by Janzen, Tara
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 underground banking network able to transfer millions of dollars in a matter of hours, the kingpins with their harems of mistresses, the gambling, the drinking, the drugs.
Whatever Cooper Daniels’s new project turned out to be, she was drawing the line at mistresses, gambling, drinking, and drugs. Money was her forte, not vice.
She shuffled the top article to the bottom of the pile and started in on the next, one printed in the London Times. She found little new information in the four-column spread until she reached the second-to-last paragraph. There was enough information there to make her sit up in her seat and take notice.
She carefully read the long paragraph twice before letting the article drop back on the pile in her lap. No one in the shipping industry liked to publicize piracy, so most thefts and hijackings were not reported by the news media. The Times article was no different in that respect, but to illustrate a point, it did summarize a story about a shipping line started in San Francisco in the 1880s that had gone bankrupt in the 1970s because of repeated pirate attacks. The line had been the Daniels American Line, more commonly known as the DanAm Line, and even more commonly known as the Damn Line.
The story made her realize two things: She’d been remiss in her original research into Daniels, Ltd. when she’d accepted it as the five-year-old international investment firm it purported to be. She also realized that even when sitting across a pub table from George Leeds, listening to all his wild stories, she’d underestimated her employer’s ties to piracy.
“Damn Line,” she murmured, skimming the article again and shaking her head.
“The old man loved that name,” Cooper said around a yawn, his voice bringing her head around. “He thought it made him sound invincible.”
He dragged his hands through his hair, and she watched the silky fall of it slip back into place, brown strands and blond finger-combed together.
“Ship with Daniels,” he continued, grinning wryly. “Best Damn Line in the Pacific.” He turned his head and leveled his gaze on her. “It wasn’t, of course. Matson was the best damn line in the Pacific, and it galled the hell out of the old man.”
“Your father?” she asked.
Cooper shrugged, relaxing back in his seat. “He preferred to be called Mr. Daniels, or sir. Mostly I just called him the bastard.”
Jessica let the information sink in before she hazarded a guess about the painting in the San Francisco office. “You don’t look much like him.”
His grin returned, wryer and broader than before. “If I wasn’t already overpaying you, that would get you a raise, Ms. Langston.”
“You’re not overpaying me by that much,” she said in her own defense, then added, “If you didn’t get along all that well with him, why do you keep his portrait in the office?”
“To keep his memory sharp and clear in my mind. It never pays to forget your enemies, Ms. Langston, not in my business.”
“You considered your father an enemy?” she asked, not quite believing anyone’s paternal relationship could be so bitter.
“Don’t sound surprised, please,” he said drolly, glancing over at her. “God, you are an innocent.”
He had an infuriating way of delivering an insult.
“You make innocence sound like the kiss of death,” she said, not bothering to hide her irritation.
To her surprise, he laughed. The sound wasn’t sardonic, sarcastic, or wry, but a true laugh, a transforming sound that melted the weariness from his face and made her realize he was younger than she’d thought—younger and even more intriguing.
When he was finished chuckling, he looked at her again, his eyes alight with mischief. “Just so you know, Ms. Langston. A ‘kiss of death’ is something a sailor buys from a prostitute on the streets of Bangkok and it’s about as far from innocent as you can get.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to maintain her dignity while her face turned a hundred shades of crimson.
“Not to change the subject—”
Thank God, she thought. He was going to change the subject.
“—but I’d like to spend some time familiarizing you with a lady named Fang Baolian.”
“A friend of yours?” she asked, trying to keep the conversation going in the new direction. A kiss of death. She could just imagine what it was—barely. Maybe. She cast a glance at him, wondering if he’d ever had one. Then she chastised herself for prurient curiosity.
“No,” he said, leaning forward to get his briefcase. “Not a friend. A pirate, the worst of the lot.”
“Is she someone you’re after . . . in a professional sense?” She ought to be ashamed of herself, and she was, but she was also curious. What kind of man was he, anyway? she wondered.
He snapped open the briefcase and removed a batch of files. “Until I get her,” he said, “she’s the only one I’m after.”
“What about Pablo Lopez?”
“He’s a stepping-stone to Baolian. He used to be her man in Manila before he decided to go out on his own. He should have stuck with Baolian. She never hits the same line or shipping federation twice in the same year, not anymore. By concentrating on Somerset, Lopez has made himself known and notorious. Somebody has to take him out.”
The phrase, and the way he said it, set off all of Jessica’s warning bells. Masking her alarm with a casual tone, she asked, “What exactly do you mean by ‘take him out’?”
“Don’t worry, Ms. Langston,” he drawled. “I didn’t hire you for the dirty work.”
Somehow, she didn’t take much comfort in his answer. She was tempted to ask him what he thought negotiating the price on a man’s freedom was, if not dirty work. Instead she asked something else she’d been wondering about. “What did you hire me for?”
