“You were innocent, terrified, and completely alone. Len never should have abandoned you. That’s why I was angry. It was as close as I ever came to giving Len the fight he thought he wanted, no holds barred. All that kept me from beating him unconscious was that two of us had a better chance of finding you than one.”
In the dim light of the bar, Archer’s eyes were narrowed, feral. Dangerous. Hannah swallowed uneasily. “I’ve often wondered why Len came back. At first I thought it was because he loved me. But he didn’t.”
“You touched everything that was good in him, Hannah. That’s all anyone can ask.”
Pain drew her face into taut lines that the black wig made even more grim. “It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t what he needed. I only made him worse.”
“No.”
“Yes,” she countered bluntly. “After he was paralyzed he needed someone older, someone who needed him less and could help him more.”
“Paralysis changed Len’s body, not his soul. He wasn’t an easy man when he could walk. He wasn’t an easy man when he went on wheels. You didn’t make him what he was. You couldn’t make him different. Only Len could do that, and Len didn’t want to.”
“If I hadn’t made him marry me—”
“You didn’t make him marry you,” Archer cut in. “No one ever made Len do one damned thing he didn’t want to.” He glanced down toward the dim, narrow hallway where the prostitute and her trick had disappeared. Nothing moved in the shadows. “Come on.”
Relieved that they were leaving the depressing barroom, Hannah stood quickly. She made a sound of dismay when Archer turned her away from the front door. Instead, he urged her down the reeking hallway, opened the door to the men’s bathroom, and looked around.
Empty.
Without a word he dragged Hannah past a stained urinal toward the single stall. What the place lacked in size, it made up for in sheer quantity of dirt.
“What if someone comes in here?” Hannah asked, jumpy as only a woman can be in a men’s public toilet. “What will he think?”
“When you change into this, he won’t have to think. He’ll be sure I hauled you in here for a quickie.”
While Archer talked, he rummaged in the duffel. Rapidly he pulled out a short black skirt, black lace bikini panties, and a black-and-pink striped crop top so tight there wasn’t room for a bra beneath. A pair of black high-heeled sandals completed the outfit. What there was of it. Without the jacket—which Archer left in the duffel—there wasn’t much more concealment in the clothing than in an Australian bikini.
“What is that?” Hannah asked, staring at the hot pink and black stripes.
“Clothes. Yours, to be precise.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Screaming pink isn’t my color,” he said blandly, dangling the stretchy top from his index finger. “Stripes don’t do much for me, either.”
“I think you’d look smashing in that. Every man needs a jockstrap that looks like an embarrassed tiger.”
“It’s not a jockstrap.” He held it out to her. “It’s a blouse.”
“No.”
“And this is the skirt that goes with it.”
“Not until you tell me why.”
“Pink turns me on.”
“We didn’t have it earlier and you did just fine.”
He smiled a remembering kind of smile. “Yeah, we did. Imagine what we’ll do now.”
Hannah hesitated, then gave Archer a smile that made him wish they were in bed. “I’m imagining.” She reached for the buttons on her blouse. “Want to imagine with me?”
“Hell, yes. But I know better.”
Reluctantly he turned his back and went to the pitted sink. If he watched her undress, he would do something really stupid, like take her right here, right now, as though she was bought and paid for with a twenty-dollar bill.
A turn of the tap told him this would be another cold-water shave. Grimacing, he pulled out the disposable razor—April Joy had only sent one—and shaved off his mustache with swift, painful strokes. He rinsed the sink carefully before he pulled out his own disguise and looked it over.
The change of clothes began with simple and shockingly expensive black slacks and a white silk shirt. A Krugerand on a heavy gold chain told him that he was expected to wear his shirt in the European style, unbuttoned halfway to his belt. He wondered if April knew that the chain would nip and gnaw at the hair on his chest.
The shoes answered his question. Though they took up most of the space in the duffel, they were a size too small.
April must have laughed herself into a coma at the thought of his discomfort. She knew everything about him, including his shoe size. She certainly knew him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t the type to flash a chunk of gold against his hairy chest. But once he was dressed, he would be a fit partner for Hannah’s outfit: money and barely bridled sex.
When he turned around, she was struggling to zip up the skirt’s back zipper. He stood where he was and stared. Just stared. He had had her naked, had licked every bit of her, and still he was rocked back by the sexy sway of her breasts beneath the tight top and the hot curves of her long, long legs.
“Why do they put zippers in skirts this tight?” she muttered. “Why not just spray the ruddy thing on and be done with it?”
“Let me try it.”
The husky timbre of Archer’s voice brought Hannah’s head up. The blunt male appreciation in his eyes made her feel sleek, sexy, and primitive as a cat in heat. “I wish you didn’t have to shave your beard.”
“Why?” he asked, walking around behind her.
“I liked the feel of it . . . everywhere.”
He gritted his teeth and tried to think of all the reasons he couldn’t do what he wanted to do. What she wanted him to do. The blood hammering through his body made it almost impossible to think. Carefully he pulled up the zipper.
She cleared her throat. “Thanks. My fingers kept slipping off the tab. What’s this stuff made of?” she asked, running her fingers up and down the skirt, from waist to midthigh hem. “It feels like silk, looks like silk, but doesn’t wrinkle.”
