Chapter 15

ONE YEAR LATER

The Daimyo of Fire Country would be pleased to attend the grand reopening of the town of Konohagakure. He has asked me to convey his particular interest in the Arabian Nights mural in the public library as the tales are favorites of his.

Sasuke read the letter again and was about to give a whoop of joy and triumph—until he looked at the second paragraph, in which the Daimyo's secretary asked that the dates of the reopening ceremony be confirmed. "But that's . . ." He broke off in horror as he looked at his watch to check today's date, then glared at the calendar on his desk to reconfirm his suspicions.

"Hanabi!" he bellowed at the top of his lungs, and after about three minutes his secretary came wandering into his office.

"Yeah?" she said, looking at him with big, bored eyes.

Sasuke had long ago learned that nothing, not any intimidation on earth, could overset Hanabi's complacency. Calm down, he told himself. But then he had another look at the Daimyo's seal on the letter and tranquillity be damned.

Silently, he handed her the letter.

"That's good, isn't it? I told you I'd get him here. We got connections, me and Hinata."

Sasuke put his head in his hands for a moment and tried to count to ten. He made it to eight, which was a new record for him. "Hanabi," he said with controlled, exaggerated calm. "Look at the dates. How far from now is the date when the Daimyo is due to arrive?"

"You need a new calendar?" Hanabi asked in puzzlement. " 'Cause if you do, I can get you one from the store."

Since Hanabi had been spending six thousand dollars a month on office supplies, Sasuke had had to cut off her charge accounts, and he did not want to reopen them. "No, I can read one of the ten calendars that are on my desk. Hanabi, why is the Daimyo coming in a mere six weeks when the opening is planned for six months from now? And why does he think the library murals are about the Arabian Nights when the painter has been commissioned to do nursery rhymes?"

"Nursery rhymes?" Hanabi blinked at him.

Sasuke took a deep breath intended to calm himself, but instead thought of ways to murder his brother. Naruto had, once again, conned his "wiser," older brother into something that was driving Sasuke insane. Hanabi was Hinata Hyuga's sister, and Naruto had begged and pleaded for Sasuke to hire her to help him supervise the rebuilding of Konoha. At the time, Sasuke had readily agreed because he missed Hyuga and he'd never found anyone half as efficient as she was.

But Hanabi was as inept at business as Hyuga was adept. Hanabi was as inefficient, as disorganized, and as scatterbrained as Hyuga was perfect. Within three hours of her employment, Sasuke had wanted to fire her, but Hyuga was pregnant and she'd started crying, something that had completely disconcerted Sasuke, since he'd had no idea that Hyuga could cry.

"Can't you just keep her for a few days?" Naruto had pleaded. "This pregnancy isn't easy for Hinata, and Hanabi is her only sibling, and it would mean so much to both of us. After all, you're so good at this that you could do it without a secretary."

Sasuke had been flattered and, ultimately, persuaded.

That was eight months ago. Hyuga was still pregnant, still crying at the least thing, and Sasuke was still trying to work with Hanabi as his secretary. If she wasn't misunderstanding everything he said, she was buying things, such as six cases of red paper clips and twelve dozen Rolodexes. "In case we run out," she'd given as an explanation. To make matters worse, she'd also made it a personal mission to help him get over Sakura.

"Nursery rhymes," Sasuke said tiredly. "You know, 'Humpty-Dumpty,' 'Little Miss Muffet,' that sort of thing. We hired a man to paint them, and he's to start on Monday. It's going to take him three months to paint the whole library, but the Daimyo is coming in six weeks to see them. Except that the Daimyo expects to see Arabian Nights, not nursery rhymes."

Hanabi stared blankly at him. Maybe he should call Naruto again and see if his wife had given birth yet, for the minute Hyuga delivered, Hanabi was out of here.

"What about the knights?" she asked at last.

"Nights? As in Arabian Nights? Or are you asking whether the painter will work nights?" With Hanabi, one never knew.

"No, silly, knights, like in Robin Hood."

Sasuke wanted to scream. "There are no knights in Robin Hood." Heaven help him, but he was beginning to understand her!

"Oh," Hanabi said, blinking. She was beautiful in a blank sort of way, with enormous milky eyes that she rimmed in black, which made them seem even larger, and she had about fifty pounds of crinkly black hair. The men of Konoha nearly swooned when they saw her.

