Kimi sighed. “Go see to Jason. I will let myself out.”
“You’re going to be okay?”
Kimi nodded, though she was not sure of anything.
She took the guest elevator down to the fourth floor and tried not to feel as if the handful of people she passed was privy to her and Greg’s lapse outside the training room. She did not know why it was so difficult now; she had been little more than a child when she had first become accustomed to people gossiping about her.
The door to Greg’s room was closed when she passed it and she let herself into her own, only to stop short at the sight of him leaning against the side of her desk.
“I used a passkey,” he said.
She slowly closed the door behind her. “I thought that was against your code of ethics.”
“My ethics have taken a beating since you’ve come around.”
She winced. “That was never my intention.”
He sighed. “I know.”
“You, um, you own jeans.” It seemed a foolish observation once she voiced it. What did it matter that the very sexy GQ look he had sported at the party had been replaced by even more appealing worn blue jeans and a thick gray sweater?
“And I put them on one leg at a time,” he drawled, though his face did not look particularly amused.
She did not need to have images of him dressing…or undressing…running through her imagination.
“Where have you been?”
She brushed her hands down the sides of the dress that she wished now she had left safely buried in her crowded closet. “I went up to see my stepsister. Did you, um, deal with the—”
“Sex tape?”
She flushed painfully. “Do not call it that! We were not—”
“Making out in the corridor of the hotel I run for your family?” His voice was tight. “That is exactly what we were doing, Kimi, and you’d damn well better believe that word about it is likely to spread.”
“Can you not erase the tape or something?”
He flipped a small square device onto the desk. “It’s a digital drive. And the only record that I know of.”
“Why would there be one that you do not know of?”
“There shouldn’t be. We were only lucky that Shin happened to be in the monitoring room to call and remind me that I’d lost all sense. And he can warn the other two guards who were there to keep their mouths shut, but that’s a crapshoot at best.”
“I am sorry I wore the dress.”
He exhaled noisily. “It’s not the damn dress, Kimi. It’s you.”
“Would you like me to apologize for being me?”
“That’d be like asking the earth to stop spinning. If word about this gets back to your parents, I’m done here.”
“I wish I could convince you that you are wrong. If I called them right now and admitted the truth, you would see!”
“What truth? Not only am I your boss, I’m too damn old for you! You should be messing around with well-heeled college boys who are still wet behind the ears. Ones with pedigrees as long as my arm.”
“I am not interested in college boys. Pedigreed or not. I am interested in you.”
“Why?”
“I do not know!” Her voice rose with frustration. “You are uncompromising and annoying and—” her eyes were suddenly burning again “—and fair and honorable. And I—I am in love with you.” There. She had said it. Voiced the words that had been hovering inside her for weeks now.
“Don’t say that.”
“That is the response every girl wants to hear,” she observed, but inside her heart felt like it was cracking into pieces.
“What should I say?” he demanded roughly. “Should I go down on my knee and beg you to marry me?”
She could barely breathe. “Would that be s-so terrible?”
“Yes, because you’ll come to your senses soon enough.” His voice was flat. Uncompromising. “Particularly when it sinks in just how far apart our lives are. Then you’ll realize that what you think might be—” his jaw tightened visibly “—love was anything but.”
“The only thing that feels too far apart is you from me.” She closed the space between them and slid her hands up his arms.
“Kimi, if we start this, I’m not going to be able to stop. Not again.”
“When did I ever ask you to? You are the one who pulls away, Greg.”
“Would you prefer I’d have taken you right there in the corridor for the camera to see?”
“You would not have done that.”
He looked even more grim. “I’m glad you sound so certain, because I sure as hell am not.” He caught her hands and squeezed them tightly for a moment, then set her from him.
His face could have been carved from stone, and wariness slid through her uneasily.
“I have to at least see the Taka through the gala.”
The wariness shifted into full-blown alarm. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that after that, I’ll be submitting my resignation to Helen and Mori.”
“Do you not think that is a little extreme?” She tried for lightness and fell miles short. The set look in those stained-glass eyes of his told her everything. “Greg.” She lifted her hands, feeling utterly helpless. “You cannot resign. Not…not because of me. I will go.”
“Your leaving wouldn’t change what happened, Kimi.”
“So you will give up what you have strived for all of your life just because we made love?” She stared into his face. “Or is that simply a convenient excuse for you to prove that you really do not belong in this world?”
The edge of his teeth bared. “I never said otherwise. I learned that a long time ago.”
“From whom? That other rich girl you talked about?”
“Sydney was only a little taste,” he said, his voice flat. “I’ve made a career in an industry where, in order to make it to the top, the only thing that matters is your pedigree. A pedigree I don’t have and never will. The only thing I have is the stamp I’ve made on the houses I’ve run, and maybe, maybe some day that would stand well enough to open my own. If I’m lucky. If I had the financing. If I had a spotless reputation that could make up even partially for having the gall to even try. Believe me, Kimi. Working in this world is not the same as belonging to it.”
“And because I do belong to it, you and I—” she waved her hand dismissively “—can never have anything other than an, an interlude.”
