With my gift situation all settled and feeling a little stronger, I found the boarding gate for our flight.
Nobuki had managed to get there before me. He was sitting in the far back and, like always, he was on his phone. Of course he was. The foreign marketing department had been away from the office for a week and I knew how many emails he got in a single day.
Even if we had left the office, he was working just as hard. His work ethic was stunning. I took a deep breath, mentally preparing myself for whatever would come my way, and took a seat across from him.
He looked up from his phone. “I’m sorry we didn’t spend some time to buy gifts. The duty free shops in airports aren’t very good.”
Was he not going to mention the way I abandoned him at the curb?
The smile wobbled on my lips. “It’s okay. It’s my fault. There were plenty of opportunities, I just didn’t take them.”
His mouth pressed into a tight line. “With Julian, I suppose?”
I kept my smile somehow. “He was very kind to me.”
Nobuki shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss Hasegawa.”
That’s right. He was calling me by my last name because we weren’t alone.
I shook my head. “It’s okay.”
“He’s a good man,” he continued in a thoughtful manner. “He would’ve treated you well.”
I clenched my jaw. I did not want to go down that road. Maybe I wasn’t as prepared as I thought I was. “He would’ve.”
“And yet you chose to return with me.”
I stared at him. “Why…why would you say that?”
Nobuki turned back to his phone. “He asked my permission.”
I blinked in shock. “Your permission?”
“He wanted to know what I would say,” he said. “He wanted to know what the chances were of you taking a chance on him. Of staying here.”
I tried to swallow the lump in my throat. “I couldn’t accept his offer. I mean…all of my family…friends…I can barely even speak the language.”
“You seemed to have little problem at the trade show.”
“Did you want me to stay here?” My voice shook. “With him?”
Nobuki’s dark gaze flickered up to me. “I’m surprised, that’s all. You strike me as the practical type. Why take a chance when you could be with someone who loves and respects you?”
“What are you trying to say?”
His eyes narrowed. “There can be nothing between us, Miss Hasegawa. If you are entering our arrangement with misguided hopes of somehow making me fall in love with you, then you are very, very wrong. That will not happen.”
“Trust me, I know,” I bit out, wishing I still had my luggage so I could throw it at him. What a haughty bastard. “All I want out of this is your body. I wouldn’t want a heart as cold as yours anyway.”
His lips curled up. “As long as we’re both aware of the situation.”
“Oh, I am.”
He turned back to his phone. “Good.”
We sat like that in stony silence for the next two hours, him on his phone and me thumbing through my copy of The Graveyard Apartment.
When they opened up boarding and called for people in first and business class, Nobuki and I stood up, while I studiously avoided looking at him.
But then he paused and pulled something out of his pocket.
I eyed the proffered silver key in his hand. “This is…?”
“My house key,” he said. “I assume you want to meet at my house, as opposed to yours?”
Of course. If my mother ever saw a man walk into my apartment, since my parents owned the building, she’d have us wed within the week.
I nodded and accepted the key. “Thank you. This is very convenient.”
“Come whenever you want,” he continued in that same casual voice as though this meant nothing to him. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I slipped the key into my front pocket. “Thank you.”
With the key burning a hole in my pocket, I followed Nobuki onto the plane and back to Tokyo.
What happens when a one night affair with a handsome devil turns into something more?
Rika is determined to keep love and lust separate. And that means making sure her relationship with Nobuki remains strictly physical, no matter how much her family wants her to settle down. But with her heart set on causing trouble, Rika is forced to confront the fact that maybe, just maybe, she might have caught feelings for her boss. Now more than ever, she has to keep their relationship secret, or else risk losing her job and Nobuki entirely.
But life only gets more complicated when Yue Kinou storms through the office and straight into Nobuki’s life. As it turns out, this beautiful former soft-core porn actress shares a long and sordid history with Nobuki, one that includes a child of dubious parentage and simmering tension…tension that remains to this day.
And Yue will stop at nothing to destroy Rika and Nobuki’s one chance at happiness.
THE HANDSOME DEVIL: HIS UNTIL DAWN
Coming July 31 2017!
I was back.
My back hurt, my legs hurt, and my head hurt.
The taxi driver opened the trunk for me, and even though he offered to help me with my bags, I refused his kind offer, paid him quickly, told him I didn’t need the change, and levered the overloaded luggage out the back.
My back cracked ominously as I slammed the trunk door and when the taxi’s lights faded away into the darkness, I took a deep breath.
Los Angeles had smelled like gasoline and the ocean. Tokyo smelled like…flowers. Flowers and food. It made sense, I supposed. It was spring, after all. The sakura blossoms were out in full force and it was dinnertime. Mom promised to have a good dinner laid out for me. Body creaking from the twelve hour flight, I moved quickly and entered the courtyard of the five-floor apartment building that my parents both owned and managed.
My parents lived on the first floor, and I took a deep breath as I approached the front door and recognized a voice I hadn’t heard in a few weeks.
Crap.
