and more important, because they’d had their confrontation over the phone. If they’d been face-to-face, he’d always thought she wouldn’t have been able to maintain her poise.
But this woman with the steely self-possession could stare down the scariest monsters he’d ever dealt with and not turn a hair. If she could hold him at a disadvantage with such effortlessness when he’d thought she would be vulnerable and off balance, no one else would stand a chance against her.
He shook his head. “I didn’t choose my old persona. It wasn’t the real me. This new one I created is. I bet you can’t say the same about yourself. So whatever you call what you do for a living, I call you a professional fraud, out of choice. And whatever elaborate deception you’re perpetrating now, I will stop you. I let you get away with deceiving me once. I’m not letting you get away with anything again.”
He’d let his lethal side surface as he talked. Expecting exposure to it to shake her at last, he was again amazed when she met his menace head-on.
“You can only ‘stop’ me if you expose me. And you can’t, because it would mean exposing yourself.”
He coughed in incredulity. “Are you threatening me?”
“You’re the one who’s threatening to strike me down like your old code name. I’m just pointing out that your righteousness is blinding you to the fact that it’s in your best interests to keep my secrets. Why do you think I was so free with them?”
“Because you think I can’t do anything with what I know?”
“Not if you want what I know to remain buried.”
“You are threatening me, then.”
Something like exasperation tinged her gaze. “I once promised I’d never hold my knowledge over you, and I remain at my word.” When he glowered at her, failing to find any words to express what collided inside his head and chest, she exhaled. “Listen, Raiden, you’re the one who can create this impasse, and you mustn’t. Not when you’re mere steps from attaining the family and the status you’ve craved all your life.”
His heart convulsed. She knew this?
Though it shocked him, it stood to reason. Through his obliviousness, his misplaced trust, this woman had somehow once found out his every secret. It must have been easy for someone of her shrewdness to extrapolate his life goals and future plans. Now that she knew the arrangement he had with Megumi and her father, as it had been announced in society already, the details must have been as obvious to her.
It made sense, but it still galled him that she knew so much about him when he knew nothing about her, except what she made him feel, how she still had such power over him.
As if reading his mind, something like gentle persuasion entered her gaze. “Whatever you feel about me, no matter your burning desire to punish me for my transgressions against you, I’m not worth tarnishing the perfect image you’ve worked so hard and long to create. And that would certainly happen if you expose me. For what would you say I blackmailed you for? You can’t say that you succumbed to my blackmail, since it would make you look weak, or that you needed to hide something that badly. If you expose me anonymously, once the mess is out in the open, details have a way of surfacing, of becoming land mines you never know which step will set off.”
Fury, and something else he hadn’t felt since he was a child—futility—mushroomed inside him.
Everything she’d said was true. Any action against her now, in this delicate time, would have consequences, and the fallout would inescapably harm him. If not now, then later. Whatever impacted him, it would surely drag his brothers in by association. So he couldn’t act on the burning desire to punish her, as she’d so accurately put it.
When he made no response, she prodded, that same chafing gentleness in her tone. “Why don’t you let me be and go about your business? Your wedding and adopting your family name are just over two months from now, and you can’t afford to let anything sabotage that.”
She was right again. Damn her.
But there was one thing he wasn’t backing down from. “I will let you be, on one condition. That you keep away from Hiro. I’m not letting you exploit him as you did me.”
It seemed he had finally managed to surprise her. Her eyes, those eyes that in spite of everything he wanted to drown in, widened. “You’re really worried about him? I thought, as his number one rival, you’d welcome whatever misfortune befell him.”
“I certainly wouldn’t. I fight my adversaries with merit. I wouldn’t want to win dishonorably.”
“It wouldn’t be dishonorable if someone else felled him for you.”
“It would be if I knew of his jeopardy and looked the other way. And I won’t.”
“This is about honor, isn’t it? You’re really taking integrating into your new society to the limit, huh?”
“You may never understand what honor is, but it’s the most important thing to me, and I would do anything to satisfy mine. Even if it means risking my plans.”
He held her incandescent gaze as it fluctuated through the range of blue-and-violet spectrum in the softly shifting lights. He imbued his own with his contempt, and his conviction.
She finally shook her head. “You don’t have to do that. And you don’t have to worry about Hiro. I’d never hurt him.”
A skewer twisted in his gut. The way she’d said that... That look in her eyes... It was as if she truly cared for Hiro.
Then the icicles of memory sank into his core, numbing the ache. She’d once looked at him with the same profound emotions. Her ability to project genuineness was unheard of. She could be doing the same now. She must be.
“I can almost see you rejecting what I just said as more fraud.” Her eyes were opaque, her voice hushed. “I can’t do anything about that, but I can about something else. Before anyone realizes you’re here with me, leaving your fiancée back there, and you cause yourself unneeded scandal, I’ll do you a favor and do what you seem unable to do. I’ll walk away. Let me do that and you can forget all about me again.”
With that, she strode to the door she’d entered from. At the threshold, she paused, turned, and the crisp night wind blew her hair toward him like tongues of flame.
Before he could storm after her as every cell in his body was screaming for him to, her voice carried to him across the still warmth, lilting, husky, exactly what had poured into his brain on their transfiguring nights of passion.
“You won’t believe this either, Raiden, but it was...nice seeing you again. This time, I at least get to say goodbye.”
* * *
Scarlett walked away steadily. Her five-inch heels clicked on the wooden bridge leading away from the garden house over the pond in a rhythmic, deliberate staccato.
Inside her, absolute chaos raged.
This confrontation with Raiden had been a total shock. It hadn’t even been a possibility in her mind coming here.
When Hiro had called her a few hours ago,
