One-Click Buy: June 2009 Harlequin Blaze Page 27
“We’re just going for look-sees.”
“And what if…”
“Don’t get ahead of things.” They stopped at the commuter-choked entrance to the station. “We’re just getting back on common ground. Anything more would be premature.” Then Sasha sent her an unsure glance. “Don’t you think?”
“I think you should do whatever feels right.”
They smiled at each other, and even in that one small gesture, Juliana could see that her friend had truly shed most of the shell that had always kept her at a distance.
It cracked Juliana’s heart, because it was almost as if she had taken that shell and slipped into it herself, with Tristan.
She’d always admired Sasha, especially after her friend had left Chad to chase her own dreams without anyone or anything to hold her back. Juliana had wanted the same independence but, like Sasha, she was finding that there was something missing.
The other woman took hold of Juliana’s fingers. “Hey. You thinking about him again?”
“Always thinking.”
Always staying in her role as Girl Friday, the family loyalist, even though she’d tried to slough it off for a few days.
But she hadn’t even managed to do that, because here she was, away from him because she was still that Girl Friday.
Would she always be?
“Bye, Jules,” Sasha said as she let go of Juliana’s hand. “Good luck, okay? Call me if you need to.”
“I will,” Juliana said, having no intention of doing so as she watched Sasha walk away.
As always, she would handle this on her own, staying faithful to what she knew, putting everything else on the back burner for the bigger Thomsen picture because it was so much easier that way.
She turned around, heading for the trains, feeling as if she were going nowhere.
9
LIKE ATAMI, Hakone was a resort town known for its hot springs. But where the first location had the Adult Museum, the second had a view of Mount Fuji.
One was naughty, the other a nature-infused sister to Yellowstone.
When Tristan arrived in Hakone, he used the directions Jiro Mori had given him to take a very short taxi ride to the ryokan, which waited on the incline of the road, a traditional pagodaesque hotel under the bent sway of trees.
As he looked at it, his heart sank, mainly because it was the type of place you would take a woman for a weekend alone. He could easily imagine bringing Juliana here to hold each other for hours, shutting themselves away.
But that was the problem, wasn’t it?
Shutting her away. Pretending that he hadn’t fallen for her, keeping the greatest find of his life a secret from the family he also loved.
Last night, Juliana had left him as surely as she’d done all those years ago, and he hadn’t the initiative to force the issue; he regretted it now.
If he’d asked her outright, instead of only hinting around at it to avoid being wounded by her yet again, would she have told him that she wished, more than anything, to come clean to their families?
He hadn’t wanted to hear anything else, so he hadn’t directly asked. Losing her the first time had done too much damage that was just coming to the surface, and he didn’t need any more of it.
As Tristan looked at the sky, he noted that although the weather had cleared in Tokyo, it was rainy here. So he nixed his plans to take a walk around town before the negotiation, which was scheduled for a few hours later in the day.
Instead, he would relax inside, he thought as he arrived at the hotel’s entrance. He had an interesting-looking book about the yakuza that he’d purchased while souvenir shopping, and he’d been meaning to start it anyway.
His body protested that sedate idea by tightening, reminding him that Juliana would be here, and instead of reading in his room, he could be with her.
Yeah, he thought. Like knocking on her room door would be that easy, now that the painting had arrived.
And now that the sex had somehow gotten more complicated.
When he entered the hotel, he was greeted by two women, each in a cotton kimono; the younger one retreated from the room while the older one warmly welcomed him in Japanese. Thanks to his basic language lessons, he understood her and responded in kind. As the younger woman returned with Jiro Mori, Tristan was shedding his work boots for slippers because wearing shoes inside a ryokan would be considered unrefined.
“Tristan-san,” the art dealer said, bowing. He was wearing a yukata and, even with his blue-streaked hair, he looked more traditional in this setting. “My first arrival. Your trip was smooth?”
“Yes, thank you.” So Juliana wasn’t here yet. The news made the surroundings fade a little.
“I made certain that you and Ms. Thomsen will be the only guests tonight. You’ll have the run of the hot baths, along with everything else.” Jiro thanked the women and motioned for Tristan to follow him. “Let me show you around.”
He gave him the tour, including the baths, the communal restrooms and, last but hardly least, the arrestingly green, rain-jeweled gardens with their stone lanterns, rocks, streams and bamboo trees.
Each sight pierced Tristan, because all he could think of was Juliana here with him, breathing in the fresh air from the screened windows, watching the rain while he watched her.
Jiro led Tristan through the cedar halls and eventually brought him to his room. There, Jiro slid open the shoji door and bade his guest enter after they had doffed their slippers, which weren’t to be worn on the tatami mats covering the floor.
“I’ll be sending your personal maid to you,” Jiro said, walking around in his socks, “but she doesn’t speak English. I know you can get along a bit with your Japanese, but I thought I might answer any questions you might have before she gets here.”
