by LJ Evans
I hadn’t trusted myself to call Dawson, so I’d texted instead. It had been a stupid message about how Jada was just tired and drained from being in New York. I was amazed he hadn’t seen through it. Maybe he hadn’t wanted to.
He’d already escaped the dark world of the Kyōdaina once, and I knew he had no desire to go back to it. He had Violet and the light she brought into his life to focus on now. There was no room for the shadowy underworld to leak back into their days. My chest clenched at the thought of them finding Dawson before Jada told them what was going on. I should have said something. I would if Jada didn’t, but I wanted to give her a chance to tell them first.
I straightened the button-down shirt I’d thrown on, pulling on another suit jacket. This one was a sage tweed that my father was blending beautifully with warm chocolates and creamy tans this season. A burst of burnt orange was a hint of contrast in the lines on the shirt. It matched the new pair of sneakers on my feet.
I was due at the boat show again today, but for the first time in years, my excitement seemed missing. I loved our yachts. I loved the changes Dawson and I had made to the latest model of the Conquista line, but I wasn’t really interested in keeping a smile plastered to my face.
I headed to the kitchen for a much-needed coffee. The open floor plan of the tastefully but simply decorated apartment provided views from every room. The Golden Gate Bridge was on display, partially covered in fog while the sun tried to break through. As much as I liked it, I would never have bought a place in the city if Dawson hadn’t made it his permanent home.
My phone rang just as I took my first sip of coffee.
“Bonjour, Papa, how are you and Maman?” I answered.
He continued in French, “Good morning! We’re both good. But I am wondering when you will be back to continue our conversation.”
I tried not to groan, tried not to feel the well of anxiety his words brought me. It was yet another way my life had been divided into halves.
My father wanted to step down as head of Éclair S.A. He was going to keep his position on the board and hand his chief executive officer title to his chief operating officer. He’d made it clear that he thought it was time for me to take on much more than the advisory position I’d held in the company for the last eight years by backfilling the COO position.
It wasn’t that I hated the idea. I enjoyed many things about Papa’s retail empire, but we both knew that role would consume me. I’d have little time for Armaud Racing and our yachts.
“I will tell you the same thing I told you last week,” I finally responded. “I need time.”
“You don’t have to give up the racing business, Dax. We can hire someone to help Dawson out.” It wouldn’t be the same. He knew it as well as I did, but he continued to push gently. “You hardly ever race anymore.”
It was true. Dawson and I sponsored friends and employees much more than actually getting behind the helm these days.
“It isn’t that simple,” I said. Dawson was not the face of our company. He was the guy who made sure the boats were built to the right specifications. I was the one who ensured we had access to exclusive venues and yacht clubs. I closed the deals with the billionaires buying our ships. If I stepped away, I feared Armaud Racing might disappear altogether.
“I know,” he said gently. “You love what you’ve built, and you don’t want to see it fail. It is exactly how I feel about Éclair. I need someone I trust to keep it safe.”
The company wasn’t the only thing that needed to be kept safe. Thoughts of Jada invaded my brain again and brought back her father’s words about my aunt, my father’s twin that he’d lost because of Tsuyoshi Mori.
Before I could stop myself, I was sending a text.
ME: Lunch?
MON BIJOU: No, Armaud. I’ll be at the office all day, trying to catch up.
ME: I can bring it to you.
“Dax?” My father’s voice brought me back.
“I promise I’m thinking about it. That’s all I can give you at the moment,” I told him.
He grunted and murmured something under his breath.
“I love you. Please kiss Maman for me,” I said. I missed them both, but my mother and I had been passing in the night for too many years now. With her still filming Bollywood movies and me racing, building a company, and helping Papa, I was rarely in the house at the same time as she was. Not to mention that I’d spent the last two years purposefully galivanting around the globe with Benita.
“We love you too. Stay safe, my boy,” my father said.
After we hung up, the word safe echoed in my head. While my parents had always been around growing up to ensure I’d been safe, refusing to leave my care solely to nannies like many of their peers, no one had been there for Jada. She’d grown up essentially alone in an apartment of employees. And now, with her father and whoever else was coming after her, she had even less protection.
As if she could feel my thoughts of her over the distance between us, Jada finally messaged me back.
MON BIJOU: Don’t let yesterday go to your head. You were a needed distraction, that was all.
If I didn’t know Jada so well, I would have been offended by her response, but I knew that behind her sarcasm was a woman who didn’t want anyone to be dirtied by the darkness of her father’s world. She was so determined to protect everyone else in her life that she would gladly put herself in front of the target to do so.
The problem was, deep in my heart, I wanted to be a distraction for other reasons. The skin-tangled-with-skin kind of distraction. The blending-of-our-souls kind of distraction. But I’d settle for being the friend I’d first been to her in the early days of our acquaintanceship.
Jada looked stunning, sitting at her family’s table at the biggest charity event of the London season. The mahogany depths of her eyes sparkled, and her black hair shimmered with white lights that mimicked the diamonds on her neck. Her gentle curves were on display in a bright-blue dress that made it hard to look away from her.
