Jade's Dragon

by Maren Smith

  Jade’s Dragon

  The Red Petticoat Saloon

  By

  Maren Smith

  ©2016 Blushing Books® and Maren Smith

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Smith, Maren

  Jade’s Dragon

  EBook ISBN: 978-1-68259-712-5

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

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  Table of Contents:

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Author’s Note:

  About the Author

  EBook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  Prologue

  She always wondered, had Madame Jewel known the kind of trouble that followed her, would she still have taken Chin in the night Nettie found her huddled in the back kitchen doorway, soaked to the skin in the cold monsoon-like rain of winter and shaking as she clung to her bundle of belongings.

  Thin notes piped from reed flutes were Chin’s only accompaniment as she turned and twirled, ten feet of pink ribbon flying in the air all around her as she danced for an audience enraptured by the sight of her in the elaborate silk gown of her ancestors—pale blue and pink fabric trimmed in pearl white, with sleeves every bit as long as the rippling ribbons she danced with and every inch embroidered with the depictions of seasonal flowers, swooping long-tailed birds and butterflies. It was standing room only tonight, as so often it was when Chin danced, but she wasn’t thinking about the audience. Comprised mostly of rough and dirty miners, a few cowpokes, and at least three upstanding citizens of Culpepper Cove—every one of them watched her movements with the same hungering attentiveness of half-starved lions and yet, she knew, not one would spare so much as a kind word for her, Madame Jewel or any of the other gems once Sunday rolled around.

  So no, Chin didn’t think about the audience. Instead, she let the music of her homeland move her and she thought back to that first night when the cook, Nettie, had flung open the back kitchen door to cast out a pot of dirty water only to have Chin tumble in, literally, at her feet.

  Although months beyond the anniversary of her twentieth birthday, both the colored cook and the brothel madame did as most in America had when taking in her foreign features and diminutive height—they mistook her for a child. Clucking like hens over a new-hatched chick, they wrapped her in a blanket and swept her in to sit beside the fire. They gave her hot soup and even hotter coffee. They stripped her down to her shift, where the tiny buds of her small breasts, the dip of her waist and curves of her womanly hips went completely unnoticed under the bulk of the blanket they wrapped her in. They asked repeatedly where her family was, how she had come to be there, lost and dripping and ill—because by then the fever she had contracted on the stagecoach west had sunk its fearsome claws in so deep that, nearly a full week afterward, she was still alternating between baking hot sweats and chills so violent that the sound of her chattering teeth could be heard rooms away.

  They’d called a doctor for her. It was only when the kindly Dr. Norwood ordered an ice bath and stripped her to nothing to put her in it, that they all discovered the truth—or at least, the only part of Chin’s truth that she was ever so careless to let slip: Chin was not a child.

  The bells on Chin’s silk slippers and in the coiffure of her jet black hair—the waist long tresses pinned up into a fan of gold combs that dripped with pearl-teardrops and more bells—jingled as light and airy as the steps that moved her into another swooping turn.

  “Oh, child,” Madame Jewel had sighed, as she sank down to sit on the edge of her bed the morning after Chin’s fever had finally broke. Her gowns had been luxuriously soft and the same sapphire blue of her eyes, which had gazed into Chin’s in both sympathy and concern. “Do you know where you are? I’ve sworn my gems to secrecy, but if anyone saw you enter here…” Pausing, she’d shaken her head. The elegant coiffure of curls tumbling like golden sunshine down over her shoulders. “Tell me where your family is. I
will try to get you back to them.”

  “Work,” Chin had croaked back, her broken English garbled by the dryness of a throat still parched from fever. “Please, I need to work.”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” the madame had said, patting her hand. “When you’re well enough to know what you’re saying, and if you still want to stay.”

  But Chin had been in America for four years and on her own in her native China for two more beyond that. She knew better than anyone that “later” offered no promises, and for the next six hours, she’d pushed her worth every chance she could. She shown her hands, calloused by years of needlework.

  “We’ll talk about it,” Madame Jewel had promised, giving her arm a reassuring squeeze.