Jiro handed Tristan a tip sheet in English that explained how to stay in a ryokan, and it seemed like that would be enough to get him through the night.
When Tristan told Jiro as much, his host nodded, then finally got around to mentioning the reason they’d gathered here.
“At five o’clock,” he said, “we’ll meet downstairs for libations and business. Then we’ll have a meal you’ll never forget. And you can wear your yukata, even out of your room,” Jiro added, motioning to his own robe. “You’re here to relax, and if there’s anything I can do for you, please don’t hesitate to mention it.”
At his smile, Tristan said, “Sounds great. I’m looking forward to all of it.”
They bowed to each other, and his host departed, leaving Tristan to glance around the room, wondering where the most comfortable place to sit would be. A chair—which was really just a cushion with a straight back located on the floor at the level of a low, glass-topped table—wasn’t his number one choice. But there were bamboo seats near a table that overlooked the garden.
Of course. There would be a garden, and it would have to smell like Juliana’s hair.
Chest aching, he meandered over there, the view making him realize that his room was basically a bridge over the greenery.
The open window allowed in the scent of humid leaves and rain, a lazy fragrance that mixed with the room’s own aroma of cedar and what smelled like straw from the mats. And as Tristan took in the room from this vantage point, he noted that the place was clean-lined and elegantly simple, with windows and screens featuring slim, angled wood designs over the white of glass or rice paper.
There was a tiny TV in the corner, a small safe, an old phone. The tap of rain on leaves and the roof. The call of birds.
It was almost enough to make him forget.
His maid came, and she gestured for him to sit in the low chair while she poured green tea and offered a jellylike yellow candy wrapped in a leaf. She also had him fill out an English questionnaire about service preferences: things like when he wanted breakfast and if he liked to use chopsticks.
She showed him the yukata he was to wear, then left.
He drank his tea, listened to the rain, trie
d to read, took out his phone and toyed with the idea of touching base with his number one vintage-car client so they could meet tomorrow.
Yet after dithering for about an hour, he couldn’t stand it, and he stole out of his room, not admitting to himself that he wanted to see if Juliana had arrived yet.
She had, and when he caught her in her own gray-and-white yukata wandering the halls, playing the curious tourist in a cryptic place, his breath caught in his chest.
She was looking out a screened window into a garden, an expression of such wistfulness on her face that it bent something inside him like a steel crowbar curved by heat out of its normally direct line.
Did everything about this place remind her that she could be enjoying the quiet with him, too?
“All settled?” he asked softly.
He hadn’t wanted to startle her, but his voice seemed to have that effect anyway, making her suck in a breath as she glanced at him.
Her gaze made him think that maybe she had been thinking about him all this time.
“So what’s your take on all this?” he asked, avoiding the tension that was so clearly hanging between them like a fog that it made his lungs heavy.
“My take?” She glanced at the garden again. “A place like this can sweep you away from just about everything else.”
Just like the love hotel, the snack bar…his own room last night.
He was talking before he even knew what he was saying. “In a perfect world, I would’ve wanted to bring you here, just like a normal couple.”
Okay. So he’d said it.
And he was damned glad he had.
She blushed, as if she’d been touched by his words.
Something within Tristan rose, up through his chest, pushing out.
But then she looked at the floor, and it was obvious that she was going to keep to the family hard line, come hell or high water.
“I can’t, Tristan,” she finally said. “I love my aunt—my whole family—too much. And even though I’ve told myself that I need to change, I’m not sure I could deal with the disappointment they’d…”
Her voice cracked, and all he wanted to do was go to her, hold her, tell her he felt the same way but, together, maybe they could convince their families that all this was wrong. That the feud had resulted in tragedy with Terrence and Emelie, and it didn’t have to do so again.
But she walked away from the window before he could do it, then nodded her head to indicate that he should follow her down the hall.
To where? he thought, his pulse beginning to race—not necessarily because of what might physically happen if they went to her room.
It could’ve been just because he was going to be with her, near her, close enough for his senses to take her in until her scent, her presence, was absorbed into every part of him.
“I was hoping to find a section of the garden that was safe from the rain,” she said, her voice whole again. She’d recovered. “But it’s all in the open. I had this Victorian notion of looking over Emelie’s letters outside because I thought communing with her might get me in the frame of mind to negotiate.”
She put her hand on the sash of her yukata, where he noticed she’d stashed a bunch of copy-quality papers.
Emelie’s letters, he mused, thinking of the copies of Terrence’s journal pages that he was carrying in his own travel bag.
They came to his room first, so he silently invited her in.
When she paused, he wondered if maybe she’d only wanted to walk around with him, with no rendezvous involved.
But that would’ve meant that just being around him was enough for her, too.
His heartbeat doubled in time, and he tried to read her.
A moment passed, the seconds beating out in his chest until she smiled almost shyly and accepted his invitation to enter.
After shedding their slippers, they sat in the low chairs overlooking the garden, acting as if the humid awareness wasn’t still surrounding them.