“An interlude I should have never allowed.”
“Why not? At least you can use it as an excuse to flog yourself even more!”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Anger, like none she had ever known, slammed into her. “Really? How about the fact that I know exactly how to find any and every excuse to avoid finishing something important. I know about setting my own bombs to go off before I can even cross the bridge of something that matters, because it is so much easier to stay in place than to start across and chance failure at the other side!” She lifted her chin, though she was trembling from head to foot, and pointed her finger in his face. “You want to open your own hotels, Greg? Maybe you should start learning your lessons from Helen. She doesn’t have your almighty important pedigree, and look where she is. She takes her chances because something matters to her. If you want to blow off the trust my parents have put in you to helm this hotel, that is your business, Greg. But do not dare to use me as an excuse. All of us deserve better. Including you.”
The muscle in his jaw worked but she did not back down. Did not back away.
After a long, tense silence, he walked through the connecting doorway and quietly closed the door behind him.
It felt as if a door had closed inside her heart, as well.
Chapter Eleven
“Merry Christmas, Greg.” Helen Taka-Hanson personally answered his knock on the Presidential Suite’s door. “I’m so pleased you’re able to join us for dinner tonight. I love a big Christmas get-to
gether. Kimi warned me that you might be too busy with your duties. I’m glad that wasn’t the case.” She swung the door wide. “Aren’t those lovely?”
Greg handed her the arrangement of fresh flowers. “They pale next to you, I’m afraid.”
She smiled widely. “Such a smooth tongue. Come in, come in.” He felt like hell and wanted to be there the way he wanted a throbbing hole in his head. No matter how closely Kimi’s words had struck him, he felt completely out of place. Whether Helen recognized the resistance inside him at joining the Takas for this private dinner or not, she tucked her arm through his and drew him across the threshold.
The Presidential Suite—all 3,200 square feet of it—was decked to the nines with holiday cheer and tall, slender Helen Taka-Hanson, dressed in muted gold from head to toe, looked like she should be the angel atop the decorated nine-foot Christmas tree that took center stage.
“As you can see, we’ve made ourselves quite at home since we arrived yesterday.” Her grin was slightly impish and somewhat at odds with her overwhelmingly classic beauty.
“I see that.” He eyed the enormous tree. It had not been present when he’d personally shown Helen and Mori to their suite the previous day. It was then that Helen had issued her insistent invitation for Christmas dinner.
He tried not to eye Kimi, who was kneeling next to the tree.
Not that she was looking at him. She hadn’t said two words to him since he’d walked out of her room the other night. Like the coward he was, he’d done his share of avoiding her, too. But her heartfelt words haunted him constantly.
I am in love with you.
“It’s quite a display,” he managed to tell Helen over the memory of Kimi’s voice. “It puts the decorations we have in the lobby to shame.”
“The decorations around the hotel are most becoming,” Helen assured. She let go of Greg’s arm and crossed the room. “Would you like a cocktail?” She rummaged behind the granite-topped bar and came up with a Waterford pitcher that she turned into an impromptu vase for the flowers.
“Whatever you’re having would be fine.” Greg’s gaze crept over to Kimi again. She wore a deep blue off-the-shoulder dress that clung from just below the curve of her shoulders to her knees. Cashmere, most likely.
Soft. But not as soft as he knew her skin was.
“It is my wife’s one requirement of Christmas,” Mori Taka said, delivering the wine glass to Greg.
Greg dragged his focus from Kimi to her father. He wasn’t quite as tall as Greg, but he was just as broad. Not a guy to cross either in the boardroom or on the streets.
“Whenever we travel over the holidays, Helen insists on putting up a tree and decorating it with the ornaments she has collected over the years,” Mori continued, amused. His English was more accented than Kimi’s, but only barely.
“Collected or made.” Helen went to the tree and touched a glittering, elongated star. “Kimi made this when she was sixteen.”
“Her artist phase,” Mori added, casting an indulgent look toward his daughter.
Greg could remember making ornaments in school and taking them to whatever dump they were currently calling home. But only once or twice could he recall there being a tree to hang them on. He knew that Mona had never bothered trying to save any of his efforts.
“My family could bore you with recounting all of my phases,” Kimi said, not looking at him. She adjusted the position of yet another package.
A chime sounded. “Excuse me a moment.” Helen headed back to the foyer.
“Kimi-chan, do you plan to shake and rattle every package beneath the tree? Mr. Sherman will think you have no patience at all.”
Greg could feel the reluctance rolling off her in waves, but she rose smoothly to her feet and smiled at her father. “I shake only those that have my name on the tag, Papa.” She turned toward Greg, though her gaze rose no higher than his chin. “And Mr. Sherman is already aware of my impatient nature, are you not, Mr. Sherman?”
“Zest for life, Ms. Taka.”
At that, Kimi flashed him a skeptical glance.
I am in love with you. Maybe her zest had gotten out of hand. He’d warned her she hadn’t meant it. Maybe she hadn’t.
