by Corri Lee
He’s insane, I told myself, the idea of being separated by two oceans and several countries is making him insane.
Gah, that was conceited. I had to seriously entertain the idea that he actually wanted me to meet bride number one.
“Emmeline, I think she wants to thank you for sending me back to her.”
“That was pretty awesome of me.” Way beyond the call of duty for the extra-marital gooseberry, some might think. I still thought she owed me.
There really was nothing to be gained by meeting the dying woman whose husband I’d stolen, but by the same note, nothing to be lost. “Ah, man. When?”
Blaze gave me his shy smile. “Not until we come back from my NYBJ.”
“NYBJ? Is that a new kind of oral?” And how long was he expecting me to do it for?
“New York Birthday Journey! Drag your mind away from my dick for five minutes, you perv.”
“Well it’s kinda just looking at me...” I bit my lip when he hardened in front of me. He loved knowing that I was looking at him—objectifying him very openly and brazenly. Blaze Valentine—God help me for enduring that moniker—was a man who had very few qualms about being seen as a sex object by women worldwide, getting a kick out of seeing his name synonymous with fan-bloggers who provided the internet with far too graphic descriptions of what they’d do after undressing him with their teeth. It was very easy for me to forget just how celebrated Blaze was internationally, every scrumptious bit of him, when I knew him so well beyond the portfolio.
“You realise you’ve just given me a really good reason to run away in Japan.” Not even my yummy man could deny that his timing was shocking.
His chin dropped to his chest. “Fuck.”
“That might convince me to come home. But coffee first.”
The dark skies of London were only just blushed with light when I said my goodbyes at Heathrow. Chris had come with us in the car to keep Blaze company on the drive back, but kept a wary distance after giving me a bear hug and threatening to steal my collectables if I wasn’t there to meet them at New Tokyo International Airport.
“It hardly seems fair that you’re missing out on Henry’s private jet,” Blaze mumbled into my tear-wet hair. So far, the tears had fallen in silent, melancholy rivulets down our cheeks, but I knew the full-bore hysterics would come later for both of us.
“Ah, it’s okay. I don’t mind slumming it in first class.”
“God.” He squeezed me so tightly I was sure I heard a rib pop. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
“You’ll miss me even more if you’ve killed me before I even get to board the damn plane!” I whimpered when he released me and looked down at me with those avid green eyes shimmering sadly. “I’ll miss you, too. I’ll send you a message and an email when I’ve landed, and you can call me as soon as you get it. It doesn’t matter what time just—”
“Emmeline.”
I was rambling again. I knew it. I kissed him one more time and picked up my hand luggage, backing towards the departure lounge. It felt like walking away from my reflection, but I’d promised that I’d never leave him.
So this wasn’t sayonara. It was just matane.
Glassy grey eyes stared up at me, the colour now clear in my dim nightmare. For the first time, I heard my own panting breath cut through the silence. The image was sharper, more... clear.
All was not as it once seemed.
My victim deserved her death. I felt it in the hatred that festered in the deepest pits of my blackening heart. She’d tried to take something precious from me. I killed her because—
“You gave me no choice.”
I startled awake to a stewardess tapping my shoulder too soon after my nightmare, reactively kicking off my fleece blanket in a panic.
“Goodness, Miss Tudor, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Her sloe eyes were a deep brow and kind. And worried. God, what the hell must she have thought?
“No, it’s okay, it’s not your fault. I was—” Having a nightmare like a child? No, I wasn’t going to start volunteering that information to strangers. Brushing my hair back out of my face, I retrieved my glasses from the vacant seat next to me and took a cleansing breath. “What’s up?”
“We’ll be landing in Tokyo in ten minutes, Miss Tudor. You’ll be let off the plane first.”
“What?” I leaned over to flip up the blind and was struck in full force by the stunning vista of Japan in darkness. Sure enough, the whole other three passengers in first class were gathering their laptops and hand luggage together. “Jeez.”
My plan had been to sleep for a while then do some more work on the budget investigation. Turned out that I’d slept straight through for nearly twelve hours. I must have needed the rest.
Maybe it was my body preparing itself for what promised to be an awesome week. Maybe I was gearing myself up for all the sleep I’d lose to phone calls to Blaze.
Who the fuck cared? I was about the land in my third metropolis in less than a year, where the culture and fashion was guaranteed to amaze. The streets would throb with an entirely new energy, hide new secrets and solve new mysteries.
Konnichiwa, Tokyo!
With a population of over thirteen million, Tokyo had more than enough bright minds to cater to all of my vices. As the third world economy command centre alongside London and New York, opportunities for expansion were everywhere, shaking yen at wealthy families at like mine, begging to be snatched up and fulfilled.
As a setting for many forms of media, the skyline was well known for being outstanding. There was nowhere you could turn without being wowed, no high point you could look from without being dizzied by awe. By day, the sky scrapers and spires speared into the atmosphere in clusters, forcing you to crane your neck upwards to see how far they reached. By night, the obelisks lit up in an aurora of colours—the sight of which I was hit with as my plane began to descend.
