Seduction of Tokyo’s first few pages ❄️🪘🫶

CHAPTER ONE

December 1903

Tokyo

Kiyo Iwai

“Miss Iwai, am I to understand you’ve tendered your resignation?” Pierce stood a respectable foot and a half from her desk, but his flared nostrils and assaulting glare were anything but respectful.

“I have.” She wouldn’t let him unnerve her. There was no backing down. Leaving was the only means of escaping this unrelenting flood of pathetic longing.

He rolled his jaw as though contemplating how best to disarm her. “Would you care to tell me why?”

Oh, he knew why. “I’ve accepted a position at Tokyo Women’s Magazine. I’m going to write an advice column for women about investing their family’s savings.”

That was the reason she’d given Theo Lyons, his partner in Lyons and Roth Bank, to whom she’d tendered her resignation. Theo must’ve told him.

He stepped to the front of her desk, then reached out—the gall—and turned up her lamp’s flame. She felt her body flare with the rising light. He was too close. Her cheeks burned. This was not how a respectable bookkeeper at a respectable bank was supposed to feel.

There was his why.

He let out a rush of air. Did it satisfy him to see her flush?

“That sounds like a splendid plan. We could stand to have more women interested in investments. But couldn’t you continue bookkeeping for the bank? Will this column consume all your working hours?”

She was a woman of numbers and sums. Naturally, she’d done the arithmetic. There were hours in the day she could devote to the bank. Except she wouldn’t. “I plan to spend as much time as possible at the magazine.” There, she’d brought their discussion to an end. It was time for him to return to his office.

She stood. Despite knowing the effect his proximity would have, she stepped around her desk, bringing her inches from the scent of his brushed winter wool and woodsy soap. She felt her nipples tighten and her thighs clench to stem the rush of desire. With a pointed stare she indicated her destination, the tea station across the office, then shifted to pass around him. He widened his stance—the atrocious man—and blocked her way.

Was he daring her to plow right into him? To bring their bodies into the tangle they both desperately wanted?

Absolutely not. She stepped back and folded her arms.

He folded his. “Doesn’t your family rely on your wages?”

How cruel of him to speak of her family. And how awful for them he was right.

Twice already that year, their gambling, alcoholic landlord had demanded more yen for the family’s worse-for-wear home. Work at the magazine wouldn’t bring in enough money. She’d have to find a way to make more.

Small businesses needed bookkeepers. Tsukiji had plenty of those. She’d practically grown up in the foreign quarter, and through her work at the bank, she’d met a number of foreign business owners who could use her skills.

But no employer would be as generous as Lyons and Roth.

Those words had haunted her for the past two weeks as she’d inched closer to the unavoidable conclusion: Were he to ask, her answer would be, shamefully, yes.

“My family’s situation is none of the bank’s concern.” Noting the width of his obtrusive stance, she pitched forward to step around him.

He shifted once again, blocking her way. “Miss Iwai,” he bit down on her name. Then, seeming to have realized he’d gone too far, he softened his gaze, and his irises grew frothy like the chocolate milks he brought to her desk when he received a shipment of “Cuba’s finest.”

Even while he courted, and would surely marry, the Janus-faced, selfish Euphemia Lyons, Kiyo hated to admit, she would agree to be his mistress. She wanted him bodily. She wanted his sex. Euphemia be damned.

That realization had been the most shameful because she wasn’t like Euphemia. Kiyo made every effort to be kind, helpful, and, above all, a clear thinker. Yet, she’d let him muddy her thoughts and push her to a place that would spell disaster.

“Your family could end up in a precarious position. Please, reconsider.” He used the same gentle tone as when he greeted her at dinner parties, and when he ran into her at the same concerts they attended. As friends.

They were friends. And in the course of their friendship, she’d learned what made him laugh—clumsy fools—and what made him nostalgic—reminiscing about Cuba. And she’d come to understand what he wanted from her was exactly what she wanted from him.