Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2015 Books 5-8 - Дженнифер Хейворд - Страница 17
ОглавлениеAS THE SUN dipped into the sea in a spectacular orange and crimson ending to a brutally hot day and the scents of the island descended over the cottage in a dozen different perfumes that stroked the senses, Coburn was just about to tell the cook his wife was feeling unwell and ask if she would take a tray up to her room when Diana appeared on the deck overlooking the water.
She had changed into one of the filmy, understated dresses Arthur Kent’s PA had left in her room for her, the fuchsia silk dress embroidered with tiny white flowers making her look delicate and untouchable. His eyes narrowed on her ultraslim figure. The dress was too big for her even though it was her usual size. She had lost weight. She had not been well, and that needed to stop for the sake of their baby. She would listen to reason.
He watched as she walked to the railing that overlooked the rolling waves and rested her elbows on the edge. Her back was ramrod straight, the haughty tilt of her head at a fighting angle. Was it that much of a bitter pill to come back to him for the sake of this baby? Was being with him that distasteful?
His lips compressed into a tight line as he clenched his hands by his sides. Until she’d left him in a move he could never have anticipated, he had always thought his rocky road with Diana would level out. That these were the hard years with them where they were finding their way and they would learn to compromise. He had been in a state of shock when she’d left, if the truth were to be known. He had expected her to come back to him as she always did when they fought, when she gave in to the inevitability that was them. But days had grown into weeks, and when he had finally called to end the standoff, she’d refused to speak to him.
His mouth curled in a grimace. His naïveté was staggering. The belief that if you loved someone enough you could overcome the differences that had ultimately pushed you oceans apart.
Something low and heavy stirred in his gut. He had tried so hard to put this woman out of his head. And still she tied him in knots.
“Give us fifteen minutes,” he murmured to Lucie, the cook.
Snaring the bottle of nonalcoholic champagne he’d chilled from the refrigerator, he took two glasses from the cupboard and joined Diana on the deck.
The fading light cast his wife in a golden glow as he came to stand beside her at the railing. “Is your nausea anything to worry about?”
She turned to face him, her dark lashes fanning down over her cheeks in a wary look that said the fight was not over. “It should settle down in a few weeks.”
“You’ve lost weight. Isn’t that hard on the baby?”
She shook her head. “Lots of women lose weight in the first trimester. I’ll gain it back quickly when the pregnancy accelerates.”
He caught the agitated gleam that flared in her eyes. “You’re nervous.”
“Of course I’m nervous. In nine months, maybe less, I’m going to be bringing a new life into the world. A child that is totally dependent on me for everything, every minute, every hour of the day.”
“Us,” he corrected, setting the bottle and glasses on the table beside him. “We are having this child. You aren’t alone in this, Diana.”
“I love how men say that,” she mocked. “You aren’t the ones carrying the baby. You aren’t the ones suffering the debilitating nausea and you aren’t the ones sleep deprived from getting up in the night.”
“Because we can’t,” he pointed out. “But there is such a thing as a bottle and we can take turns.”
Her gaze skimmed over his perfectly pressed shirt. “I can just see it now. You walking the living room floor at two in the morning with the baby draped over your shoulder as you rehearse your presentation for the next day.”
He lifted a shoulder. “I will.”
“Right. And when you start leaving zeros out of numbers and cost the company millions it’ll still be all good.”
He scowled. “Now you’re being ridiculous. This goes to the issue of control and you hating the fact that you’re losing it.”
She waved her arms around them. “And what is this? What would your slick tongue call this? Persuasion?”
“Reason,” he returned with a sigh. “I thought the afternoon might have put you in a better mood.”
“What? Lounging in the sea and sun is supposed to make me forget you’ve kidnapped me to make me see your way?”
He elected not to answer that, instead picking up the champagne and uncorking it. She flicked a glance at the bottle. “I can’t have any of that. Another joy of being the one carrying this baby. At least if I could drink, I could tolerate you.”
“This is nonalcoholic.”
“What are we celebrating? You forcing me into captivity?”
He lifted his gaze to hers. “We created a baby together that night at my apartment. I thought it was time we acknowledged the fact.”