Between all that and the fact that so many video games came from Japan, the developing technology, quirks and diversity of both the structures and the inhabitants, and the obvious factor of their speciality food being sushi—the whole prefecture, nay, the entire country, was outstanding.
It was also creeping into it’s second week of being in a spontaneous, unseasonable and ungodly heat wave. While many parts of the Western world were covered in snow, Tokyo was so freaking’ hot I could feel it through the air conditioned queues of customs. With sweat dripping from my forehead down my nose and beading on my upper lip, I began to think yeah, I must have been out of my fucking mind to want to stay an extra few days in this furnace. God knows how I’d last the rest of the trip without melting.
Hunter stood out in the arrival lounge, hands casually shoved into his pockets as he shifted his weight impatiently between his legs, amazingly golden brown with a tell-tale white strip around his wrist where he’d usually wear a watch. Women around me swayed and rerouted their paths to walk past him, rubbernecking when they were a few steps further ahead to view him from behind.
I understood it. I’d been there. In an airport full of Japanese gentleman, being one of the few Caucasian men in the crowd already put him in the minority, but his wholesome and traditional good looks made him stand out on his own merits.
“Hey!” I called to him as soon he was in earshot. “What’s with this heat?”
He took my suitcase from me and gave me a quick hug of welcome. “You just wait until the morning. We’ll find you some SPF five thousand in the travel shop.”
“Christ.” The blast of heat that hit me when we left the building was debilitating. It was the kind of heat that made you feel stifled and uncomfortable, the kind that not even ice chipped off a rift in the Arctic could put a dent in.
And Hunter didn’t look even slightly bothered.
“Could you not have warned me about this before I flew over? I’ve packed clothes for a UK spring and you’ve brought me to, what, the eighth circle of Hell on a cool day?”
“Huh...” He
averted his gaze when I stripped a layer down to the fairly immodest camisole I’d been wearing under a light shirt. One more degree and I’d walk around in my underwear without a second thought. “I guess it would have been decent to warn you. But then I wouldn’t get treated to a striptease.”
“Ew! That’s almost incestuous!”
Grinning, we linked arms and walked into the stuffy Japanese night scene to his car. I’d been second guessing my choice to fly over early for days. But as soon as I was on our way to his house, I stopped. Regret had no place in Tokyo.
Peter Rosen’s failings as a father really didn’t seem like such a travesty when you saw how he’d put up his son and future daughter-in-law. The Hunter-Asakuro residence was a magnificent building, modelled like a three level pagoda with covered balconies stretching around both the first and second floors, shiny solar panels attached to the sloped overhanging verandas, and a flat glass roof looking down into a home office and studio. Long stretches of windows filled the majority of the wall space, making the whole house mostly translucent, though I knew that in a second the windows could be covered by electronically powered privacy screens.
All that glass wasn’t helpful in the scorching hot weather. I thanked my lucky stars that I’d be able to check in at my hotel in the morning, where the air conditioning would be on so high I’d need a snow suit to feel overheated. Still, it was almost humbling to spend some time in such a masterpiece while I waited for the sun to rise.
“No Siobhan?” I walked a circuit of the ground floor, admiring the traditional Japanese garden surrounding the house. It was fairly excluded from neighbours, so the grass spread back a fair way until it met the twenty-foot high bamboo fencing that was, admittedly, not all that secure but attractive nonetheless. Water features bubbled at the four corners of the garden leading into a small stream that veined around three sides—two large gravelled sections with cloisters of small ornamental white houses lay on either side of the water joined by a bridge.
No wonder they were getting married in their own backyard.
“She’s staying with her family until the wedding. She didn’t want you to get chilblains going from one extreme of sweltering heat to the icy reception you’d give each other.”
Hilarious. There was no denying that our attitudes towards each other were so cool that people in a ten mile radius would get frostbite when we were forced together, but it was good of her to save Hunter the stress of being trapped between his two favourite girls. Uncharacteristically so.
Oh well, I wasn’t complaining. By getting Hunter’s spare time, I childishly felt like I had the upper hand over her. A bad mentality to have, seeing as she was marrying him, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like the duplicitous bitch and I wouldn’t insult his intelligence by pretending I did.
“Was she pissed that I changed my RSVP?”
“Strangely no.” I spun around and arched a brow at him. “She actually looked over the moon when I added your name to the guest list. I had to ask her if she’d been lobotomised.”
“Well, shit.” Maybe she was human after all, and feeling some inconvenient remorse. Perhaps that was why she’d holed up with her family—if she was in conversational proximity, she might actually have to sacrifice some pride and apologise.
I looked at my phone for the tenth time since we’d arrived at Hunter’s place. As promised, I’d texted and emailed Blaze as soon as I could but was still waiting for him to acknowledge that I’d touched down safely. “What time is it in England?”
Hunter frowned at the clock. “Sevenish?”
“Oh.” He should have been home by now. Knowing I’d made the mistake once before, I checked my sent items on my phone.
Just landed. Slept thru whole flight. Hot as fucking hell here, so ditch extra layers. Miss u already x
Nope, it had definitely gone through. The radio silence made me restless and edgy.