  She’d fallen out of bed in order to make it and then fallen again on the stairs, trying to empty her own chamber pot in order to prove that she could and would do anything asked of her. Women on the run could not afford to be too prideful. That was when she met Mr. Gabe. Half a dozen people came charging up the stairs when she collapsed on them; Gabe had reached her first.

  It had been the most amazing and confusing sensation, when he scooped her into his arms and carried her back to her convalescing room. His brown hands as he’d tucked her back into bed had felt almost fatherly. So had the stern look he’d leveled at her, her still fever-addled brain turning his Mexican features into comforting Chinese ones as he’d pulled the sheet extra tight and in no uncertain terms said, “If you get out of this bed again, I will bust your butt. Understand?”

  That threat had felt almost fatherly, too. It stayed with her, for all of the three hours in which she, exhausted by her efforts, slept. When she awoke, however, she tried again and again, she made it halfway down the stairs before he met her coming up them. Though she didn’t fall, he still picked her up. He carried her back upstairs and put her to bed…though not before laying her stomach-down across his lap and paddling the seat of her undershift until it was all Chin could do to endure in silent compliance.

  “I need work,” she’d begged, once more tucked back into a roll of warm blankets.

  “Rest,” he’d replied, and calmly walked from the room. “You do not want me to put you back in bed again.”

  It was almost midnight before Chin gained the strength and determination enough to try again. This time, opening her bundle of meager belongings (all so carefully tied into the folds of a plain brown blanket), she’d donned her great-grandmother’s silk dancing dress. Hands shaking as badly as her legs, she’d brushed out her long hair and pinned it up in combs and jade beads. She even pulled out her paints, powdering her face milky-white and coloring the bow of her upper lip a brilliant red. Donning her pearl beaded and embroidered slippers, she’d made her way back to the stairs.

  Despite the late hour, business at the Red Petticoat was only just beginning to boom. Boisterous music pounded from the piano. Gems worked the crowd, playfully dodging pinching fingers and equally playful slaps to the bottom from potential customers only too eager to spend their hard-earned pebbles of gold for a half-hour of pleasure between the coveted thighs of a favored whore. Gamblers, drinkers, singers, dancers—every square foot of that lower floor was a bustle of brothel activity…and every square foot of it fell motionless and silent within minutes of the first man noticing her.

  If Gabe wasn’t the second, it was close enough not to matter. She tried not to shake as he came out from behind the bar where he’d been quietly talking to Madame Jewel and headed unerringly for the stairs. She could feel the look he gave her in every nervous and desperate twist that writhed inside her like a belly full of snakes. She tried to be calm, to exude nothing but peace and tranquility as she spread her arms before all those silent, staring men, and then she began to dance.

  Sick for too long, she only managed two twirls before she collapsed, falling to her knee on the first dipping swoop. Gabe reached her before she mustered the strength to stand.

  “Work,” she’d pleaded.

  He clenched his teeth, sending a tic of muscle leaping along his strong jaw just before offering a hand to help her rise. He did not carry her this time, but walked her back to her room as if she were still the grand lady her mother had raised her to be. He was every bit as gentle as before when he stripped her from her gown, wiped the paints from her face with a cool cloth, plucked the combs from her hair one by one until her long, straight locks came spilling down in a waterfall of blackness around her shoulders and waist. And when she was at last reduced to nothing but her shift, he took the wooden hairbrush from the dressing table by her bed and pinned her firmly facedown across his capable thigh. Shift up, bottom bared, with her legs trapped in the masculine vise of his own and nothing but empty air to protect her flesh from the bite of that awful brush, what he’d done then had reduced her quite shamefully to anything but lady-like silence.

  She hadn’t just wept, she’d wailed. She’d sobbed. She’d danced upon his knee in ways her father and his so-rarely-cut bamboo rod never had, and when it was over, once more tucked back into bed, he’d moved the dressing table’s chair to her bedside and sat on it. Burly arms folded across his chest, he’d watched her. Waiting for that inevitable moment when at last her wounded tears dried and the throbbing that had so fiercely consumed her backside in the most miserable of bonfires subsided enough for her to once more give in to stubborn desperation and rise.

