Donovans 02 - Jade Island

was as expert as God.
    “Then it’s an even trade,” he said easily. “I’m not an expert escort.”
    When Lianne hesitated, Kyle smiled lazily down at her. He had been told that he had a disarming smile, so he used it when being underestimated was a real benefit. In this atrium swirling with Asian and Caucasian sharks, he figured he needed all the help he could get. Six months of immersion in the study of Chinese jade artifacts didn’t make up for a lifetime spent climbing over the face of the earth looking for minerals.
    Lianne didn’t relax as much under his smile as Kyle had hoped. If anything, she withdrew even more.
    “Sort of you scratch mine and I’ll scratch yours?” she suggested.
    His smile widened. “Close enough. You game?”
    “As long as all I’m scratching is your jade itch,” she said bluntly. “How much do you want to know about jade?”
    “I’ll tell you if I get bored.”
    Lianne tilted her head to one side and looked up at Kyle. “You’re really serious about this, aren’t you?” she asked, echoing his earlier remark.
    “Yeah. I hate being bored.”
    She took a breath and thought of all the reasons she should turn and walk away from the man with the easy smile and beautiful, measuring eyes.
    “All right,” she said faintly. Then, more firmly: “It’s a deal.”
    For the first time since Kyle had seen Lianne, his gut relaxed. He didn’t know why it was important for him to stay close to her. He only knew that it was. In a woman, what he felt would have been called feminine intuition. In a man, it was called reasoning, experience, deduction, or, at worst, a hunch.
    Kyle’s hunch said there was more to this deal than a pretty lady asking a big male to keep the Seng wolf at bay.
    “Where do you want to start?” Lianne asked.
    “At the beginning, of course. The Neolithic blade.”
    Kyle was intensely curious about the jade artifact that had made her stare and then stare again, until finally something that looked like fear drained color from her face. But he didn’t say anything aloud about the subject of fear. At this point their alliance was too fragile to take any kind of strain.
    For an instant Kyle wondered what he had gotten himself into. Then Lianne stepped past him to the display case and he breathed in the heady, delicate fragrance of lilies and rain. It went through him like a combination of peace and adrenaline, soothing his mind and revving his body.
    “This blade,” Lianne said, “which many Chinese would refer to as a shovel—”
    “Why?” he interrupted.
    “Wen says that in ancient times people used digging sticks with an edge like that. Some academics say that it’s more an adze than a shovel. In any case, we all agree that objects like this are modeled after a blade of some kind, an artifact that was important enough to the culture to be included in rituals.”
    Kyle nodded.
    “This blade,” Lianne continued, gesturing toward the case, “is pih, one of the eight traditional categories of jade colors.”
    “Green?”
    “Moss green. Some might call it spinach. In any case, this blade is an excellent example of buried jade.”
    “Grave goods.”
    “Exactly. They have always been valued by Europeans. Among the overseas Chinese, the old mainland prejudice against collecting grave goods is almost gone. The stains on this blade are the result of thousands of years spent in a tomb. The Chinese have a long and exacting aesthetic tradition with regard to weathered jade.”
    The reverence in her tone when she said “stains” made Kyle’s eyebrows lift. “Stains, huh? Aren’t they valued simply as an indicator of age?”
    “In some cases. For a Chinese collector, the true importance of these particular stains would be that they enhance rather than diminish the impact of the totemic patterns carved into the blade itself.”
    “So I’ve been told. But I have to say, that’s one of the aspects of jade appreciation that eludes me.”
    “Why?” Lianne asked, looking up at him.
    “The jade was selected, carved, polished, and buried by human hands. The stains just came along randomly, a byproduct of being stuck in wet earth near a corpse.”
    Lianne’s eyes gleamed behind her thick black lashes as she smiled. “A very Western point of view.”
    “That’s me, born and raised.”
    “Me, too. Wen has lectured me many times about my lack of subtlety in jade appreciation. The placement of accidental stains is one of the things I had difficulty