The husky edge to his voice caught him off guard. He kept his eyes on hers, his words hanging on the air between them like a challenge—a statement he dared her to refute. She stared at him for a long moment as if deciding which way to go. Finally, she inclined her head. “It is...something to celebrate.”
He handed her a glass of the bubbly. “I’m glad we agree on that.”
She touched her glass to his and took a sip. He took a mouthful of his own and pointed his glass at her. “Have you come to a decision?”
“Yes.” A closed, impenetrable expression passed across her face. “I agree it would be better for us to bring this child up together. If we can remain civil with each other. I agree we need to learn to understand each other better in order to do that. But I have ground rules.”
His gaze narrowed. “What kind of ground rules?”
“The only way I will agree to do this is if we do it on a strictly contractual basis. We will be together for the sole reason of raising this child. We will behave amicably toward each other, but there will be no sex.”
A wave of incredulity swept through him. “You expect us to remain married but not have sex?”
“Exactly like that.” Her mouth curved as she echoed his favorite expression.
It took him a moment to find a response to that, it was so...ludicrous. “I think,” he replied slowly, “that you are forgetting it was you as much as me initiating our sexual encounters.”
“Not anymore.” She lifted her delicate, stubborn chin. “I refuse to engage in emotional warfare with you, Coburn. I’ve had a lifetime of it already. If we’re going to raise this child together without creating a war zone, we need neutral ground.”
“So in other words you’re being a coward.”
“No, I’m being smart. A self-preservationist. We both know how you can rip me apart with the easiest of efforts. You did it that night at your apartment. That’s what started all this. So now we take it out of the equation.”
“Let’s just be clear here,” he countered, his tone edged with a warning note. “You started it that night. Not me.”
“Funny how you learn from your mistakes.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back against the railing. “So I’m supposed to be in a marriage with no physical gratification. How do you think that’s going to work?”
“You were the one giving the lectures on self-sacrifice. Or was that just you talking and me listening?”
He thought about how she had taken him apart inside earlier with that kiss he hadn’t allowed himself the night their baby was conceived. How, in using that as a weapon against her, he had allowed her to penetrate his defenses. He may be as on board as her about avoiding emotional entanglement, but sex wasn’t something he could do without.
“All right,” he said quietly, holding her defiant gaze. “We play it your way until you decide you want to change the rules. And when that happens, I will be acquiescent in your hands, sweetheart, because I will be way overdue.”
Antagonism flecked her smoky gaze. “I will not change the rules, Coburn. I’m the one who stayed away for a year. I’m the one who filed the divorce papers, remember? I have willpower.”
“Do you?” He closed the distance between them until they were mere centimeters apart. Her breath fanned across his cheek, quickened when he dragged his thumb over the pulse point at the base of her throat. “I don’t see the point in denying ourselves the very potent physical connection we share.”
“I do,” she said grimly, holding herself perfectly still under his touch. “I’ve told you my conditions.”
He brought his mouth to the shell of her ear. Felt the tremor that went through her. “Why? What is it you need to hide so badly from me? What hurt is buried so deep inside of you, you can’t let me near it?”
She pressed a hand to his chest and stepped back, a glitter in her eyes that said he’d struck a nerve. “How about we reverse that? How about we go upstairs right now, strip down and while we do it, you tell me why you run from everything? Why you hate family get-togethers with your mother so much? Why you and Harrison are always at each other’s throats? Why bicycling in the Alps is preferable to getting to know my family so you might not hate each other?”
His mouth curled. “You read too much into things, Diana. My mother is a cold fish of the highest order. Your parents hated me from the start, so why should I bother? And my brother and I are close again, thank you for asking.” He lifted a brow. “Does that cover it all?”
“Not even close,” she breathed. “So hating my parents means you won’t be there to support me?”
“Did you support me? About half of the gossip columns in New York predicted the demise of our marriage before it happened because you were never by my side. I had a wife who was a mirage.”
“You had a wife who was a resident. A resident, Coburn. The doctor who does everything and more because we aren’t senior enough to do anything but take it.” Her eyes glittered like black diamonds. “I was exhausted, I could hardly put a foot in front of one another, and you kept pushing, pushing me until I cracked. All you had to do was wait five years, five years, and things would have leveled out. But your ego, your desire for attention, couldn’t do it.”