Archer looked away from the narrow, long fingers that were running up and down Hannah’s hips. “I don’t know what it is. Have you ever worn contacts?”
“Nope.”
He held out a tiny box to her, explained the procedure, and demonstrated by opening a similar box and putting his own contacts in. She looked critically at the result. His gray-green-blue eyes were transformed into a muddy shade of blue.
“I like the original better.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” he said dryly. “Give me the wig while you put in your contacts.”
Trying not to think about the appalling condition of the sink, she leaned toward the dingy mirror and went to work. She had one contact in and was blinking furiously when someone hammered on the door.
“Hey, mate,” called a voice. “I gotta piss.”
Archer growled some words that made Hannah wince. She put in the other contact and looked at herself. A pair of brown eyes looked back at her.
It was unnerving.
“Put this on,” he said, holding out the wig.
She looked from the neat French braid Archer had made in the wig to his blue eyes. “You keep surprising me.”
“Wait until you see what I can do with cosmetics.”
“You’re joking.”
He reached into the duffel and came up with a handful of makeup. “Tell me that in a few minutes.”
A few breathless minutes later—Archer stood very close while he put makeup on her—Hannah looked at herself in the mirror again, made a startled sound, and leaned in closer over the sink. Like the clothes, her makeup sent a message of expensive sex. Very expensive. Very sexy. “You weren’t joking.”
Archer looked at the skirt flirting with revealing her tempting cheeks as she bent over the sink. Before he knew he was going to do it, he slid one hand up between her thighs. The skir
t was like her, so tight that there was barely room for him inside.
She made a startled, husky sound as he eased aside the slim thong of her underwear and stroked soft flesh until she shivered. Her eyes met his in the mirror while liquid silk licked over his fingertips.
“I don’t have much won’t power where you’re concerned,” he said, his voice gritty.
“Won’t power?” she asked huskily.
“As in I won’t bend you over my arm and make you scream with pleasure.”
She hesitated, then sighed. “Are you sure?”
“No,” he admitted.
The hammering came on the door again.
With a curse, Archer forced himself to stop teasing both of them. “Put this on.”
Hannah took the pink jacket that dangled from his big hand. It fit her perfectly. The hem of the jacket skimmed the hem of the skirt. Now she looked like ultra-high-class sin, the kind only kings or mafia princes could afford.
Archer whistled softly. April Joy had outdone herself. It almost made him forgive her for the black loafers that were gnawing on his toes.
“The pearls have to go,” he said after a moment. “Someone who looks like you wouldn’t be caught dead in anything less than the best.”
Hannah made a face at him, but removed the pearls and watched them vanish into the duffel. He pulled out a tiny, sleek, black leather purse with a long braided strap and solid gold designer initials on the side.
“Your passport is inside,” he said.
She froze. “Passport?”
Rather than answering, he opened the bathroom door and ushered her out. The man pacing the hallway began swearing. Then his bleary eyes focused on Hannah. His jaw dropped and he forgot all about the beer stretching his bladder. He stared at her until she vanished out the door into the alley.
Archer smiled rather grimly to himself as he shut the back door behind them. The man would never forget Hannah, but he wouldn’t be able to describe anything more of her than the swing and sway of a very nice ass.
When they were out on the street, Archer smiled. “You look very nice, Mrs. South.”
“Thank you, Mr . . . . ?”
“South.”
“We’re married?”
“It says so on the passports.” He took a ring box from his pants pocket. “Here.”
Hannah flipped open the velvet lid, stared, and looked hastily at Archer. “Are these real?”
“Probably.” Considering that April Joy went shopping with Archer’s money, almost certainly. April would have relished spending every dime. But there was no need to tell Hannah that. She was nervous enough about the rings as it was. “Want me to get them appraised?”
Openmouthed, she stared at the rings. The stones were set in what looked and felt like platinum—cool, heavy, hard. The wedding band was a wide circlet set with flush-mounted, square, colorless diamonds. The engagement band featured a marquise-shaped silver-blue diamond that was at least three carats, set with large, triangular, colorless diamonds on either side.
“I can’t wear this,” she said, swallowing.
“Wrong size?” He picked up the rings and her left hand. Easily he slid the rings into place. “Nope. Perfect. Let’s go, sweetheart. We don’t want to miss our plane.”
She braced herself and didn’t budge. “Not until you tell me what’s going on.”
“Simple. We’re going after the Black Trinity.”
Fourteen
From the air, Hong Kong was a silent, glittering white dream sleeping between blue ocean and black land. From the ground, Hong Kong was an exhilarating nightmare. Noise. Traffic. Smells. Crowds. Urgency. The rapid rise and fall of the Chinese language ran like a seething river through the city’s high-rise canyons. There was calm to be found inside walled residences, those private oases of proportion and elegance and silence. There was no calm on the streets. The streets were for reckless commerce, sharp-edged and unapologetic.