My hand tightened around the luggage handle. I wanted a quiet dinner and then to pass out for the next ten hours, but that wasn’t going to happen.
Not with my sister in town.
I squared my shoulders and reached for the knob.
Through no action of mine, it turned under my hand and the door swung open, letting out the mouth-watering scent of beef and potato stew and the sight of my older sister, Saki Hasegawa.
“Rika!” she squealed and wrapped me in a tight embrace that made my ribs squeak in protest. “Talk about good luck. I’m headed back to Fukuoka tomorrow morning!”
I patted her awkwardly on the back, once again painfully aware of how far I had to reach down. I was one hundred and seventy-five centimeters while she stood a very petite one hundred and fifty-five, and I had felt that difference in our heights acutely when we were growing up.
To be honest, I still felt it. “Hi, Saki. Good to see you.”
She pulled back and looked up at me, her pretty face furrowed. “God, you look horrible. Come in, come in!”
I tried to grab my luggage, but she swatted my hand away and grabbed it herself, coming in behind me as I took off my shoes in the entryway.
My mother poked her permed head out of the kitchen doorway, a spatula in one hand, and wearing her usual red and white apron. For some reason, the sight made my eyes hot.
“Oh, you’re home. Good,” she said with a warm smile. I sniffed as I tried in vain to hide the relief of being home. “Sit down. Dinner is almost done.”
“I’ll help you set up.”
She shook her head as Saki pushed past me in the narrow corridor separating the kitchen from the living room. “Don’t be silly. Your sister can help. You go and relax.”
My father called me into the small dining room just next to the kitchen and I padded toward him, the muscles slowly unknotting between my shoulders.
It never struck me how much I m
issed home until I got off the plane. When I was surrounded by a mass of dark heads, signs I could understand, listening to Japanese spoken around me, I was so relieved I could have cried.
I might’ve, if my boss hadn’t been standing right next to me, checking his phone.
Oh yeah.
My lover.
Yikes, I could hardly believe it.
Dad sat at the end of the square table, glasses perched on the tip of his narrow nose, his familiar, wrinkled face making me smile. He closed his newspaper and folded it neatly. “How was the flight?”
I slid into the chair on his right side, sitting cross-legged as I always had. “Long.”
My mother started putting out the plates, forcing me down with a strong hand to my shoulder as I tried to get up to help her.
“I thought you were in business class?” he asked.
I struggled and poured myself a glass of warm barley tea. “It was better than being in coach, but sitting down for twelve hours is hard.”
Saki snorted as she started putting out side dishes. “With those legs, yeah, I’d believe that.”
It was a good-natured barb, but I still didn’t like it. My sister had been ribbing me about my height for the last twenty years and while I wished I could say I got used to it, some things were impossible to ignore. “At least I got unlimited wine and beer.”
Saki stuck out her tongue. “Like that’s anything to you.”
And for a moment, just one small moment, it almost felt like I was in school again, coming back home late from a school council meeting, my sister fresh from a rhythmic gymnastics competition, Mom and Dad eating their dinner late so we could all dine together.
I sniffed again and brought the cup up to my mouth to hide the fact that I was a teary idiot who crumbled at the slightest provocation.
Dad coughed. “That reminds me!”
He left the room and returned with a bottle of shochu and two glasses. “Saki, get some ice, hmm?”
She wrinkled her small, pert nose. “Ew. I understand why you’re drinking that, but Rika—you, too? How old are you? Fifty?”
I didn’t mention the fact that she was closer to fifty than I was, by two years, and instead waited for her to bring a tray of ice cubes so I could pour my dad and myself a drink.
Shochu with my father was a tradition. He had always been fond of a drink or two most nights. But Mom wasn’t much of a drinker and since he didn’t have a son to pour his drink for him, the duty had fallen upon me.
Not that I minded. I liked the clean, crisp taste of the sweet potato alcohol and had grown partial to drinking it myself from time to time, even without Dad around.
He lifted the small glass in the air. “Here’s to your safe return, Rika.”
My heart swelled as I clinked my glass against his and we both threw back the shot.
The familiar blossoming of heat in my chest brought a sigh to my lips as I put down the glass, feeling like I was going to melt right into a puddle in the chair.
Dad poured another shot and we did it again, although his limit was two and done, something I appreciated. I didn’t want Saki to keep teasing me about being an old man, although it certainly didn’t stop her from trying as my dad handed her the bottle to put back in the kitchen.
“Let’s eat!”
Mom brought out a large plate, the centerpiece of my first Japanese meal in a week, her special beef and potato stew that made me almost drool over my rice.
Conversation around the dinner table, luckily, wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, what with my sister mostly focusing on talking to my mom and dad about her textile work in Fukuoka while I concentrated on eating the wonderful food I’d dreamed of on the plane.
When I wasn’t thinking about Nobuki.
Suddenly, the food stuck in my throat and I gulped down water, trying not to choke at my own dinner table.
It had been on the tip of my tongue to ask Nobuki over for dinner. I didn’t know anything about his family situation, but I was almost positive he wasn’t going to arrive home to find a delicious meal waiting for him at the dinner table. He didn’t strike me as a domestic kind of person.
