Heart of the Dragon Read online

  DEBORAH SMITH

  #498 TOO FAR TO FALL

  by Linda Jenkins

  #499 THE LADY IN RED

  by Fayrene Preston

  #500 MOONLIGHT AND SHADOWS

  by Glenna McReynolds

  #501 THE SECRET LIFE OF

  ELIZABETH McCADE

  by Peggy Webb

  #502 STARFIRE

  by Laura Taylor

  #503 HEART OF THE DRAGON

  by Deborah Smith

  “Can we sit down and hold a civilized argument?” Kash asked as he glanced around. “I never conduct important discussions in boudoirs smelling of cinnamon bath soap. Do you think of yourself as a cinnamon bun, a cookie, or a steaming cup of hot spiced cider?”

  Rebecca stiffened and gave him a fierce look. “A cold vanilla milkshake with poison in it. Please, take a big sip.”

  “Invitations were made to be accepted.”

  He pulled her to him and kissed her lightly. Her sharp gasp broke against his mouth. He held her in a loose embrace, one she could easily pull away from, but instead of shoving him away, she twisted her mouth tightly on his. Kash was astonished at his impulse and her reaction, but he refused to break the kiss.

  He felt her tremble against him. Slowly her hand dropped to his shoulder and clenched his soft cotton undershirt. Her mouth was as mobile as his own, and just as aggressive. Waves of desire shot through him, stunning him. He was far from being a stranger to desire, but not this scalding, elemental sense of losing himself in her.

  Dragging her hands over his shoulders, Rebecca kneaded the hard muscles and felt them flex in response. He was the shadowy force she’d been drawn to all her life, the visitor in her nighttime dreams, the first man who’d ever caused her to forget everything but the primitive need for fulfillment.…

  HEART OF THE DRAGON

  A Bantam Book I October 1991

  LOVESWEPT® and the wave device are registered

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  Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

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  Copyright © 1991 by Deborah Smith.

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  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Loveswept Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  One

  Though he stood in cool, elegant silence at the window, Kashadlin Santelli’s insides churned with impatience as he awaited the arrival of a woman he’d never met. His stillness came from lifelong practice, from an emotional distance he cultivated as a shield. But questions boiled inside him, and he leaned closer to the large, ebony-rimmed window two stories above the street.

  Kash stroked the pale silk curtain, thinking distractedly that it was as smooth and soft as a woman’s skin, and as cool as Rebecca Brown’s nerves must be. The combination intrigued him. She must have extraordinary self-confidence if she was here in Bangkok for the reason he suspected. The Nalinat family was inventive, to have gone all the way to America to hire a spy.

  Yes, Rebecca Brown was a puzzle. He would meet her, assess her intentions, and judge her honesty for himself.

  With a slight smile he silently warned her that his own nerves were far more than a match for hers. He was skilled at uncovering treachery and protecting others from it. If Rebecca Brown had been hired to cause trouble for his client, he would open her as easily as a lotus flower and pluck her secrets out. Innocence of any kind was an elusive treasure in life. He had learned that even as a child. Especially as a child.

  Shaking off a dark memory, he glanced around the office he’d arranged to have for the afternoon, and prided himself on his judgment. For atmosphere he’d chosen a building with traditional decor, where gold dragons scowled from carved teak wall panels and the finest Thai silk covered heavily embroidered pillows piled on a long red sofa. The room’s desk had majestic tiger heads sculpted into each corner of the mahogany top, and on the top lay a pad of pale parchment paper, a slender gold pen, and for decoration a smooth block of jade as big as a brick—hard, unyielding, its purpose a mystery. He wanted her to worry about the mysteries, to consider that she was tampering with a people and a place where the rules were ancient and not at all like her own.

  And him—she was tampering with him. He wanted her to realize that he was unlike any man she’d known before. If she was involved in the scheme he suspected, he wanted her to be afraid of him.

  The street below him teemed with small golden-skinned people in a mixture of Western and Asian dress. Saffron-robed Buddhist monks walked among businessmen wearing suits and ties. Cars and buses jostled with bicycles and puttering open-air tuk tuks, motorized three-wheel scooters with passenger compartments in the back.

  Vendors in colorful shirts and trousers and broad-brimmed straw hats squatted among their wares on the sidewalks outside modern boutiques filled with Western goods. Kash knew that everything, from a hot meal to a fine diamond, from the commonplace and legal to the exotic and very illegal, could be purchased on a Bangkok street.

  Physically he didn’t fit in with the people below. He was much too tall and broad-shouldered, barbaric by their standards. And his facial features only hinted at his Asian heritage. But inside, a part of him would always be the tough, streetwise little boy who belonged to this part of the world.

  Through the curtain he glimpsed the white sedan as it pulled up at the curb below. His heart rate quickened from the anticipation of meeting Rebecca Brown and hearing for himself the ludicrous story she’d been telling all over the city. When the driver opened a rear door, Kash turned away, preferring to wait until she was in his office, face to face, before he saw her the first time. The curtain’s silk made a sensual whisper as he drew heavy drapes over it.

