But it never failed. She always left first thing in the morning, never once waking him up to say goodbye. He’d hoped today would be different, since he’d told her he wouldn’t go to work before noon today. He’d hoped she’d take this as what he’d meant it to be, an invitation to sleep in with him and have a late breakfast together.
But then why should he feel so disappointed that she hadn’t heeded his implication? Beyond the relentless demands he made on her sexually, in anything else he maintained a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. She probably didn’t even realize there’d been an invitation hidden in his words.
But his attitude was just a front. In reality, every second he spent in her company, the bad memories of the past faded, as if they’d happened to someone else. He could no longer see her through their tainted prism. He believed he now saw through to her core self, the real woman. He believed he felt what she felt. Though she was vocal only in passion, he could swear he sensed that this was no longer purely sexual to her. If it had ever been.
And he wasn’t deluding himself about this. He’d been feeling this even before learning the truth about her current work made him radically change his opinion of her character.
When he’d first investigated her activities in Japan, he’d thought her humanitarian work with UNICEF was just an ingenious way of wheedling herself into major businessmen’s pockets, like Hiro, for donations she’d pocket herself. Then she’d asked for the hundred million, stating it would all be used in her work. He hadn’t been in a condition at the time to care why she’d asked for it, had vaguely thought she’d had to at least be exaggerating about the money’s intended use. But after he’d given her the money, and she continued working harder than ever, he had to revise his suspicions, since he’d given her more than ten years’ worth of donation drives could raise.
Further investigations had revealed the incredible results she’d been consistently getting for the past three years, fifteen months of those in Japan. Everything fell into place in the light of his new time with her. And that was before he’d discovered her most ambitious project was being funded by her own money. The money she’d taken from him.
He’d then realized she’d asked him for it only so it would free her from dependence on donations and other sources of official funding. Those had been limiting the scope of what she could achieve, and she was always threatened by being forced to stop her projects altogether if she ran out of money. He’d even traced parts of the previous sum he’d given her to more of her humanitarian efforts. He now had no doubt the rest of it had been put to very good use, as she’d told him that first night. He’d thought she was being provocative, but she’d only been telling him the truth. And expecting him to believe the worst.
But even doing so, with the way he’d been feeling, he would have given her a billion dollars had she asked. T
he way he was feeling now, if she asked, he’d sign over all his assets.
Now he watched her from slit eyes as she paused at the door of his expansive bedroom and looked back. In her utilitarian clothes and ponytail, she looked so practical, so young. So fragile. She’d lost a lot of weight in the past six weeks, and he could sometimes swear she was reverting to what she’d been before.
She hadn’t realized he’d woken up. And the expression that came over her, the emotions that gripped her features when she thought she was safe from his scrutiny, speared through him.
Such wistfulness, such pervasive dejection.
Long after she’d closed the door and he heard her leave his penthouse, he lay there on his back in the bed in which they’d shared indescribable intimacies, staring at the ceiling.
Why was she feeling that way? Did she feel that way?
He couldn’t tell for sure. Not as long as he didn’t know everything there was to know about her.
What he knew now was just feelings, observations and information about her current status. Her past remained as inaccessible as ever.
After that night three weeks ago, when she’d told him why she’d chosen the name Scarlett, her red hair and that specific face, she’d gone back to evading his probing. Beyond being candid about what she thought in the moment, and explicit about what he made her feel physically, she gave him nothing more that could make it possible to reconstruct her past.
A past he could no longer bear not knowing about.
It was no longer to tie up everything about her neatly, so that when their time together came to an end, he’d stow away her memory in a closed file and move on, with no lingering uncertainties keeping her alive in his memory. Not that he’d ever wanted that. He now admitted it to himself that when he’d hit the first dead ends in his search into her past, he’d convinced himself she was untraceable. He’d unconsciously wanted to avoid finding out what would disturb him more. Or worse, what would irrevocably eradicate her from his mind.
Now it was different. This woman he’d been sharing every intimacy he’d never wanted to share with another with was the woman he’d thought she was in the past. She’d told the truth when she’d said she’d never acted with him. And she’d never made personal use of the money she’d taken from him, except to build a new persona. He had to find out what had driven her to that mercenary life in the past, then to go through such effort and pain to escape it.
Yet he didn’t know how to start a new investigation, or if one would actually lead to anything other than more dead ends.
But he could investigate someone close to her. Hiro. His past was heavily documented, and maybe some threads from her relationship with him would lead to unraveling her mystery.
* * *
Investigating Scarlett’s relationship with Hiro turned out to be a simple matter of entering their names in an internet search engine.
At the click of a button, he got dozens of results detailing the incident that had brought them together.
About a year ago, Hiro was on one of his private jets, returning from a charity event on Kyoto. Scarlett was among the dozen people who’d organized the event and had been invited to go back to Tokyo with him. Then the plane was hit by lightning.
Five people died in the crash, and others had assorted injuries but had managed to pull themselves out of the wreckage. But Hiro was trapped. They’d tried to extricate him, but on realizing the plane was about to explode, they’d run out, leaving him to his fate. All but Scarlett.
Risking her own life, she’d refused to leave him even when he’d begged her to save herself. She’d finally managed to drag him free and away from the plane in the nick of time. Then she’d stopped the bleeding from the major artery in his leg, which would have killed him anyway, and continued to care for him until rescue teams arrived. Through it all, she’d ignored her own injuries.
Hiro had been on record so many times in the media lauding Scarlett’s fearlessness and heroism, and stating unequivocally that he owed her his life.
In addition to the press coverage Raiden found, his own investigations revealed they’d been best friends ever since, but that there’d been no hint of romantic involvement in their closeness. Apart from their friendship, Hiro had been donating massive amounts of money to her causes. But there was never enough money to establish the ongoing services she was setting up. And it was far better to have personal money she had immediate access to, since Hiro’s donations would always be tied in lengthy legal procedures before being made available for her to use.