Page 123 of Prelude To You

It felt like she was right there, and I could hear her tell a story I never knew I wanted to know. When I finally woke, her absence twisted something inside me, tightening around my chest until it ached. There was simply no escaping this feeling, and there was definitely no hope of sleeping after that.

It was barely past midnight, and I had enough work to keep me busy for an eternity. But what would a man with an empire to run prefer to do instead? Obsess over the one thing he couldn’t have.

Suddenly I wanted to know what made me look up in the bookshop at the very moment Isabel glided through the entrance. Because it was at exactly that moment that the layersof my carefully-molded façade started to peel away. Leaving me, in the end, an empty shell yearning for a life I could never have.

An idea was grinding through my head. What if I could watch that moment unfold? Maybe, just maybe it would make more sense. The footage was all on the USB drive Steven had so reluctantly left in my possession. I removed the drive from the safe and plugged it into the computer.

Was I really doing this?Yes, I really was. I was finally going to watch how this astonishingly beautiful disaster began. I stoked the fire, poured a glass of Glenmorangie Signet, and took a seat in front of the big screen.

There were four feeds from different angles inside the bookshop. I fast-forwarded the footage until I saw myself sitting on that couch reading my book. And sure enough, once I started reading, I didn’t look up once in the next thirty minutes.

Until the moment Isabel arrived.

Not to dwell on the oddness of it all, but I clearly remembered the peculiar sensation tickling my senses, forcing me to interrupt my focus and look up.

Even now, her sudden appearance on the screen as she swept into the bookshop and into my world, made my heart speed up. I watched her walk across the bookshop, her dingy coat fluttering behind, as if trying to catch up with her elegant stride.

If I hadn’t looked up, I would have missed her. How many times had we almost missed each other last night, too? If I hadn’t seen her in traffic… Hadn’t caught up with her outside when she left the wine bar… If I hadn’t been there when she came down from the penthouse in the elevator…

As I watched the story unfold on screen, I didn’t recognize the man standing in front of this strange woman as their entire world shrank down to just the two of them.

It could have ended right there, even as my mind was crowded with preposterous thoughts of possible loopholes thatmight allow Isabel to become part of my reality. If only I’d had the common sense to let her go when she wanted to leave. Ending it before it became this turmoil of affection, nesting inside me with nowhere to go.

But then of course I had to kiss her. I should never have kissed her. And even if I wanted to, she should have refused, should have been outraged that a total stranger wanted to capture her essence and keep it as a souvenir for the rest of his life.

It was that kiss that cast the final, inescapable spell. That mesmerizing, breathtaking kiss.

And where did that leave me? Here at the witching hour, reminiscing about a simple kiss when I could instead ponder being so deep inside Isabel that I felt her heartbeat pulsing through my cock. Probably because it was the first kiss where I ever experienced the tendrils of magic stirring inside my chest, spreading a heat through me that I didn’t know it was possible to feel.

Every kiss I had before was perfunctory, simply an action to preface the next phase of my evening with a woman. And they were evenings I wanted to be over the moment both parties were satisfied.

Both parties. Could I be any more detached? Sex, to me, was fulfilling a need. Like eating when you’re hungry, drinking when you’re thirsty or sleeping when you’re tired.

There was no cuddling or pillow talk, and there was definitely no whispering-sweet-nothings in moments of intense pleasure, or listening to the soft flutter of someone’s breathing as they slept in my arms. Sex was simply taking care of a need.

But that was then. There were now two very distinct eras in my life: Before Isabel, and After Isabel.

Another realization breached my mind, completely unannounced. One that rattled me more than I cared to admit.Isabel wasn’t meeting a need. Isabel had become the need.

The footage on the screen was now frozen on the kiss. I couldn’t get myself to the part where we separated, where I walked out like a self-involved jerk, leaving her to deal with a rejection I never intended her to feel.

Twice I left this magical creature in a state of pain and confusion, because twice my own misery took precedence. I was at the point where contacting Isabel was no longer outside the realm of possibility. It was just a matter of when.

This last thought, with its flimsy promise of joy, made my skin prickle. If nothing else, at least it stilled my troubled mind for a while. Or perhaps it was the whiskey, soaking up my edginess.

But what was my analytical mind anyway if not a complete pain in the ass, urging me to step back. What if I just gave this feeling some time to settle before rashly deciding to drag Isabel into a situation she wasn’t prepared for? And who could be, really?

That was to say she harbored the slightest desire to see me again. For all I knew I’d pushed her right back into the arms of the Russian dancer, Sergei. The thought of his hands on Isabel was a new thought to fuel my nightmares.

Once again I marveled at the fact that for the first time in my life, I was jealous. And not just envious, but stark raving jealous. A raging duel-at-dawn kind of jealousy. Of a man I wouldn’t recognize if he stood in this office, two feet away from me.

The frozen kiss remained on the screen at my desk. It struck me how incompetent I really was at trying to make some sense of this sudden storm of emotions. Work was my only therapy so to speak, so I gave in to the familiarity of something where at least I knew what I was doing.

I went to my desk and scrolled through the projects my father had handed over to me a while back. On a whim, I decided to call Mr. Minoru Nakamura in Tokyo. He was an old rival of my father’s. For decades, he’d blocked the construction of a Belmont Hotel in Tokyo.

Unfortunately for my father, Nakamura owned the coveted real estate where my father insisted on building the hotel.

Four years ago, when my father took me along on a business trip to Tokyo, Mr. Nakamura said he might reconsider when I one day took the reins. But as long as my father was chairman, there would be no deal.

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