Billionaires in Tokyo: Dom Vs. Domme Shorts, #3

By Cynthia Dane

It’s taken two years, but Kathryn Alison is finally an employee of her boyfriend’s real estate and hospitality company. All so she can accompany him on an official business trip to Japan, where the business etiquette is so strict it would be simply unbecoming otherwise.

All well and good, however, until the deal is sealed and Kathryn and Ian go their separate ways to party the night away.
When Kathryn wakes up? Ian is gone. What ensues is a search for her beloved that takes her on more than a physical journey through Tokyo. By the end of the trip, Kathryn will have the biggest wake-up call about what her boyfriend truly means to her – and how she can take him beyond mere boyfriend status.

Let’s just say it’s a good thing she saved that marriage license from Vegas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barachou Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386294917

Book preview

Billionaires in Tokyo

A Dom Vs. Domme Story

Cynthia Dane

BARACHOU PRESS

BILLIONAIRES IN TOKYO

A Dom Vs. Domme Story

Copyright: Cynthia Dane

Published: March 10th, 2016

Publisher: Barachou Press

This is a work of fiction. Any and all similarities to any characters, settings, or situations are purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.

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BILLIONAIRES IN TOKYO

Chapter 1

KATHRYN

I’ve been all over this great earth for business and pleasure. This year alone I’ve traveled to… hang on… ten different countries? None of them compare to Japan when it comes to making me feel like an utter fool.

It’s not really the culture shock. I’ve been worldly enough in my life to know to go with the flow and do as I’m told when in another culture. Besides, when you’re worth over a billion dollars, certain cultural matters don’t mean anything anymore – you’re living on a different level from most of the people in the whole world.

Unless you’re dealing with other rich assholes in a culture you barely understand.

Let’s say having to take off my Valentino’s to sit down to have a thousand-dollar dinner is not something I will ever get used to. Because what heiress wants to conduct million-dollar business barefoot?

I am the only barefoot person at this table. Out of the seven of us – four women, including me – I’m the only one who didn’t think to wear nude socks or pantyhose. Even my boyfriend’s assistant Valerie showed up in classy knee-high socks to wear beneath her dress. She blends so seamlessly into the background at the end of our dinner table, taking notes and doing last minute research for her boss, that I’m starting to feel like the big fool here. It also does not help that I am not good at parsing Asian accents speaking English, no matter how good that English is.

Flawless, really. Let me tell you, I can tell you what any Frenchman or Swede is trying to convey at a dinner discussing politics. I think I’m simply too overwhelmed by the place our business consorts have chosen.

We’re in Ginza, a Tokyo neighborhood that caters to the rich and richer out looking to eat and shop until their bank accounts have taken a sizable hit. (At our level, that’s almost impossible to make happen. Almost. I’ve seen enough price tags here in Ginza to make even me swallow before signing tabs with my credit card information.) The restaurant we’re in only has one table. Yeah, that’s right. One table. Its size can change as often as necessary to accommodate between two to twenty people, but it’s still the only table currently serviced in this restaurant no one has ever heard of before. They don’t advertise. They don’t have to. They do so much filthy business that they’re probably booked for the next five years. The people we’re dealing with have a standing reservation here. They must, for us to get supper at the last minute.

We can eat whatever we want. Of course, our hosts have ordered us standard Japanese group food, although I’m sure it’s been catered to Western tastes – I’m told these people are highly Westernized as it is. I wouldn’t know. My boyfriend Ian knows them much better than I do. This is my first time meeting them in person.

I am in way over my head here.

What’s the line between a family representing their culture as a whole and simply being stinking rich assholes? I mean, if you used my family to represent all of American culture, you’d be rightfully laughed out of the building. Although now that I think about it… unhappy marriage? Check. Wife having a mental breakdown and fucking off to God knows where? Check! One child who will be in therapy for the rest of her life? Check-check. Same daughter constantly trying to make amends for the shit her ancestors did when they arrived in the New World? (My ancestors are Swedish. Let me tell you about the shit the Swedes got up to when they showed up a couple hundred years ago…) Er, half-check, depending on who you ask.