He spent some time organizing the files before he replied. “You mentioned a lot of the reasons yourself, last night.”
“But not all the reasons?”
“The rest of it is a little hard to explain. I guess you could call it a last-ditch effort.”
She hadn’t thought she could slip any lower than a fatal error in judgment or a dandy little helper. She’d been wrong. Being hired as a “last-ditch effort” took the prize.
“A hundred men have died trying to bring Baolian to her knees,” he continued. “I want her stopped. I think a woman can help me do it.”
“A woman?” She didn’t like the sound of that. She also wondered if his brother was one of the hundred men.
“Strictly behind the scenes,” he assured her, looking uneasy for the first time since she’d met him. It was the only crack she’d seen in his armor of arrogance, and like his laughter, she found it remarkably appealing.
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand,” she said.
He was quiet for a moment, his unease obviously increasing. “Women . . . well, women are different from men. T
hey see things where men see nothing, and they respond to what they see. I can’t get at Baolian by playing a man’s game of strength. It’s too obvious. She’ll never let herself be outgunned.”
“Smart woman,” Jessica said while she wondered what it was he thought women saw that men didn’t.
“She is that,” he agreed. “But according to your transcripts and Elise Crabb, so are you—very, very intelligent. I’m gambling that if I give you enough information, you can tell me something about Baolian I never would have figured out on my own.”
He was full of surprises. From what she’d seen of him so far, she wouldn’t have taken him to be a closet feminist. Personally, she doubted if his theory about women knowing women would hold even an ounce of water, but she wasn’t sure if she should tell him or not.
“I see,” was all she said. She’d wait until she had a better understanding of what he wanted, if that was possible, considering the vagueness of his description.
“There’s a million-dollar bounty on Baolian’s head,” he said, “partly because the people who are putting it up don’t believe anyone will ever collect. No one from the West has ever seen her. Nobody has a photograph, or so much as a bad copy of any government identification. She works mostly through her associates, which all conspires to make her damn near impossible to track, but I still think she can be captured and brought to justice. People have weaknesses. Baolian’s aren’t manpower or firepower, or financial. But there has to be something she wants badly enough to come off her phantom ship to get. If I can get my hands on that, she’ll have to come to me. The other possibility is that of all the pies she has her fingers in, one is more important than all the others. If I can find out which one, I can concentrate my resources on taking it away.”
“Phantom ship?” she asked. Her questions about his resources, or the lack thereof, would come later.
“A stolen ship with false registration papers and a new paint job on the funnels. Every few months the papers and the name change, over and over, until they get caught fencing a cargo they acquired through fraud.”
“Shippers don’t check the registration’s authenticity before they put their goods on board?” she asked, a little incredulously.
“Not enough of the time for phantom ships not to be profitable.” He handed her an aerial photograph from out of the top file. “This is Baolian’s ship. The photograph was taken four months ago, when the ship was known as the Chin-lien. It’s as close as anyone has ever gotten.”
Jessica looked at the small oval of what appeared to be a big ship floating on an expanse of gray water. “They didn’t get very close.”
He handed her another set of papers. “This is what I’ve been working on for the last two months, an inventory of all of Baolian’s holdings, legal and illegal. Next to that is a list I’ve made of her business associates—”
“Legal and illegal,” she interrupted.
“Yes. I want you to run down their holdings and cross-reference the two. I know at least two of the people she’s done business with in the past are involved in the Jakarta resort. If that’s going to be her crown jewel, then I need to get in. With enough leverage, I can push her out. Baolian doesn’t like being pushed. She’ll come after me before she risks losing face.”
“And if her crown jewel turns out to be something else?”
“Then we’ll go after whatever it is.”
Jessica slowly nodded in agreement, more out of politeness than conviction. She was tempted to ask him if he’d ever heard of the proverbial needle in the haystack. She didn’t, though. She was being well paid to go on his wild-goose chase, and she only had to keep the chase alive for a week. Then she’d be pounding the pavement, looking for another job with a more secure paycheck. Unless, of course, they could find a way to collect the cool million on Fang Baolian. A percentage bonus on that kind of take could smooth over many of her problems with Cooper Daniels.
The thought no sooner crossed her mind than she retracted it. Pirate hunting was not an appropriate career for a Stanford MBA, or for a single mother.
Or was it?
No. No, it wasn’t. She was sure. Besides, working for a man she found devastatingly attractive was a package with doom written all over it.
Damn. She should have known the job was too good to be true. It was discouraging to hit a brick wall when she’d thought she’d made all the right moves.
“Mrs. Crabb never said anything about maritime bounty hunting,” she said, trying not to sound too disappointed, or too bitchy. “Not in the whole six weeks she spent running me through the wringer, making sure I was good enough for you.”
“The wringer, huh?”
