“I hope you’re proud of yourself.” Tanaka’s voice was cold as he slid into the empty bar stool beside him.
Turning, Antonio bared his teeth in a smile. “If you mean proud of marrying Hana, then yes, I’m very proud. She’s carrying my child and I’ve done right by her.”
“Right,” Tanaka sneered. He glanced back at Hana, who was still by the doorway talking to Emika Ito, throwing them worried glances. “The right thing would have been to set her free to marry someone who’s worthy of her.”
“That’s you, I suppose.”
“More than you’ll ever be.” Tanaka looked around. “This is how you marry Hana? No cake, no wedding dress, just some office party in a bar?”
The last thing Antonio needed was to be criticized just when he was already kicking himself about the prenup. His lip twisted in a snarl. “She doesn’t love you, Tanaka. Get over it.”
“She might have found a way to love me, someday, if you’d just left her alone. But you couldn’t, could you? You selfishly took her for yourself.”
“She kissed me first,” Antonio took malicious pleasure in informing him. “I didn’t seduce her. She kissed me.”
The younger man’s eyes flashed, then his jaw set. “You’re a selfish bastard, Delacruz. You jump from one place and person to the next, because you’re afraid if you stick around anywhere too long, people will realize you’re nothing. An empty husk.”
From long practice, Antonio kept his expression amused, so the other man wouldn’t know he’d hit his target. His voice was cool as he pointed out, “And yet Hana still chose me over you.”
“A choice you’ll make her regret, won’t you? Starting with this pathetic wedding.”
“I’ve planned her an amazing honeymoon,” said Antonio, who’d just that moment thought of it.
Tanaka muttered something in Japanese.
Antonio bared his teeth. “Consider your friendship with her over. Stay away from my wife.”
“You’ll never be good enough for her,” the younger man replied coldly. “You know it. I know it.” As the two men looked at Hana across the room, she turned and met Antonio’s gaze. Almost at once, her stunning face lit up, and he unwillingly felt his heart rise. Then he heard Tanaka add under his breath, “And someday soon, Hana will know it, too.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
HEAVEN. SHE WAS in heaven.
The hot Caribbean sun was shining on a sea that was so impossibly blue it burned Hana’s eyes to look at it from the pink sand beach.
Looking out from the lounge chair beneath the open-air cabana, where she was stretched out in a turquoise string bikini, she lifted her sunglasses and watched her husband rise from the sea.
Rivulets of water ran from his dark hair down his thick neck and over the muscles and hollows of his torso, to the edge of his swim trunks. All that water, and as she looked at him, her mouth went dry.
Coming over to the cabana, which was just wooden pillars, a slatted roof and white curtains perched over the sand, Antonio smiled down at her, his eyes crinkling. “You should have joined me in the water.”
“I was reading...” Then she saw that her book had fallen from her lap, and lay upside down in the sand, and blushed. His smile widened, and he sat beside her on the lounge chair.
“I have other ways to entertain you,” he said softly, running his large hand from her neck down the valley between her breasts, to her belly, naked and warmed by the sun. Her breathing quickened.
Her husband. Antonio was her husband now. She still couldn’t quite believe it. When they’d left their reception in Tokyo, he’d surprised her by taking her on a honeymoon to his private island in the Caribbean, where she knew for a fact he’d never taken anyone. It had always been his private demesne, where he went to get away from the world.
But he’d brought her here.
“You’re so good to me,” she said.
“So you don’t mind not having the wedding of your dreams?”
Not for the first time, Hana wondered what Ren had said to him in Tokyo. The last thing she wanted was for Antonio to feel bad. “I didn’t need a romantic wedding.”
Antonio gave her a skeptical look.
“Well, the honeymoon has more than made up for it,” she said, sighing with pleasure as she leaned back on the lounge chair, and that, at least, was utterly true.