  Rebecca Brown slid a hand under her hair and delicately adjusted the hearing aid in her right ear. Her Thai escort, the slender, unhappy-looking man who’d hardly spoken a word in the long ride from her hotel, was now trying to tell her something. But they were in the middle of a bustling sidewalk, and several Thai businessmen were gesturing politely for her to move her somewhat tall, awkward self out of their paths. She remembered a scene outside her hotel yesterday. An elephant had wandered away from his owner and into the street, blocking every vehicle larger than a motor scooter.

  Now she knew how the elephant felt.

  She nodded to the businessman apologetically and pressed her palms together in a prayerful gesture beneath her
chin. The Thais called it a wai. It could mean hello, good-bye, or in this case, pardon me, I’m goofy, she thought with embarrassment. The men detoured around her gracefully, with strained smiles.

  “Pardon me, what did you say?” she asked her escort again, craning her head down to his and touching the sleeve of his white suit.

  His eyebrows shot up. She pulled her hand away and winced inwardly. She kept forgetting that it wasn’t proper for women to touch men in public, even when the man was a boyfriend or husband, or in this case, a scowling executive from the Vatan Silk Company who’d been given the obviously unpleasant task of taking her—finally!—to meet Mayura Vatan.

  “You will go upstairs alone,” her escort said, louder this time. “I leave you now.”

  “But—”

  “Office number two-two, on the second floor.” He made a curt wai to her and turned toward the car.

  Rebecca resisted an urge to tug at his sleeve. “Is Ms. Vatan expecting me? What building is this? Does the company have offices here too? I thought we were going to the other offices, the ones I’ve visited before.”

  “You will see.” The driver opened the door so that her escort could slide into the sedan’s dark interior. In the noonday heat the car’s air-conditioning burst toward Rebecca like a wonderful cool fog. “Are you going to wait here?” she asked hurriedly, brushing away the feathery hair stuck to her damp forehead.

  “No, but you can always find a taxi. Good day, Ms. Brown.”

  A little flustered, Rebecca stared after the car until it merged with the bumper-to-bumper traffic. Well, rudeness and desertion wouldn’t stop a real adventurer, she told herself, and retucked her damp white blouse into a long, matching skirt. Toting her soft leather satchel and feeling a little foolish, she went inside the office building and found an elevator. The building’s tenants were listed on a small chart encased in glass on the dark enameled wall adjacent to the elevator. She saw office 2-2, but found no name beside it.

  A knot of dread and bewilderment grew in her stomach on the short ride up. The door opened into the small lobby of a single suite. She stepped out slowly, studying the heavy double doors facing the elevator. They had ornate brass handles in the form of curving snakes and were inset with glistening lacquered red panels. The effect was exotic and forbidding. Her heart began pounding as if the doors hid a hungry tiger. There were still tigers in the mountains of northern Thailand, she recalled.

  Rebecca smiled tightly. She hadn’t come all the way from Iowa to be scared off by her own imagination, vivid and colorful though it was.

  She went to the doors and knocked firmly. The sudden loud thudding of footsteps on the other side made her eardrum ache, and she winced. She’d forgotten to turn the hearing aid down to normal. Throwing a hand up to her ear, she nervously fiddled with the volume.

  As the footsteps halted and the doors clicked open, she scooted the control in the wrong direction. A high-pitched electronic squeal zapped her ear.

  When the doors swung back, the first thing she saw, through the eye that wasn’t squinted shut in pain, was a masculine vision that conjured up jumbled thoughts of pale champagne, hard, cool onyx, and satin. And the first thing the tall, darkly glorious male vision saw was her grabbing her right ear frantically, while her purse fell off her left shoulder and slid past the scuffed brown satchel hanging from her left hand, then fell by her left foot, where, in her haste to grab the purse, she lost her balance and stepped on it.

  Rebecca was too stunned by the man standing in the doorway to be deeply embarrassed; her clownish lack of grace was a dearly prized part of who she was, as essential as her sense of humor. It kept her world a little off-center, and made her career as a cartoonist successful. She simply drew the world the way she lived.

  Besides, this man made embarrassment the least of her worries. More important was the lightning snap of feminine alertness, the feeling that her blood and breath were frozen in expectation, and that she couldn’t take her eyes off him.

  Kash was having the same difficulty with her. He’d expected someone clever enough to make herself seem likable and ordinary, not eccentric. Rebecca Brown peered up at him from under feathery brunette bangs, while one hand clutched oddly at her right ear and the other wrestled a white purse from under her white sandal. But if her actions were strange, her neat white blouse and long cotton skirt were the height of unremarkable tourist attire.

  Then she flashed him a cheerful, if tentative, grin that turned her face into a merry invitation to smile back, and she straightened, apparently not embarrassed by whatever the hell it was she had been doing or its results. She was slender, but her figure was not the least bit boyish. He realized that he was giving her the kind of slow, head-to-toe assessment that he never gave a woman, because it lacked subtlety and respect. He didn’t hesitate to admire a woman who wanted to be looked at, but neither did he stare the way he was staring at Rebecca Brown right then.

