And the Tang family had made more than its share of them.
Anna Blakely walked into the room carrying a lacquered tea tray that held a bone china teapot and two elegant, handleless cups. She wore a brocaded peach silk jacket, slim black silk pants, low-heeled sandals. Pearls gleamed at her neck and wrists, along with a Rolex set with enough diamonds to glow in the dark. On her right hand was a diamond-and-ruby ring worth more than half a million dollars. Except for her height and glorious blond hair, she was the picture of a prosperous, semi-traditional Hong Kong wife.
But Lianne’s mother was neither prosperous nor Chinese nor a wife. She had built her life around being the mistress of a married man for whom family, legitimate family, was the most important thing in life; a man whose Chinese family referred to Anna only as Johnny’s round-eye concubine, a nonentity who didn’t even know the names of her parents, much less her ancestors.
Yet no matter how often Anna came in at the bottom of her lover’s list of family obligations, she didn’t complain. Watching her mother’s quiet elegance as she poured tea, Lianne loved Anna but didn’t understand the choices she had made. And still made.
Bitterness stirred, a bitterness that was as old as Lianne’s realization that she would never be forgiven for not being one hundred percent Chinese. She was too much an American to understand why any circumstance of birth, blood, or sex should make her inferior. It had taken her years to believe that she would never be accepted, much less loved, by her father’s family.
But she had vowed she would be respected by them. Someday Wen Zhi Tang would look past her wide, whiskey-colored eyes and thin nose and see a granddaughter, rather than the unfortunate result of his son’s enduring lust for an Anglo concubine.
“Is Johnny coming by later tonight?” Lianne asked.
She never called her mother’s lover by anything other than his given name. Certainly not “Father” or “Dad” or “Daddy” or “Pop.” Not even that all-American favorite for a mother’s dates: “Uncle.”
“Probably not,” Anna said, sitting down. “Apparently there’s a family get-together after the charity ball.”
Lianne went still. A family get-together. And she, who had spent three months of her free time preparing the Tang Consortium’s display, wasn’t even invited.
It shouldn’t have hurt. She should be used to it by now.
Yet it did hurt and she would never be used to it. She longed to be part of a family: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents, family memories and celebrations stretching back through the decades.
The Tangs were her family. Except for Anna, they were her only family.
But Lianne wasn’t theirs.
Without realizing what she was doing, Lianne ran her fingers over the jade bangle she wore on her left wrist. Emerald-green, translucent, of the finest Burmese jade, the bracelet was worth three hundred thousand dollars. The long, single-strand necklace of fine Burmese jade beads around her neck was worth twice that.
She owned neither piece of jewelry. Tonight she was merely an animated display case for the Tang family’s Jade Trader goods. As a sales tactic, it was effective. Resting against the white silk of her simple dress and the pale gold of her skin, the jewelry glowed with a mysterious inner light that would act like a beacon to jade lovers, connoisseurs, and collectors.
The jewelry Lianne owned was less costly, though no less fine to someone knowledgeable about jade. She chose her personal pieces with an eye toward her own desire rather than their worth at auction. The trio of hairpicks that kept her dark hair in a swirl on top of her head were slender shafts of imperial jade carved in a style four thousand years old. When she wore them, she felt connected to the Chinese part of her heritage, the part she had spent her whole lifetime trying to be accepted by.
Distantly Lianne wondered if she would have been invited to the party if Kyle Donovan was her date. Johnny, Number Three Son in the Tang dynasty, seemed hell-bent on getting an entree into Donovan International. He certainly had gotten tired of waiting for her to screw up her nerve. Come on. Don’t go all modest and fake Chinese on me. You’re as American as your mother. Just do what the other girls do. Go up and introduce yourself. That’s how I met Anna.
The memory of her father’s words went down Lianne’s spine like cold water. She couldn’t help wondering if Johnny figured that what was good enough for the mother was good enough for the daughter—a life of guaranteed second best in a man’s affections.
