Death is Forever
Hong Kong these days?”
There was no answer.
“Listen to me, Wing. Your men—and your thoroughly trained sister—had better treat Erin Windsor’s welfare like it’s the only hope for the survival of the Chen clan. Because it is. Tell Uncle Li to read between the lines in my file. Do you understand me?”
“I’m pained that you distrust us so much.”
“Yeah, I’ll just bet you are. Right in the ass. Using Lai as bait was a mistake. Good-bye, Wing. I won’t call to give you progress reports. I’m sure your obedient little spy will take care of that for me.”
Cole broke the connection and turned to the woman who had been standing silently behind him. His face was expressionless as he looked at her, a golden feminine statue standing in the exact center of a nimbus of light from the doorway. He wondered if she’d always been like that—every movement, every breath calculated to display her extraordinary beauty.
He didn’t remember Lai as calculating. He remembered the seething violence of her sexuality, a hunger that had seemed as unforced as the sunlight pouring over her right now.
Grimly Cole measured how young he’d once been, and how old Lai had always been. Without warning his hand flashed out and closed almost gently around Lai’s throat. She stood motionless but for the sudden, heavy beat of her pulse beneath his thumb.
“I trust you heard everything,” Cole said.
“Yes,” she said softly.
“You’ll tell your men.”
“Yes.”
Gray eyes measured the delicate, perfectly formed woman standing before him. Once he’d dreamed of having Chen Lai in his grasp again. Wing must have known that. Certainly Uncle Li had. So the Chen family had made Cole’s dream come true. As long as the diamond mine was found, Cole could do whatever he wished to Lai, punish or humiliate or rape her, take anything he wanted from her.
Even her life.
Lai knew her risk as well as Cole did. It was there in the hidden tremors that made her quiver, in the rapid pulse beating beneath his thumb, in the shallow, rapid breaths that touched him across the few inches separating their bodies, in the luminous black eyes that watched him.
But it wasn’t fear Cole saw in Lai’s glance. She was looking at him as though he was meat and she’d been long without food. The delicacy of her perfume was mixed with the primitive, far more heady scent of female desire. Against the thin silk of her blouse, her nipples showed as hard buttons.
She wanted him.
Cole’s thumb moved against Lai’s soft throat in what could have been either a caress or a threat. “Such an obedient daughter of China.”
She lowered eyelashes the color of midnight. “Thank you,” she said huskily, moving her chin slowly, caressing the hard hand at her throat. She shifted, easing forward, flowing against him as she lifted her hand and traced the line of his jaw with her fingertips. “We were always very good together, Cole. I have dreamed of you.”
Erin came to the doorway holding two cups of coffee. She saw Lai moving against Cole and Cole’s thumb caressing Lai’s throat. For an instant Erin was too shocked at the intimate tableau to speak.
Then she wasn’t.
“Obviously you have your hands full,” Erin said sarcastically. “I’ll leave your coffee in the kitchen.”
“Stay.”
The quality of Cole’s voice was like a whip. She found herself automatically obeying. That, too, infuriated her.
“Do you keep pets?” she asked in a clipped voice.
He turned away from Lai and focused exclusively on Erin. “Pets?”
“Sit. Stay. Roll over. Pets.”
He smiled crookedly, released Lai, and walked over to take a cup of coffee from Erin. “No pets, honey. Nothing would have me.”
“Really? I’ll bet there’s a Venus-flytrap close by with your name on it.”
Cole’s laughter was lost as the beat of a helicopter’s rotor blades washed over the house, the sounds magnified by the humidity.
“Tell him we’ll be out in a minute,” Cole said.
The words were for Lai, but he didn’t look away from Erin as he spoke.
Lai turned and left the room. Not once had she looked at Erin.
Over the rim of the coffee mug, Cole measured the depth of Erin’s anger. He regretted it, but now wasn’t the time to do anything about it. He was too angry about her lack of trust in him to be civilized on the subject. Cautiously he sipped the black coffee, found it hot but not scalding, and drank it without ceremony. The sound of the helicopter
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