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  A climax was just heartbeats away, as an inner pressure moved to her chest, around her heart….

  Almost there…

  Almost—

  He came first, exploding into her, just about ripping her apart and making her expand until she almost broke.

  But she didn’t.

  Dammit, why not? Why couldn’t she…?

  He reached down and helped her along, strumming her.

  She embraced him, bringing him against her, pressing her face against his head as she worked her hips.

  She remembered that last night, when she hadn’t wanted to leave him, when she’d thought her heart was getting chiseled out of her chest….

  Then finally, finally—

  She cried out as an orgasm slammed her, depriving her of a heartbeat and breath, suspending everything in a void in time.

  When she came back to herself, she had no idea how long she’d blanked out.

  Trembling, slumping against him, she slid down his body until they came face-to-face, panting against each other.

  They stayed there for what seemed like an hour, holding each other, not letting go, and then with every passing second, reality nudged her, growing, taking over.

  Her family.

  What would happen if they found out?

  Pressured by the disappointment she knew they’d feel, she kissed Tristan one more time, then pushed away, heading for the side of the pool.

  As she reached the edge, she looked back to find him running a hand through his hair, questions clearly written on his sculpted face.

  Well, she had questions, too, and unfortunately, her conscience was giving her answers she didn’t want to hear.

  5

  IN HIS WEAK-LIMBED AFTERMATH, Tristan lazily dipped under the water, then moved through the pool on his way to the waterfall.

  She’d been everything he’d been hoping for—more than any other woman in this world. More than any dream he’d ever satiated himself with at night, when he’d pictured her under him, on top of him in all those scenarios he’d created in his fevered mind.

  So what was with the space Juliana had put between them now?

  Actually, he didn’t even have to ask because he knew.

  The painting. The negotiations that only signified something much larger between them.

  But why had all that crap entered into something that was supposed to be an escape?

  He maneuvered under the waterfall, allowing the liquid to patter down on him, cooling his body. At the same time, he watched her at the side of the pool where she was recovering, too.

  The moments passed, his body mellowing while the water lapped at her waist as she kept her back to him.

  Her slim, toned, tempting back.

  “Not bad for a Thomsen,” he finally called over to her once he’d fully gathered himself.

  She glanced over her shoulder with a look that pounded him just as surely as the water.

  “Not bad for a Cole,” she answered.

  She smiled, just as if they were back to seducing each other, then turned all the way toward him. Water glistened over her small breasts, the pale-pink pebbled tips. Her stomach was flat, and he thought about how her whole body had curved like willow branches under his hands.

  When she moved through the pool in his direction, it was suddenly harder to take in air.

  “Your family,” she said. “What would they say if they knew you’d brought me to a tawdry love hotel of all places?”

  A cutting laugh escaped him. “Why’re you worrying about what they or anyone else would say or do? We don’t have to be thinking about that. Not right now.”

  She paused, floating in the water a few feet away, where the waterfall sent stray splashes over her. Her gaze became distant as she smiled again, more to herself than anything.

  “Yeah,” she said. “You’re right. I can’t have their opinions controlling my every move. I keep telling myself that, but hearing you say it drives the notion home.”

  Tristan tried not to let her see how much that pleased him. He was no advice-giver, but she made it sound as if he were good at it.

  “No one,” he said, his body ticking—a time bomb set to go off inside her again—” is going to know what happened here in Japan. Not even Chad. I can keep my mouth shut.”

  Even though it was a promise he would keep, there was a part of him that wanted to shout out that she’d been with him.

  Juliana Thomsen, who’d been the one to leave him when he would have sucked up his courage and defied his family for her, if she’d only asked him to.

  Being with her made it easy to admit it now.

  She pushed through the pool until she came all the way to him, the waterline coming to her neck as she held up her hand, her pinkie extended.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “Pinkie promise.”

  “What the hell’s a pinkie promise?”

  “A binding vow. Like blood brothers.” She laughed, and the sound almost took him under. “Didn’t you ever hear of this?”

  “I guess. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were blood brothers.”

  “Then we can be blood…” She searched for a description.

  He helped her out. “We can just call it our little secret.”

  Giving in to her—hell, it was way too easy—Tristan held out his pinkie.

  Her eyes went bright as he hooked onto her.

  The sound and vibration of the waterfall suspended, leaving a vacuum around them, and there was just her.

  Juliana.

  As their fingers tightened, he realized that he’d never felt this kind of connection. He’d never even gone beyond a few dates with a woman before one or the other of them lost interest.

  Then again, he supposed he’d never really forgotten Juliana. Maybe he’d even held out hope that he’d see her walking past the ranch some day. Right. Or more likely, during one of his infrequent trips to town, he’d see her in a diner or through the window of her family’s bookstore, if he felt like causing some gossip by lingering too long in front of it.

  He worked his pinkie out of hers, latching on to her hand instead and towing her closer to him.

  Then he pulled her through the waterfall, bringing them both into a hollow, faux-rock minicave, where the rest of the room looked warped from behind the tumble of water.