"Hanabi," Sasuke said, this time with more urgency. "Where did the Daimyo of the Fire Country get the idea that we were doing Arabian Nights murals?"

"From that man who discovered the world and rode with the Robin Hood knights," she said.

Unfortunately for him, Sasuke sometimes almost enjoyed trying to piece together the logic of Hanabi's thinking. Now what she'd said rambled about in his head: man who discovered the world, Robin Hood, and knights. It was the name Columbus that gave him a clue. "The Knights of Columbus," he whispered, and when Hanabi rolled her eyes as though she was frustrated at his slowness, he knew he was right.

The Knights of Columbus were one of the sponsors of the remodeling of the old Konoha Library, and for some reason, Hanabi had chosen them to fixate on. How she got from Knights of Columbus to Arabian Nights intrigued him—as Hanabi's brain often did.

"What made you think the library murals were going to be about the Arabian Nights?" he asked softly.

Hanabi gave a sigh. "Mr. Aburame really likes Princess Caroline, and since she's there, of course that's what she would like."

It took Sasuke a moment to follow her reasoning—if it could be called reasoning. Mr. Aburame owned the local pet store, which was next door to the building where the Knights of Columbus met, and Princess Caroline lived in Monaco, which sounded like Morocco, which is part of the Arab world.

"I see," Sasuke said slowly. "And Mr. Aburame's interest in the princess made you think the library was to be painted with Arabian Nights stories instead of fairy tales."

"They'd look better than Humpty-Dumpty, and, besides, the Daimyo won't come to see Little Bo-peep."

With a glance at the letter, Sasuke had to admit that she had a point in that. "You see, Hanabi," he said patiently, "the problem is that a man is flying in from Suna to paint the murals and he'll be here tomorrow. The man has spent the last year working on the drawings for the murals, and—"

"Oh, is that what you're worried about? I can fix that," she said, then left the room.

"Here," she said when she returned a moment later. "This came two weeks ago."

At first Sasuke wanted to bawl her out for leaving a letter lying around for two weeks before showing it to him, but he decided to save his energy and read the letter. It seemed that the mural painter had broken his right arm and would be out of commission for at least four months.

"You aren't going to yell again, are you?" Hanabi asked. "I mean, it's just a broken arm. He'll get well."

"Hanabi," Sasuke said as he stood, glad that there was a desk between them or he might be tempted to wrap his hands about her neck and squeeze. "In six weeks the Daimyo of the Fire Country is coming here to see a town that is months away from completion, and he wants to see murals in a library that have yet to be painted because I have no painter." At the end, his voice was rising until he was nearly shouting.

"Don't you shout at me," she said calmly. "It's not my job to hire painters." At that she turned and walked out of the room.

Sasuke sat down so hard the chair nearly collapsed. "Why did I give up business?" he muttered, and, once again, when he looked back on his former life, he remembered it as efficient and organized. When he'd moved everything back to Konoha, he'd tried to take his key staff with him, but for the most part they'd laughed at him. His butler had laughed heartily. "Leave Suna for Konoha?" the man had said, highly amused. "No, thank you."

And that had been the attitude of everyone else who'd worked for him. So he'd returned to his hometown virtually alone. Or at least that's how it had felt at the time.

Sasuke looked at the baby pictures of Kenji that covered the upper right-hand side of his desk. Two years, he thought, and he'd not heard a word about either of them. It was as though the earth had opened its jaws and swallowed them whole. All he had were these photos that he'd begged from Tsunade, Sakura's mother-in-law, and had framed in sterling silver. Nothing but the best for his Kenji.

At least he still thought of the child as his. And again in this he was alone, for no one had any sympathy for him when it came to his pining away for Sakura and a baby he'd known for only a few days.

"Get over it!" his father had said. "My wife died. She had no choice in leaving me, but that girl you wanted left you and she hasn't called since. You should take a hint and get it through your thick skull that she didn't want you and your money, so she hightailed it out of here."

"My money has nothing to do with this," Sasuke had said quietly.

"Yeah? Then why are you spending a fortune paying a bunch of snoops to try and find her? If she wasn't for sale when she was here, what makes you think you can buy her when she's not?"