While I was there with Maman, Jada was all alone. My heart lurched.
She was always alone.
It was one of the reasons I’d first asked her to dance when we’d met a year ago. A dance that had led to Maman warning me to stay away from her. A softly whispered admonishment about the Moris being bad news. Talk of her father’s criminal organization and how Papa’s business couldn’t withstand the gossip if we were seen together by the paparazzi.
She’s too young for me, anyway, I told myself. Not that my sixteen to her fourteen was that great of a gap, but we were lightyears apart in life experiences. She was completely sheltered, raised in her grandmother’s penthouse in New York City, surrounded by servants and nannies who shuffled her from place to place and made sure everyone stood ten steps away. Whereas, I’d been raised by parents who wanted me to see and experience the real world and not just the illusionary bubble our wealth created.
As I watched, Jada got up and walked to the dessert table with a grace one might not expect of a girl her age in heels that high. Before I realized it, I was following her and staring down at the treats laid out on white linen decorated with flowers and gold chains.
As Jada reached for a plate of tiny bonbons, I said, “They’re not as good as the ones in Paris.”
She turned to me, taking in every inch of me in my tuxedo before returning to my face.
“Dax Armaud talking to a Mori again. You better make sure your mother doesn’t see you, or you’ll be banished.” While I’d spoken in English, she’d responded in a French that was almost perfect, as if she’d been raised in Paris instead of New York City.
I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Maybe that would be a reward and not a punishment,” I teased. She just stared at me, eyes going to my mouth as I talked. I liked her lips way more than I should have, the way the middle was peaked and the corners tugged upward. The soft-pink shade she’d painted on them was alm
ost her natural color. I wanted to touch them. My body actually ached to do so.
When she hadn’t said anything back, I asked in French, “Why are you alone?”
A flicker of emotion wavered over her face at my question. Then, her shoulders went back, and she replied, “I was the only one who could make it.”
My breath caught at the loneliness I thought I’d seen as much as the way she hid it, and even though I knew I should walk away, I did the opposite.
“Want to get out of here?” I asked.
She looked around the room, taking in the world’s elite gathered there in gowns and gems, as if trying to find a reason to stay. Then, she shrugged in acquiescence.
I led the way out of the ballroom and down to the first-floor lobby. As we neared the entrance, I looked down at her stilettos.
“You going to be okay if we take a walk?”
She laughed as if I’d told a joke, and when she realized I was serious, she couldn’t hide her smile. “I’ll be fine, but thanks for asking.”
Outside, the night was unusually warm for a London spring. Clear skies and a full moon shone down upon us as we crossed the street and entered the depths of Hyde Park.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Somewhere quieter.”
“I didn’t take you as a nature boy,” she said as we walked toward my favorite spot in the park.
I shrugged. “In the middle of the ocean on my father’s sailboat is probably my favorite place to be. I like the quiet of the sea. There are no people to deal with. Just the sky and the water.”
“And the fish,” she teased.
I chuckled. “But they don’t talk behind your back.”
She rolled her eyes.
I led her down the path to where the Serpentine Waterfall flowed into a little pond. At night, the quiet rush of the falls muffled the noise from the streets of London. If I closed my eyes, I could almost imagine being at my parents’ villa on St. Micah.
Jada took in the entire scene and then looked upward to where we could see a few stars shining through the ambient lights of the city. They seemed to capture her attention far more than the water and flowers captured me.
“Wow. This is…” she said.
“Amazing,” I said, but I was looking at her, and it drew her eyes from the heavens back to me. As her gaze met mine, she shivered, and I realized that the night air wasn’t as warm for her in a strapless dress and bare legs as it was to me in a tuxedo. I unbuttoned my jacket and draped it around her shoulders.
At first, she stilled, surprise registering on her face. Then, she said quietly, “Arigatōgozaimashita.”
My brow furrowed at the word, and she smiled. “It means thank you.”
“I think I’d like to learn Japanese. Maybe you should teach me.”
It was a poorly done flirtation that my friends would have laughed at had they heard it. Jada just stared at me, as if trying to assess my level of honesty. The moonlight cast her in an ethereal glow. After our first slow dance, I’d been haunted for weeks by the silkiness of her skin under my fingertips.
“It’s only because you’ve been forbidden to talk to me that makes that idea tantalizing. It’s the illicitness of it that you want, not me,” she said with an edge to her tone before she looked away again.
I raised a hand to her chin, tilting her face toward me.
“It’s not that, Jada,” I told her, my voice deepening in a way it never had before. “It’s you.”
She shut her eyes against my look and my words as if they were unbearable, and her dark lashes made a thick line against the shining porcelain.
I fought the desire to kiss her. I’d spent a lot of time kissing a lot of girls over the last couple of years. Experimenting. Learning the way to caress a tongue so that my partner softened against me. Learning how to lead without demanding, to taste and sip and touch until we were both on the edge of breaking. I wondered if Jada had ever been kissed.