He clenched his hand tight around his glass. “If you mean my ego couldn’t handle being put second to your job every single time, then yes, that’s true. You shut down when you work, Diana. You put every single bit of emotional energy you have into your patients, and when you get home, there’s nothing left for me.” He waved a hand at her. “Men are simple creatures. Throw us a bone every once in a while and we’re good. But you didn’t even have that for me.”
The color drained from her face. She looked pale, so very pale standing there in front of him. It made his guts twist. But this was a necessary conversation, long, long overdue.
“You’re right,” she said finally, “I didn’t. I expected you to understand the demands of my career. To let me put my future, our future, first until that tough period was over.”
“While I spent five years in a relationship with myself?” He shook his head. “Life is too short for me to sit by while you learn the meaning of balance, Diana. Begging for affection is not my style.”
“While I was begging for support. Begging for help getting through the five toughest years of my life.”
“And then what? You would have convinced Frank Moritz to give you that fellowship and it would have been another two years of hell while you obsessed about being perfect for him. When was it all going to end? You have this need to prove yourself I don’t understand.”
“Because you run away from your need to do the same.” She threw the words at him, bitter honesty ruling her now. “You hated that your father gave Grant Industries to Harrison to run. Instead of fighting for it, instead of proving to Harrison you should have equal footing, you pretended you didn’t care. Well, I care. I will not apologize for caring. I will not apologize for wanting some security in my life so when you decide you don’t want me anymore, I have something to fall back on.”
His mouth dropped open. “What the hell are you talking about?” She slammed her mouth shut. He closed the distance between them, capturing her jaw in his fingers. “Why would you say that? Give me one reason that would have ever led you to think I would have left you. One.”
Her gaze dropped from his. “It would have happened eventually. You were constantly disappointed in me. I could never give you what you wanted.”
His fingers tightened around her jaw as rage swelled inside him. “This is not about my disappointment in you. This is about your history with your parents. I worshipped the ground you walked on, Diana. I would have done anything to make our marriage work. But how was I going to do that when you were so busy staking out your territory so you could run the minute things got bad?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“It was absolutely like that.” He let go of her jaw and stepped back before he truly lost it. “What else did I need to do to make you feel secure? What else, because it is beyond me?”
“You could have kept your hands off those women.” She yelled the words at him, the champagne in her glass tipping over the side in her fury. “You could have kept it in your pants long enough to convince me that I meant something to you, Coburn. That I wasn’t replaceable as easily as your next flavor of ice cream.”
His vision clouded over as he clenched his free hand at his side. “You walked out on me, remember? I tried to call you. I tried to make things right and you wouldn’t have me, so do not accuse me of being unfaithful.”
“Weeks later. After you’d already been with those women.”
Fury tunneled through him, flaying every centimeter of his skin. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. Because I can’t help but remember the timing. It was after you threw my attempts to talk in my face for about the fifth time that I got the message and satisfied my needs elsewhere. You made it clear you didn’t want me, so I took what I needed.”
She blinked hard. Stared at him for a long moment before she looked away. “I hope she was good, Coburn. I hope she satisfied your slavish devotion to your needs so you didn’t go without.”
“I would have preferred my marriage was intact, but I didn’t have that choice.”
Color leeched from her cheeks. She turned away from him, rested her forearms on the railing and drew in a deep breath. “Rehashing all of this isn’t going to help us move forward.”
“I beg to differ. I’m finding it highly illuminating. Who knows? If we put all our cards on the table, we might even find some clarity.”
“With a card counter like you?” She kept her gaze on the horizon, where the sun had sunk so low it was about to be swallowed up by the sea. Her skin looked too pale in the dying light, her shoulders set high in a defensive posture, her mouth a brittle line. As if a surge of wind might blow her away.
“We should eat,” he said roughly. “We can continue this conversation over dinner.”
“I’m not very hungry. Maybe I’ll just go straight to bed.”
“You will eat.” His harsh tone brought her head around. “There is no running from things you don’t like this week. We are facing them head-on.”
