Still no one following. Or if they were, they were too slick to spot. It would be interesting to see if he and Lianne picked up anyone between the valet parking and the south door of the hotel.
“Let’s go in this way,” Kyle said, guiding her past the main entrance.
“Any particular reason?”
“Because I can.”
She blinked, looked at him, and smiled suddenly. “That answer would cover a lot of questions.”
“That’s why I like it.”
Casually Kyle glanced over his shoulder. No one had pulled into valet parking behind them. He opened the hotel door for Lianne, walked in after her, and quickly scanned the collection of luxury shops. All closed. All empty. Several people were smoking outside the main entrance of the hotel, but no one was conveniently puffing near the south door.
Inside or outside the hotel, Kyle didn’t see Archer, but he didn’t doubt that his brother somehow was in a position to see him. When Archer said he would do something, it got done. The only other person Kyle had met with Archer’s combination of brains, integrity, and lethal training was his sister Honor’s husband, Jake Mallory.
“The penthouse elevator is this way, just around the corner,” Lianne said.
As they rounded the corner, a dark, slender, very handsome Asian man standing near the penthouse elevator burst into a cascade of enthusiastic Chinese. He took one of Lianne’s hands and stroked it repeatedly. For a Chinese male, it was an unusual display of public affection, unless he had been raised among a very wealthy, fairly Westernized overseas Chinese family.
Lianne answered the familiar greeting with a professional smile that made Kyle appreciate just how much warmth was in the smiles she had been giving to him.
Maybe he wouldn’t be sleeping single after all.
But first he would have to detach the incredibly good-looking leech from Lianne’s hand. No matter the man’s feline, almost feminine beauty, the signals he was sending out were heterosexual and as blunt as a hard-on.
“Kyle,” Lianne said smoothly, “this is Lee Chin Tang. Mr. Tang is an executive with the Tang Consortium. He doesn’t speak English.”
“Am I pleased to meet him,” Kyle said without inflection.
“Moderately, but not excessively. He’s acting as official greeter for the party.”
As Lianne looked at Lee’s dark, liquid eyes and raven hair, she waited for the slash of regret or anger she always felt when she saw him. Nothing came but a bittersweet acceptance that whatever love she had once felt for him no longer existed. With another polite smile, she removed her fingers from his grasp.
“Yes, the man with me is Kyle Donovan,” Lianne said in clipped Cantonese. “Please take us up to the suite. Uncle Wen,” she added, using the common Chinese honorific uncle as she would use mister or sir in English, “will be eager to hear about the results of the auction.”
“You left early,” Lee said. “Is it true the Jade Emperor’s Tomb has been found and sold to a foreign devil?”
“Ask Wen Zhi Tang,” Lianne retorted before she could think better of it. “He knows more about jade than I do.”
“Why did you leave the auction early? Where did you go? Was this man with you?”
“There was no need to stay at the auction,” Lianne said, answering the only question she would. “Like me, Uncle Wen is not interested in Pacific Rim gems.”
Strong, narrow fingers caressed her hand, her wrist, the soft skin beneath. “I have missed you.”
“How kind of you to say so.”
Beneath the polite answer, old anger flared for an instant in Lianne. Even six months ago, she would have given the earth to hear those words from Lee’s full lips. Now it was all she could do to act professional.
Well, not entirely professional. There was a very personal, very female part of her that was delighted to encounter Lee while she was on the arm of Kyle Donovan, a man who drew a woman’s eye whether the woman was Chinese or Caucasian. Glancing up at Kyle through her eyelashes, she smiled with frank, female approval.
Both men registered the difference in her smile. Suddenly expressionless, Lee let go of Lianne, stuck a key in the elevator, and motioned them inside.
“Good thing I don’t wear glasses,” Kyle said softly as the doors swished shut. “That smile you just gave me would have fogged them up inside and out.”
