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urge to turn her back on Cooper for added privacy.
    “Good mornin’, Jessie. He weren’t too hard
on you, was he? I never expected him to come after us in the
Boarshead or we would’ve stayed someplace more respectable.”
    “I appreciate your concern,” she said.
    “Of course, if we’d only stayed in the
respectable places, you wouldn’t have seen what you wanted to
see.”
    “Of course,” she said, uncomfortably aware
of her employer’s nearness. She’d asked George to take her to the
places Cooper usually went. It was professional curiosity, she’d
told herself. The man was as inscrutable as they came, and she
could do her job better if she understood him better, even if the
job only lasted another six days. Her request, she’d assured
herself, had nothing to do with green eyes, sex, or dragons.
Mothers didn’t think about such things. She was simply curious.
    “I heard you decked a sailor in the
Boarshead,” George went on, a noticeable chuckle in his voice.
    “Yes, well . . .” was all she could manage
before George laughed out loud.
    “You tell Coop he’s got himself one dandy
little helper.”
    “I’ll be sure and do that, George,” she
said, her voice drier than day-old toast. Going from “a fatal error
in judgment” to “a dandy little helper” wasn’t the sort of
promotion she’d been aspiring for.
    “Right, luv.” George laughed again, proving
he was well aware of her sarcasm. After a short pause, he turned
the conversation to a more serious vein. “There were a few things I
didn’t get around to telling you last night. Things you ought to
know.”
    “Such as?” she prompted when he hesitated
again. She hoped he wasn’t about to renege on the terms they’d
hammered out over the last two days. The line she was treading
between the law and criminality was already too damn thin to suit
her. Despite her research, she wasn’t sure under what circumstances
extradition might become kidnapping, or if either applied to the
deal she’d struck. She wasn’t sure what the exact parameters were
for the laws of bounty hunting, and the more information she got,
the less sure she became. She did know that pirates were legally
hostis humani generis
—“enemies of all mankind”—and
therefore under no nation’s protection, which precluded the legal
climate necessary for extradition.
    That seemed to leave only kidnapping, and
only because the Somerset Shipping Federation had decided against
simply having Mr. Lopez killed, a small consolation Jessica was
holding on to for dear life. She couldn’t sanction murder. She
could only do her damndest to prove to herself and Cooper Daniels
that she was capable of handling any job anybody threw at her.
    “Such as,” George said, “you ought to go
home when you’re done here. You’re a sweet bird, Jessie. You don’t
want to get messed up with Cooper and his like. I know the business
don’t look too bad from London, and it probably looks real good
from Coop’s San Francisco office, but just about the time you get
into the middle of the Malacca or forty leagues south of Singapore,
a lot of bad things can happen.”
    Actually, Jessica thought the maritime
bounty-hunting business was looking more appalling every day, even
from the relatively safe environs of London. She had every
intention of going home after this contract was signed. She had
also had every intention of quitting Daniels, Ltd. when she got
there, until those phone calls to her Stanford connections had
given her reason to think otherwise. Besides checking up on Andrew
Strachan, she’d discreetly checked out other employment
opportunities. Her options weren’t as varied as she’d hoped.
California’s economic slump was starting to reach even the upper
echelons of the financial district, and Daniels was already paying
her more than most of her colleagues were getting. Awful as it was,
the pirate business was booming.
    “Under normal circumstances, don’t you see,
I’d say