A mistress.
As Lianne drank tea from ancient, unimaginably fine china, she told herself that Johnny only wanted her to meet Kyle, not to seduce or be seduced for the sake of Tang family business. She also told herself that it was impatience rather than fear she had seen in her father’s eyes that morning.
“Lianne?”
She swallowed the bracing tea and realized that her mother had asked a question. Quickly Lianne replayed the past few moments in her mind.
“No,” she said. “I won’t be staying for the ball. Why would I?”
“You might meet some nice young man and—”
“I have work piled up,” Lianne interrupted. “I’ve spent too much time on Tang business already.”
“I wish I wasn’t going to the South Seas tomorrow at dawn. I’d come to the exhibit.”
“No need.” Lianne smiled and pretended she didn’t know that her mother never went anywhere that she was likely to meet her paramour’s family. Just as she pretended that she was an adult who no longer needed her mother’s presence to mark important passages in life. “The hotel will be a zoo.”
“Johnny appreciates all the hard work you’ve done with the jade. He’s so proud of you.”
Lianne drank tea and said nothing at all. Disturbing her mother’s comfortable fantasy would only lead to the kind of argument that everybody lost.
“Thanks for the tea, Mom. I’d better get going. Parking will be impossible.”
“Didn’t Johnny give you one of the Jade Trader parking passes?”
“No.”
“He must have forgotten,” Anna said, frowning. “He’s been worried about something a lot lately, but he won’t tell me what.”
Lianne made a sound that could have been sympathy and headed for the door. “If I don’t see you before you leave for Tahiti or wherever, have a great time.”
“Thanks. Maybe you could join us there for your birthday.”
Why? Lianne thought acidly. Did they need an audience while they screwed their way through a South Seas paradise?
“You need a break after all your hard work,” Anna said. “I’ll have Johnny get a ticket for—”
“No,” Lianne said curtly. Then she forced her voice to gentle. “Thanks, Mom, but not this time. I have a ton of work to catch up on.”
Careful not to slam the door hard behind her, she headed out into the gusty night. As she walked to her car, she glanced around uneasily. Earlier that evening, when she had left her apartment, she had felt a chill, prickly certainty that she was being watched. She felt the same now.
Telling herself that she was just nervous about the cost of the Tang jewelry she wore, Lianne hurried around the side of the building, grateful for the motion-sensing walkway lights that flared to life at her presence and died away thirty seconds after she had passed the sensors. Her little red Toyota was right where she had left it. She got in and locked all the doors before she turned the key in the ignition.
The benefit ball for Pacific Rim Asian Charities was one of the big social events of the season in Seattle. Invitations were reserved for the rich, the powerful, the famous, and the merely gorgeous. Normally Kyle and Archer wouldn’t have bothered attending this kind of show-and-tell in the name of charity and social climbing, but not much had been normal since Archer had received a call from the government. That was why they were pushing through the crowd just outside the hotel lobby.
“At least the tux fits,” Kyle muttered. Except for the loose area just under the le
ft arm, which had been tailored to fit seamlessly over a gun holster.
“I told you we were the same size, runt.”
Kyle didn’t say anything. He was still surprised that he fit into Archer’s long-legged, wide-shouldered clothes. No matter how old Kyle got, part of him was still the youngest of the four Donovan brothers, the butt of too many brotherly jokes, the runt of the litter, always fighting to prove that he was as good as his bigger brothers in everything from fishing to gutter fighting to exploring the face of the earth for gems.
“You see her?” Kyle asked, looking past the herd of limousines to the glittery crowd filing into Empire Towers, Seattle’s newest hotel. Dick Farmer’s hotel, as a matter of fact.
“Not yet,” Archer said.
“Not ever. I didn’t know this many people owned tuxes. Not to mention stones.” He whistled softly as a matron walked by, wearing a diamond necklace whose central feature was a pendant the size and color of a canary. “Did you see that rock? It should be in a museum.”
