JADE STAR by Catherine Coulter

Jameson Wilkes sat down beside her and carefully laid his hand on her breast. He felt her quiver.

He leaned down and caressed her nipple with his lips.

Suddenly she lurched up, crying out in horror. She began striking him with her fists. I didn’t give her enough, he thought as he

subdued her. But now I know. Probably, his thinking continued, it was only the opium that had relaxed her so much, sent her into that otherworldly, detached kind of dream state. He’d seen it before.

‘What did you do to me?’ she yelled, struggling with all her might, even after he’d again bound her wrists.

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‘Why, nothing., MY dear,’ he said easily. ‘Perhaps you’re really a little whore at heart. Didn’t you enjoy my touching you?’

She recoiled from him, from herself. She closed her eyes, not moving even when tears streamed down her cheeks.

Jameson Wilkes walked slowly to the cabin door. He’d won. He ignored the stabbing pain in his belly.

San Francisco

It was near to midnight. There was a quarter-moon, but the fog was so thick that the night looked an eerie gray. Saint had returned to his house thirty minutes before. He had an appointment with Hoot Moon, an unlikely criminal with a personality as unlikely as his name. As he settled down in his favorite armchair to wait for his visitor, he wondered what the man had to tell him. Hoot Moon owed him, as did many other of his friends, for Saint had, through sheer luck, saved the man’s life when he’d been shot in the head. He heard a furtive knock on the front door and rose to answer it.

Hoot Moon quickly slipped into the small entrance hall. He was a small man, vicious to his victims but possessed of a strange sort of honor that made him as loyal as a tick to his friends. He counted Saint among his friends.

Saint watched him slip off his thick cloak. ‘Why all the secrecy, Hoot?’ he asked.

‘You told me to let you know if any slavers came in,’ Hoot said in his low, hoarse voice, the result of a knife wound in his throat many years before.

Saint felt himself stiffen. ‘Who and when?’ ‘Jameson Wilkes, the old scoundrel, he just got in yesterday. Word’s out that he’s got something besides just the usual count of little Chink girls for that Chinese madame, Ah Choy. He’s got him a missionary girl, Doc, stole her in Maui. I can’t say I rightly can hold with that, no siree.’

Maui! ‘I know you spent a couple years there, Doc, in Lahaina. I wanted you to know right away.’

Saint felt such a surge of rage, mingled with fear, that he couldn’t speak for a Moment. He got hold of himself and said crisply, ‘Come on into the living room, Hoot, and let’s have ourselves a drink. Whiskey.’

Hoot scratched his ear and followed Saint. He downed the shot of whiskey in one quick gulp, then moved to stand by the fireplace to watch Saint expectantly.

‘Now,’ Saint said, ‘tell me everything you know.’

‘He’s having an auction tomorrow night, at the Crooked House on Sutter Street. He’s really toutin’ the missionary gal. He wants plenty of money for her, of course, her bein’ a virgin and all.’

‘Is there a description of the girl?’

‘Yep. Flame-colored hair and green eyes. About eighteen, I think, maybe nineteen. Beautiful, according to what I heard, and real white skin.’

Saint went utterly still. Oh yes, he knew who the missionary girl was, all right. Juliana DuPres. Jules. Lord., she’d been only fourteen or fifteen when he’d left Maui. His little ruby jewel, he’d called her, ruffling her thick red curls, always out swimming and searching out new species of fish, or hiking to find new plants. She’d quickly become ‘Jules’ after that. And she’d tagged after him like a puppy, that pert little face of hers filled with worshipful infatuation. He could have told her to go to the moon and she’d probably have done her damnedest to do as he wished.

Rage filled him and he felt his stomach heave. He rarely felt the urge toward violence, but he did now. He wanted to kill Jameson Wilkes with his bare hands.

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