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“You mean...?”
“I mean, luckily for you, he says there’s more than enough room for the both of us.”
“Not in one hotel room, there isn’t.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” They’d reached the lower level, and Annie hurried to keep up with Chase’s long stride. “He says we’ll have a living room, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom all to ourselves.”
“Well, that’s good news,” Annie snapped, as Chase thrust her out the door ahead of him.
“Damn right. The last thing I feel like doing is curling up in a hotel lobby tonight while you take over my bed.”
“Such gallantry. But—”
“But what?” Chase snapped in her ear as a black limousine slid to the curb. The driver got out, executed a perfect salute and opened the rear door. “Just get into the car, Annie. We can endure each other’s company a little while longer. As tempting at the thought of leaving you at the airport is, I can’t bring myself to do it.”
As tempting as it was, staying at the airport for endless hours didn’t appeal to her, either.
“All right,” she snapped back. “But you better hope this suite is the size of Yankee Stadium. Otherwise, you may find yourself sleeping in the lobby anyway!”
* * *
It wasn’t the size of Yankee Stadium—although it was close.
But it wasn’t a suite, Annie thought an hour later, as she stared around her in shock. And it certainly wasn’t a hotel.
The limo had not taken them to one of the high-rise buildings in downtown Seattle. It had whisked them to a pier, where they’d boarded a sleek motorboat.
“Chase,” Annie had said, over the roar of the boat’s engines, “where are we going?”
Chase, who’d been starting to think he knew the answer, looked at the pilot.
“Tell me that we aren’t going to the island,” he said.
The pilot grinned. “Sure enough, we are.”
Chase groaned.
Annie looked at him as he gripped the railing and stared out over the churning water. She’d read the one, silent word on his lips and the tips of her ears had turned pink.
Now, standing in this room, she half wanted to say the word herself.
The wisps of fog that had drifted across the boat’s bow during their journey had lifted as they’d neared their destination. Annie had glimpsed an island, a place of towering green trees sloping down to a rocky shore. High among the trees, as if it were an eagle soaring out over the water, there was a lodge. It was a magnificent sight, a sculpture of redwood and glass. It was a fabulous aerie, commanding a view of the Sound in isolated splendor.
Wooden steps led up the craggy face of the cliff. Annie had climbed them, refusing Chase’s outstretched hand and instead clasping the wooden railing, telling herself that when they reached the top, she’d see something more than that one structure. A hotel. A cluster of buildings. A resort...
But there was only the lodge, and when Chase opened the door and went inside, she followed.
The rooms they passed through were spectacular. There was a kitchen, white and shiny and spotless. A bathroom, complete with a deep Jacuzzi and a stall shower built against a glass wall so that it seemed open to the forest. There was a living room and as Annie stepped into it, sunlight suddenly poured through the huge skylight overhead, so that the white walls and pale hardwood floor seemed drenched in gold.
Mr. Tanaka’s ancient heritage showed in the room’s elegant yet simple lines: the woven tatami mats on the floor, the handsome shoji screen that served as a backdrop for a low, black-lacquered table and the plump, black-and-white silk cushions that were strewn on the floor before the fieldstone fireplace. Sliding glass doors, flanked by tall white vases filled with pussy willows, opened on to the deck.
But it was the bedroom that made Annie gasp, and mentally repeat Chase’s muttered profanity. Their absent host’s living room had been serenely Japanese—but Mr. Tanaka had very Western tastes when it came to his sleeping quarters.
The floor was covered with white carpet so deep and lush it made Annie’s toes curl longingly inside her sneakers. One wall was mirrored; one was all glass and gave out onto the forest and the Sound. The furnishings themselves were spare and handsome. There was a teak dresser. A matching chest. A bentwood rocking chair.
And a bed.
One enormous, circular bed, elevated on a platform beneath a hexagonal skylight, and swathed in yards and yards of black-and-white silk.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANNIE TOLD HERSELF to calm down.
Count to ten. To twenty. Concentrate on finding the peaceful center within herself. Wasn’t that what she’d spent six weeks trying to learn when she’d taken that Zen philosophy course last winter?
