“It’s already done.”
Helplessness plunged through her. “In nine months I’m having this baby, and once that happens I won’t be able to do anything for years. This is my time, Coburn.” She punctuated the words with the slap of her palm to his chest. “I won’t let you take it away from me.”
He looked down at her palm pushing ineffectually against his chest. As if she was a juvenile in need of restraint. “Pull yourself together,” he advised coldly, lifting his gaze to her face. “You have your entire life to do this. Just not now.”
She gritted her teeth. She wanted to tell him his outrageous arrogance wasn’t winning this time. That he couldn’t tell her what to do, not any longer. But a tiny part of her, a part she’d been ignoring ever since she’d arrived here and seen the physical challenges she’d face if this nausea went on, which it might for another few weeks, had already been questioning the wisdom of her decision. Was scared.
Did she need to accept that Coburn was right? That the timing was the timing and she was powerless to fight it except with the knowledge that she would come back. She would do this.
A tear slid down her face. Then another. She lifted her fingers to brush them away, but the hot drops of desperation kept rolling like runaway bandits down her cheeks. Once, just once, she’d wanted to do something for herself. Something to bring her soul back from the depths it had sunk to.
Coburn reached up and brushed her fingers aside, sweeping the tears away with his thumbs. The hard glint in his eyes softened a fraction. “This is not over,” he said quietly. “It’s just postponed.”
“And what’s been postponed for you?” she asked bitterly. “You are a CEO. You have the ultimate power. You don’t even want a baby. You want to control me. This.”
His mouth tightened. “I never said I didn’t want a baby.”
“Your complete avoidance of the subject said it for you. Every time I tried to talk it through so we were on the same page, you said it was a future conversation.”
“It was a future conversation. The timing wasn’t right for either of us. But regardless of how I feel on the matter, the fact is, we are pregnant. We need to deal with it, and running away and hiding isn’t going to work.”
“I wasn’t running away. This was planned.”
“Before you added our baby’s health to the equation.”
She studied the taut, sharply defined lines of his face. This was a Coburn she didn’t know. The tough, impenetrable iteration of him that had emerged from their bitter split.
A total stranger.
“Show me where your room is,” he ordered. “We have one shot to get out of here tonight, and I’m not missing it.”
Her shoulders slumped, exhaustion taking her in one fell swoop. She didn’t have the energy to lift another finger, let alone go through another day like the one she’d just had.
She lifted her gaze to his. “I will come with you because I agree it’s the right thing to do. But you will not order me around, Coburn. Not anymore.”
His rock-hard expression didn’t change. “Let’s go.”
She led him into the hotel and upstairs to her room. She didn’t have much to pack because she’d brought only the bare essentials. They checked out and traveled to the airport in a dark sedan with blacked-out windows manned by two big burly security types.
With an ease only the Grant family’s connections could produce, they were ushered through a quick separate security check and onto the company jet. Diana buckled into her seat and watched her dream fly out the window as the plane took off, banking over the sprawling capital city and heading west. So angry with Coburn, so angry at everything, she laid her head back against the cushiony seat as soon as they were airborne and closed her eyes.
She fell asleep almost instantly in the seductive coolness of the perfectly climate-controlled jet. She woke halfway through their journey as they refueled in Spain, ate the omelet the flight attendant served once they were airborne and went back to sleep. She must have slept for a long, long time, because when she woke again it was dark and Coburn was nudging her to put her seat belt on for landing.
She rubbed her eyes, drunk on sleep, and slid the belt on. Looking out the window, she searched for the bright lights of New York. It was pitch-black outside. She looked at Coburn, confused. “Didn’t you say we were about to land?”
He looked up from his paperwork. “We are.”
She looked out the window again. It was as if they were in the middle of nowhere. Alarm bells rocketed through her. “Where are we?”
“About twenty miles north of an island in the Caribbean.”
Her vision went red. “You said you were taking me home.”
“Eventually, yes, I will.”
Her fingernails dug into the leather seat rest at the nonchalant expression on his face. “What do you mean, eventually?”
He looked at her then, an expression of deadly intent in his eyes. “I’ve taken a week off work. My friend Arthur Kent has offered us the guest cottage on his private island.”
“Why?” The question was delivered in a tone just short of shrill.
“Because,” he drawled, “you and I are about to put our marriage back together for the sake of this baby, Diana. It’s just you, me, this island and a whole lot of soul-searching to do.”
Her breath jammed in her throat. “You can’t be serious.”
He sat back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve never been so serious about anything in my life.”
That night at his apartment flashed through her head. The extreme destruction they had wreaked together... How it’d felt as if he’d gutted her as a hunter did a prime piece of kill...
She shook her head. “It will never work. Nothing about us works anymore, Coburn.”
An emotion she couldn’t read flickered in his eyes. “I think we proved in creating this disaster that some things still do work.”
Heat stained her cheeks. “Sexual compatibility does not make a relationship.”
