her tiny voice requested he throw her in the air over and over.
I followed Jada out of the room, and the tension followed us up the stairs.
When we entered the enormous bedroom, a suite with a bathroom as big as my apartment in Palo Alto, and a walk-in closet even bigger, Jada’s shoulders sagged. She flung herself on the bed, arms around her middle.
“What the hell is all this?” I asked her.
“Leave it alone, Vi,” she said, which confused me as much as Dawson’s lack of defense.
“How can I? He seems despicable. What the heck kind of business does he have with Dawson? And why are you agreeing to marry him?”
I sat next to her on the bed with my legs crisscrossed, running my fingers through her silky black hair. I’d once thought I wanted hair just like hers, thinking it was better to be dark as night than almost nonexistent.
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 three Grâce Charmante products 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 on Obaasan’s lounge 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