Donovans - Pearl Cove Part 32

He didn't pick up the conversational ball. Instead, he watched the room around them with eyes as clear and hard as diamonds. It beat watching Hannah fidget and wiggle in Honor's clothes clothes that had never looked like that on his sister. It was all he could do to keep from lowering his head and running his tongue deep into the cleavage that was so nicely displayed.

Irritated by his body's relentless hunger for the woman who had no use for him beyond s.e.x and protection, Archer turned his back and forced himself to focus on the room. The tail they had picked up as soon as they left the condominium was somewhere in the crowd behind them, fingering pearls as though she cared. The man who was with her didn't even pretend to care. He looked at everything but pearls.

Wistfully Hannah ran her fingertips over strands of gleaming dyed pearls. It had been nice to have a neutral conversation with Archer, if only for a few moments. Perhaps he could be lured back into it.

"Culturing pearls," she said, "inserting a bead, feeding and scrubbing the oyster for a year or two, then harvesting and grading the pearl I understand that. Once the seed is in place, the oyster is responsible for the color and l.u.s.ter of the pearl. How can they call this kind of manufactured dyed stuff pearls?"

"No problem." Deciding their shadow was harmless, Archer turned back and faced the woman who could pierce his self-control with a word, a touch, a look. "Some folks are calling imitation pearls 'semicultured.'"

"That's deceptive."

"That's business. Let the buyer beware. Besides, pearl growers aren't eager to get into a public p.i.s.sing contest over cultured versus manufactured. Then people might start asking at what point a cultured pearl becomes a manufactured one."

"When you add or subtract color," Hannah retorted.

"Not to the j.a.panese. Or the Chinese, for that matter. Then there are the Arabs. To them, cultured is manufactured. Imitation. And we're not even touching on Majorica 'pearls'." He tipped his head toward the next booth.

"Gla.s.s beads dipped in fish scales and glue," she said, dismissing the legitimacy of the Majorica process.

"The people who produce Majoricas call the dip 'pearl essence'," he said blandly.

"More like essence of bull dust."

"At least Majoricas have a brief history to recommend them. They've been made for a hundred years, they're heavier than plastic, cooler to the touch, and more expensive to buy."

"But still imitation. Not pearl."

He didn't argue the point. No part of a Majorica "pearl" had ever seen an oyster.

Hannah went to another booth. This one also featured Akoya pearls, but of a higher quality. Sighing, she fingered the cool, silky weight of several necklaces. They had the pale blue overtone that was common to Akoya pearls in their natural state. The weight of the necklaces suggested that the pearls had spent a year gathering nacre in the oyster sh.e.l.l rather than the six months she suspected was the maximum for the previous booth. This booth also had the pink Akoya as well, but they had been handled with care and dyed with discretion. The drill holes were smooth and uniform. Not surprisingly, the price reflected the higher standard of production.

Quietly Archer urged her on around the room, milling at random through the booths, trying to make sure that only the government was following him.

"Wait," she said suddenly. "Aren't these beautiful? Odd, but beautiful."

He looked at her hand on his arm. She didn't seem to be aware of having touched him. He wished he could say the same.

"Biwa," he said curtly.

"What?"

"Freshwater pearls from Lake Biwa in j.a.pan."

"What a lovely, icy, iridescent white," she murmured, fingering a strand of the oddly shaped yet nearly identical pearls. "A necklace of little crosses. Natural or cultured?" she asked, turning to him.

"Natural, probably. But the ones in the next booth certainly aren't."

She looked at the next booth and laughed softly. "Little Buddhas. How on earth...?"

"Same way maybe pearls are produced, on the sh.e.l.l itself rather than in the mantle of the oyster. Take a bead shaped like a flattened Buddha. Cement it on the inside of the sh.e.l.l. Cement lots of them, actually, like measles erupting all across the interior of the sh.e.l.l. The oyster just covers the intruders over. Six months later, the sh.e.l.l is harvested and the Buddhas are cut away. The Chinese have been doing it since the eleventh century."

