinese just threatened to break off all relations with the U.S. if the Jade Emperor’s treasure turns up on our soil.
He didn’t know how Lianne was involved in the Jade Emperor mess, but he knew that she was. There had been a lot more than professional curiosity driving her to examine the burial suit. There had been desperation.
“And I thought Johnny was a bad driver,” Lianne muttered when Kyle executed another illegal turn and shot through another alley.
“What do you mean, bad? No scraped paint, no ticket, and a clear road ahead of us.”
“What about lights behind us? The kind that come with sirens.”
“None of them, either.”
She let out a breath she hadn’t been aware of holding and settled into the comfortable leather seat. “Lucky man. Where are we going, or are we just wheeling around to get my adrenaline count up?”
Instead of answering, Kyle asked a question of his own. “Where’s the Tang party?”
“Back at the hotel we just left. The Tangs rented the penthouse suite.”
“Same hotel, huh?” he said, thinking quickly. “Am I expected to show up in this monkey suit?”
“That’s up to you.”
Kyle didn’t care whether he wore a tux or bib overalls to the party, but changing clothes was the best excuse he could think of to get back to his room. Or better yet, Archer’s. His older brother was sure to have a nine-millimeter in the safe, plus a spare magazine or two.
Kyle really didn’t like what his gut was trying to tell him, but he didn’t ignore the warnings. The last time he had told himself that he was jumping at shadows like a kindergartner on Halloween, a Lithuanian thug had come within one blow of killing him. The blow that had made the difference was Kyle’s. His attacker had gone head over heels out the cab of the truck and sprawled in the muck by the side of the road.
“I’ll see what’s clean in my closet,” Kyle said.
“Suit yourself. Literally.”
He looked at her. She wasn’t as pale and tense as she had been at the hotel. In fact, she looked so calm that he wondered if he had been imagining her distress. Before he could talk himself into that cozy little reassurance, his gut let him know he was being a fool. Again.
Whatever was going on, Lianne was in it right up to her sexy lips.
Kyle turned the car into the driveway of one of Seattle’s more upscale and less ostentatious condo complexes. The
three buildings were under twenty stories high, designed around the waterfront view, and owned by the real estate subsidiary of Donovan International.
“Is this your place?” Lianne asked.
“My family’s. Whoever is in town uses it.”
“Nice.”
“I prefer my cabin,” Kyle said, “but I’m here and it isn’t.”
“Where is your cabin?”
“In the San Juan Islands.”
He pulled an electronic unit from a compartment in the driver’s door.
“Is that a garage-door opener?” Lianne asked.
“Sort of.”
“It looks like a TV remote.”
“That, too.”
The handheld gadget Kyle used to get into the parking level had begun life as a suburban garage-door opener. Then he had started thinking about how useful it would be if it not only opened doors, but told him if anyone else had come looking for him while he was gone. The result was a soldering-gun marriage between a pager, a door opener, a TV remote, and a spiffy little computer chip that could store an organic chemistry textbook with room left over for the Oxford unabridged dictionary.
Archer had christened the bastard electronic unit a “gizmo snitch” and promptly ordered one for himself. As long as they remembered to replace the batteries regularly, the snitch was reliable.
The garage door unbolted automatically and lifted up long enough to allow Kyle’s hunter-green BMW to slide through. He looked at the display window of the snitch and saw a comforting line of zeros. Nobody in since he had left. No power interruptions. All doors in the condominium exactly as he had left them. Locked.
“Is that some kind of fancy security system?” Lianne asked as he put the unit away.
“Just a gadget I invented because I’m lazy.”
She looked at him doubtfully. Nothing she had seen so far tonight—or in the past two weeks—had suggested that Kyle was lazy.
“It’s true,” he said, smiling at her as he shut off the engine. “Unless it involves fishing, I don’t make a move I don’t have to.” Before she could ask any more questions, he changed the subject. “Ever been fishing?”
“I went out on a ‘cattle boat’ once during the salmon season.”
“Hell of a way to fish.”
