Wedding Date with the Billionaire Read online

  “Kento sure looks good after all this time,” Christy whispered in Erin’s ear. “Is he seeing anyone in Japan?”

  “I have no idea,” Erin said in return, even though she thought whispering in each other’s ears was rather childish.

  “I told you,” Christy continued, “you should talk to Demarcus Hall, sitting next to Amber.” She gestured with her head as if Erin wouldn’t know where to look otherwise. Erin had recognized him as one of the group listening to the giggle girls’ gossip earlier at the afternoon tea. She’d certainly noticed that Demarcus was a nice-looking man in a tan suit politely listening to Amber, whose mouth never stopped moving.

  Sure that Kento wouldn’t have heard the exchange between her and Christy, her eyes nonetheless darted across the table, over the mini log centerpiece, to check on him as he chatted with Lucas’s mother. His eyes shot briefly to her and then back to his conversation.

  It was nothing less than surreal to be in his presence again. His invisible pull was so powerful it was as if there was only an inch between them rather than a table. As if she could feel his breath on her. No wonder that a few minutes ago it had seemed to her that the moon was shining down on him. The moon existed only for him.

  She sneaked another peek while he was bringing a spoonful of stew to his mouth, reacquainting herself with his big hands and their long fingers. She could almost sense them on her skin as if it was yesterday, not years, since they’d last touched her. The cioppino had no idea how lucky it was to be crossing his lips.

  Erin herself was almost too nervous to eat, though she nibbled small spoonfuls for the activity it provided. How different this moment would have been if Harris had waited until after the wedding to desert her. With his extroverted personality, he would have sucked up all of the oxygen in the room and demanded her full attention. Not leaving her alone like this, inside her mind, to reminisce about Kento and days long ago.

  On a day shortly after their university graduation, they were to meet at their favorite bakery café in the city’s Belltown neighborhood. The day before, Kento had been with her at her parents’ house, and when Erin was coming back into the room after a phone call, she’d observed something suspicious. Her parents were in a heated discussion with him. He kept snapping his head back at what they were saying, as if he was surprised by it, almost as if they were delivering blows. His body had been taut with tension. All Erin had been able to catch when she reentered the room was her father saying to him, “Just so we understand each other.”

  She’d been looking forward to the coffee date so that she could ask him about the conversation. Especially as, when she asked them, her parents had denied that anything strange occurred. Kento would provide the truth. Arriving at the bakery ahead of him, Erin ordered a tea latte and a dill-and-goat-cheese scone.

  Little did she know when she snagged the window table to look out on a rainy afternoon that she’d be sitting there alone until after dark. Picking at the scone and bitty sips of her latte ended up as a clean plate and empty cup. After Kento was past a reasonable amount of late, phone calls to inquire went straight to his voice mailbox. Finally, Erin acknowledged that he wasn’t coming, and she left.

  Could something have happened to him, she fretted? He could have been lying in a hospital somewhere, or worse. After a horrific night of worry, it wasn’t until the next day that she was finally able to reach his roommate and hear the news that Kento had boarded a flight for Tokyo. Taking the offer of a job from his uncle Riku that Erin had thought he was going to turn down. She must have read the situation between them very wrongly indeed.

  The welcome dinner progressed with Erin and Kento stealing glances at each other over their plates of cowboy pepper steak, jacket potatoes and sautéed green beans. Bunny sauntered by and whispered in Erin’s ear for her to sit up straight as, unforgivably, she must have been slouching. “Eleven o’clock.” Bunny did one of her nonobvious-obvious finger points. “Jack Piccadilly. Accounting firm in Pioneer Square, keeps the books on everyone who’s anyone in Seattle finance.”

  “Is he the one with the three hairs on his head doing a comb-over?” Had all of Seattle’s best sons under thirty been taken, and now Bunny was looking within the available crop of older gentlemen?

  “We’re going to find you an appropriate match, Erin. Weddings are a wonderful place to get things started.”

  Kento made Lucas’s mother smile with something he said. She dropped her bandanna napkin, and he instantly reached down to the floor to retrieve it for her. She smiled in recognition like a schoolgirl. Bunny’s voice sounded like an insect in Erin’s ear that she swatted away. Thankfully, her mother moved on.

  She stood up, telling Christy, “Excuse me.” Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Kento watching her go.

  Working her way through the narrow channel between the tables, she overheard someone she didn’t know say to their dinner companion, “That’s the one Harris Denby dropped like a hot potato.”

  Glancing behind her, she saw MacKenzie, Amber and Divya had wasted no time in surrounding Kento after Erin left the table. Not to mention a few other overtly flirty women. The look on his face told her that they all grated on his nerves. She hadn’t known whether he was with someone or was going to bring a date to the wedding. Even if his money wasn’t good enough for Ingram and Bunny, the sheer volume of it was attractive to the bounty hunters. It seemed as if the both of them were going to be driven crazy this weekend by matchmakers, gossipers and hangers-on. If only there was a way to get everyone off their backs!

  Instead of going to the ladies’ room, Erin darted through the lobby and out the lodge’s front doors. The sky was pitch-black and a constellation of stars filled the sky.