“But it is an integral part of it.” He moved his gaze over her face, raked it down over her body in a blatant perusal, then brought it back up again. “If we have to build some kind of a foundation on my ability to make you beg, so be it. We aren’t leaving this island until we learn how to communicate, sweetheart. If getting you off gets me into your head, I won’t hesitate to play that card.”
Her nails dug harder into the leather. She had both hands on her seat belt ready to pounce on him when the attendant came into the cabin to check they were buckled up. She fell back into her seat, temples pounding.
Coburn’s gaze glittered. “Hang on to that emotion a little longer, tiger. We’re alone on the island until Thursday night. Soon you can let it all out.”
As if. She pressed her lips together mutinously. She might be having a baby with him, but she was not spending the week on a deserted island trying to put their marriage back together. Or sleeping with him again. Definitely not that.
The first thing she was going to do when they stepped off the plane and she was alone was call her father and get him to charter a plane to come get her.
Except it was the middle of the night when they touched down on the runway. A waiting car and driver drove them to a dock on the edge of the palm tree-strewn island, and there they transferred to a boat. She took in the inky dark sea that loomed around them as they zoomed across it toward a tiny island ahead that glimmered with a handful of lights.
They were in the middle of nowhere. Literally. Panic settled into her bones, deep and jarring.
When they reached the shore, she stepped out into the steamy night air that carried the scent of a dozen tropical flowers and the salt of the sea. There was only a canopy of palm trees fronting a lush forest. She couldn’t see anything beyond.
Co
burn ushered her into the Jeep SUV waiting for them, then slid in beside her. The road they traveled was a narrow, bumpy passageway. She closed her eyes against the nausea that rose in her throat from too much motion. Too much emotion. Fatigue overtook her again. She fought it, but it’d been as if she’d had a sleeping sickness since she’d gotten pregnant, and she hadn’t slept well in Africa.
“Sleep,” Coburn instructed beside her. “We’ve got a good twenty-minute ride across the island.”
More to avoid him, she rested her head back against the seat and let her eyes close. She would call her father in the morning. Then the cavalry would be on its way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DIANA AWOKE TO brilliant sunshine, a pure, magnetic version of it that reflected off the turquoise sea in a blinding display of light that cast everything in a warm, resonant glow. She would have lain there, reveling in it, had the thought of exactly where she was not flashed through her head at that precise moment. And whom she was with.
A fuzzy memory of Coburn carrying her in from the car, half-asleep, and up to this room followed it. She had woken only long enough to ensure herself he was sleeping somewhere else before she’d buried her face in the lavender-scented sheets and surrendered again to unconsciousness.
She flicked her gaze to the door. She needed to get out of here.
Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she reached for the short robe draped over the back of a chair and pulled it on. With barely a glance at the beautiful nautically themed room with its huge canopied four-poster bed and multiple views across the sparkling sea, she found her purse on a chair near the window and rummaged through it for her phone. Rummaged some more. Frowned. She had definitely put it in there when they’d left Africa. It was the one thing she wouldn’t leave behind.
Coburn. Heat, the combustible kind, spread through her like wildfire. Yanking the door to her room open, she flew down the hallway to the other bedrooms in search of her target. But they were all empty, including the one Coburn had commandeered. Spinning around, she left the room and went down the stairs two by two to the living room. The beautiful airy space that overlooked the sea was empty. So was the magnificent library with its ten-foot-high built-in bookcases and scads of priceless old volumes lining them. She turned on her heel and walked toward the kitchen, the only place she hadn’t checked. It was empty, too. If she knew Coburn, he was out for a ten-mile jog or taming the water with some sort of boat or machine.
Combing the kitchen, she searched for a phone. When she didn’t find one there she went back to the library. It didn’t have one, either. What kind of a house didn’t have phones? Had Coburn gotten rid of them along with her cell phone?
Her heart slammed into her chest. She could not be kidnapped on a private island. She could not. She spied Coburn’s laptop on the desk. Pouncing on it, she tried to log on, but it was password protected. A curse escaped her lips. Really?
She went back to the kitchen, looking for something, anything that would tell her where she was. She was rifling through drawers when Coburn strolled lazily into the kitchen in shorts and a T-shirt soaked with perspiration. She froze, hand in the drawer.
“Looking for something?”
She pulled her hand out of the drawer, closed it and leaned against the counter. “My phone, actually. You wouldn’t happen to know where it is?”
“I took it,” he responded casually. Conversationally. “You can’t have it.”
Her blood boiled in her veins. She pushed away from the counter and crossed the kitchen to stand in front of him, her body vibrating with fury. “Give me my phone.”
“No. We are here to work through our issues, Diana. I’ll not have you calling Daddy so you can orchestrate a rescue.”
“That would be difficult when I don’t know where I am.”
“Double insurance.”
She looked at him in disbelief. “You can’t keep me here like this. Kidnapping is a crime.”
His mouth curved. “You are my wife. That would be kind of hard to prove.” He waved a hand at her as if she was a six-year-old in need of diversion. “Why don’t you go put on a bathing suit and come for a swim? The sea’s like bathwater.”