Sasuke had no reply to his father's words, but then his father was the only person on earth who could reduce Sasuke to a naughty nine-year-old boy.

Naruto was even less sympathetic than their father and his cure for his big brother had been to introduce him to other women. "Konoha courtship" is what Naruto called it, and Sasuke had no idea what his brother meant until the food started arriving. Single women, divorced women, women contemplating a divorce, showed up on Sasuke's doorstep with jars and dishes of food.

"Just thought you might like to taste my bread-and-butter pickles," they'd purr. "I won a blue ribbon at the fair last year."

Within three weeks of his arrival, Sasuke had a kitchen full of every kind of pickle, jam, and chutney known to mankind. His refrigerator was always full of cakes and coleslaw.

"Do they think I'm a man or a hog to be fattened for the kill?" Sasuke asked one night in a bar as he looked at his brother over a glass of beer.

"A little of both. It is Konoha, you know. Look, big brother, you ought to take one of them out. You ought to get back into life and stop mooning over what you can't have."

"Yeah, I guess so, but . . . You don't think they'll try to pickle me and enter me in the fair, do you?"

Naruto laughed. "Maybe. Just in case, you should try Shiya Akimichi first. Her specialty is mulberry gin."

Sasuke gave a bit of a smile. "Okay. I'll try. But . . ."

"I know," Naruto said softly. "You miss Sakura and Kenji. But you need to get on with living. There are lots of women out there. Look at me. I was mad about Sakura, but then I met Hinata, and—" He broke off because it was still a sore spot with Sasuke that he'd lost his magnificent secretary and was now stuck with Hanabi.

So Sasuke had dated one female after another, and without exception, they all fell in love with his money.

"What do you expect?" his sister-in-law had snapped. "You're rich, handsome, heterosexual, and eligible. Of course they want to marry you."

Sasuke liked Hinata much better as a secretary than he did as a pregnant relative. He didn't need to be reminded that his greatest asset was his bank account.

"What you've done is sanctify her," Hinata said in what had become her usual tone of exasperation. She wasn't handling pregnancy well, as her body was so swollen even her nose was fat. And the doctor had put her on bed rest. "Sakura Senju is a very nice person but not out of the ordinary. There are lots of Sakuras out there; you just have to find them."

"But she didn't want to marry me," Sasuke said with a sigh.

Hinata threw up her hands in exasperation. "Are you only interested in women who don't want to marry you? If that's your logic, then you should be madly in love with me."

"Ah," Sasuke said with a smile. "I can guarantee you that that's not the case."

Hinata threw a pillow at him. "Go get me something to drink. And put some ice in it. Lots of ice; then come back here and find the remote control. Oh, Lord, is this child never going to be born?"

Sasuke practically ran out of the room to obey her.

So now he'd been back in Konoha for nearly a year, and it seemed to him that he'd been out to dinner with every female in the state of Konoha, several from Iwa, and a couple from Taki. But none of them interested him. He still thought of Sakura, still thought of Kenji, at least twice an hour. Where were they? What did Kenji look like now?

"Sakura probably has six men fighting over her," Tsunade Senju had said just last month. "She has that endearing quality that makes men want to do things for her. I mean, look at you. You gave up everything to help her."

"I didn't give up anything, I . . ." In the eyes of a great many people his efforts to save his hometown were great and noble, but to his relatives and almost-relatives in Konohagakure, he was simply "moonin' over a girl."

Whatever the truth was, it wasn't an attractive picture, and many times he'd vowed to remove Kenji's photos from his desk and do his best to get serious about one of the many females he'd dated. As his brother had pointed out, he wasn't getting any younger and if he did want a family, he should get busy with it.

But now he had other problems. In a very short time, the Daimyo of the Fire Country was coming to Konoha to see some Arabian Nights murals, and Sasuke didn't so much as have a painter. Out of habit, he picked up the phone and started to tell Hanabi to get Tsunade on the line, but he knew where that would lead. Hanabi would want to know which Tsunade he wanted, as though he didn't call Kenji's grandmother three times a week.

Sasuke dialed the number that he knew by heart, and when she answered, he didn't bother identifying himself. "You know some local who can paint Arabian Nights murals in the library and do it real fast?"