Something flickered in her eyes, but she didn’t argue. Likely because she knew she had to keep her strength up for the baby rather than any form of obedience. He pulled out a chair for her at the candlelit table Lucie had set on the deck, then settled into the one beside her. Her gaze flicked to the chair opposite her as if she’d rather he sat there, and it made him smile inside. Letting her get comfortable wasn’t part of his plan. Infiltrating her was.
“We need to buy a proper home,” he announced, filling their water glasses.
“I heard a business associate is selling his town house down the street from me. It actually has a yard. Maybe we should take a look at it.”
Her hand paused midway to her water glass. “I’m not living in Chelsea.”
“A fifteen-million-dollar townhome isn’t good enough for you?”
“Not if I’m bumping into your castoffs in the park.”
His mouth quirked. She’d be shocked at how few of those women he’d taken to bed. Everyone would.
“My discards won’t be strolling in the park at midday.”
“I’m not living in Chelsea, Coburn.”
“And I’m not living on the East Side. Maybe we split it down the middle and go somewhere neutral? The Upper West Side perhaps?”
Lucie set their salads down in front of them. The scowl disappeared from Diana’s face long enough for her to give the cook a smile. It disappeared when she left. “I need to think about it. It needs to be somewhere central for me for work.”
“You don’t have a job. And you won’t for a few years to come.”
“You’ve decided that, have you?” She picked up her fork and pointed it at him. “I have a career, Coburn. I’ve spent fourteen years studying to become a surgeon. Maybe you should stay home and I should work.”
“And that would make sense since you just quit your job, you’re the one having the baby who’ll need the recovery time and I just took the job as CEO of a multibillion-dollar company.”
“You’re the one preaching sacrifice.”
“Not on this. Yes you will go back to work, but the early years for a child are crucial. You know that better than anyone. You can go back to work when they’re in grade school.”
“Grade school? That would kill my career. Who’s going to want to hire me after five years away from the knife?”
“What’s the alternative? Do you want our child to be raised by a nanny?”
A flush filled her cheeks. “I don’t know. I need more time to think about it.”
“I do. I was raised by a succession of nannies. My father worked every waking hour of the day and my mother spent all her time laying the charitable groundwork to be a politician’s wife. I will not have our child raised like that. We will be emotionally and physically present for him or her.”
Her hand fisted on the table. “Me working doesn’t preclude that.”
“Yes it does. Your job is all consuming and you know it.”
“I can work part-time.”
“And how does that work out for most of the surgeons you know? Then comes the phone call at two in the morning and you’re out the door. You need to be realistic here.”
“Coburn—”
“It’s not happening. You have to start acknowledging your limits, Diana. Now.”
She blinked hard and stared down at her plate. He watched her in astonishment. Were those tears? Tears of anger or real tears?
She looked up at him. The stormy expression in her ebony eyes gave him his answer. “I found out a week ago that my life as I know it is going to change irrevocably. I gave up my dream in Africa because of it and have agreed to give this marriage a shot for the sake of this baby. But if you continue to push me like this, I will walk the minute we set foot in New York and you will be talking to me through our lawyers.”
He took in the defiant angle of her chin. The fierce glitter in her eyes. She meant it. “All right,” he said, holding up a hand. “I’ll back off, I promise. But we need to make these decisions soon. Finding a house in New York is going to take time.”
“Wrapping my head around all this is going to take time. Give me some space.”
He proved he could by making small talk throughout the rest of the meal and ensuring she put food in her mouth, albeit a small amount. By the time they got to dessert, she looked as if she was going to fall asleep in her seat. When her eyelids closed for the third time in a minute, he pushed back his chair and stood up. “Bedtime.”
Her eyes flew open.
“For you,” he drawled. “Although you know I am available whenever you have the urge.”
She scowled at him and stood. Swayed slightly. He stepped to her side with a lightning-quick reflex and slid an arm around her waist. “What’s wrong?”
She took a deep breath, her eyes fluttering closed in a far-too-pale face. “I just stood up too fast.”
He frowned as she leaned into him. “Does this happen a lot?”
“It’s my cardiovascular system catching up.” She took a few more breaths, then stepped away from him. She didn’t look much steadier on her feet. He cursed and slid an arm under her legs and back to pick her up. Her protests ringing in his ears, he carried her inside and up the stairs past a wide-eyed Lucie, who probably thought they were destined for a night of hot sex. He wished.