He didn’t know how long he could carry this off without reaching across the table, just to touch her.
She took the papers out of her sash and laid them on the table, probably because sitting down made it uncomfortable to have them tucked against her body.
“Funny,” she said, “but outside of what we shared after high school and now in the bedroom, I’m not sure I even know you that well.”
That slammed him, because he knew she was right. “What do you want to know then?”
She shook her head, laughed a little. “Everything? Maybe how much you like your job? Maybe if you’ve ever been in love since we were young? We’ve skipped over all of that.”
“Yeah, we did.”
Their gazes held, just as they always did when they were in a room or an alley or anywhere together, and his adrenaline surged.
Okay then. He was willing to tell her everything if it would…
What?
What exactly did he want from her?
He continued. “Cars are what I’ve always done, ever since I was a kid. Finding heaps of metal with potential, fixing them until they gleam, selling them to someone who’ll treasure them. It’s peaceful, that job. It always has been. Keeps me out of trouble, too.”
She smiled, and he wanted to tell her more.
“And about falling in love?” He fortified himself with a breath. “How could I when you set the standard, Juliana?”
She flinched, then blushed.
Had he gotten to her?
“It was just puppy love, Tristan,” she finally said, and he could tell that she was trying hard to convince herself of that idea.
He wasn’t sure that she was succeeding though.
“Maybe. But I always hoped that you might come around again one day—that we’d see each other and it’d be as if only an hour had gone by.”
The rain kept popping away on the foliage, providing a wall of sound to cushion the pause.
When she next spoke, she did it quietly. “Me, too.”
He’d barely heard her, and he hardly had time to respond before she added, “But, growing up, stories about Emelie and Terrence influenced me more than I’d ever admit. I was a sucker for a good romance, sure, but there was…something else. I knew their breakup was harsh—enough to start a feud, for heaven’s sake—so I think, even subconsciously, I started protecting myself from having the same thing happen to me. I’m not sure I even realized it until I came over here and had enough room to myself to really sort through everything.”
“What’re you saying, Juliana?”
She blew out a breath. “When I left you for college, it wasn’t an easy choice, but you didn’t seem inclined to keep me there. I suppose I was protecting myself, the way Emelie should’ve done with Terrence. Maybe I even wanted to keep the memory of what we had for that one summer…” She seemed to lack the word to complete her thought.
Then her gaze went hazy and soft again when she found it.
“Pure,” she said. “I wanted to keep it pure.”
A dream, he thought. A story she could go back to time and again like the first part of Terrence and Emelie’s.
Shaking her head, she added, “The two of us barely knew each other, even though we spent all that time together. There was never a guarantee that anything would’ve come out of kisses and stolen moments, anyway.”
“I wanted you to stay.”
It was only now, when she looked up at him, that he saw just how confused she was about all of this.
“Then why didn’t you say so?” she asked.
Because he was fully aware of Terrence and Emelie, too? Because he thought that they would bring him and Juliana grief because of all the inescapable bitterness these two ancestors had handed down from generation to generation?
She rested her fingers on Emelie’s letters. “Can you imagine going back home and dealing with the guilt? Our families would never let us forget, Tristan. We’d have to make a choice between us and them. There’d be no middle ground.”
A choice.
Would she be willing to make one now, unlike in the past?
She just kept her fingers on those letters, as if unwilling to let them go while she watched him, her gaze bared, a deeper violet than he’d ever seen in his life.
But what if she could move on and let go of what those letters symbolized?
At the same time, was he ready to turn his back on his duties?
He thought about his gramps—how he lay in his bed with a troubled frown, even in sleep. How Tristan had vowed to do anything to wipe it away and make the man who’d meant so much to him his whole life smile.
Yet Tristan also wanted Juliana. So badly it was tearing him apart.
Terrence and Emelie, he thought. Him and Juliana.
It hit him.
They were falling into a trap, just like their ancestors, and they weren’t going to get out unless they confronted the pride that Terrence and Emelie had let ruin their own lives.
It had taken a trip here to learn this, to a world that couldn’t have been more distant in miles and culture, a place that upended everything he was used to.
These nights spent hiding with the woman he wanted in private love-hotel rooms had finally forced Tristan to see clearly.
He got up, retrieved Terrence’s pages from his bag, and brought them to her.
At first, Juliana just stared at him, as if she couldn’t believe it. This gesture.
This grand statement he’d made without any words at all. But then she raised her fingers from Emelie’s pages, allowing Tristan to take them.
As the rain fell, they sat across from each other, reading together in silence, yet still divided by the page-laden table between them.
LAUGHING, SASHA AND CHAD fell backward onto the bed of another love hotel.
This was the third one today, and she was really racking up the bills with these look-sees for her research.
But, oh, was she getting great material.
“I never thought I’d see a place like this,” she said. “I might not have even tried it before now. I think this trip has done something to me.”