  The evening air was nippy, and she hadn’t brought along a sweater or wrap. But as she moved farther and farther away from the lodge, the darkness and quiet were welcoming. She continued into the night, reassuring herself she’d get through this. Although if one more person made reference to Harris leaving her, she thought she might blow a fuse.

  Honestly, she also need to process seeing Kento again. Unlike Harris’s flashy personality, Kento’s magnetism was grounded and solid, like one of the majestic trees in front of her, with unseen roots and a firm standing on the earth. No one else had ever reached down right into her soul like he had.

  A cold breeze swept under her dress and chilled her to the bone. She wrapped her arms around herself as she shivered. Behind her, she heard a rustling and figured the wind was kicking up. The night was wild, untamed, making her wish she could emulate it. But it was time to go back inside and be civilized for dessert. She’d make an effort to get to know some of the guests she’d never met and smile for every photo.

  As she was about to turn around and go back, she heard leaves crunching again. Suddenly, she felt a presence behind her. Her body startled as a low voice hummed into her ear, “Are you cold?” just as Kento put his suit jacket around her shoulders. It felt like a long-lost blanket that she had been searching for everywhere. She pulled it tightly around her. Involuntarily, her cheek rubbed itself against it, and she inhaled its scent. Kento’s scent. “The stars are beautiful, aren’t they?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing out here?” Erin turned around to face Kento after he’d slipped his jacket around her slender shoulders in an impulse that managed to feel affectionately familiar and crackling new at the same time. With the moon and stars above them, Erin was luminous. A harsh intake of the night air barely hid his reaction.

  “Same as you, I’d imagine. I could use a break from the crowd.” It was true that Kento had been looking for a reason to get out of the party room. Besides the bridesmaids, it seemed like every unmarried woman on the island for the wedding had been trying to make his acquaintance. The wealthy class of the Northwest was an insular bunch. A person practically had to have made their money during the Klondike Gold Rush to
be legitimate in their books.

  Now that Kento had amassed a fortune, his new foreign money, as some of them regarded it, was apparently good enough for some of them to try to get near, even if it wasn’t respected. And so the women here were marching their cosmetically altered assets in a parade for him. It was no different in Japan—prospectors came in every race, creed and color. He had bitter memories from Tokyo as well, though not as many.

  He supposed there were men who would take advantage of the situation. They wouldn’t care about ulterior motives when receiving attention from these glittery objects. Kento understood. These women used their wiles as currency. Everything was a bargaining chip. A commodity. Everything had its price. Erin’s family thought quite literally in that way.

  As if money and accomplishment were the only ways to define a person. He’d never encountered anyone who really saw him. Not growing up poor here and not staggeringly wealthy in Japan. Not Ayaka. He’d originally thought that Erin was the exception to the rule. That he’d found his soul mate. Until he learned the hard, burning way that he’d been very wrong. Erin was, and always would be, an heiress to not only a financial portfolio but to a way of thinking.

  Still, watching her hold the lapels of his jacket around her after all this time stirred him inside. His jacket. Once he’d gotten over the squeeze to the gut from seeing her after so long, he was grateful. He required this. To be with her here in the States, no longer the ghostly mystery still haunting him from across a gigantic ocean.

  “We have to be on this weekend,” she said. “How are we going to survive it?”

  “I was expecting you to be huddled with your boyfriend when I saw you again.” A boyfriend whose jacket she’d already have over her shoulders, signaling that Kento’s was unwanted and that she belonged to someone else.

  “So was I.”

  “What went awry?”

  “My parents.”

  “What do you mean? I thought you told me they liked him.” Kento didn’t allow his smirk to grow wide. The conversation never veered far from Bunny and Ingram.

  “They chose him for me. A founding family in the Pacific Northwest—they own fleets of cargo ships and whatnot. Could have been a great merging of families.”

  “Right, that sounds like a business transaction that would make your parents ecstatic.” The sarcasm poured off his tongue. Her eyes looked glassy in the moonlight, almost as if she was going to cry. He hadn’t meant to upset her with his tone. Even though she was at the top of the list of people who had instilled the cynicism he lugged like a ball and chain.

  “What my parents hadn’t spent any time on was figuring out if Harris and I were compatible past our family coffers. You have to at least like a person a little bit, even if it was an arranged union, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” More quips in his voice.

  “If my parents had investigated a little better, they’d have heard the common knowledge—he was a cliché bon vivant with the yachts and the models in bikinis and all of that bling. He had no interest in settling down in Spokane, or anywhere else. Or with me.”

  “You found out after you were already together?”

  “I was willing to give it a try. I’m not expecting to find love after...” Her voice trailed off, making Kento wonder what she wasn’t saying. “But they could at least try to find me someone who actually wants to be in a relationship.”

  Kento snickered. Which finally made a small smile appear on Erin’s face. That was part of what had made them work as a couple, their ability to laugh even when the going was at its toughest. He was glad to bring her some relief from what was obviously a painful recollection. “So what happened?”