Lianne’s smile widened into laughter. She felt years younger, almost giddy. It was a great relief to file Lee Chin Tang under “Old Business,” shut the mental drawer, and be fairly certain that she wouldn’t open it again in the middle of the night, when memories were especially cruel.
“Should I take the smile personally,” Kyle asked, “or were you just trying to piss Lee off?”
“I wasn’t trying to make anyone mad. I was just glad to be here and now instead of there and then.”
“Would it help if I asked what you were talking about?”
“Nope.”
“Just checking.”
“No problem.” Lianne tucked her arm through Kyle’s and grinned up at him. “Has anyone ever told you what a fine, handsome, really world-class stuffed elephant you make?”
“Trust me, you’re the first.”
“I’ll bet you say that to all the girls.”
He grinned. “Only the ones who might believe me.”
The elevator stopped with stomach-curdling speed. Lee punched the Door Open button and held it down.
“To your right,” he said in Chinese. As Lianne walked by him, his left hand shot out and wrapped around her free arm, stopping her. “Better that you be my cherished concubine than a foreign devil’s whore.”
“I am neither concubine nor whore. Let go of me. Johnny won’t be pleased if his honored guest, Kyle Donovan, is late.”
“Johnny is only Number Three Son.”
“Far better than zero,” she said coolly. “That is your number, Lee. Zero. You married a distant, undistinguished cousin of Uncle Wen’s and changed your name to Tang. You are no man’s son.”
“Do not speak so to me, female spawn of a foreign whore!”
“It would be my pleasure not to speak to you at all.”
Lee’s smile was as cold as his eyes. “May your fondest wish come true.”
It was an old Chinese curse. Lianne’s eyes narrowed and her chin went up. She looked at Lee’s hand on her arm and thought of the pepper spray in her purse.
The elevator beeped, announcing that it had been held open too long.
“Put a hustle on, sweetheart,” Kyle said blandly. “That snack we ate at the auction just wore off.”
“Sorry, I—” Lianne’s breath caught when she looked up at Kyle. His voice had been so neutral that the cold anger in his eyes was totally unexpected.
“Why don’t you tell this elevator jockey to take his thumb off the button?” Kyle asked in the same calm tone. “Or should I just pick him up and carry him along for you like a pet?”
The beeping became a buzzer.
Kyle glanced at Lee. Slowly Lee released Lianne’s arm.
The elevator kept buzzing while Lianne and Kyle walked toward the penthouse suite. He felt Lee’s black eyes measuring him for a shroud every step of the way. Not a jade shroud, either. The good old-fashioned linen kind.
Laughter, a woman’s voice wailing a Chinese song, and cigarette smoke flowed out of the Tang suite into the hallway. Lianne’s steps slowed. The noise surprised her. In the past, whenever she had been with a member of the Tang family, the atmosphere had been calm, almost silent, little but the whisper of Wen’s soft slippers against wood or the dry rustle of his words as he described jade pieces that had been carved five thousand years before the birth of Christ.
“Second thoughts?” Kyle asked.
Lianne winced as a man’s off-key voice joined the woman’s in dreadful harmony. “I’m wondering if Wen’s hearing has failed along with his eyes.”
“Don’t worry. Family gatherings are always noisy.”
“I
wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to one.”
Surprised, Kyle looked down at her. She was visibly composing herself, pulling what Americans would call her “game face” into place, her emotions retreating behind a coolly polite facade. For her, a family gathering was obviously more a battlefield than a place of safety and relaxation.
Lianne stepped into the smoky room and scanned it quickly for familiar faces. Two things registered immediately. The first was that only Tang men had been included in the party. The second was the nature of the women who had been invited to serve the men. All were young, striking, and for hire.
At that moment Lianne was intensely grateful her mother hadn’t been included in the roster of female attendants. The humiliation would have been intense. And intentional.
“Looks like a lively family,” Kyle said, glancing at the fifteen or so men of all ages and the handful of young women who were scattered around the penthouse’s large living room. “Where do we start? Or is it just a free-for-all?”
