Page 7 of Blossoms of the Heart
I didn’t mean to be so fixated on the monetary benefits.
The truth was, it was just a good distraction for me right now.
A distraction from women… my other weakness.
I sighed and leaned against the wall, my gaze between the samurai and the sword.
Candace, my ex, had been back in town for over two weeks now. She blew back into my life on a whim, asking me to give her another chance.
I was supposed to be thinking about that, weighing up all the pros and cons. I was solely supposed to be thinking about that and maybe this discovery of ours. That part was allowed.
What I shouldn’t have been thinking about was Phoebe Walker.
The girl –woman–I was supposed to forget and stay away from.
I stayed away just like her mother demanded but I never forgot. That was the problem.
All those long years I never forgot the precious pampered princess her mother didn’t want me to get my filthy hands on and mess up.
She was coming back into my life too. Today at some point I was told.
God… I didn’t need this shit.
If I wasn’t working here I probably would have disappeared somewhere.
Candace would be here in an hour or so, expecting me to have an answer for her or some sort of… I didn’t know. Hope.
Hope that we could rekindle our relationship.
I’d met her when I first came back to Japan, two months after I left the Marines. She was a travel journalist and at the time on assignment for one of the exhibitions.
We got on straight away, started dating, became serious.
Ibecame serious, and that never happened. Ever.
I was usually the one in a relationship calling the shots because I didn’t want to be tied down. I was Mr. Fun, until I met her then she taught me to be very, very wary of love because it could blind you. Cover your eyes with wool so you couldn’t see straight and before you knew it, love could leave you flat on your face in the dirt wondering how the fuck you got there.
Candace was possibly the only woman I’d ever given my heart to, but when it came to choosing, she chose her career. A full-time position with National Geographic in San Francisco.
I would have tried to arrange something for us to stay together, but she broke it off with me and said long distance never worked for anyone and she’d rather remember us happy as we were than miserable trying to be together.
We were together for over a year and it took me nearly that length of time to get over her.
Now she wanted back in my life…
My Samurai friend definitely couldn’t have come at a better time. He would be a most welcomed distraction because I didn’t have an answer for her.
I pulled in a breath and checked my watch. The meeting would start in a few minutes.
Akito called this meeting for their team to discuss the plans going forward. This recent discovery meant that we’d have to delegate responsibility across our four-man team and call on some of the research assistants.
That was for the Samurai and the sword.
The journal was Phoebe’s department. Even when I knew her, she was the only person I knew that could speak more than ten languages.
I’d never seen language like what I saw in the journal. I spoke and read Japanese, mandarin and Cantonese. That was it for me.
I made my way to the meeting room. Everyone I expected to be here was already there, but I was surprised to see some of our investors, as well as Izu Fusima, the minister of education. That man couldn’t stand me, and the feeling was mutual. He thought I was a reckless, lay about playboy who was always looking for a chance to make money.