Archer flicked a glance at the woman and then looked away. “You want to talk museum pieces, try the companions of the Taiwanese industrialists who just walked in. Especially the woman in red.”
Kyle glanced beyond his brother. The red silk sheath—and the body beneath it—was an eye-popper, yet it was the woman’s headdress that sent murmurs of appreciation and greed through the crowd. A lacework cap of pearls encased her gleaming black hair. Teardrop pearls as big as a man’s thumb shimmered and swayed around her face. A triple strand of matched teardrop pearls the size of grapes fell from the back of the cap down to the cleft in the woman’s rhythmically swinging ass.
“Companion, huh? As in mistress?” Kyle said.
“It’s common enough. When some well-heeled Asian men come to the States, they leave their wives at home with the kiddies and in-laws.”
“Afraid their little women will bolt to greener pastures if they get the chance?” Kyle asked dryly.
“Wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t be fenced like that in the first place.” Kyle pushed through the hotel doors into the lobby. “Let’s try the atrium. That’s where the Jade Trader has its display. SunCo’s stuff will be there, too. Ever since China took over Hong Kong, the Sun clan has been whittling away at the Tangs.”
Archer smiled slightly. “Been doing some research?”
“If I had to do research in order to name the competition, I wouldn’t be much good to Donovan International, would I?”
“You’re really serious about dragging Donovan Inc. into the jade trade, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been serious about it ever since I held my first five-thousand-year-old jade bi,” Kyle said simply. “I’ll never know why the piece was carved, but I do know that someone way back then was like me. He loved the smooth satin weight of jade. Otherwise he never would have tackled a stone that hard with little more than rawhide, sticks, and grit.”
When Kyle would have turned and started toward the atrium, Archer put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “There’s only a limited market for Neolithic jade artifacts,” Archer said neutrally.
“The market is expanding every day. Even New York has caught on. Besides, there’s a lot more to jade than Neolithic artifacts.”
“Do you feel expert enough to advise us on the full spectrum of jade, to go one-on-one with the Pacific Rim’s best?”
“Not yet. But Lianne Blakely is. Or didn’t your contact mention that?”
“He didn’t make a point of it. He just said she was a kind of back door into the closed world of the Tang Consortium.”
“Back door, huh? Okay, let’s see if I can learn more from sweet Lianne than she can learn from me before she’s finished using me for whatever old man Wen Zhi Tang has in mind.”
Archer blinked. “That’s scary.”
“What?”
“I understood you.”
Kyle forged a way through the crowd with Archer at his side. Once inside the atrium, the crush of people broke into clots centered around various exhibits of the corporations that were donating pieces to the auction.
“Forget it,” Kyle said, pulling Archer away from an exhibit of black South Seas pearls. “Lianne Blakely is into jade, remember?”
“Any harm in looking at something else?”
“If it’s you and pearls, yes.”
“As bad as you and jade?”
“Worse,” Kyle said, looking around.
Against the towering greenery-and-glass backdrop of the atrium, people from three continents and several island nations revolved around the central fountain, creating a kaleidoscope of languages and fashion. The fountain itself was striking—a clear, cantilevered glass sculpture of rectangles and rhomboids where light and water danced with a grace people could only envy. The sweet music of the water blended with the languages of Hong Kong, Japan, and several regions of China, as well as with English accented by countries as distant as Australia or Britain and as close as Canada.
“The jade must be on the other side of the atrium,” Kyle said.
“Why?”
“Most of the Anglos are right here, crowded around the rubies and sapphires from Burma or the Colombian emeralds or Russian diamonds. Jade is a more subtle, civilized taste.”
“Bull,” Archer said mildly. “Civilization has nothing to do with it. Jade was available in ancient China. Diamonds weren’t. Same goes for Europeans. Clear gemstones were more available than jade. Tradition is created from the materials at hand.”
