Golden Lies by Barbara Freethy Page A

she was supposed to learn? And why couldn't she learn it, understand it?
    Untangling herself from the sheets, she walked over to the window and threw it open. The cold air washed over her, cooling the fever in her body, in her head, but she still felt frustrated. She was close to something. She could feel it in her heart, a heart that sang to the past more than to the present. It was a love she shared with David, a love of history, of China, of people and places that seemed both magical and yet very real, as if she had lived there once. But she hadn't lived there. Her parents had been born in China, but she had been born here in Chinatown, just a few blocks away in an apartment that she'd shared with her three brothers and one younger sister. How could she know of things that had happened a continent away and several lifetimes ago? Was it just her imagination, or did she have an old soul, as a fortune-teller had once told her?
    Shivering, she stayed by the window, refusing to give in to the cold or to the reality of her life. She tried not to look down, not to see what was right before her, because so much of her present was not what she wanted it to be. Instead, she looked up at the moon and the stars, to her dreams, her desires. She was a fool, she knew that, too. Foolish to believe in miracles. Her life had been hard since the day she was born missing the index finger on her left hand, a sign of just how inadequate she was and would be. She had disappointed so many people in her life. So why was she here on this earth? What was she supposed to accomplish with her life?
    The answers had something to do with the dragon. She knew it with a certainty that she couldn't explain. David knew it, too. He was as much a dreamer as she was. And her persistent dreams had always intrigued him. Over the years, they had looked through centuries of stories about dragons to find some similarity to the one in her dreams. Only one tale had come close, but that tale involved two dragons connected together. She never dreamed about two, only one. Unless they were a perfect match, unless they blended together as one in her dreams. She remembered seeing a rough sketch of those dragons in a book of Chinese fairytales, and there had been a small similarity, but neither had really matched the dragon in her dreams. Another dead end, she had thought. But today ... when her fingers had traced the joint opening where two dragons could become one, she had known the truth.
    And if there were two dragons ...
    Where was the other one?

Chapter Six

    Paige walked through the front doors of the hospital and blinked against the brightness of the early Thursday morning sun. She couldn't believe the night had finally ended. For a while she had thought it might go on forever.
    Her father was in a coma, the doctors said. There was severe swelling in his brain. They didn't know the extent of the damage, if it was permanent or temporary. In fact, they didn't know much of anything. Only time would tell. So they waited and they waited. When the sun came up, Paige had ventured down to the lobby, grabbing a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, finally making her way out here, to the front of the hospital where a horseshoe driveway allowed for pickups and drop-offs.
    She sat down on a cold bench and let out a long, frustrated, anxious breath—the breath she'd been holding most of the night. But she couldn't relax, not yet. The immediate danger wasn't over. And she had to be ready for everything that would follow, the press, the police, Riley McAllister. She knew he'd be back. And she'd have to deal with the question of the missing dragon.
    Maybe it was somewhere in the store. She would have her secretary search every floor. She'd ask Martin, too, and whomever else she could enlist to both help and keep the search confidential. The last thing she wanted was for the public to catch wind of not only her father's attack but also the fact that a piece of art that Hathaway's had