“I caught one,” Lianne said, eyes gleaming. “There’s a lot of power in them, even the little ones.”
“How little was yours?”
“Six pounds.”
“That’s pretty little,” Kyle agreed.
“It didn’t affect the flavor one bit,” she retorted. She licked her lips, remembering. “Succulent, like lobster. The color was so vivid.”
Kyle slid out of the car. It was either that or take Lianne up on the unconscious invitation issued by her tongue. At least he thought it was unconscious.
He leaned back into the car and looked at her intently. She wasn’t posed like a siren with her skirt halfway up to her crotch. Though her coat was open, she wasn’t fiddling with the jade beads that nuzzled against silk and taut nipples. If she was sending out sexual invitations, she was a hell of a lot more subtle about it than the women he was used to.
And she smelled like heaven, after a whiff of the garage’s concrete-and-crankcase purgatory.
“You’re welcome to come upstairs with me,” Kyle said. “If going to the condo makes you nervous, you’re welcome to wait down here. Your choice. Either way, I won’t be long.”
Lianne met his eyes without coyness. “If you were going to be a jerk, you would have tried something when I ‘fainted’ or while we were playing hide-and-seek outside the hotel.”
He smiled slightly. “I thought of it.”
“Was that before or after you counted every vertebra in my spine?”
Kyle’s laughter echoed in the parking garage. He thought again how much his smart-mouthed little sisters would enjoy Lianne. His older brothers would, too, but somehow that thought wasn’t nearly as appealing. All of his brothers were single and too damned good-looking.
He went around the car in time to close, not open, the door for Lianne. She was a woman accustomed to watching out for herself.
“This way,” he said, putting his hand lightly on her back. Though her coat was a butter-soft wool, he missed the sleek texture of silk with a woman’s heat burning softly through it. Unconsciously his fingers pressed more deeply, seeking her warmth.
“Counting vertebra again?” Lianne asked.
“Just wanted to be sure I didn’t miss any.”
“Is being part of a big family why you have such a quick tongue?”
“Doubt it. You’re an only child and there’s nothing slow about your tongue. Succulent color, too.”
Lianne saw his teasing grin and wondered if she should have stayed in the car and faced all the worries she had shoved into a corner of her mind until “later,” whenever that came.
Without realizing it, she shook her head; she didn’t want “later” to be “now.” She had the whole Tang party to get through. She couldn’t do it if she was thinking about a Neolithic blade and a jade suit that should be in Tang vaults.
“Don’t worry,” Kyle said, seeing Lianne’s faint frown. He stuck a key into the wall by the elevator. The door opened immediately. “I’m not going to do the Jekyll-Hyde thing.”
She blinked, slammed the door to her worries shut, and concentrated on Kyle. It wasn’t hard. The more she looked at him, the better she liked what she saw. And what she
felt. It was an odd, pleasant feeling to be aware of herself as a woman again, a woman who was very aware of a certain man.
“You sure about the Jekyll-Hyde act?” Lianne asked.
“Relatively,” he said, holding open the door.
“Pity,” she said, stepping past him into the luxurious elevator. “I was hoping to get a chance to try out my pepper spray.”
“Not in the elevator, sweetheart. Neither one of us would make it out alive.”
While Kyle punched in a six-digit code on the illuminated keypad, Lianne admired the elevator. Recessed lighting. Tibetan rug in jewel colors. Panels of cherry and bird’s-eye maple. A telephone made out of something space-age, matte-finished, and curved. A small TV screen.
“What, no wet bar?” she asked.
His eyebrows rose. “In an elevator?”
“Well, this has everything else a good limousine does, including a driver wearing a tux.”
“You know,” Kyle said calmly, “all that’s standing between you and a good kissing is that pepper spray.”
Lianne put her hand over her heart and fluttered it like a Victorian maiden. Then she laughed, surprised at herself. It was heady to simply enjoy a man’s company without watching every word she spoke, everything she did. She had had to be very careful when she was with Lee Chin Tang. Her sense of humor and his hadn’t overlapped much. In truth, beyond his interest in Chinese culture, international trade, and the family of Tang, not much about Lee and her had overlapped.
