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

enough to
change his mind. He did not appear to be a man who changed his mind
or his opinions easily, and he’d made his opinion of her quite
clear.
    “Underneath all your innocence, you’ve got
courage, integrity, and tenacity. I need all three.” He paused
before adding in a quieter tone, “I need you.”
    She barely heard his last words, but they
echoed more resoundingly than any of the others he’d spoken.
    Every brain cell she had told her to turn
around and walk away, and every instinct she possessed told her to
stay and help. She knew how good she was. She knew she was an
unqualified asset no matter how many leagues south of Singapore he
got.
    . . . quid to a bloater Coop’ll be dead
too . .
. Maybe she was the edge he needed.
    Maybe he was more than she could handle.
    Damn.
    She looked up at him and forced herself to
hold his gaze. He met her challenge head-on, one eyebrow raised in
a silent dare, allowing her to see whatever she might. They both
endured the probing intimacy of her visual search, until heat raced
across her cheeks and she had to look away.
    George had been right, she thought. Cooper
Daniels was a man on the edge, willing to risk everything. He
hadn’t hidden his pain or his desire; he not only needed her, he
wanted her. The mixture was potent and devastating.
    “I . . . uh, don’t think so, Mr. Daniels,”
she stammered, turning to gather her briefcase off the hall
table.
    “You aren’t dismissed, Ms. Langston,” he
said in a tone that stopped her in her tracks—for a nanosecond.
    She picked up her briefcase in defiance.
    “You owe me six days,” he said behind her,
and her hand stilled in its movement. “I want them
.”
    Jessica knew she was caught. Her mouth
tightened. Six days, she thought, mentally bracing herself. What
could possibly happen in six days?
    Nothing worth the cost of a lawyer, she
decided. She would hang tough and wait it out. That left her with
just one small problem to clear up with him.
    She took her time, deliberately laying her
briefcase back on the table before she faced him. She met his gaze
straight on so there would be no misunderstanding. “No matter what
you think, Mr. Daniels, I am not innocent, nor am I easily
manipulated. It’s my job to know the score, and I am very good at
my job.”
    The smile she hadn’t seen before came in a
wry curve, deepening the lines on either side of his mouth and
putting a teasing light in his eyes. His brows shifted subtly
upward.
    Jessica belatedly realized they weren’t
talking about the same kind of innocence. She also, on a deep
instinctive level, realized that she’d been warned. She was playing
with fire, the dragon’s fire, and even more than she, he understood
the allure . . . and the danger.
Four
    Cooper Daniels slept through the takeoff
from Heathrow. Jessica had never seen anybody fall asleep before
takeoff and stay asleep through the G-forces and engine whining.
Not that he didn’t look as if he needed sleep. She certainly needed
sleep, but she hadn’t succumbed. No, not her. She was wide-awake,
breathing deep to keep her stomach calm and trying not to smell the
tidily wrapped lunches stockpiled in the galley.
    When the plane reached its cruising
altitude, she was able to relax enough to pull some files out of
her briefcase. There were a number of articles she’d printed out at
the hotel that she hadn’t had time to read. One of them estimated
yearly losses to the shipping industry from piracy at a hundred
million dollars; another guessed the losses were closer to two
hundred and fifty million dollars a year. Her insurance connection
had quoted a number closer to the hundred-million-dollar mark, but
he’d also advised her that most acts of piracy weren’t reported.
Shipping lines did not want to get a reputation for not being
secure.
    George Leeds had also been a storehouse of
information, especially about the seedier sides of piracy: the
syndicates running out of Singapore and Hong Kong, the