Pride revved inside his chest. For he was certain she meant it. She couldn’t wait to have him again. Even if he didn’t already know that, she had no reason to exaggerate. He’d already offered her everything she might want up front.
“You only have to give me your word and you’ll have ten weeks’ worth of more. With a huge cash incentive. To put things in perspective.”
Her eyes grew opaque, making him regret those last words. Before he found a way to take them back, she finally nodded.
But before relief surged, she added, “But since it’s for a good cause, how about doubling that cash incentive to a hundred million dollars?”
Five
“Are you mourning parting with your nine-figure sum?”
Scarlett bent over the couch and slid her arms over Raiden’s seminaked body as she whispered the teasing question into his ear.
He remained unmoving, staring ahead through the floor-to-ceiling window at the spectacular Tokyo Bay at sunset.
Which was weird. For the past three weeks since they’d started their...arrangement, he’d always met her halfway as soon as she’d entered, always impatient, urgent, voracious.
It had become her nightly ritual, and whenever possible a midday one, too, coming to his penthouse, to which he’d given her full access. He’d gotten this apartment in the first place for her, acquiring it the very next day after she’d agreed to his proposition, to be a few blocks away from her apartment. This, and everything else he did continued to be in the service of her convenience, and to make the most time for each other, wasting as little as possible commuting.
Before she came here every evening, she passed by her place and prepared an overnight bag. When she departed before his housekeepers came, she left no evidence behind to betray that Raiden shared this place with a woman.
She also went home first to shower. He showered as soon as he returned home and was always starving for her at the end of his workday, and she couldn’t let him take her to bed fresh, or not so fresh, from hers. She’d been flying back and forth daily to the areas still affected by the last earthquake and tsunami in the northeast of Honshu island, and the fieldwork she’d been doing had been grueling. Over three hundred thousand people were still in temporary housing, and over ten thousand of those were orphaned children, the focus of her work. She’d been going all out setting up their special shelters. She needed to get things up and running before she left.
Her departure had become even more imperative now. The day, the hour her time with Raiden was up, she’d leave Japan and never come back.
Till then she’d spend every possible second with him. And Raiden was beyond generous with his time. Her days, as per his decree, were hers—if he couldn’t get away and meet her back here. Her nights were all his. She was so very okay with that.
Then in the mornings they left separately, and they never met anywhere else. There were no lunches or dinners or evenings out. They’d been taking every precaution to make sure their arrangement remained a secret. She was even more careful than he was. When she left this time, she wanted to leave him nothing but good memories, and no lasting damage of any sort.
That was, nothing more than the hundred-million-dollar-shaped new hole in his pocket.
It still flabbergasted her that he could so easily part with that much money. But he had, without batting an eyelash. Right there in his limo, he’d just produced his checkbook from his hand-tailored jacket, and had written the check. Payable the very next day.