The change in government known as the Turnover hadn’t diminished Hong Kong’s wealth or ambition. The newspapers printed communist sentiments and exhortations daily, but the city was fueled by a breathtaking capitalism. Hong Kong was a neon-flashing city of gamblers whose sheer dedication to money made Las Vegas look like a sixty-five-watt bingo parlor run by parish priests.
The streets boiled with pedestrians locked in unequal battle with delivery trucks, taxis, buses, motorbikes, bicycles, and private cars. Beneath the haze of vehicle exhaust, white was the most common color of the buildings. Dazzling rainbow bursts of neon signs climbed entire buildings, calling attention to commerce. Black was the usual color of clothes. Smoke blue was the color of the air in the streets where sidewalk vendors grilled snacks on braziers for the endless, restless, relentless tide of humanity.
Archer tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder and pointed toward the sidewalk. Without looking at traffic, the driver pulled over. Hannah tried not to look, either. Despite her dislike of the rain forest’s primitive villages, she had never been comfortable in big cities. They were exciting. They were fascinating. They were exotic. But after a while, a numbing sort of overload set in. Then all she wanted was silence and space. Cities offered neither.
“Almost there,” Archer said. He tugged down the black cowboy hat he wore. He had picked it up from one of Hong Kong’s remarkable street vendors. Wisely, he had declined the dazzling diamond “Rolex” the same vendor was ready to part with for ver’ tiny cash, sir-sir, ver’ tiny.
“Anyone following us?” Hannah asked.
“We lost the last one in the meat market, when those German tour buses unloaded.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“Them,” he corrected. “No. I just recognized the moves. But you could lose an elephant in that market. That’s why I went there.”
Hannah swallowed and said nothing. Hong Kong’s immense open-air food market had reminded her of a jungle without trees, Genesis without pages. Every kind of creature that walked, flew, jumped, swam, or slithered waited in cages for housewives and cooks to bargain over the cost of fresh protein for dinner. The cats and dogs were difficult enough for her to bear, but the monkeys were the worst, so nearly human in their silent pleas to be freed from the cage of heat and smoke and noise. Eventually, this meal or the next, they would get their wish.
Shuddering, Hannah put the memory of the cages out of her mind.
“Over there,” Archer said.
She followed his glance and saw the store without even having to stretch her neck; when they weren’t being followed, being tall enough to look over the heads of most of the street crowd was an advantage. She couldn’t translate the ideographs that flashed over the shop, but the owner obviously had his eye on world trade. Translations of the Chinese symbols were provided in Japanese and Korean ideographs, the Russian Cyrillic alphabet, plus the more familiar alphabet used by the French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English speakers.
“No Arabic,” Hannah said.
“No Arabian buyers.”
“Why? Do they like hard gems?”
“They like diamonds as well as the next guy, but the Arab princes and oil sheiks have treasure rooms that are jammed with ropes of natural pearls,” Archer said. “They’ve been harvesting naturals for two thousand years in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Gulf of Aden.”
“Bet they hated Kokichi Mikimoto.”
Archer looked around. Despite being literally shoulder to shoulder with other pedestrians, he and Hannah might as well have been alone. The people dividing around them were talking fast in Chinese, walking faster, and smoking as though there was a million-dollar prize for finishing the most cigarettes in a day.
“Are you talking about the guy who patented the technique for culturing round pearls?” Archer asked.
She nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “Mikimoto’s not a hero in the Gulf. He blew the bottom out of the pearl trade when he destroyed the rarity of the pearl.”
“But not the b
eauty.”
“The child of moonbeams. Tears of the gods. The soul of the sea.” Archer smiled. “Pearls are all of that and more.”
“But not cultured pearls, is that it?”
“Not to the Arabs. They say cultured pearls are inferior to naturals, and they’ll say it as long as they have natural pearls supporting their currency along with the rest of the royal treasury.”
“What do you think?”
While people jostled and chattered and poured by on either side in a human tide, Archer looked across the bobbing heads at the window where a gleaming South Seas necklace was the centerpiece of one display. The choker was made of round pearls that had an unusual, almost tangerine orient. “I think that gem-quality natural pearls are far too rare—and therefore astronomically expensive—to support any kind of extensive pearl trade. Fortunately for Chang’s Sea Gems stores, the rest of the world isn’t prejudiced against cultured pearls.”
“I admit to a prejudice in favor of black pearls,” Hannah said, looking at a matinee-length necklace that had a lovely dark luster. She would have liked to get closer to the window, but the crowd was like a moving, impenetrable barrier.
“Must be your American parents,” Archer said. “Asians prefer silver-white. South Americans like South Seas gold. It’s classic white for Europe, pink for the low-ticket American Akoya trade, and black for the American luxury trade.”
She leaned very close to Archer. “If the Asians don’t like black pearls, why are we here?”
“Japan loves black pearls. For the right gems, they’ll pay twice what Americans would.”
“Then we should be in Japan.”
“Last year. Or maybe next year. But right now, the yen is very weak against the dollar. Whoever has the goods will sell them where the currency and demand are the strongest.”
“America?”
Archer nodded.
“So why are we in Hong Kong?” she asked.
“When it comes to luxury goods, Hong Kong is the commercial crossroads of the world. If someone wants a quick transaction and is willing to settle for a cut-rate price, this would be the place.”