had reason to believe they were outright lies, with the way said senses were disabled around you. I had no inkling of your deceit for five straight months of ultimate intimacy.”
Her fixed glance remained unchanged as her head tilted to one side, sending the curtain of her loose silk curls swishing over her polished shoulder. “Speaking of that, I always wondered what finally gave me away that time.”
He was damned if he’d give her the satisfaction, and the security, of knowing it had been total chance that had finally alerted him, and not his allegedly infallible abilities.
“You want to find out so you’ll never repeat the lapse, hone your deception powers to perfection? Sorry, you’ll have to keep on wondering. And worrying.”
“Oh, I never worry. Even in the rare times I slip up, I always manage to compensate. As I did when I preempted you.”
How she’d realized he’d found her out back then had remained a major question mark. Needing an answer to it had even outstripped his need to find his lineage in the past years.
Wrestling with the urge to pounce on her and force her to tell him now, he tried to match her nonchalance. “And now? How will you preempt me this time?”
A sigh accompanied a regretful shake of that elegant head. “It really would have been better for everyone if you didn’t recognize me.”
“Everyone meaning you.”
“Everyone meaning everyone. Starting by you.”
A vicious huff crackled from his depths. “You’re implying knowing your real identity poses danger to me, too?”
“It poses danger to you...only.” Before he processed that outrageous statement, she added, “And you don’t know my real identity.”
Giving in, he obliterated the distance he’d put between them. He needed a physical reinforcement of his dominance, feeling he was on the losing side of this confrontation.
He regretted it the moment he drew his next breath. Though she’d been so thorough in her disguise to the point of changing the soap and perfume she’d used before, her own scent deluged him, even through the masking of new adornments. Hot, vital, intoxicating. The exact bouquet that had been the only one to activate his libido.
Glaring down at her, as if it would shift the balance of power in his favor, he said, “I know this one is fabricated. As was the one before it. Which should be enough. So explain to me how this knowledge, when it’s clearly a secret you’ve kept from everyone here, wouldn’t impact you.”
“It would cause me intense inconvenience. But it’s you who stands to suffer major damage if you expose me.” Before he scoffed at that preposterous declaration, she asked, “But really, why would you want to expose me at all?”
“To stop you from setting Hiro up.”
After a moment, when it looked as if she didn’t get his meaning, incredulity coated her face. “What makes you think I’m doing any such thing? Because you consider I set you up?”
“And you don’t? What do you call what you did to me?” He waved, stopping any argument in its tracks. Haggling over facts turned them into points of view that could be contested and rewritten. And he was damned if he’d let her do that. “Whatever you’re doing, it’s criminal.”
“Because I’m withholding my real identity? Pot calling the kettle black much?” Her full lips twisted. “And if you’re citing my past actions in your unsubstantiated accusations, I did nothing criminal with you. I actually...helped you.”
It was his turn to cough in disbelief. “Sure, by systematically deceiving me for five months, then leaving a fifty-million-dollar gaping hole in my liquid assets. I bet that’s every man’s idea of ‘help.’”
“It isn’t a crime to con a con man. I was sent to expose an assassin who was posing as a squeaky-clean businessman. The only crimes were in your past, not mine.”
He gaped at her, astounded all over again. Even after he’d found out she’d conned him, after she’d blackmailed him, he’d thought she’d held her own with him only because he’d been in a precarious position, and more important, because they’d had their confrontation over the phone. If they’d been face-to-face, he’d always thought she wouldn’t have been able to maintain her poise.
But this woman with the steely self-possession could stare down the scariest monsters he’d ever dealt with and not turn a hair. If she could hold him at a disadvantage with such effortlessness when he’d thought she would be vulnerable and off balance, no one else would stand a chance against her.
He shook his head. “I didn’t choose my old persona. It wasn’t the real me. This new one I created is. I bet you can’t say the same about yourself. So whatever you call what you do for a living, I call you a professional fraud, out of choice. And whatever elaborate deception you’re perpetrating now, I will stop you. I let you get away with deceiving me once. I’m not letting you get away with anything again.”
He’d let his lethal side surface as he talked. Expecting exposure to it to shake her at last, he was again amazed when she met his menace head-on.
“You can only ‘stop’ me if you expose me. And you can’t, because it would mean exposing yourself.”
He coughed in incredulity. “Are you threatening me?”
“You’re the one who’s threatening to strike me down like your old code name. I’m just pointing out that your righteousness is blinding you to the fact that it’s in your best interests to keep my secrets. Why do you think I was so free with them?”
“Because you think I can’t do anything with what I know?”
“Not if you want what I know to remain buried.”
“You are threatening me, then.”
Something like exasperation tinged her gaze. “I once promised I’d never hold my knowledge over you, and I remain at my word.” When he glowered at her, failing to find any words to express what collided inside his head and chest, she exhaled. “Listen, Raiden, you’re the one who can create this impasse, and you mustn’t. Not when you’re mere steps from attaining the family and the status you’ve craved all your life.”
His heart convulsed. She knew this?
Though it shocked him, it stood to reason. Through his obliviousness, his misplaced trust, this woman had somehow once found out his every secret. It must have been easy for someone of her shrewdness to extrapolate his life goals and future plans. Now that she knew the arrangement he had with Megumi and her father, as it had been announced in society already, the details must have been as obvious to her.
It made sense, but it still galled him that she knew so much about him when he knew nothing about her, except what she made him feel, how she still had such power over him.
As if reading his mind, something like gentle persuasion entered her gaze. “Whatever you feel about me, no matter your burning desire to punish me for my transgressions against you, I’m not worth tarnishing the perfect image you’ve worked so hard and long to create. And that would certainly happen if you expose me. For what would you say I blackmailed you for? You can’t say that you succumbed to my blackmail, since it would make you look weak, or that you needed to hide something that badly. If you expose me anonymously, once the mess is out in the open, details have a way of surfacing, of becoming land mines you never know which step will set off.”
Fury, and something else he hadn’t felt since he was a child—futility—mushroomed inside him.
Everything she’d said was true. Any action against her now, in this delicate time, would have consequences, and the fallout would inescapably harm him. If not now, then later. Whatever impacted him, it would surely drag his brothers in by association. So he couldn’t act on the burning desire to punish her, as she’d so