Dragon and the Dove by Tara Janzen Read Free Book Online Page A

his
throat if he don’t pay up. But I’m not the only one he’s into,
Jessie. If I was to give you any advice besides leaving, it would
be not to hold on to your paycheck too long.”
    Jessica swore silently again and closed her
eyes, lifting her hand to rub her brow. She was beginning to get
the picture George was laboring so hard to draw. She was working
for a partially deranged, grief-stricken bounty hunter bent on
revenge, who was willing to dismantle his whole company to
accomplish a goal she did not even begin to comprehend, and her
check was going to bounce.
    “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