Free Fire & Ice by Anne Stuart Page B

don't answer me, I'll stab you with a chopstick again,” she warned him.
    He glanced at her. “You don't have any.”
    “Point taken. I'm starving. Find me chopsticks and food to go with them and tell me what the plan is.”
    “We're going to a love hotel.”
    “Right,” she drawled. “Right after hell freezes over.”
    “Don't jump to any conclusions. They're anonymous—they have them all over Tokyo. You check in by machine—no witnesses. You'll like it—there are theme rooms. Pirates and samurai and slave girls. Just the kind of fantasy young women like.”
    “I have no deep-seated fantasy to be a slave girl,” she snapped. “And I hate to tell you, but you're no Johnny Depp.”
    “That leaves samurai,” he said. “You don't get a choice.”
    “Do they have two beds?”
    “In a love hotel? Not likely. Don't worry—they're like a family theme park of sex. Everything clean and pretend.”
    “I'm not having sex with you, even pretend sex.”
    “I don't remember that I asked you for sex. If I'd wanted it, we would have already done it.”
    At some point she really was going to hit him. She already knew perfectly well that he didn't find her to be anything more than a pain in the butt. He didn't need to embarrass her, as well.
    “No love hotel,” she said flatly, staying on point. “You'll have to knock me out and...” She let the words trail off as she remembered he'd already done just that. “No love hotel,” she said.
    “It's that or a capsule hotel.”
    She brightened. “Oh, cool! I've seen those on TV.”
    “You won't like that much better.”
    “A capsule hotel sounds perfect.”
    And you think I'm going to do what you want?”
    “I'm a lot less trouble if you do.”
    He smiled. Just when she was thinking he never smiled, he did, and she almost wished he hadn't. It was a smirk, as if he'd gotten exactly what he'd wanted and knew she wasn't about to back down.
    And she wasn't. She might have to spend the night with him, as she'd had to spend every minute since he first walked into the back bedroom at Summer's house, but she didn't have to spend it in a place designed for illicit sex. She'd seen capsule hotels on TV—they were strictly utilitarian, for people who needed to sleep and nothing else before they went back to work the next day.
    “No more arguments?” Reno said, his voice silky.
    Why did she feel she'd walked into a trap? “No more arguments. As long as it's not a love hotel I won't put up a fuss.”
    “You Americans are so puritanical,” he said. “It's much better to be practical about these things. Sex is recreational, marriage is a business matter.”
    “And what is love?”
    “Doesn’t exist.”
    She just looked at him. “What about Taka and Summer? Don't you think they're in love?”
    “Su-chan is American, Taka is half.”
    “Meaning only gaijin fall in love?”
    “Meaning only gaijin are fool enough to pay any attention. The best thing to do if you start thinking such things is to lie down and wait for it to pass. It always does.”
    She stared at him. “You speak from your great experience at falling in love?”
    “I've avoided it. It's a weakness and a waste of time, if it even exists. I'm better off without it.” He pulled the car to a stop. The street was darker than most of Tokyo's neon-lit brilliance, and he cut the engine, turning to look at her. “So you can stop looking at me like that when you think I don't know. I'll go to bed with you if that's what you want, but that's all you're getting.”
    She'd never hit another human being in her entire life. She punched him, hard, so fast and instinctive that he didn't have time to stop her, so fast that she didn't realize what she'd done until it was too late. She'd hit him hard—her knuckles had slammed against bone and flesh and it hurt.
    He didn't move. “I guess that's a no,” he said.
    She'd been about to apologize, but the words died in her mouth. “Are you trying to make me hate you?” she