  “We dated for a while, attending charity functions and the like, as good heirs do, and then our parents pushed us to move in together. We played at the domestic routine. Within a month Harris began disappearing, first for long weekends and then for weeks at a time.”

  “Where did he go?” Even though Kento was bitter about what had happened between them, he wouldn’t have wished her the disappointment or shame she was describing. After all, he had left her, too. He hated that he’d hurt her, that he’d never said goodbye. In fact, the guilt of that decision tortured him still. To hear that another man had left her without an explanation tore at his heart.

  Forces opposed within him. On one hand he’d never forgive her for being complicit in her family’s doings against him. Yet on the more mature other, he felt sorry for her inability to break away from their hold. He respected family loyalty, so he couldn’t blame her. It just made no sense that this beautiful and dynamic woman wasn’t making her own decisions.

  “Martha’s Vineyard. Rome. Rio. You name it. When I asked Harris if I could go with him, he’d say it was for business and that there was no place for me there.”

  “You knew he was lying?”

  “He had no business to take care of. And even if I didn’t know he was lying at first, it wasn’t long before my gossipy so-called friends—” she gestured her head toward the lodge, where the snooty party guests were probably forking into their desserts “—sent me photos and videos they saw online. Harris was either too uncaring or too stupid to even try to keep his image clean for his parents’ sake, let alone mine.”

  “I hate the internet.”

  Erin belly-laughed at his joke, as obviously his multibillion-yen business was dependent on the high-tech world. She was so infectious that he laughed, too, until the sound of their laughter permeated the silent darkness that surrounded them.

  She had wounded him deeply, the most profound cut he’d ever received, a knife stab that would impair his breathing for the rest of his life. Yet he felt relief to be near her again. Finally. She’d never know the torment she had caused him. The replaying in his mind of the times they shared. They were only together for a year, but it shaped him. She didn’t assess him, unlike everyone else. He could just be around her, relaxed, with nothing to prove. He’d learned who he was through her.

  Their coupling was unlikely, the well-to-do white girl and the son of a Japanese grocery store owner. Yet they created something genuine together. They were natural around each other, just as their laughter was now. It was as if they were the only one in the other’s life who saw through to their insides, laying their souls bare. They’d met in the early fall of a university class and by graduation had dreamed of a future together. She spent more time in the cramped apartment he shared with a roommate than she did in the mansion where she grew up. Until Ingram and Bunny squelched everything.

  The recollections of those days and nights together still called out to him, randomly in the middle of a conference or looking at a flower. Confusing his conviction that avoiding relationships altogether was the solution. He’d never met, or believed he’d ever meet, anyone like Erin. He’d never experienced that closeness with Ayaka or anyone else he’d dated. He’d been given one chance at the real thing, or at least he’d thought he had, before Erin and her family snatched the dream away from him. That was the result of taking a chance on trust, of opening his heart. That’s why he so desperately wanted to see Erin one last time, to liberate himself from the hold she had on him.

  Because although he’d never love again, he did need some companionship and fun. As he approached thirty, the lone-wolf life was unsatisfying. He had sexual encounters with women here and there, after which he couldn’t get away fast enough. Even that was growing tiresome. He knew he’d never genuinely partner again, but maybe some kind of casual understanding with a woman was possible. After Erin and then Ayaka, he’d closed himself off. It wasn’t healthy. Except how could he hope to have anything when he compared every woman to Erin and found them lacking? He had to find a way this weekend to let go of her once and for all.

  “This is good,” Erin said as she pulled his jacket to her tighter in a way that made him feel like his arms were wrapping around h
er instead of the garment. “A moment’s tranquility from being fed to the sharks.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Our wedding party jobs will keep us busy, although they haven’t stopped me from being the most gossiped-about maid of honor in Washington State history. And everyone has someone new for me to meet.”

  “A destination wedding without a date. The pressure is already killing me. Get me back to Japan.” They laughed again. Kento had been working especially hard lately to launch a new accounting software program. It was a huge hit in the marketplace, his biggest yet, and the stress had left him drained. Howling into the star-filled Seattle sky with Erin Barclay was about the best remedy he could possibly imagine.

  “Actually, I was thinking something kind of outrageous,” she said.

  “I already like the sound of that.”

  “If I was here at the wedding with a date, that would show everyone that I’m not just Harris Denby’s old castoff. And get the matchmakers and my mother off my back at least for the weekend.”

  “So you’re going to call someone and ask them to come to the island?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t have anyone to call.” He was surprised that she said that so matter-of-factly. She must know dozens of men who would jump at the chance to be with her, even without her family’s name. “No one I could trust, anyway. It was just a crazy thought.”

  With the moon and stars as their only light, Kento could make out Erin’s outline as they walked the outskirts of the lodge’s property, beyond the courtesy lamps stationed to keep guests on their path. The two of them alone together again at last. Unexpectedly, he pulsed with the urge to pull Erin from the perimeter into the tempestuous unknown of the adjacent forest. He could imagine pinning her up against one of the enormous tree trunks, pressing his body against hers, into hers, as he took her lips without restraint. He could only shake his head in amazement of his own thoughts.