Kyle and Archer continued arguing about culture, civilization, and gems while they circled around the glittering fountain. On the way to Asian jade, they passed museum-quality, pre-Columbian jade artifacts from Mexico and Central and South America. Fright masks of gold and turquoise grinned or snarled, scaring off demons whose names were known only to people thousands of years dead. Mixed in among the artifacts were modern examples of gold and jade art.
Everything, ancient or modern, had a card in front of it naming the corporation which owned the object. Corporate display of support for the arts was as much the purpose of the evening as the charity auction that would precede the ball.
By the time the Donovan brothers came to the section reserved for offshore Chinese exhibits, Kyle was wishing he was aboard the Tomorrow, sharpening hooks and tying leaders for a dawn fishing raid. He snagged a glass of red wine from a passing waiter’s tray, sipped, and grimaced. At a function like this, he had expected higher quality.
“Bingo,” Archer said softly.
Kyle forgot the mediocre wine. “Where?”
“To the left of SunCo’s jade screens, near the Sikh in the jeweled turban.”
Though they were less than ten feet away, Kyle at first didn’t see any woman. Then the Sikh stepped aside.
Kyle stared. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“Hell.”
Kyle didn’t know what he had been expecting, but he knew Lianne Blakely wasn’t it. With a combination of skepticism, disgust, and grudging male interest, he studied the sleek, petite young woman who supposedly was so smitten with him that she had been watching him from afar for two weeks.
Yeah. Right. He was standing close enough to admire the fit of her panty hose, and her patrician little nose was buried in an exhibit of Warring States jade ornaments as though she was alone in a museum.
Then Lianne turned and looked at Kyle. Her wide, tilted eyes were the color of cognac. She hesitated, almost as if she might have recognized him. Then she shifted the thin strap of her tiny white silk purse on her shoulder and went back to studying jade as though no one else in the room existed, certainly not a man she was interested in meeting.
“You’re sure that’s her?” Kyle asked quietly, praying it wasn’t.
“I just said so, didn’t I?”
“She doesn’t look like an international art thief.”
“Really?” Archer asked softly. “How many have you known?”
“Not as many as yo
u, I’m sure. So tell me, is she?”
“A thief?”
“Yeah.”
“They don’t wear labels.”
Kyle didn’t say anything more. He simply watched Lianne Blakely.
Archer looked from his brother to Lianne, wondering why Kyle had come to a point like a bird dog scenting warm pheasant. Lianne was attractive, maybe even beautiful in an exotic way, but she certainly wasn’t in the gorgeous-companion category. The simple white dress she wore fit well enough, but wasn’t slit from hem to crotch or throat to pubic bone in order to draw and hold a man’s eye. The jade bracelet she wore was doubtless Burmese and of the highest quality, as was her necklace, yet Kyle didn’t seem to have noticed the jewelry. He was staring at the woman and ignoring the jade.
Not good.
“Maybe we should forget the whole thing,” Archer said abruptly. “I’ll put off the trip to Japan and Australia, give you more time to heal up.”
“I told you, my shoulder is good as new,” Kyle said without looking away from Lianne.
“Nothing is good as new after a bullet.”
Kyle shrugged, then winced. His shoulder still ached when the weather was setting up for rain. In the Pacific Northwest, that was pretty often. “I know much more about jade than you do.”
“Considering how little I know, that’s not much of an argument for your participation in this little waltz.”
Kyle smiled crookedly. The non sequitur hadn’t even made Archer pause before he answered. That was the good thing about family: they knew you well enough to follow your thoughts.
It was also the bad thing about family. That kind of knowing could be claustrophobic when there were six kids. But Kyle had learned the hard way that running off to the other side of the world didn’t prove anything except what he already knew.
He was four years and one century younger than his oldest brother.
“What’s really bothering you?” Kyle asked, looking at Archer. “Afraid another woman will grab me by my dumb handle and lead me into trouble?”
“If you get hurt because of me, Susa will have my butt on a canvas stretcher.”