“This is unnecessary,” Diana muttered as he shouldered his way into her room and nudged on the light. He set her down on the carpet, keeping his arm around her because she still looked far too pale for his liking. She extracted herself and looked expectantly toward the door. “Thank you.”
He shook his head. “I want you in bed first. Otherwise I’ll have visions of you keeling over in the bathroom.”
“Coburn, I’m fine.”
He sat down on the bed and crossed his arms over his chest. “Go brush your teeth.”
She marched off to the bathroom and shut the door with a loud thump. He turned the bed down and waited. When she came back a few minutes later, her cheeks had recovered a bit of color. “You can go now.”
“Get undressed first and into bed.”
She shook her head. “Out.”
“I don’t take orders from fainting pregnant women.”
“I didn’t faint.”
He set his jaw.
She muttered an expletive under her breath, raised her arms and stripped off her dress. His gaze drifted down over her lacy white bra to her flat stomach. “When will you start to show?”
“Not for a while.”
She reached past him for her nightshirt. He caught her hand with his, bringing it to the curve of her stomach. Her breath hissed from her throat as his fingers flattened across her warm, silky skin. His baby was in there. His baby. A surge of emotion passed through him, almost blinding in its intensity. Up until this point, he had felt only anger and frustration, but this, this was something else entirely. Elemental. Powerful.
He raised his gaze to Diana’s. Something passed between them then—the knowledge that they had created this together. That no matter how mixed up they had been when they had made this life, it was about to transcend them both.
He moved his gaze back up over her breasts, straining against the lace of her bra. They were swollen, larger than the handful he’d always coveted, the tips of each peak stained a darkish red-brown.
“Your body is already changing.”
Her nipples hardened beneath his gaze. Her cheeks were filled with a rosy color when he lifted his eyes to hers. She curled her fingers around his hand on her stomach and pulled it away, confusion darkening her eyes to inky black pools. “Leave, Coburn.”
“Why?” A husky note infiltrated his voice. “You know how much easier this would be if you let me get under your skin.”
“Easier how? So you can have your way?”
He immersed himself in the hazy, conflicted desire shining in her eyes. “Because of all the things we’ve screwed up, this has always been right.”
“No.” Her denial pierced the air between them, an iron edge to her vehement tone. “This is what we do, Coburn. We use sex to cover up all the other things that are wrong with us. If you truly want this to work, it has to be about more than that.”
“See, that’s where you and I see it differently.” He reached up and tucked a wayward chunk of her hair behind her ear. “For me, sex is part of the solution.”
She turned and reached for her nightshirt. Stripping off her bra with maximum efficiency, she pulled on the short, less than feminine cotton shirt he’d always hated, hiding her curves from view. But not before he got a perfect silhouette of her ripe, swollen breasts, which woke his frustration from that afternoon up in a hurry.
“How about,” he offered silkily, dropping his gaze to her bare, delectable thighs, “I just take care of you? The way you like it best? It would put you to sleep...get all that frustration out. We don’t even have to call it sex.”
Her face turned the color of a ripe tomato. “Get out of my room.”
He shrugged and strolled to the door. “Call me if you change your mind. I’m just around the corner.”
The bad word she uttered under her breath made him smile. “Oh, and, Diana...?” He turned around, absorbing her mutinous stance, hands clenched by her sides. “I’m expecting us both to bring things to the table this week. Things that will help us bridge this divide between us. So use the time between now and tomorrow to think of what you want to address. Questions you have for me, things you hate about me... This is your chance. But be ready by nine. I’m taking you for a sail.”
“A sail?”
“Arthur has a beautiful sixty-five footer. Assuming you still remember how to man a boat?”
“I’m rusty, but yes. What does this Arthur do if he owns million-dollar islands and beautiful yachts?”
“Airlines. Railroads. He’s an old friend from my cycling days.”
She eyed him. “So this is what we’re going to do? Address our marriage like a grocery list?”
He lifted a shoulder. “You took sex off the table. I’m just following your lead.”
He left then. She needed rest. And if he wasn’t going to spend his night buried in his wife’s delectable body, he had a handful of pressing emails to address.