Well, one thing had. They both wanted very much to be accepted into the Tang family. Lee achieved his ambition, but not through Lianne. He married the granddaughter of one of Wen’s male cousins, changed his surname, and was now managing the Tang Consortium’s Seattle office. She still saw Lee occasionally. It hurt a little less each time. The sting these days was to her pride, not her
heart. Lee had wanted her connection to the Tang family much more than he had ever wanted her.
The elevator stopped. To Lianne’s surprise, Kyle punched more numbers on the keypad. Only then did the door open.
“This way,” he said.
The carpet in the hallway was a thicker version of the one in the elevator. The walls were a pale cream that seemed to glow from the inside out. Chinese silk paintings were spotted throughout the hall. Though Asian paintings weren’t her area of expertise, Lianne knew these were excellent, and quite old.
“A code to get out of the elevator, too,” she said. “Now I see why.”
Kyle glanced at the paintings and smiled. “Archer won them in a poker game.”
“He must be Chinese at heart.”
“Because of the paintings?”
“No, the gambling. It runs like lightning through the Chinese culture. Every male over the age of ten bets, whether it’s on mah-jongg, dogs, horses, or the next bicycle to reach the intersection.”
“Good recipe for empty pockets.”
“The hit to the pride is worse. Whoever lost these paintings also lost a lot of face with his family. These were once part of a family’s cherished heritage.”
“They still are. Just the name of the family has changed.”
“That’s a very Western point of view.”
“That’s because I’m a very Western guy,” Kyle said, opening the door. “Come in and sit down.”
In the course of her work appraising jades, Lianne had been in many expensive rooms. None had appealed to her quite so much as this one, with its high ceiling, colorful rugs scattered over an oak floor, and walls of windows overlooking a shimmering, rain-drenched city.
“How odd,” she murmured, looking around.
“What do you mean?”
“I like it.”
“That’s a shock?”
“I’ve always been drawn to a more Oriental approach to living spaces.”
“Mahogany screens, low tables, floor cushions, inward facing rather than outward, that sort of thing?” Kyle asked, turning on lights.
“Oh, I admit to liking chairs. It’s just that a room of this size, this height, all this glass and space…” Lianne paused. “Usually the result is impersonal. Like a palace or big hotel lobby. But this is lovely, very welcoming.”
“It’s my parents’ home away from home. One of them, anyway. The Donovan and Susa live a lot of the year near Cortez, Colorado. Unless they’re traveling. We’re all holding our breath on that subject. My mother is determined to paint the Silk Road.”
“Paint it?”
In answer, Kyle touched another light switch. Impressionistic landscapes hung like muted thunder on the only wall that wasn’t glass.
Lianne’s breath caught. She felt herself sucked into the paintings, through them, a feeling like dizziness, the top of her head lifting off and worries flying out to make room for the incredible energy of mountains and distance, desert and silence, rain and renewal, endurance and storm.
“Who?” she demanded. “Who did these?”
Kyle looked over her head at the wall of paintings. “Susa.”
“Your mother?”
“Yeah. Good, aren’t they?”
“Good? They should be in a museum!”
“Some of them are. These are Dad’s favorites. Go ahead, you can get closer. The paintings change into pure abstraction, but they don’t lose their power.”
Lianne drifted away, drawn by the silent explosions of color.
“I’ll check out my closet,” Kyle said, “unless you want me to fix you a drink first.”
She shook her head without looking back at him. “Nothing, thanks. These are enough. More than enough.”
Kyle walked past her, stepped around a freestanding bookshelf and into a slate-floored corridor that was invisible from the front entrance. Six widely spaced doors opened off the corridor. Each door led to a separate suite. There were no locks on the doors except from the inside. Only family stayed here. If someone was feeling a need for privacy, he or she locked the suite door from the inside and enjoyed as much peace as was possible in the presence of a large family.