Lianne wanted to start by turning around and heading back to the elevator, but it was too late. Johnny was already walking across the foyer. His left hand held a nearly empty plate. His other hand was out, American-style, ready to grasp Kyle’s.
“I knew I could count on Lianne’s sense of duty,” Johnny said with a big smile, shaking hands. He nodded to Lianne and then focused again on Kyle. “Come in and meet everyone. I’ll translate for you.”
Kyle looked at Lianne. Hunch and intelligence together told him that she was certainly angry and very probably hurt, but her game face was excellent. If she resented being dismissed by her father like an employee, nothing showed on her face. Perhaps she felt nothing. Perhaps she was simply an errand girl whose errand was finished. She had produced Kyle Donovan for the Tangs, and now they had no further need of her presence.
Then Kyle saw the pulse beating hotly in Lianne’s neck and knew she wasn’t nearly as unaffected by Johnny’s brush-off as she appeared.
“No need to take yourself away from your family,” Kyle told Johnny. “Lianne is an excellent translator.”
“Of course. I keep forgetting that she spent a couple of years in Hong Kong.” He turned to Lianne and spoke in rapid Cantonese. “You did well, but do not monopolize our guest. I want Harry to meet him.”
“After Uncle Wen, I will of course introduce Mr. Donovan to Number Two Son,” she said.
Impatience thinned the line of Johnny’s full mouth, but only for a moment. “So very proper and Chinese.”
“You are very gracious.”
“After we make the necessary introductions,” Johnny said, “help the others serve drinks. I will act as translator for Kyle Donovan.”
Lianne’s eyelids flinched, the only outward sign of her sudden fury. “I think not, Mr. Tang. I am not a trained companion. Nor am I an untrained one.”
“So very proper and American,” Johnny said.
“You are kind to notice.”
“You would do better to remember that you are here at the sufferance of the family of Tang. Do not make your mother lose face by showing less than the manners she would expect.”
Chinese culture dictated that Lianne accept the reprimand with bowed head and many apologies. Part of her intended to do just that; then she saw a willowy young female kneel at the feet of Harry Tang and offer tidbits to him with a pair of ivory chopsticks. He didn’t even look away from the man he was talking to. It was typical of the treatment women expected in Asia.
And Lianne was damned if she would bow her head and take it like a good Asian girl. Not here. Not in America.
“I have an excellent memory,” she said, meeting her father’s eyes squarely. “It is my only value for the family of Tang. As for my manners, they are what one would expect from the daughter of an adulterer and his paramour.”
Chapter 9
Kyle didn’t understand the words father and daughter were speaking, but the body language needed no translation. Lianne looked icy. Johnny looked like a man who had just taken a slap across the face and was about to return the favor.
“Sweetheart,” Kyle said, smiling engagingly at Lianne, “I hate to interrupt, but I’m hungry enough to go back and eat that damn elevator jockey. Think it would be possible for you to translate all those buffet dishes for me?”
Lianne turned away from her father. Her expression softened as she spoke to Kyle. “Of course. You’re the Tangs’ honored guest. Johnny will explain to Uncle Wen how hungry you are. Won’t you, Johnny?” she asked carelessly.
An odd combination of hope and anger crossed Johnny’s handsome face. Then he nodded curtly and headed back across the room to a place where an old man sat with a beautiful girl at his feet. She was playing tunes on a yueqin, a Chinese “moon guitar.” Neither the tonal scale nor the style of singing owed anything to Western traditions.
As Johnny started talking to Wen, another young, lithe woman hurried over to take the nearly empty plate from Johnny’s hand. Without a word from him, she went toward the buffet.
“I suppose it was rude of me to insist on being fed before the introductions,” Kyle said.
“No more rude than Johnny speaking to me in Cantonese in front of you.” Or dismissing her as though she was a badly trained employee.
A corner of Kyle’s mouth turned up. “That’s kind of what I thought.”