“Good heavens, all this mister and miss business sounds entirely too formal for a Christmas get-together,” Helen observed, returning with her daughter and son-in-law in tow. Jenny’s coloring was different than Helen’s—she was a redhead, for one thing—but seeing the two women standing alongside one another, their resemblance was even more striking.
“Mr. Sherman’s professionalism has made an indelible habit,” Kimi said. She crossed to her sister. “May I take him?”
Jenny passed over the baby, murmuring something he couldn’t hear before Kimi wandered away from the crowd, cooing to the small bundle.
Greg finally looked away from her, only to find Mori watching him. His fingers tightened around the stem of the wine glass. “I’m sorry I was unable to give you a tour of the Taka yesterday afternoon, myself.”
“Perfectly understandable. You have responsibilities,” Mori dismissed smoothly. “Carter Janes was more than informative.”
The back of Greg’s neck itched. Just how informative would his assistant manager have been? Shin had already alerted Greg to the few rumblings he’d heard where Greg and Kimi were concerned. Rumblings that he’d reportedly squelched.
For all the good that was likely to do.
“You’re doing an excellent job, Greg,” Helen said. “Mori and I couldn’t be more pleased, isn’t that right, darling?”
“As usual, my wife has found the right notes for success.”
That music would come to a screeching halt once they knew about Greg and Kimi. “I look forward to going over the final details for the gala on New Year’s Eve.” Final details that would be including his resignation, if Greg made it even that long, considering the unreadable look on Mori’s face.
“All right. That is enough business for tonight,” Helen ordered lightly. “We’ll have plenty of time after today to discuss it all.” The door chime rang again. “Kimi, darling, would you mind?”
Looking altogether too natural for comfort with the baby in her arms, Kimi went to answer the door, and soon the living area was crowded with even more family members as the influx didn’t seem to stop through one glass of wine or the next.
“The boys,” as Helen called them, were her fully adult stepsons from her first marriage to millionaire George Hanson. Some of them Greg had met before. Some not. Jack was the eldest. Another legal eagle like Richard Warren. Then came Evan and Andrew with their wives and their assortment of young offspring.
Before long, the place was a hive of activity. They could have been any rambunctious, somewhat disorderly family from anywhere—squabbling over everything from football to politics to favorite shoe designers. It probably should have seemed odd that they were there in the Presidential Suite.
But, Greg realized, it wasn’t odd at all.
It was…enviable.
And he didn’t belong there at all, no matter how graciously Helen had insisted he join them for their dinner.
He finished the wine that Mori had refilled more than once, escaping a heated debate between Evan and Andrew over what teams were shoo-ins for the Super Bowl, and took the glass over to the bar.
“Running away already?” Kimi’s voice was low, barely audible over the voices and laughter and Christmas carols playing from the state-of-the-art sound system.
“Don’t you think it’s wise?”
She pressed the baby’s small hand to her lips. He’d noticed that she hadn’t let go of the infant once since she’d taken him from his mother. “You already know exactly what I think.”
“This is a family affair. I’m not family.”
“You could be.”
He very nearly snapped the wineglass stem in two. “Kimi—”
“Sumimasen. Please. Forget I said that.” Her cheeks were red. “Blame it on the wine.”
“I have yet to see you carrying a wineglass since I arrived. Your hands have mostly been full of your nephew.”
“Then blame it on whatever you like. Maybe I just have weddings on the brain since the Nguyens’ fete.”
Business. Talk about business. “I heard you handled everything brilliantly. I would have told you earlier if I’d had a chance.” If he hadn’t been avoiding her.
She lifted a shoulder. “We all have our jobs to do. I am surprised to see you here this evening, though. Unless you are planning to confess all to them over the Christmas pudding.”
His jaw tightened. “No.”
“Then why come?”
“It’s hard to refuse an invitation from the owners.”
She looked up at him through her lashes. “Is that the only reason?”
“Remember, now, no business talk over there.” Helen’s voice carried over the others.
“Then what else would we talk about?” Kimi smiled lightly, raising her voice enough to be heard. “Mr. Sherman was enquiring about a large wedding we held here the evening before last.”
“Did you jump out of the cake?” Andrew asked, amused. “Hold on. That would have been the bachelor party.”
Kimi made a face at him. “Very funny. I was in charge of the event.”
Andrew visibly shuddered, earning himself an elbow poke from his petite wife. “What?”
“Be nice,” Delia chided.
“Oh, hell. Kimi knows I’m just kidding, don’t you, squirt?”
Kimi just kissed the baby’s tiny knuckles again, looking amused and immune to the teasing.
Greg saw it for the act that it was, though. “The wedding had a guest list of four hundred,” he told them. “And Kimi was the only person in the house able to satisfy the exacting demands of the wedding coordinator. She did an excellent job. The event was flawless, according to the Nguyens. It’s a guarantee that we’ll have more business out of it. The bride’s father is a well-known Japanese artist. I met with him this afternoon to discuss some photography he’d like to do of the hotel.”
“This afternoon?” Delia looked surprised. “But it’s Christmas Day.”
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