The thought caused me to back away, dropping my hand.
Her eyes opened, and she stared again with her chest heaving under my jacket. She’d wanted me to kiss her, but it seemed…too soon. Too dangerous. Risky, like she’d said, in a way that might hurt us both.
After what felt like a thousand heartbeats, she turned her gaze back to the heavens. Mine dropped to the water and the plants bordering the pond. Amongst them was a group of stargazer lilies with closed blooms. They reminded me of Jada, not only because she was looking at the stars right now but because the pink and white flowers were strong and yet silky. They seemed like the Jada I was coming to know.
I picked one of the stems, pushing it into her hands. Our fingers collided, and electricity shot through me. She looked down, as surprised as I was by the feeling but also by the flower I’d given her.
“What’s this?” she asked.
“A stargazer. It’s closed right now, but when the sun rises, it’s going to bloom.”
For a year after that moment in London, whenever I knew I’d see Jada, I’d left stargazers for her. I’d leave them at the plate with her name on it at the tables, or I’d send them to her hotel room. It was like a hidden message that I’d see her there. It was a promise to steal precious moments with her where she could teach me Japanese, and I could make her feel heard. Where we talked about nothing in our lives and yet everything at the same time.
And then, I’d kissed her.
I’d kissed her and told my father I wanted to date her, and he’d told me, with sadness in his eyes, that it was impossible. He’d told me the first truth of our families’ histories―not the one about my aunt, though. He’d saved that one until he could do nothing else but tell me. Instead, he’d told me the story of our beginnings, of fortunes made in ways that would lead the world to think we were in bed with the Moris and the Kyōdaina if we showed up next to them. He’d insisted that if I continued to pursue her, I’d ruin the family.
I couldn’t do that to Maman’s career…let the world spread rumors about her. I couldn’t take seeing Papa’s smiling face disappear into worry. I loved them both too much.
So, I’d done the unthinkable. I’d stopped sending Jada flowers, stopped signing up to attend every single charity event I thought she’d be at. I’d hidden away at university without a word to her of why I’d disappeared. It had been a jerk move, but at seventeen, I hadn’t known another way to handle it.
I’d never stopped thinking of her, though. I’d wondered on a regular basis, with a heart-searing ache in my chest, who was getting her kisses. By the time I saw her again, hanging around Dawson, she’d discovered what and who her father was, but not the secrets of our families.
Whatever had happened in the years between our kiss and her reappearance in my life, it had ensured that, instead of slowly opening to the world, Jada had slammed into it with full force. Her gentle, enticing ways had turned into a fiery flame that absorbed all the oxygen in a room.
She’d become a tiger lily instead of a stargazer. A single bloom standing alone.
But I knew the truth. Somewhere below the surface flame, the stargazer still existed.
Jada
TOO CLOSE
“This heart beat's tricking me into wanting to come close to you,
But I can't afford getting hurt again.
So, I'm just going to take a step back.”
Performed by Yuna
Written by Zara'ai / Hannibal / Braun
My gaze had strayed to the fog outside the office window even when it should have been focused on the trail of emails I needed to respond to. Other than the note that had appeared my first night back and the fact that my father was in the city, nothing else unpleasant had happened, and yet I’d still spent another night tossing and turning.
I’d lived two years waiting for this shoe to fall. Otōsan had insisted that Dawson and I were safe. He’d been clear in his instructions to the entire syndicate to keep their hands off, but I knew
exactly how much the Kyōdaina prized loyalty. I knew exactly what they did to people who tried to turn on them.
The door of the office opened, and Ashton walked in. Tall, skinny, and freckled, he looked like he should have been entering high school instead of having a Master’s in Business Administration and Marketing from Stanford. He’d lost a leg in a car accident as a child, but you’d never know he had a prosthetic by the smoothness of his gait. Violet and I had hired him to help with administrative tasks, social media, and marketing ideas. His was a catch-all kind of position that we’d been grateful for as the company had blown up over the last year. He’d probably need his own assistant soon, but I wasn’t prepared to do any hiring while Violet was on her honeymoon, just like I wasn’t prepared to shop for bigger production space until she returned.
Ashton made his way over to the brocade chairs and round table that sat between my desk and Violet’s in the office we shared. When we’d bought the facility with its lab and production space, we’d decided to share an office because we worked better together. But instead of filling the room with normal office furniture, it looked like a family room. My desk was a reclaimed buffet, and Violet’s was an antique that we’d restored. Quirky, unmatching, but all us.
When Ashton didn’t sit down, I raised an eyebrow. “What’s up.”
“So, Nyra is having a conniption fit because of some woman trying to get in to see you. I thought I better ask if you want us to let her in before Nyra tossed someone important out of the building.”
My heart lurched, the pace increasing. We hadn’t told the employees about the threat against me, but they were smart enough to know something was up. My security team had doubled, and getting in to see me had become almost as difficult as seeing the President of the United States.