"Like blister pearls."

Archer smiled slightly. "Nothing is like blister pearls. They're naturals all the way. I have one in my collection that's as big as Summer's fist."

"The pearl?" Hannah asked, startled.

"No, the blister. I haven't opened it up yet to see if there's a pearl inside the blister."

The rise and fall of conversations around Hannah faded as she concentrated only on Archer. "If there is a pearl, it would be natural. Priceless."

"And if there isn't, if the blister is full of organic goo, the sh.e.l.l is worthless."

"You won't know until you open it."

"I've opened other blisters and found nothing but tar."

"But you won't know about this one," she insisted.

"Would you open it?"

"Of course. Not knowing would drive me crazy."

"Even if you had opened other blisters?"

"Yes. That's what hope is all about. Knowing the odds are against you but going for it anyway."

His black eyebrows rose. "I should have been an oyster."

"What?"

"Then you wouldn't be afraid to open me and see what's inside. But you're sure it's tar and there's no point to this conversation. Let's go. The bureaucrats following us are getting impatient."

Touching her for the first time, he put his hand under her upper arm and led her toward a bank of elevators. Though the touch would look familiar to anyone watching, Hannah felt its lack of intimacy like a slap. There was no hidden circling of her skin, no tender caresses, no sweet feeling of connection, nothing but an impersonal pressure that directed her through the crowd.

"Where are we going?" she asked as the elevator doors closed.

They were alone in the cage that smelled of musty carpet, spilled espresso, and Chinese cigarettes. Asian nicotine addicts simply didn't get Seattle's no-smoking rule.

"To the next floor."

"And then?" she asked.

"To the next. Then the next."

"Do you really expect to find the Black Trinity in one of the retail stalls?"

"It isn't likely, but the Linskys aren't expecting me until eleven. If I'm lucky, I'll find a black rainbow in one of the wholesale booths. Then I'll trace it. If I'm not lucky, I'll have gotten a feel for what's new at all levels of the pearl market, and the two government bureaucrats following us will have learned more than they ever wanted to know about pearls."

Hannah smiled slightly. "What about the black pearl you already have? Why not trace it?"

"Dead end. Teddy bought it from a man who bought it from a woman who bought it from a man n.o.body can find, who supposedly got it in Tahiti. That's the reason Teddy showed me the pearl. He thought I might know where it came from."

"You did."

"He doesn't know that. That's why he sold it to me. He's been looking for over a year and found nothing more than rumors. He decided to take cash for a pearl curiosity rather than trying to a.s.semble enough black rainbows to make a piece of jewelry."

The elevator door opened. The second floor was slightly better maintained than the lower one, but its atmosphere still was more carnival than restrained luxury. Despite not having the studied elegance of a high-end jewelry outlet, the goods on the second floor were obviously more expensive than those on the street level. Video cameras covered every angle of the area. The booths were more s.p.a.cious, less jewelry was dangling within reach, and rent-a-cops watched everyone with bored eyes and big holsters.

It didn't take Hannah and Archer long to circle the second floor. The pearls were bigger and of better quality than on the first floor, but the emphasis was the same: finished jewelry. There was a very nice pair of Tahitian black earrings with violet overtones, and a tangerine South Seas parure consisting of brooch, necklace, bracelet, ring, and earrings. The latter made Hannah pause, but when the salesman came forward, she shook her head and moved on.

There were few loose pearls for sale. None of them was a black rainbow.

The elevator smelled the same on the way to the third floor. When Hannah and Archer stepped out, they were confronted by a desk and an armed guard who was even more bored than his buddies downstairs. Archer wrote his name, corporate ident.i.ty, and wholesale number in the logbook on the desk, took two tags, and gave one to Hannah. He clipped his to his pocket. After several tries, she managed to clip hers on the neckline without wrinkling the material.