But I couldn’t work up the courage, too afraid of being turned down.
We were at the baggage corral and he was scrolling through his phone, his brows drawn down.
“So…” I said hesitantly. “Do you have any plans after we get our bags?”
“Work,” he said brusquely, eyes never leaving the screen. “I have to answer some emails.”
“But it’s a Sunday night! Can’t you take a break?”
Nobuki Miyano was a notorious workaholic, but I didn’t know he was this bad.
“Unfortunately, Miss Hasegawa, for people in my position, there is no such thing as breaks.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but then closed it. Why bother refuting something that was true? He was right. Japan had one of the highest rates of work hours per week in any developed country. Most people my age got to work at 8:00 a.m. and didn’t leave until 6:00 or 7:00 p.m., even though the mandated work hours were from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. There was no such thing as overtime pay; not when everyone was expected to put in the extra hours.
Which made me feel even more uncomfortable because I always left work at five sharp every day, usually leaving Nobuki at his desk, unless he left before me to go to a dinner meeting with another department bigwig.
I had been on the verge of asking him to come to my house for dinner, but then he shot me a piercing glance. “I believe that’s your bag, Miss Hasegawa.”
It was hard to believe we were something other than boss and employee but I remembered the touch of his hands on my body, his lips against mine, and with a red face, I chased my bag down the carousel.
And now here I was, sitting at the dinner table, chopsticks dangling from the corner of my mouth like I was a kid, as I reached for a handful of napkins.
Saki’s large brown eyes settled on me as I dug into my food again.
“Hey, Rika?”
“Mmm?”
She pushed away her half-finished bowl, through with the meal. Then again, Saki had always left food on her plate. Maybe that explained why I was twenty centimeters taller. Certainly it couldn’t have been genetics, because my parents were of average height, with my mom barely taller than Saki, and my father half a head taller than her.
Suffice to say, whenever we took family pictures, I was usually sitting down.
“I heard from Mom you’re still not seeing anyone?”
I almost choked on my food again and had to cough discreetly into a napkin. “Um. No.”
Saki sighed heavily, leaning her elbows on the table, even though Mom had always chastised her for doing that.
Not this time. This time she put down her bowl and chopsticks and looked at us inquisitively.
Shit.
“Rika, come on, how old are you?” cajoled my sister. “Aren’t you getting a little long in the tooth?”
My appetite was rapidly waning from the sudden turn of conversation and I put down my chopsticks. “Can we not talk about this right now?”
Her brow lifted. “Your biological clock is ticking, little sister.”
I wanted to tell her that she was thirty and childless, but that would cause a fight and I knew I could never win, not against my stronger-willed sister. “Sorry.”
The quickest way to end an argument with her was to agree with everything she said and she would get bored. Otherwise she would keep going and going until I wanted to kill myself to end the misery of listening to her.
She exchanged a look with my mother while my father continued to eat in his usual laconic way. “You’re almost thirty. You need to think about getting married and having kids.”
I sighed. Damn my timing or damn hers. “I’m a little busy.”
“You don’t think I am? I’m a buyer for one of the largest fabric companies in southern Japan. You think I had time to get married? I didn’t, but I still did it
.”
My jaw clenched, but I didn’t say what was on my mind, that Saki married a man from her company and divorced him two years later after a childless and, according to her, loveless marriage.
But that would draw out this conversation and I found myself longing for bed.
“I know.”
She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Are you seeing someone now?”
“No.”
She was quiet for a moment, almost thoughtful, although my sister was too impetuous and high-strung to do anything remotely considered thinking. “I know someone.”
“Pass.”
She huffed. “Oh, give him a chance. He’s a really good guy. I went to school with him. He actually went to our same high school. Sure, he’s had a divorce and everything, but considering your age, I don’t think you can afford to be picky. You know, after thirty a woman’s uterus starts dying. Most parents won’t even consider their sons getting married to a woman as old as you, but I—”
I pushed back the chair so quickly it tumbled to the floor. “Thank you for the food, Mom, Dad. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
Saki stood up as well, although much more gracefully than me. Then again, she was always the small, graceful one, while I skulked around and tried to avoid comparisons to giraffes.
“Rika, I’m serious,” she said. “He remembers you, too.” She worried her lower lip between two small white teeth. “I’ve already taken the liberty of arranging a meeting between you two.”
I stared at her in horror. “You’ve what?”
“He’s a good guy,” she countered hastily, looking at Mom and Dad as though she expected their help. “He was in my class. Yuuki Sugiwara. Remember him?”
“Why should I? He was your classmate, not mine. Why would I give a crap about him?”
Her mouth fell open. My father stopped chewing.
“How could you say something like that?” she asked in a halting tone, voice trembling like she was about to burst into tears.
But she didn’t fool me. Nothing short of a catastrophe would induce my sister to tears and, even then, she would probably fake it to fit in with everyone else.
A One Night Affair (Kissing the Boss Book 2) Page 22
