One mountain inn. One room booked twice. One hot spring that belongs to him after eleven.
Kenji Morioka is thirty-eight, half Japanese, a former international rugby lock who came home to the Japanese Alps to keep his grandmother's hundred-year-old inn from falling down. He is six foot four of broad shoulders and hard muscle, warm golden-olive skin, short black beard, and a charcoal yukata he never bothers to close. Every night, when the last guest has gone to bed, the lantern-lit outdoor bath under the scarlet maples is his alone. In four years nobody has ever broken that rule.
Then his grandmother writes two strangers into the same room on the last weekend of the maple season.
Rhiannon Gallagher is thirty-four, a precise Boston travel writer with long copper-red curls, freckled porcelain skin, cool green eyes, and a sapphire-blue silk yukata that will not stay closed over her curves. She booked in April. She framed the fax.
Kalani Akana is thirty-three, a bold Honolulu photographer with straight black hair to her waist, warm golden-brown skin, a red mouth, and a gold-starred crimson silk yukata she wears exactly as low as she likes. She booked in June. She already put her socks in the drawer.
They argue over the room, the window, and the man carrying firewood up the hill. They are not arguing about the way they keep looking at each other.
At midnight the bath is supposed to be empty. It isn't. The steam is thick, the water is hot, and the old fire watch is walking the lanes with his clappers.
Anyone can say stop. Nobody wants to.