  That moment never came. Hiccupping and gasping, still very much a teary-eyed, runny-nosed mess, Chin hadn’t yet recovered when Madame Jewel walked into her bedroom. She never gave Chin a chance to beg for employment.

  “If you get out of this bed again before I allow it,” she’d said, quite sternly, “I will fire you before you can begin working.”

  It was all Chin wanted. She stayed in bed after that, but she also kept her secrets hidden and her past unspoken. She improved her English, immersing herself in the will to lose all trace of her accent, only to forget every American word she knew whenever someone got too close or asked her where she was from. Or why she had immigrated. Or what a woman as lovely and delicate as she—with skin so soft and refined, hands that had never known a field plow, and face that had never been kissed by the harsh reality of daily weather working a farm—what a woman like her was doing in a place as rough as the mining boom-town of Culpepper Cove. She ignored the marriage proposals and the other gems’ tentative offers of friendship. She kept herself apart. She ate alone. She stayed alone. And every penny she earned she withdrew from the bank just as fast as Madame Jewel deposited it in her weekly account.

  If Madame Jewel knew that, she never said anything. And so, once more, for the seventeenth time in six years, Chin started her life anew. That had been four months ago, but it bothered her, and every now and then she couldn’t help but wonder: Had Madame Jewel known the kind of trouble that followed in Chin’s silk-slippered footsteps, had she known the circumstances that had forced her to flee her beloved homeland, would she ever have offered Chin a room, a bed, a wage and the name of Jade in her employ of coveted gems?

  Would she have rescued Chin from her back kitchen stoop, instead of leaving her outside to die?

  Somehow, Chin didn’t think so.

  Chapter One

  “There’s more cock out there than in every henhouse, chicken ranch and farmyard in the county combined.” Peeking through the stage curtain, blonde-haired and blue-eyed Rose eyed the noisy crowd. Turning, she cast Sapphire a somewhat cynical laugh. “Listen to that racket.”

  Charlie had been at the piano for hours already, pounding out the liveliest tunes—Turkey in the Straw, Camptown Races, Molly Do You Love Me?—for the pleasure of all the Red Petticoat’s hardworking patrons. The saloon was crowded, with every inch of danceable floor space occupied. The romping stomp of more than sixty pairs of boots kept up the tinny beat and could be felt through the floorboards. Without enough women on the floor, miners ready for fun had taken to dancing with each other.

  “That, my dear,” Sapp
hire answered, “is the sound of money.” She flicked the ringlets of her black hair over her bare shoulder. She wore what most of the gems wore on working nights: a thin white shift (unlaced just enough to coax the straps to fall off her shoulders), a tight, underbust corset and the bright red petticoat that had made this particular brothel infamously famous in the few short months since it had opened. “We need to get some of that before it’s all gone.”

  Smirking, Rose didn’t move. “It’s not going anywhere. Not yet, anyway. Not until she’s done with them.”

  Turning, both women gave Chin identical looks of good-natured amusement. Though she couldn’t help overhearing, Chin said nothing. She leaned in closer to the backstage mirror all the gems shared and continued applying the finishing touches on her makeup—white rice powder from neck to hairline gave her face a ghostly paleness and amplified the peach pinkness that striped across her eyes from one temple to the other. Her black painted eyebrows stood out starkly against such a palette. So did the blood-red of her paint, applied only to her upper lip and only upon the curves of the bow itself. To Chin, it was a look passed down through the centuries to all noble women in her country; to the men of Culpepper Cove, it was an exoticness never seen anywhere before. On nights when Chin danced, it was this look that packed the house.

  “What do you say, Jade?” Rose called. “How many “pockets” you feel up to draining tonight?”

  Putting the cap back on her bottle of lip paint, Chin set her brush aside. Though she knew they were only teasing, she did not smile as she stood and quietly moved to join them. Though neither woman was particularly tall, at less than five feet herself, both towered over Chin as she slipped between them to part the curtain with her fingertips.