Free Dragon and the Dove by Tara Janzen Page B

she’d gotten herself into, she should get out.
Piece of cake.
    She reached for her tea and took a hesitant
sip, her hand shaking. It was obvious what she had to do . . . walk
away. It was so simple.
    “Damn,” she whispered to herself, rattling
the teacup against the saucer as she set it down. Nothing was
simple. She wasn’t walking away or jumping anything, and she knew
it.
    She had agreed to fulfill her contract, and
she wasn’t going to be frightened off by a little “big boy” pushing
and shoving. With four brothers, she’d had years of hands-on
training in dealing with macho posturing.
    Of course, what had looked like an
intimidating bluff on the part of the bodyguards had looked
remarkably like a sincere promise of damage from Cooper Daniels.
His willingness to protect her struck a responsive chord deep in
her psyche, one she was sure she should have outgrown. It should
have galled her to think she needed a man’s protection.
    But in a man’s world, playing a man’s game,
having a man ready and able to protect her virtue didn’t seem like
a bad thing at all, even if it was macho posturing.
    Not when the man was Cooper Daniels.
    “What did Mr. Chow say that got us into so
much trouble?” she asked when Cooper returned from locking the
doors behind Chow and his gang. If she was in the game, and she
was, then she needed to know all the facts.
    He looked at her before walking behind his
desk. At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her question,
but then he spoke.
    “The most honorable Mr. Chow,” he said,
seemingly disinterested as he checked his fax machine, “thought you
looked too old to be a virgin, but noticed with great pleasure that
your skin was beautiful, like white jade.” He read the fax message,
then turned and flipped a switch on his computer. The actions were
automatic, casual, but the tension in the room didn’t drop by so
much as a degree.
    “And?” Shocked as she was by the revelation,
she knew there was more.
    “He wondered if you would disrobe. If he
dismissed his bodyguards, of course.” His fingers moved over the
keyboard, punching in commands.
    “Disrobe?” Her voice was a hoarse croak of
disbelief.
    The typing stopped, and she could see the
working of the finer muscles in his jaw. A perfectly silent moment
passed before he shifted his gaze up to meet hers.
    “I told him you would not disrobe under any
circumstances.”
    She was grateful, but she sensed anything
she might say would be inadequate, or worse, embarrassing.
    “And that last bit of conversation?” she
asked instead, even though she was afraid of what he might say. It
seemed nothing was beyond Chow Sheng.
    His eyes held hers across the length of the
room, level and compellingly green, the irises still bright with
the adrenaline rush caused by the confrontation. “When he accepted
that you wouldn’t disrobe in my office like a Chinese slave girl,
he wanted to buy you for the night.”
    She’d been right. No atrocity was beyond
Chow Sheng. His request was shocking and abhorrent. It was also
curious and archaic. But curious begat curiosity, and much to her
perplexity, she found herself asking the most awful of
questions.
    “How much?”
    “Two thousand Hong Kong.”
    She did some quick figuring, and
embarrassment blossomed full-blown. “Isn’t that a little on the
cheap side?” She should have had more pride than to ask, but a part
of her hoped she’d made a mistake in her figuring.
    A smile curved the corners of his mouth, and
the brightness of adrenaline in his eyes was replaced by a glint of
pure mischief.
    “Skin like white jade can be a most
desirable feature in a woman,” he said. “But the lack of virginity
is an irreparable flaw, which, under any circumstances, lowers the
value of the goods in question.”
    As the goods in question, Jessica showed
great face-saving restraint in her reply. “Of course.”
    “I probably could have haggled the price
higher,” he said, with only a hint of