The family here goes back as far as our own families. Cumulatively, the Isoyas are worth over a billion dollars, and that doesn’t include every single share and holding in their possession… only the ones we know about. If you looked at the four people sitting before us, you’d think they were the quintessential Japanese family: father, mother, one daughter and one son.

Yeah, right.

These business-oriented families are ruthless. Granted, from what I gather some people died along the way, and these people are blood related… somehow… but it’s not as simple as Daddy loves Mommy and now they have two little heirs to carry on the family tradition. Nope. The woman whose eyes I’m staring into every few seconds (even though I thought the Japanese hated eye contact?) is the twin sister of the chairman, the man sitting on her left. On the other side of him is the heiress of the company, a woman who looks like she can’t be much older than me. I’m still not quite sure who the young man taking the older woman’s notes is. She keeps referring to him as her nephew, even though my own notes say that this woman’s only nephew is married and weighs about fifty more pounds.

The property is as hot as lightning, Ian says, referring to the files we’re looking at in our folders. The chairman turns to his heir for an explanation. If we had known that the young woman at the table was the most fluent in English, we would have asked for her to sit closer to the center. Instead, we’re playing this weird game of English and Japanese telephone, because no American here can speak a lick of Japanese beyond the business pleasantries.

Once the chairman is convinced that he knows what we’re talking about, he responds with, Branding is important to our company and to our customers. His accent isn’t as thick as his sister’s, and his simpler use of my native tongue gets some getting used to, but if you could see this guy like I see him, you’d take him super seriously too. He’s older than Ian and I put together, but he scares me more than my own father. Fuck, he scares me more than anyone in my boyfriend’s family, and there’s a reason anyone with the last name Mathers is a billionaire!

Is his hair still naturally black, or does he dye it? I see some flecks of gray on his scalp… or I would if he didn’t keep staring into my soul like he was debating whether to buy my blond ass. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not leering at me, but the chairman of this Japanese hotel empire has been sizing me up ever since I arrived. Ian told them that I was coming, right? I may not know Japanese, but I’ve studied enough Japanese business culture to have had the foresight to make Ian’s father add me as an official employee of Mathers & Co. before I touched ground at Narita International Airport this morning. The Japanese really don’t like it when outsiders are invited into regular ol’ business meetings. One as delicate as this? They don’t care if I’ve helped the Mathers buy a thousand properties back in America. All they know is that my last name isn’t Mathers and that I’m boning the sole heir. (Boning him for going on two years now, but, you know, boning him on the regular.)

We absolutely understand. Ian motions for his assistant Valerie to hand him more folders. That’s why we want to make it clear that we are willing to share the branding of this location. On top of that, all Japanese literature will have your company’s brand as if it’s the only one, with only a minor footnote regarding Mathers & Co. He opens the newest folder to show off what he has in mind. The pamphlet mockup is entirely in Japanese, including the golden logo of the Nippon Royal Hotel empire that the Mathers are trying to team up with. I admit, it’s a brand-new venture for them, and one that even shocked Ian when his father brought it up a month ago. The Mathers have never shared branding like this with any of their investors, but the Isoyas aren’t your usual group of hospitality entrepreneurs. They’re one of the most powerful names in Japan when it comes to hotel living. You’d almost think they dealt exclusively in high-end hotels, but they’ve made a killing appealing to the common businessman and couples on a nice vacation.

Ian’s father is looking to retire soon, although you didn’t hear that from me. One of the last things he wants to do before formally passing the torch on to his son is establish a powerful foreign connection. So happens that the Isoyas are looking to do the same thing from their side of the ocean. They have opened a swanky hotel in Okinawa. Next stop? Brand-sharing in America, apparently.

That’s assuming they can agree on what property to buy together. The Mathers will be doing most of the grunt work, but the Isoyas are ponying up millions of dollars to make it happen. All they want in return (besides their share of the profits, obviously) is to have their brand plastered on everything, especially to the Japanese businessmen and tourists they’re referring that way. That way, when they open up their own hotel in America within another ten years, the groundwork has already been laid.

Or so I’m figuring. I can barely understand what I’m having for dinner tonight, let alone what’s going on ten years from now.

The chairman exchanges