In the Age of Love and Chocolate (Birthright #3)(43)

I looked into my husband’s eyes.

“What are you thinking?” he whispered.

“I can’t believe I’ve—we’ve—done this.” I was about to faint. They’d wrapped the kimono too tight, and the weight of the fabric was causing my machete to jab me in the thigh.

He chuckled and seemed less ill than he had in some time.

“Suddenly you’re looking healthier,” I said.

“Are you worried that I will live?”

“Yuji, of course not.” But it had honestly not occurred to me that he might get better.

I was beginning to feel rather unwell myself. I wanted to be back in New York. I told my “husband” that I needed to lie down. He took me to a room reserved for married couples that was near the shrine.

Kazuo trailed us. He called to Yuji in Japanese.

“Kazuo wants to know if I am sick,” Yuji translated. “For once, it is Anya,” he called merrily to Kazuo.

Yuji and I went into the marital suite. I lay down on the bed. Yuji sat nearby, watching me.

What had I been thinking? How had I convinced myself that this made sense?

I had married a man I barely knew.

I had married him!

I could not unmarry him either.

This was it. This had happened. This was my first marriage.

Natty and Theo and everyone else who’d tried to warn me off this had been right.

I was hyperventilating.

“Calm yourself,” Yuji said gently. “I will die as promised.”

I started to cry. “I don’t want you to die.”

I was still hyperventilating.

“May I loosen your obi?” he asked.

I nodded. He untied my kimono, and I began to feel better. He lay beside me. He looked at me, then he touched my face.

“Yuji, do you think I am a bad person?”

“Why?”

“Because you know I don’t love you. In a sense, I am marrying you for your money.”

“The same could be said of me. You are on the verge of being richer than I am, no? The truth is, I do not think of you in terms of good or bad.”

“How do you think of me?”

“I remember you as a child, playing in the garden with your sister. I remember you as a teenage girl, angry and reckless. I see you now, as a woman, usually so sturdy and strong. I like you best now. I like you better than I have ever liked you before. It is a shame we have had to do everything in the wrong order, but those are the lives you and I have. I would have liked, if I were young and strong, to have courted you, to have made you love me above all others, to have wooed you and won you. I would have liked to have known that when I died, Anya would be inconsolable.”

“Yuji.” I turned on my side so that I could face him. My kimono fell open and I pulled it closed.

He grabbed the obi and wrapped one end around his hand. “I wish I could make love to you.” He pulled me toward him by the belt.

My eyes widened. I was not such a fallen creature that I would make love to a man I barely knew, even if he were my husband.

“But I cannot. I am too weak. Today has been very tiring.” He looked at me. “I am pumped full of drugs and nothing works as it should.”

He was a ridiculously beautiful man, and the sickness had made him almost unbearably so. He looked like a charcoal drawing of a man. In death, he was blacks and whites.

“I think I could have loved you if we’d met when I was a few years older,” I told him.

“What a pity.”

I pulled him to me. I could feel his bones coiling and creaking around me. He must have weighed less than me, and he was terribly cold, too. We were both tired so I pulled open my kimono and then I sealed it so we were both inside.

“This life,” he said when we were eye to eye. “This life,” he repeated. “I will have more reason to miss it than once I thought.”

* * *

In the morning, he was gone. Kazuo explained that Yuji had needed to return to his own room on account of his health and that we were to meet him at the Ono Sweets factory later that day.

Back at the house, I changed out of my wedding kimono, which I had been wearing for almost twenty-four hours, and into my regular clothes. The servants were even more deferential than they had been before, but I almost did not know to whom they were speaking when they called me Anya Ono-san. I did not take his name, if you were wondering, but my Japanese was insufficient to explain to the servants that despite what it looked like, I was still Anya Balanchine.

* * *

Yuji, accompanied by an even larger entourage of businesspeople than had been at the airport, was waiting for us at the Ono Sweets factory in Osaka. For the first time since I’d arrived, Yuji wore a dark suit. I associated him with that suit and I found it comforting to see him in it again. He introduced me to his colleagues, and then we toured the plant, which was clean, well lit, and well run. There was no telltale scent to indicate that chocolate was being concocted. Their main product appeared to be mochi, a gummy, rice-based dessert.

“Where’s the chocolate?” I whispered to Yuji. “Or do you import it the way my family does?”

“Chocolate is illegal in Japan. You know that,” he replied. “Follow me.”

We separated from the main group and took an elevator down to a room that held a furnace. He pressed a button on the wall. The wall disappeared, and we entered a secret passage that led to a room smelling distinctly of warm chocolate. He pressed another button to close the door.