Free The Typhoon Lover by Sujata Massey

her next stop at my parents’ home in San Francisco, I would head to Hugh’s office to take him something to eat.
    “So, he has to go to work when he’s still sick. It’s a shame,” Chika said gravely.
    “That’s right. And I don’t know if he’s going to be sick again, so I think it’s probably better if I’m just there.”
    “Of course. I’d like to be home this evening, in case the boys call between sets. Sridhar promised.”
    I looked sideways at my cousin. “How was last night on the futon?”
    She beamed radiantly. “Very fun. Liberating, really. I never spent so much time with foreign men before.”
    “All the men I know are foreigners,” I mused. Hugh was so profoundly Celtic, and Takeo came from centuries of Japanese inbreeding. Come to think of it, the boyfriends I’d chosen in college had all been bilingual and of international ancestry. My roommate used to call the motley parade of beaux that crossed our doorway Rei’s United Nations. I’d never dated anyone all-American like Michael Hendricks.
    I shook myself. Why had that thought popped into my head? Probably, it was because I had turned thirty and felt a need to evaluate all the men I met, whether I liked them or not.
    “Foreigners,” Chika continued, interrupting my distressed thoughts. “They are more intense. The differences…it’s exciting at first. But it cannot last for eternity, as my mother says.”
    “Oh, does she.”
    “She’s not watching me that closely right now. She’s working on an o-miai for my brother, though.”
    “Tsutomu-kun is going to have an arranged marriage?” I felt faint at the thought of her older brother, my beloved cousin Tom, so attractive, lively, and caring. Why did his mother think he needed help finding a partner?
    Chika answered my unspoken question. “My brother is so old—thirty-three already. Japanese girls are becoming choosy. They won’t want him in two more years. Now is the time he can still have any hope of selection.”
    “All he needs is some time off from work! Time to socialize, meet people on his own,” I said. “How could a matchmaker find a better woman for him than we could?”
    “I have no interest in fixing up my brother. But if you do…” She waved an elegant hand studded with heavy rings. “ Onegai-shimasu!”
    I request of you , she’d said in formal Japanese.
    In a week’s time, I would have the chance to see her brother and ask him how he felt about arranged marriages. But first, I had to get to Japan—and that meant working things out with Hugh.

8
    “No!” Hugh said.
    We were sitting on the carpet in his office with the Thai food spread out like a picnic between us. I had spent the last ten minutes explaining my situation: a onetime contract job for the government to bid for antique Japanese pottery, a special passport back to Japan. An opportunity to jump out of my diplomatic black hole—an opportunity that might never come again.
    He’d listened carefully the whole time I’d spoken, not eating a bite. And now, the verdict was negative.
    “You mean you don’t think I should go?”
    “No, no, no!”
    “But why—”
    “I mean no, as in no kidding! I can hardly believe it. What brilliant luck.” Hugh’s serious expression had turned into a radiant grin.
    I could breathe again. “So you think I should take it? I haven’t told them yet—”
    “Of course you should bloody take it! Rei, thank God you came to Washington. Because of all that publicity you gathered in the last few months, someone high up must have twigged that you’re the right person for the job. When you return here with whatever Momoyama vase you buy, I want to throw a party. Do you think, if you ask nicely, they’ll let you have it at the Smithsonian?”
    “I doubt it. Hugh, you must be on the way to recovery if you’re thinking of parties again.”
    “Yes, watch me eat rice and soup without losing it.” He did so, and when he spoke again, his voice was slightly hoarse from