She closed her eyes, and a tear leaked out the corner. “I don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” I said, determined.
She dragged herself away from me, heading to the dresser, stripping off her designer clothes and pulling on an equally designer nightgown, one that screamed sex and honeymoons.
“You think there’s always a choice because you’ve never been stuck between a rock and a hard place,” she said. “Those are my choices. Rock or even more rocks. Jagged, pointy ones.”
“Is it the money? I’ll help you. If Jersey and I can survive on barely anything, so can you. You have so much to offer the world, Jada. You don’t need your family or their fortune. You certainly don’t need Ken’Ichi Matsuda.”
She stared at me before throwing me a nightgown as well, one equally as gorgeous that would show as much skin as hers did, if not more.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said and headed for the bathroom.
I changed into the nightgown, the silk slipping over my skin as if it were hardly there. Then I followed her. She had pulled her hair back and was washing her face. After she patted it dry, she spread an expensive cream all over it while I watched.
“Stop giving me that disappointed look,” she said in the reflection of the mirror.
“It’s not a disappointed look. It’s an I’m-worried-about-my-friend look.”
I twined my hair into my normal braid, went to the second sink, and repeated her actions by washing up. I took the cream container in my hand and read the label. “This isn’t any good for you.”
She laughed. “Leave it to you to check the ingredients.”
“Seriously. I have threeGrâce Charmanteproducts that are ten times better than this, plus I bet they cost a third of what you paid.”
“But the question is, can I leave them for months at a time and have them be any good when I get back?”
I sighed. She was right. Jada flitted around the globe between houses sprinkled across it. There were months, if not years, between her visits to some of them. If she left the natural products there, they’d go bad before she got back to them, or she’d have to cart them around with her, and that definitely wasn’t Jada.
“I’m working on it,” I told her.
We tucked into her king-sized bed with its gazillion-thread-count sheets.
“Did he kiss you?” Jada asked, longing in her voice that only served to confuse me more than I was already. She and Dawson had both insisted there was nothing between them. Jada had looked like she was much more into Dax Armaud than she’d ever looked interested in Dawson.
I pushed her shoulder with mine. “Did Dax kiss you?”
She closed her eyes. “If he’d kissed me, we wouldn’t have been on the balcony when Ken’Ichi showed up. Or…maybe we would have been, but it would have been onObaasan’slounge chair, naked, and that would have been a disaster.”
The Japanese word for grandmother always sounded like an endearment when she said it. I was pretty sure that woman was the only person who’d shown Jada true love while she was growing up.
“You didn’t answer me. Did he kiss you?” she asked, eyes closed. As the alcohol she’d consumed wore off, and the adrenaline of whatever had gone down silently between her and Ken’Ichi and Dawson left her, she was being dragged into sleep.
“Almost,” I whispered. Her eyes flicked open, and a smile curled over her lips.
“Thank God. I give it another day. The party at the longest,” she said.
I shrugged. Maybe.
Anticipation and fear shot through me. What if, after waiting this long, he kissed me, and it was only as pleasant as Silas’s kiss? What if the dynamic between us was all in my head? The tingling I felt in my soul just a fantasy?
“You think too much. Next time, just kiss him,” Jada said before slipping into an uneasy slumber.
I couldn’t sleep at all. I lay looking at the ceiling, wondering. Wondering what had happened when we’d left the billiard room, and Dawson had been left with the schmuck claiming Jada as his. Wondering what Dawson’s connection to it was. Wondering why Dax’s and Jada’s families were at odds. Feeling like I’d been thrust into a fairy tale halfway through the story. The part where the villain was winning.
My brain was on overdrive, tossing through scenarios almost as if they were formulas. Math and science melding together. I needed tea. Something to relax me enough to push aside the white chalkboard drawings in my head.
I dragged myself out of bed, slipped from the room, and found my way to the immaculate and very expensive kitchen. I’d been at the penthouse once before. It felt like a lifetime ago, but I’d spent a couple of nights there as a teenager. Back then,Obaasanhad been in residence with her Michelin-starred chef and a much bigger staff. Jada had brought me here to escape Dawson, and now here we were with her forcing us together.