As they crossed the room to the buffet, Lianne recognized two of the young men as her half brothers, Johnny Jr. and Thomas. She didn’t wave or speak in greeting, for the simple reason that she had never been introduced to them. Johnny’s sons, along with cousins of various degrees, were debating the uses of corruption on mainland China, the relative worth of political contributions in America as opposed to outright bribes in Hong Kong, and the merits of Chinese versus American or Canadian banks.
“What’s that all about?” Kyle asked, gesturing toward three particularly passionate debaters.
“The young man on the left is trying to convince his uncle to put more money into mainland Chinese banks in order to win favors in bidding for construction jobs or import permits.”
Kyle was familiar with the argument. The Donovan clan tended to divide along age lines when it came to international finance. “What does his uncle have to say about it?”
“He doesn’t want to leave any money hostage to the next political turnaround on the mainland,” Lianne said. “He would rather buy a few key bureaucrats outright and get favorable treatment that way.”
“The nephew is a lot louder.”
“That’s because he’s losing and he knows it. The older the man, the more experience he has with China’s always unpredictable, sometimes self-destructive politics.”
“Once burned, twice shy?”
“If you’ve only been burned once, you haven’t been doing business in China very long.”
The buffet was enough to make a hungry man salivate, but Kyle was the only man there. The other males were all being served food wherever they sat or stood.
“Bet I lose face by serving myself,” Kyle said indifferently, reaching for a plate.
Quickly Lianne took the plate from him. “I should have thought of that. I’ll serve you.”
Casually he looked around the room, not missing any detail of the interaction between the men and the young women. He turned back to the buffet and took another plate for himself. “Thanks, but I’ll serve myself. I haven’t hired you for this night or any other.”
Though red flared on Lianne’s cheeks, she spoke without emotion in her voice. “The customs in Asia and America are quite different.”
“Some are the same.”
“Please, I don’t mind serving you.”
“If we really were in America, instead of in Hong Kong East,” Kyle said, helping himself to a mound of garlic chicken, “who served whom would be a matter of convenience, not sexual politics and individual face. But we’re in a different place.”
“That’s why I should—”
“If I serve
myself tonight,” he continued, gently ignoring Lianne’s attempt to talk, “it’s no skin off my, um, face. If you serve me, it says something about you that I’d deck a man for saying out loud.”
“You’re—”
“Very American,” Kyle interrupted. “We settled that earlier. Want some garlic chicken, if only in self-defense?”
“Yes,” she said quietly. An odd feeling expanded through her, both gratitude and something more. Something hungry. She touched Kyle’s wrist, taking a very female pleasure in his heat and leashed strength. “Thank you for understanding what very few people would have.”
“No thanks needed,” he said, piling chicken on her plate. “All part of being a stuffed elephant.”
“I think it has more to do with being American, and male. And…good.”
The husky hesitation of Lianne’s voice made Kyle want to put down the plates and take a loving bite out of her. Instead, he gave her a lazy kind of smile that had nothing to do with being good.
Breath filled her throat and yearning emptied her mind. She realized it would be very, very good to lose herself in passion with Kyle Donovan. No more fear, no more worry, no more Jade Emperor looming like death on her personal horizon.
“Kyle…?”
“Any time,” he said, watching her. “And if you keep looking at me like that, the time will be now.”
Startled, Lianne looked from Kyle’s mouth to his eyes. It was a mistake. She could see herself too clearly in them. She could see other things, too. The two of them naked, her hands clenching on his biceps as he lifted her and slid into her, filling her until pleasure overflowed.
Harsh words cut across her fantasy. Johnny Jr. was arguing in Cantonese with his younger brother, saying that he would have to wait a few more years before their father would approve of any marriage at all, much less one to a foreign ghost. Better that they do as their father had—marry Chinese and go whoring in whatever cultures and races tickled their cocks.
“Hey,” Kyle said, smiling despite the sexual heat flooding his body. “Don’t go all pale on me. I won’t really ravish you among the egg rolls.”