  The mist reminded him of the wan copy of Dream Rising his family displayed over his gramps’s fireplace.

  “So what do you think happened between Emelie and Terrence?” he asked. “I mean, what really happened?”

  Juliana wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “I’ve always believed Emelie’s letters. Then again, that’s how I was raised, on her version of the story. But I chose to concentrate on the part where they were in love instead of everything that came afterward.”

  A romantic, he thought. He remembered how she’d loved to hear slow songs on the radio, and even in the short week they’d been together, he’d thought it said a lot about her, just like those books she’d read with women wearing silk dresses, leaning back in the arms of pirates.

  “I’ve always thought Terrence’s journals revealed everything,” he said. His family had even sent along copies of the pages so Tristan could review them if needed on this trip.

  He skimmed the wet hair away from her face, and her eyes went soft.

  “Bottom line,” he said gently, “is that there’s got to be middle ground. Terrence and Emelie both saw the same situation in different ways. In reality, there’s probably not a villain in their story.”

  “I just wish our indoctrinated elders felt the same way.”

  Tristan grinned. “They need to find hobbies, like we have. Some other kind of fulfillment.”

  They both laughed, and he deposited her into a rock nook.

  “Fulfillment,” Juliana repeated, leaning back, drawing her legs under her like a mermaid. “Now there’s a concept that escapes me.”

  Although she was naked, laid out for the taking,
he was more enthralled with what he saw in her bared gaze—an obvious hankering for something more than she’d found in life.

  He knew what Juliana could’ve done with her talents. Top-notch grades, a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, a partner in a tour company she’d started in San Diego until she’d returned to Parisville… She could’ve gone places while he’d refrained from college and favored self-education.

  But she’d ended up in the same situation he was in.

  “I’m pretty sure,” he said, “that we’ve both been swayed by what others have wanted our whole lives.”

  “Living up to expectations. Ain’t it a bitch?”

  He smiled, running his fingers over her toned calf. She had to be a jogger, he thought. Had to stay in shape somehow.

  “Truthfully,” he said, “I don’t know what my gramps is expecting out of this.”

  “Same with my family. Dream Rising is gorgeous, and I really do understand the emotional attachment to it since it’s part of our family history, but there’s a…” She paused. “I suppose you’d say zealousness to have it that has nothing to do with its beauty.”

  “It’s not about the art itself,” he said.

  “No. It’s not. It’s about domination to all of them.”

  He watched her, wondering what she personally saw in the picture. As far as he was concerned, the painted strokes were a flowing puzzle—something he almost had a grasp on but could never quite get.

  She’d tilted her head, watching him, too, and the accessibility of her sympathetic gaze made him talk more.

  “Before my dad passed on a few years ago, he told me that the family would expect me to feel the same way they do. But he told me to consider what was really going on before throwing myself wholeheartedly into the fray. When he was alive, he kept me away from it as much as he could.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your dad, Tristan,” she said softly.

  He knew she would’ve heard about how sudden and terrible his father’s too-recent death had been, even from her family’s place across town. A heart attack one night after dinner while Tristan had been working away in his garage.

  “I appreciate your saying that,” he said.

  Behind him, the waterfall started to lose power, spilling to almost nothing but trickles, and Tristan realized that it must be on a timer.

  “Sometimes I think that Gramps measures his life against how he fares with your family,” he continued. “He took the lead position in the feud back after the property-line dispute that you all won, and he hasn’t let up since.”

  “My aunt Katrina’s the same way. After she lost her husband, she started researching family trees and developing this uber-pride about our history. She’s a nut about ‘preserving’ it, as she calls the campaign to get the painting.”

  Tristan rested his fingers on her knee, but he didn’t let go. Her skin felt so smooth, comfortable against his own flesh.

  “Yet here we are,” he said, “representing their sides in these negotiations. You think we’ll turn out like them?”

  “Or,” she said, almost sadly, “like Emelie and Terrence, hating each other afterward?”

  A broken love affair, he thought. A sad waste of two people who could’ve had something if it wasn’t for circumstance and maybe even pride.

  He moved his hand from her knee upward, over the outside of her thigh, and she sighed, sinking down as she kept her eyes on him.

  “Let’s just think about the next two hours between us,” he said.

  But even as he kissed her again, his mind was already racing ahead to tomorrow and how he could possibly stretch this one night of stolen bliss into two.

  AFTER RETURNING TO THE hotel, Chad Cole had decided that the best way to pass the time would be to have a fine Japanese beer or two in the hotel’s English-style pub.

  As he relaxed in one of the deep, tastefully upholstered chairs in the dim-lighting-and-etched-glass atmosphere, he tried not to think about this afternoon in the castle.

  Tried not to think about how Sasha had walked away from him.

  But what had he expected?

  For months, he’d mentally flayed himself for what had happened between them, but every time he’d tried to pick up the phone to apologize, he would stop himself.

  Wait a week, he would think. That way, Sasha wouldn’t be as angry.

  Instead, he had sent flowers at the five-month mark, and Sasha had thanked him with an e-mail—a clear sign that she wasn’t open to any sort of personal contact.