As he watched her smooth the borrowed dress beneath the tag, his hands itched to help her. Then he could savor again the creamy warmth and resilience of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, feel their tips harden beneath his hands, his tongue.

Cursing silently, he turned away from the endless temptation of Hannah McGarry. A quick scan of the room told him that the same traders were in the same places. No new faces. In fact, he would have sworn that some of the same people were leaning across the same counters arguing the same prices as they had been six weeks ago, when he had strolled through the Pearl Exchange just for the pleasure of seeing so many varieties of loose pearls gathered under one roof.

Hannah scanned the various booths and almost smiled. This she understood: the people haggling over a tray of pearls, the other people watching as though placing side bets, the dramatic gestures of disdain on the part of buyer and seller, the handshakes, the voices rising and falling. Chinese, j.a.panese, Australian, American, European the languages varied, but the focus didn't.

Pearls.

Everybody was buying, selling, trading, wishing, living, and dreaming pearls. Some people wanted only to match pearls for a pair of earrings. Others wanted to create triple-strand necklaces or parures with hundreds of pearls. A few people went from booth to booth, collecting for purposes only they knew.

"You like this, don't you?" Archer asked, watching Hannah because he couldn't make himself stop. Right now her eyes were a vivid indigo with flashes of violet. Her whole body was alert, quivering, like a cat closing in on pray.

"I love it," she said. "At first Len didn't let me do any of the selling or trading. For the last few years I've done all of it. I never went beyond Broome, but I always wanted to. Pearl Cove has some of the best-matched, highest-quality pearls in the world." Excitement faded as she remembered. "Or we had. Now..." She shrugged. "It depends on whether you want to resurrect the operation. Even if we find the Black Trinity, I don't have the money."

"Is that what you want? Pearl Cove up and running again?"

"It's what I know."

"That's not the same thing."

"It's as close as I can come."

"Why not do what you love?" Archer asked.

Eyebrows raised, she looked at him. "And what would that be?"

"This." He waved a hand at the room where pearls were changing hands. "Trading pearls."

She opened her mouth. No words came out.

He was right. What she loved most was weighing and balancing the merits of individual lots of pearls, pricing them, bargaining over them, coming away with a good deal because she had a better eye than anyone she had ever met when it came to matching pearls.

"All the professional traders I've known are men," she said.

"Yet it's a fact that most women's color vision is better than most men's."

"No argument here, mate," she said dryly. After a moment she smiled rather like a shark. "I'll just have to be the first, won't I? My color vision against theirs."

And she laughed.

Archer wished he could pick her up and whirl her around, laughing with her, sharing the heady feeling of a new world opening up. But that was the kind of thing you did with family or friends or a mate. s.e.x alone didn't qualify for the latter, sharing Len between them didn't qualify for the former, and she didn't like Archer well enough for them to qualify as friends.

"How do you go about becoming a trader?" Hannah asked.

"Get a reputation for knowing good pearls."

"I have one, but it's half a world away."

"Then we'll just have to work on it here."

"Not when I look like a tart."

The corner of his mouth kicked up. "What you look like is a s.e.xy woman."

Unconsciously she smoothed the creeping skirt farther down her hips. "I feel awkward."

"Every time I've had my hands on you, you felt just fine."

She shot him a sideways look that glittered like blue-black sapphires. "That isn't what I meant."

He shrugged. "You walk around in three patches and a handful of string and never worry, but you're fidgety in a dress that covers you from collarbones to midthigh."

"That was the tropics. This is here. Honor's clothes just don't fit me."

"Then we'll go shopping after we're done here."

"We?"

"You're not getting out of my sight until all the players know that you're off the table."

"I was out of your sight last night," Hannah said before she stopped herself.

"That's different."

"Bull dust." She took a breath and a better grip on her too-quick tongue. "I can't afford clothes."

"I'll give you "

"No," she cut in. "I owe you too much already."

"You don't owe me a cent."

"You've got that right, mate. I owe you a h.e.l.l of a lot more than a penny."