She nodded. “She had a list of requirements as long as my arm and went on and on about how only the best was good enough for Mr. Daniels. She’s either been misinformed about the nature of your work, or she’s sweet on you.”
He laughed again. “You wouldn’t think she was sweet on me if you’d heard what she said when I called her and told her I wanted my money back .”
“You asked for your money back?” Jessica turned on him, her pride plummeting another five notches. She couldn’t believe it. He’d tried to return her like a bargain-basement sale item.
“I told Mrs. Crabb to hire me a man-eating shark,” he said, a sinful smile curving his mouth and darkening his eyes. “She sent me you. I wasn’t sure what to do with you . . . not professionally at least.”
There was a compliment in there somewhere, but Jessica didn’t think she dared to untangle it from the blatant insult.
“I also asked for brilliant and practical,” he continued. “She told me you were both, in spades.” A small laugh escaped him as he turned away and rested his head on the back of the seat. “I didn’t ask for beautiful, but I’m learning to live with it.”
Without any noticeable effort, he’d shocked her again. Another round of warmth crept into her cheeks.
“Mothers have to be practical,” she said, becoming suddenly busy with shuffling papers around in her lap.
“I’m sure that comes in real handy.”
She didn’t need to look up at him to know he was grinning a mile wide, damnably cocksure of his ability to fluster her out of both her practicality and her brilliance.
* * *
Fourteen hours later they arrived in San Francisco, having left London at ten A.M. Friday morning and, by the miracle of time zones, reaching the West Coast at four P.M. of the same day. Jessica figured she only had five working days left to get through, and knowing she deserved at least one of them to sleep in order to recover from the trip, she revised her calculation down to four days.
Four days. Nothing of the magnitude he wanted could happen in four days. She was safe. And if on the off chance he talked her into the full five days, she would be okay. She was sure of it.
Stifling a yawn, she maneuvered through the other passengers crowding around the luggage carousel. She felt like a truck had hit her and not bothered to put on the brakes. Her back ached and her head was pounding from the hours spent in the air. She positioned herself to retrieve her suitcase, but before she could grab it, Cooper wrapped his hand around the handle and swung it to the floor.
“Let’s go,” he said, readjusting his grip and balancing the weight with his own suitcase and carry-on bag. “I’ve got my car here, so I’ll take you home. It will give us a chance to continue our discussion.”
Jessica groaned. They’d talked nothing but business since he’d handed her the files on Fang Baolian. She was all talked out. What he wanted to do was impossibly daunting. Despite the sizable amount of liquid assets he’d compiled over the last few weeks—selling off many Far Eastern properties he and his brother had acquired—she doubted he had the monetary clout to walk into any boardroom and force Fang Baolian out. She was sure what he wanted was crazy, but she wasn’t going to tell him. No, she was going to keep the secret to herself. She was going to keep her mouth shut and her eyes fixed on the future—instead o
f on him, where they had a tendency to wander.
He fascinated her. He wasn’t an easy man to look at, but she had surprisingly little trouble doing just that. In truth, during one of his naps on the flight, she’d memorized every angle and curve of his face, from the differing falls of his hair to the bare impression of a cleft in his chin. Most people didn’t hold up too well under such close scrutiny. Cooper Daniels had done fine, much to her dismay. Admittedly, she wouldn’t have had time to memorize anything if he’d been awake. Then he would have looked back, and the perceptiveness of his gaze was what made him hard to look at in the first place. That and the edgy emotion underlying his facade of calm. The laughter he’d shared at the beginning of their flight had become more remote with every minute spent discussing Fang Baolian.
“I have to make a phone call,” she said when they came upon a bank of phones. “I’ll only be a minute.”
“Take your time,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
She watched him walk away with a sense of relief. She didn’t want to think about pirates anymore, especially one named Fang Baolian, and she needed a break from thinking about her soon-to-be ex-employer. The physical attraction she felt, had felt from the first moment she’d seen him, was embarrassing. It was probably perfectly normal, but even though she’d never felt another attraction as strongly or as suddenly, she was sure it was the type that made people do foolish things they later regretted.
To date, her ex-husband had failed to regret his plunge into adulterous lust, but she was sure Ian was the exception. She wasn’t a prude, but she liked to think she had the maturity to make wise decisions.
Cooper Daniels was not a wise decision, and he wanted the impossible. He wanted her to follow a laundered money trail through an international labyrinth on a seek-and-destroy mission. He wanted to use his small financial empire to bring about the demise of a much larger one, even though his empire was crumbling. He wanted revenge.
Jessica wanted sleep. Not for the first time she wished she’d been thinking with more than her checkbook and her heart when she’d chosen Cooper Daniels’s company over the ones from the East and the Midwest that had made her offers. She would never stoop so low as to go back to New York, the scene of her marital humiliation, but Chicago wouldn’t have been so terrible. It wouldn’t have been home, but it would have been bearable.