  Final is final, he’d thought, knowing Sasha didn’t fool around when she made a decision.

  In the heavy days afterward, Chad’s family had revealed that they were relieved about the breakup. As intelligent and genial as Sasha was, they’d said, the family had never really taken to her. There was just something so…closed off.

  Chad hadn’t admitted to them that he’d thought so, too.

  There were many other girls out there, they’d said—ones who were willing to leave their careers behind and were more open with their emotions.

  Yet Chad had wanted to tell them—and convince himself—that just because Sasha was choosy with her words and gestures, that didn’t mean she felt any less than the rest of them.

  They didn’t understand what he saw in her, but who could explain love? He couldn’t elaborate on how the shy way she smiled made him feel protective and passionate at the same time. He couldn’t diagram the pride he saw in her eyes when he told her about what he’d accomplished that day.

  And he couldn’t chat about the sex: how they fitted and moved together. How, every time, he’d believed that this would be the moment Sasha would finally let her hair down for good when they held each other, sweat-sticking body to body.

  He’d told himself that one day she would expose the extent of her feelings, yet she never had, and he’d begun to wonder if he was only fooling himself, wonder if his love had only been one-sided and everyone but him had seen it. Yet that hadn’t stopped him from going to her today in that castle, out of pure impetuousness.

  Enough months had passed for her to reconsider, he’d thought, but he’d obviously been wrong….

  By the time Tristan finally sauntered into the bar, Chad had plowed through five beers and, even then, the answers weren’t any clearer. In fact, everything was a little murkier.

  His cousin was tucking his rented international cell phone into his back jeans pocket. Chad vaguely noticed that he was wearing a different pair than earlier.

  “Got the message you left under my door,” Tristan said, taking a seat at the table. “How long have you been here?”

  Chad realized that the other man’s hair was wet, too. “An hour. Two. Hey, is it that humid out there? It looks like you jumped in a pool.”

  The shadow of a smile crossed Tristan’s lips, and for some reason, Chad thought it resembled the type of grin a man wore when he was hiding a secret.

  But his brain wasn’t working well enough to pursue that idea. Sasha’s face kept flashing over his mind’s eye, blocking out everything else.

  Tristan ran a hand through his hair. “I took a shower after I got back from wandering around outside.”

  “Long walk, pardner.”

  “Part of the time I was on the phone with Jiro Mori. He said the painting’s being shipped from New York as we speak, and he expects it to be ready for us by the day after tomorrow.”

  “Honestly, I’m glad for this lag. I’m kind of enjoying myself here in the Land of the Rising Sun.” Or maybe suns, since Chad was seeing double of just about everything at the moment.

  “You’re slurring,” Tristan said.

  Chad lifted up his half-full beer. “I certainly should be.”

  Tristan gave him a withering glance.

  “Okay, okay,” Chad said. “So seeing Sasha wasn’t the best brainstorm I’ve ever had.”

  “Sasha.” Tristan sank back in his chair, as if realizing it was going to be a long talk. “I should’ve gues
sed you got sloshed because of your ex.”

  “Not all of us were born with the Joe Cool gene.”

  At first, it looked as if Tristan were about to contradict him, but then his cousin’s mouth set into a firm line.

  Another weird vibe niggled at Chad, but it had nothing to do with Sasha, so he ignored it.

  “She turned her back on me.”

  “You told me all about it earlier on the return trip.”

  “It’s not right that she’s in a hotel that’s only a walk away and I’m here.” Determination started burning in Chad’s belly, a screw-what-everyone-else-thinks blaze. “I’m not sure how to persuade her of it, but she’s the one, Tristan. The only one.”

  His cousin paused before saying, “I hope you’re not asking me for ideas about how to win her back or something, because I don’t know squat about romance.” He grinned. “Not really, anyway.”

  Then, after a second more of that strange grin, Tristan abruptly stood. “Let’s go to the room, clean you up then get us some dinner.”

  “I’m having a constructive conversation here. Or I was.”

  Tristan finally turned back to his cousin, his brow furrowed. “You’re serious about this.”

  “Couldn’t be more.”

  Chad’s chest felt as if it was being pulled apart, making the cliché about the broken heart seem painfully true. Seeing Sasha again had been like yanking open a stitched wound.

  But he would’ve done it a second time, a third, just because he could’ve sworn that he’d seen something in her eyes—something hinting that she’d missed him as much as he’d missed her.

  Tristan was gauging him, no doubt coming to the conclusion that Chad was one sorry idiot. But there was a flash of understanding, too.

  Would his rogue cousin help him, out of the goodness of the heart Chad knew Tristan had somewhere beneath all the layers?

  He thought he heard Tristan curse under his breath, not loudly enough to offend the servers or the few other customers. But definitely enough to reveal some reluctance.

  “Come on then,” his cousin said, extending a hand to help Chad to his feet. “There are those guidebooks in your room. Maybe we can look through them to find someplace romantic for this windmill-tilting of yours.”