“Everything okay?”
“I hope so.” God, listen to yourself. You’ve only been on solid ground for a little over an hour. “I mean... Yeah, of course. I’m just waiting for Blaze to call me. I thought he might have got a jump on it as soon as I let him know I was here.”
“Oh.” I stared out across the garden again, contemplating all the reasons that might be delaying his call, trying to avoid any that might stop him flying out to Japan in a few days. “Everything going well there?”
“Yeah.” Apart from the arguments over Japan, it was great. And apart from the complication of Natasha refusing to divorce him. As much as we’d straightened ourselves out, our environment was still very much complicated. “It’s internally awesome. Not so much awesome with the external.”
“Do you ever wonder if you should have stayed in New York?”
It took a few seconds to register what he’d asked me. I distinctly remembered him dragging me home, so why now would he be asking about my other option—staying there?
I was spinning around to ask, “What gives?” when I saw it. The face of a man completely out of his element—indisputably ill at ease. An expression that didn’t belong on someone about to marry the love of his life. Pre-wedding jitters? No, it was more than that. I had the horrible feeling that whatever Blaze had felt in his waters had been dead on.
“Are you okay, Hunter? You should be tap dancing on cloud nine but you’ve got that look about you.”
“What look?”
“The what-am-I-doing-with-my-life look.” He scoffed, tutted and shoved his hands back into his pockets. That’s when I knew it. That’s when I knew that he was mentally lacing up his running shoes.
I wasn’t going to make it easy for him to get off the starting blocks.
“Have you and Siobhan had another row?” When his eyes rolled, I knew I had him. I could read him like a book and he made it even easier with body language that told me I was dangerously close to breaking his resolve. “You can talk to me. No judgement, because that would make me a hypocrite.”
He finally cracked on a sigh. “No arguments, which is weird for us. Things have been good.”
I followed him into his neo-modern kitchen when he waved a hand towards it. “So what’s with the little boy lost look? And asking me if I wish I’d stayed in New York instead of going back to Blaze after you brought me home to him.”
“I brought you to your friends and family, Emmeline. Not to him.” What the hell was he saying? Fixing my relationship had to be the motive. Didn’t it? That much was definitely on everyone else’s agenda, if not Hunter’s. “Do you never just wonder what would happen if you’d taken the more arduous path?”
“I did take the arduous path.” Compared to what Blaze and I had to contend with, Calloway’s elitist one man mission to turn me into his drone was a fucking picnic. “What’s really on your mind?”
“I don’t know.” Hunter groaned and pulled two wine glasses off a shelf. “Maybe I’m just curious as to what could have been waiting for me if I hadn’t taken the easy option.”
“Oh, you took the easy option, all right.” He nodded mindlessly and filled our glasses. He nodded. To an insult at his blushing bride. “Well shit, Hunter. I come all this way to throw petty insults and you’re not even going to acknowledge my dry wit?”
“What?”
God help me, he was going to make it difficult. Unfortunately for him, I thrived on difficult. It wouldn’t happen right then, and it might not happen that day, but without a shadow of a doubt, I was going to find out what was going on in that thick head of his.
It had never made sense to me when people told me that they’d had ‘too much’ sleep. Contrarily, I often felt like I couldn’t get enough. I lusted after the days I’d been a simple soul working in a bookshop that was only a short walk from my home. I could hit snooze a few times and roll out of bed at the very last minute looking like I’d been dragged through a hedgerow because so few people would see me, and barely scraping a punctual arrival carried very few penalties. It usually just meant I had to do the coffee run.
All that had changed, though. Now, I was programmed to wake up before my alarm, shower and suit up before tackling the commute through rush hour traffic to The Parr. I was very much in “Please, just five more minutes” territory.
So yeah, I never really got it until I emerged from that long haul flight after a good solid snore session.
By the time I could check into the hotel at ten, I felt like a zombie. My head felt like it was pulsating with every heartbeat and my eyes were so dry they were streaming. Combining that with the rising temperature outside, I was also pretty damn ratty, too.
Hunter left me in the lobby, maybe a little too scared to stay with me any further. I was the type of person to get... eh, a little testy when I was hungry or tired, and that morning I was both, so he’d spent a good hour taking my snide comments on the chin. I’d apologised implicitly but it had lacked any sincere punch and I didn’t care. I just wanted a shower and a couple of hours to cat nap before he took me to my first meeting with the project manager for one of Henry’s new ventures.
That was all the information I had. That they were a project manager and it was a new venture. That alone was annoying enough.
I got my much needed shower after unpacking my clothes into the wardrobe in the master bedroom of the suite Blaze would be joining me in. As far as I could make out, the only advantage of the heat wave was that the creases would drop out pretty quickly.
Oh, and the weather would be good for the wedding. I guess that was an advantage, too.
The suite wasn’t quite as cool as I would have liked but rather than call down to the reception desk and be a diva, I sprawled out across the bed and closed my eyes.
My phone rang. Of course it did. And I damn near threw it across the room until I had the sense to check who was calling.