Free Sleeping With My Boss: A Standalone Novel (An Alpha Billionaire Romance Love Story) (A Dirty Office Romance) by Claire Adams

few
hours,” I said. “All of those hours of intense concentration and work will be
erased.”
    She looked surprised. “That's…kind of tragic,” she
remarked. “It will all be lost?”
    I nodded. “All of it. Nothing will remain. This is the
nature of Zen Buddhism—there is no attachment.”
    “How do you know so much about this? You've spent the
last hour telling me all sorts of things about Shinto, Buddhism, and now this.”
    “I took an extended sabbatical from the company
several years ago. I felt I was losing my focus. I had been struggling to come
to terms with the loss of my grandfather's and there were other…family matters,
on top of running the company and trying to get it to the top.
    “So, I left it in the control of my grandfather's
second-in-command—a close family friend who had been with the company with my
grandfather from the beginning and came out of retirement for that short time
to assist me—and I traveled for a few months. I spent time with an old family
acquaintance in Japan at his remote mountain residence.”
    “Oh, wow, maybe you are Batman,” she joked.
“Seriously, though, that sounds like quite an experience.”
    “It was. During the second World War, my grandfather
served in the Pacific and he saved the life of a high-ranking Japanese Naval
officer, Colonel Tanaka, who was about to be wrongfully executed for crimes he
didn’t commit. He and my grandfather became fast friends, and he told my
grandfather he owed him a great debt that he was determined to repay.
    “We visited the Colonel a number of times when I was a
boy. He lived in an old manor in the mountains which had been in his family for
many generations. According to the stories I was told, he was the descendent of
a prominent line of samurai warriors, and, like his forefathers, he had
maintained the traditions of the samurai.”
    “Wow! That sounds like a movie.”
    “It was kind of like a movie. I mean, the place looked
like it must have been built two hundred years ago, with a few modern
conveniences thrown in, of course. I loved going and staying there as a boy. My
grandfather taught me to speak Japanese as a kid. I was pretty good at it,
actually. I still try to keep it sharp by watching Japanese movies when I can,
and I do have a few business contacts in Japan.”
    “Nice. I speak Spanish pretty fluently myself, and I
could survive in Italy if I had to.”
    “Excellent. Everyone should try to master at least one
other language besides their mother tongue, I think.”
    “Agreed. Anyway, tell me more about your time in
Japan,” her eyes lit up as she insisted I continue. It was endearing.
    “Yeah, well, like I said, it was great for me. Colonel
Tanaka, while in his nineties at the time, was still a skilled martial artist.
Oddly enough, he really was a true master in the ways of the samurai. Ways that
had been passed on to him from his father and his father's father before that.
I told him I felt as if I'd lost my way, and that I needed to find my focus and
drive again. I’ll never forget the smile that came over his face when he told
me that the time had finally come for him to repay the debt he owed my
grandfather. So, he took me in and trained me as if I was one of his own
grandsons.”
    “Trained you? In what way?”
    “As a samurai.”
    Lilah's jaw dropped, and I did my best not to laugh at
the expression.
    “No way. So, you’re telling me you lived in a Japanese
manor that was a couple hundred years old and trained as an actual samurai,
under a genuine samurai master?”
    I smiled and nodded. “I did. Every morning I'd be up
at four to meditate in front of the shrine for an hour. Then I'd spend the next
three hours completing grueling, menial tasks, during which I wasn't allowed to
speak a word or display any emotion. After that, I'd begin weapons training,
which was followed by more meditation, and in the afternoons we'd perform
hand-to-hand combat. The evenings were spent writing old style