Her boiling blood heated to a ferocious roll. He was holding her here against her will, had taken her phone and now he wanted her to go swimming with him? Was he insane? She flew at him, her fingernails poised to inflict maximum damage. He caught her easily, his fingers manacling around her forearms. “I take it that’s a no?”
She struggled against his grip. “You can’t do this. Let me call my father right now and I will consider giving you partial custody of this child by not siccing the police on you for kidnapping.”
He tightened his fingers around her wrists, his blue gaze ice-cold as it rested on her face. “You left me no choice, Di. You walked away from me without telling me we were having a baby. If I take you back to New York you will disappear again and I will be talking to you through our lawyers. And since I intend for us to make this marriage work for the sake of our child, that is not happening. We are hashing this out right now, this inability to coexist together.”
“In a week? I understand you are angry. I understand we have things to work out with regards to this baby, but I am not staying married to you, Coburn.”
“Why?” His gaze lashed her face, all belligerent testosterone. “Don’t you think it’s better for our baby to grow up with both parents?”
“If we didn’t hate each other, yes.”
His gaze narrowed. “We have a lot of emotions in the mix right now, but hatred isn’t one of them.”
She wasn’t sure what to call it, but whatever it was, it wasn’t a good basis for a marriage. “We can’t make this work. We’ve proved that.”
“The only thing we’ve proved is what doesn’t work. How good we are at running away from our problems instead of facing them.”
Her eyes widened. “Yes,” he said harshly, “I’m including myself in that. I know I wasn’t perfect, either. We have fundamentally different views on how we want to live our lives, Diana, but somehow we are going to have to reconcile those views for the sake of this baby. To give him or her a chance to grow up with the solid foundation of a cohesive family unit.”
“What if I want to be happy?” she blurted out. “You don’t want to marry anyone else right now, but what if you do someday? What if I want to? Shouldn’t I have that choice?”
His eyes darkened into that midnight shade of blue she knew signaled imminent danger. “You don’t want to marry someone else, Di, because if you did, you would have filed for divorce months ago. You wouldn’t have waited a year to do it, until you were about to step on a plane and fly off to another continent so the coward in you wouldn’t have to face your unresolved feelings for me until the papers were signed and we were beyond the point of no return.”
“I don’t have unresolved feelings for you.”
His mouth twisted in a derisive curl. “That night on my terrace was strictly you getting yourself off, was it? The questions you asked about my other women, the way you tried to take me apart? That was all because you are so over me. I can see it now.”
An all-over body flush suffused her. “That was closure for me, Coburn.”
“Yeah, you looked like you had it when you left.” He studied her with that analytical intensity that seemed to reach right inside her. “There’s this thing that happens when I touch you. A need inside of you to connect that makes you slip out of that shell of yours and try to crawl inside of me. I can feel it when you do it. I felt it that night we were together, Diana. It’s still there.”
The husky play of his words singed her skin. If she’d tried to verbalize how being with Coburn made her feel, she couldn’t have done it better. Except he didn’t want her anymore—he wanted his child.
“I think you flatter y
ourself,” she denied. “Are you sure that isn’t your own emotion talking? Because there was a hell of a lot of anger in you that night, Coburn.”
“There still is.” He surprised her by admitting it. “But we’re talking about you and your refusal to acknowledge your emotions. You ran away because I was forcing you to address a part of yourself that terrifies you. You were afraid I would break down those walls and leave you wide-open for scrutiny.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she scoffed, pulling against his hold. “Let me go.”
“Not until you admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“You still have feelings for me we can build on.”
“I don’t.” She lifted her chin. “But even if I did, why would I tell you, a man who professes to feel nothing for me?”
A guarded expression passed over his face. “I believe if we put the past behind us, we can find something in what we had. Maybe it won’t be love, but it can be enough.”
A sharp pain went through her at his blunt admission. “You honestly think that’s enough to raise a child together?”
“I know it is. It’s more than the political arrangement my parents had. They didn’t even sleep together. There was no affection.”
And there it was, three years into their relationship, finally a clue into what made her husband tick. She yanked on her arms again, still manacled by his hands. “Let me go.”
He let go of one of her arms but only to move his palm to her back, her other wrist still held firmly in his grip. His gaze latched on to hers. “Kiss me right now without emotion, and I will call the pilot to fly us out of here before the day is done.”
She recognized it for the ploy it was. “I’m not playing that game, Coburn.”
“It isn’t a game. If you can prove to me there is no connection left between us to build on, I give you my word we will leave.”
She stared at him. At the matter-of-fact expression on his face. Surely she could do that. Surely after what he’d done to her that night at his apartment, she could kiss him without emotion. All she needed to do was channel the intense hatred she felt for him in that moment and she’d be out of here, free, because she knew if she stayed the consequences would be worse.
Reunited for the Billionaire's Legacy: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella) Page 7