  Rebecca managed to keep smiling even when the object of her friendliness lost his surprised, somewhat benign expression and looked her up and down as if calculating whether he wanted to undress her with his eyes. That look—as much as she resented it—had a hypnotic effect, making her knees weak and her muscles feel heavy.

  She’d never gotten many outright sexual stares back in Iowa, or felt her own heart thumping because of them. She’d never run across a man who seemed to be caught between cultures, either, one with slightly tilted eyes, a strong, sculptured nose, a hint of gold in his skin, and hair the soft black color of charred wood. Where did he belong? Where was he from? And—good lord, she’d almost forgotten what she was there for—what was he doing there in place of Mayura Vatan?

  “I’m at a loss,” she said finally, as she hooked her purse back over her shoulder and casually pulled her hair over the hearing aid to hide it. “I think you know who I am, but I don’t know who you are. I came here to see Mayura Vatan.”

  “I’m her representative,” he answered, his words measured. “She asked me to hear your story and report the details to her.”

  His voice was low and compelling, a cognac that slid warmly through her veins, and Rebecca was surprised to hear not only an American accent but a slightly southern one. It gave his voice an elegant lilt. She scrutinized him with her head tilted to the left side, to catch each nuance of tone with her good ear.

  Kash cursed her strange response silently. It was exasperating and put him on the defensive. Perhaps she’d planned it that way. He stepped back and swept an arm toward the room. “Please, come into my office. My name is Santelli. Kashadlin Santelli, Ms. Brown.”

  “Do you work for Vatan Silk? I think I’ve met every executive in the company during the past two weeks.”

  “I doubt it,” he said with a hint of amusement that could have warmed her, except it didn’t reach his dark, shrewd eyes. “It’s far too large a company. You could have gone on meeting unimportant executives for a long time before you accomplished your goal. But you’re lucky—they’ve sent you straight to me. We’ll settle this quickly.”

  She stiffened and drew her shoulders back. “I was told that Mayura Vatan would be here. I’ve spent so much time trying to see her, and when I got a phone call from her office today, I thought she’d be waiting. Are you telling me she’s not here?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry you were lied to. But please, come inside, where we can discuss this further.”

  “At least you’re blunt about what’s going on.”

  “You and I haven’t determined ‘what’s going on’ yet.” He gestured again toward an office of sparse but luxurious furnishings. He seemed to be pointing straight at a thick red sofa strewn with beautiful pillows. “Let’s discuss your claim,” he said softly.

  Rebecca wasn’t certain she wanted to sink into a wickedly plush sofa with this man. His unusual name, Kashadlin Santelli, kept revolving in her mind and distracting her. He was at least six inches taller than she, and that added to his aura of command. She bristled at the way he
made requests sound like orders.

  “You have nothing to worry about, Ms. Brown,” he said smoothly. “I’m a trustworthy employee of Mayura Vatan.”

  Rebecca walked into the big, dark office with a pleasant smile stamped on her mouth. Richly embroidered drapes covered the windows. The only light came from an ornate brass lamp on an enameled black table in the room’s center. Her stomach twisted with apprehension, but also anticipation. Good Lord, the man was playing some kind of mind game with her. She stopped in the middle of the room and stood rigidly. She hoped she looked resolute. “The only thing that worries me is whether I’ll have to see a dozen more people like you before I’m allowed to meet Ms. Vatan.”

  “No, as I’ve already said, you’ve reached the top this time.” He shut the doors behind her. She refused to glance back over her shoulder to watch him, but every hair on her neck stood on end. She pictured the imaginary tiger prowling up to her and—Stop it, she ordered herself silently.

  When he cupped her elbow, she felt the heat of his palm radiate through her whole body. And he was suddenly so close that she smelled the faint, clovelike scent of his cologne, along with the more subtle scents of fine cloth and freshly showered masculine skin. She tried to breathe steadily but couldn’t subdue a mental image of the lean golden body under his exquisitely cut suit. He wasn’t brawny-looking, but his shoulders were broad and conveyed powerful grace. The hand that closed lightly on her elbow had a wide, hard palm, and long, confident fingers. She glanced back, dry-mouthed.

  His expression was aloof. If there had been a hint of warmth in it before, it was now as neutral as the crisp lines of his suit. A black suit, a pale gray shirt, and a black tie with only the finest of silver stripes, Rebecca noted. Thoroughly Western, and solemn.

  “May I get you a drink?” he asked.

  “No, thank you. I just want to know why I’m getting shuffled around every time I ask to see Ms. Vatan. Who are you exactly?”

  “Sit down, please.” He guided her to the decadent-looking sofa. At the risk of appearing nervous, she glanced around for a less disturbing place to sit, but there was only the upholstered office chair behind his desk. Rebecca’s pride rebelled. She might not be his equal in this game—whatever it was—but she wasn’t going to run for safety.