He looked away. “I must go to Osaka for a few days,” he said in an expressionless voice. “A business trip with suppliers. If you need me, I could cancel my trip—”
“No, I’ll be fine,” Hana said, relieved to put off further discussion of an issue that would be awkward at best, and at worst, horrifyingly painful for them both. It might even cost her Ren’s friendship entirely, and that was a prospect she just couldn’t face today. Rubbing her eyes, she confessed, “I feel like I haven’t slept in a year.”
He gave her a kind smile. “Come with me.”
Twenty minutes later, she’d kicked off her shoes and was comfortably ensconced in a luxurious penthouse suite. He indicated her overnight bag. “If there is anything you need, anything at all, my staff will be glad to assist you.”
“Thank you, Ren.”
“It is the least I can do,” he said, and she hated the way he looked at her. “Until I return.” With a formal bow of his head, he left.
Hana exhaled, shivering with exhaustion as the aching hollows of her feet rested against the tatami mat on the floor. Picking up her bag, she silently blessed Ramon Garcia, who must have noticed she’d left her satchel and arranged to have it dropped off at the hotel. It certainly wouldn’t have occurred to Antonio. No way.
But she wasn’t going to think about him. She was not!
Pushing aside the sliding paper doors, she went past the main room of the suite, into the bedroom. Though exquisitely decorated in traditional Japanese style, the room still had some Western elements—like a king-size bed.
Which again, in spite of her best efforts, made her think of Antonio.
Setting down her overnight bag, she looked out the bedroom’s wide windows. In the distance, she could see the bright neon lights of a busy shopping district. So different from the tranquil park where he’d just kissed her amid all the beautiful pink-and-white flowering trees.
She could still hardly believe Antonio had asked her to be his mistress—and she’d told him no.
It was the right thing to do, Hana told herself wearily, leaning her hand against the window. For Antonio, there was only one thing that was always right: strength. One thing that was always wrong: weakness.
If he crushed his opponents, it was their own fault. He’d say they had been weak, letting themselves become takeover targets or badly managing their businesses. If he bruised the hearts of his mistresses, it was the women’s fault for not believing him when he told them he would never love them.
No matter how incredible their night together had been, no matter how every time she remembered their passion her body burned from her fingertips to her toes, sex wasn’t enough. Antonio would never be the man she needed him to be.
Yes, she’d done the right thing, refusing to be Antonio’s mistress, when it would have brought only brief pleasure at the expense of endless grief. The
right thing for her. The right thing for their child.
So why did Hana feel so miserable?
Her shoulders drooped as she went into the gleaming, ultramodern bathroom and turned on the shower. She washed her hair with the orange-blossom-scented shampoo and felt the blast of water massage her skin.
Best to make the best of things. Her mother had been forty-two when Hana was born, a surprise to the married couple, who’d already spent nearly two decades teaching and traveling the world. Restless hippies both, they’d believed problems could be solved just by changing the country one lived in.
Wherever they’d traveled, Hana had been a chameleon, fitting in everywhere—and feeling like she belonged nowhere. With Hana’s mixed heritage, no one looked exactly like her, certainly not her pale, red-haired father or her olive-skinned, dark-haired mother.
Her parents had had a passionate relationship—full of arguments and moaning kisses—almost like teenagers. Sometimes they’d seemed to forget they even had a daughter. Sometimes Hana had felt like she was the grown-up in their family.
Every time she started to make friends and actually become part of a new community, her parents would inevitably have a big fight, or declare themselves bored, and then grandly announce it was time for another “adventure” in a new country.
“It’s wonderful to be free,” they’d say, toasting each other with cheap wine, scorning the “poor slobs” who were “trapped in one place till death.”
To Hana, without friends or roots and often feeling even excluded from her parents’ tight relationship, being trapped in one place sounded like heaven. Her beloved grandmother Sachiko, a widow who was her last living grandparent, had been her only true source of stability. Whenever her parents had needed space from the onerous demands of child-rearing—“Grown-ups need time just to be romantic, darling, just for ourselves, you understand”—they’d send Hana for a few weeks to her grandmother’s rural almond farm in northern California.
Sachiko was the one who’d taught her Japanese. Each time she felt her grandmother’s warm arms around her, and look up into her calm, wise eyes, Hana would vow, when she grew up, she’d settle down nearby and never leave again.
But Hana had barely started college in nearby Sacramento before her father suddenly died of a stroke in Tasmania, leaving her mother in shock. No one was sure whether it was an accident when Laurel’s rental car had gone off a cliff in Thailand six months later. And the very next month, her grandmother had the first onset of dementia that would eventually claim her life.
Now Hana was alone.
No, she remembered. Not alone. She’d never be alone again. She put her hand over her belly. She was going to have a baby.
Hana was going to be a mother. She’d build them a home. She had enough money so she could wait to get a job, until her baby was a few months old. She could be choosy. So she’d lost her home in Madrid. She told herself there were other places in the world.