Golden Lies - Barbara Freethy [76]
"Just be careful," Carey warned. "Don't fall in love. Girls like Paige can break your heart."
"That's never going to happen."
Carey walked out of his office with a disbelieving laugh. But she was wrong. He had no intention of falling in love. Long-term commitments were not for him, and not even a beautiful, brown-eyed blonde was going to change that. Besides, he had more important things on his mind right now. He had a dragon to find.
* * *
When Jasmine opened her door, she was shocked to see her mother, An-Mei, on the doorstep. She couldn't remember the last time her mother had come to visit. They lived only a few blocks from each other, but the distance between them was as big as a continent.
"Ma," she stuttered. "Is everything all right?"
"No, all wrong," An-Mei said shortly, brushing past her into the apartment.
Jasmine closed the door and waited for An-Mei to state the purpose of her visit. A flicker of nervousness ran down her spine as she watched her mother critically peruse the contents of her apartment. Her mother would find some fault with the way the furniture was arranged or the color of the painted walls. There would be something to criticize. She waited quietly, patiently, feeling as if she deserved whatever criticism was coming. Because she was bad; she'd always been bad. Her mother had told her so over and over again.
Sometimes she wondered if anyone else saw the temper in the tiny, barely five-foot-tall woman in front of her with the long black braid down her back and the baggy clothes that covered her from head to toe. Jasmine couldn't remember the last time she'd seen her mother's bare legs or arms. Modesty was a virtue, An-Mei believed, along with many other virtues that Jasmine had never been able to live up to, even before the biggest sin of them all.
She'd always been a disappointment. When she'd been born missing a finger, her mother had screamed in fury, according to her auntie Lin. Ever since then, Jasmine had been treated as an outcast. Her mother had once told her that the missing finger was the mark of shame she would grow into. And Jasmine hadn't disappointed her.
By sleeping with a married man, she'd committed a terrible sin, and having an illegitimate baby made it even worse. Her mother probably wouldn't have spoken to her again if it hadn't been for her father's influence. His heart attack a few years earlier also had softened her mother's stance, perhaps made her realize that too many years had passed with this anger between them.
Jasmine wouldn't have taken the scraps of affection if it hadn't been for Alyssa. She'd buried her pride and forged a tenuous relationship with her parents so that Alyssa would become part of the family. But that hadn't really happened despite her efforts. The sins of the mother were forever visited on the daughter.
An-Mei walked over to the painting of the dragon that hung on the wall. She stared at it with piercing black eyes, then turned those same eyes on Jasmine. "You take down. Hide away. Never speak of dragon again." Her heavily accented voice was sharp, pointed, definite. Despite the fact she'd lived in San Francisco for fifty-some years, An-Mei still spoke as if she'd only recently gotten off the boat. Her heart had never really left China.
"I saw it," Jasmine said somewhat defiantly. "I saw the dragon. It's real."
"You are a liar. You make up stories."
"I'm not lying. I saw the dragon." She watched her mother closely, seeing something in her eyes that looked like fear.
"You see nothing. You are a bad girl."
"I'm not a girl. I'm a middle-aged woman with a grown child of my own. When are you going to realize that?"
"You send Alyssa to see your father. She make him worry about dragon. She tell him you in trouble. Mixed up in Hathaway robbery."
"I'm not in trouble. But David Hathaway did show me a dragon statue that was taken from him later that evening. Someone else must have wanted it very badly." Jasmine paused, seeing the pulse beating rapidly in her mother's neck. An-Mei knew something about the dragon.