"Oh? You're asking me? You're asking someone from little old Konoha? What happened to your fancy big city painter?"

Sasuke gave a sigh. The rest of the world acted like he was a saint, but the people of his hometown thought that he was doing what he should have done a long time ago, and they thought he should be doing more of it. "You know that the man was considered the best in this country and one of the top painters in the world. I wanted the best for this town, and—" He paused to calm himself. "Look, I don't need an argument this morning."

"So what's Hanabi done this time?"

"Invited the Daimyo six months early and changed the murals from nursery rhymes to Arabian Nights."

Tsunade gave a whistle. "Is this her best yet?"

"No. She'll never top the one where she had the food delivered on the day after the three hundred guests arrived. Or when she sent the new furniture to Wind Country. Or when she—"

"Hinata deliver yet?"

"No," Sasuke said, his jaw clenched. "The kid is eleven days late now, but Naruto says maybe the dates are wrong, and—"

"What's this about the murals?" she asked, cutting him off.

Quickly, he told her the problem. In the past year in Konoha, Tsunade had been invaluable to him. She knew everyone and everything. No one in the town could so much as bat an eyelash without Tsunade knowing about it. "Don't put those two men on the same committee," she'd say. "Their wives are sleeping together and the men hate each other."

"Their wives . . . ?" Sasuke had said. "In Konoha?"

She just raised her eyebrows. "Don't get uppity with me, city slicker."

"But wives?" Sasuke felt that he was losing his innocence.

"You think that because we live in a small town that we're some sort of living in the middle ages?"

So now when Sasuke had a problem, he knew to call Tsunade. "Do you know someone or not?"

"Maybe," Tsunade said finally. "Maybe I do, but I don't know if this person will be . . . available."

"I'll pay double," Sasuke said quickly.

"Sasuke, honey, when will you learn that money can't solve every problem in the world?"

"Then what does he want? Prestige? The Daimyo will view his work. And considering how often Konoha changes things, two hundred years from now, the murals will still be there. Whatever he wants, I'll pay it."

"I'll try," Tsunade said softly. "I'll give it my best shot and let you know as soon as I know."

After Tsunade hung up the phone, she stood still for several minutes, thinking. Despite her retort about money, she knew in her heart that the Sasuke who had come home to Konoha a year ago was not the same man he was today. He had returned to his hometown with the thought that he was going to play Santa Claus and everyone in town was going to fall down and kiss his feet in gratitude. But instead he had encountered one problem after another, and as a result, he had become involved. He'd started out wanting to remain aloof, distant, apart from the townspeople, but he hadn't been allowed to, and she believed if the truth were told that now he wouldn't have it any other way.

Now, still staring at the phone, she smiled in memory of all the women in Konoha who had done their best to win his hand in marriage. Or just plain, old-fashioned, win him in bed. But as far as Tsunade knew Sasuke hadn't touched a hometown girl. What he did on his frequent trips back to Suna, she had no idea, but he had been nothing but a gentleman to the women of Konoha.

Much to their fury, Tsunade thought with amusement. There wasn't a sewing circle, book club, or church meeting that didn't discuss what was going to be the outcome of Mr. Sasuke Uchiha's moving back to Konohagakure.

But, Tsunade thought, with a smile that was growing bigger by the minute, Sasuke still had the photos of Kenji on his desk and he still talked about Sakura as though he'd seen her just last week.

Tsunade put her hand on the phone. Wasn't it a coincidence that Sasuke desperately needed a mural painter and she just happened to know someone who could paint murals?

"Humph!" she said, picking up the phone. About as much a coincidence as it was that she'd easily conned Hanabi into giving her the mural painter's address in Suna; then Tsunade had written him a note saying he was no longer needed. Then Tsunade had sent a letter to Sasuke saying the painter had broken his arm. That Hanabi had taken weeks to give the letter to Sasuke just added to Tsunade's beautifully planned scheme.

She dialed a number that was burned into her memory, then held her breath before the phone was answered, her mind full of doubt. What if she didn't need a job right now? What if she refused? What if she was still angry at Sasuke and Naruto and everyone else in Konoha for playing a trick on her? What if she had a boyfriend?

When the phone was answered, Tsunade took a deep breath, then said, "Sakura?"