He took a glass of brandy into the library, sat down at the desk and flicked on his computer. But he couldn’t seem to focus. His head was too busy processing the raw and unabridged version of his marriage according to his wife. She had chosen to call out “irreconcilable differences” on the divorce papers sitting in his office, which would have made sense to him given their different philosophies on life. But unbeknownst to him, she had also apparently spent their entire marriage waiting for him to call it quits and walk out the door. Just as her father had.
Heat moved through him. He was nothing like Diana’s father. Wilbur Taylor was a megalomaniac with a god complex that came from being a world-renowned surgeon everyone treated like a rock star. He considered everything and anything in this world his domain, including the women in it, his affair with a fellow surgeon simply being the longest standing of his string of indiscretions. Yet Diana’s mother had chosen to stay. Why?
He took a slug of the brandy, twisting the chair to look out at the sea, now shrouded in darkness, its great mass an inky pool you could lose yourself in a million times over. Wilbur Taylor’s infidelities were just one reason he didn’t respect the man. The way he treated his daughter had been inexcusable to him, the tactics and subtle threats he had used to nourish Diana’s need for perfection coming at the cost of her happiness. So that she would follow in his footsteps—so that she wouldn’t let the family name down.
It had always taken him hours to soothe Diana after a visit with her parents. That was why he disliked them so much. That and the fact that Wilbur had never considered him good enough for his daughter...
His mouth curved in a bitter twist. How would Diana’s father react now if his daughter had brought him home with stars in her eyes? Perhaps the newly minted CEO of a Fortune 500 company, instead of the overlooked second-in-command, would meet with his approval? Would have been a suitable alternative to the young surgeons Wilbur had kept shoving down Diana’s throat even after they were married.
He sat back in his chair and took his brandy with him. It would make sense given her family history that his wife might have harbored a fear he might do to her what her father had done to her mother if, at any time, he had given her pause to doubt him. If he had spent his time admiring other women as he’d watched Wilbur Taylor doing. Instead, he had consistently deflected the attention of women who hadn’t cared if he’d worn a ring on his finger or not because he was rich and good-looking and being a wealthy man’s mistress wasn’t the worst gig in town.
He hadn’t needed to stray. He’d loved his wife. He hadn’t given any of those women more than a passing smile when Diana had abandoned him on social nights out for work. And yet here she was doubting him? His supremely confident wife who had never been fazed by the women who had chased him.
What were those women to you? A salve for your embittered soul? A way to prove I meant so little to you?
Her words from the night they’d conceived their baby came back to him. He had taken it as her usual arrogance. Bitterness. What if it had actually been a whole other side of his wife he’d never known existed? A vulnerability at her core she’d never displayed. The fact that she’d left him, shattered him, when he’d taken those women didn’t seem to matter. In her eyes, he had proved her right all along.
A fatalistic feeling enveloped him as he ran his finger along the blunt edge of the tumbler. How would he know? The woman he had married had been a total enigma he’d thought he could one day solve and never had. The woman he’d removed from Africa another Diana again. Who was the real Diana? He’d be damned if he knew.
The ocean stared back at him, dark, silent. I could do an emotional autopsy on you and I’d still never get to the bottom of you. Had Diana been right? Had he been just as guilty of not showing his true self to her? Had he even known who he was? Taking over Grant had changed him. Had illustrated just how lost he’d been since his father’s death. However cutting Diana’s appraisal of him had been, she had been right about him not fighting Harrison for control of Grant. About him running. He hadn’t wanted any part of a power struggle with his brother. Wasn’t sure a legacy that had seen his father blow his brains out was something he wanted.
If there was something he had over his wise older brother, it was the knowledge that life required living. To tie his identity to a role, to a job that was inherently vulnerable to any number of agenda seekers, was not how he wanted to live his life. He wanted that elusive balance no one ever seemed to find.
He finished the brandy on a last smooth, fiery gulp. He knew his future now. He intended on making Grant the most powerful car-parts manufacturer in the world, so indelibly the analysts would stop comparing him with his saintlike brother and recognize his brilliance for what it was.
But that wasn’t what he was here to do. He was here to put his marriage back together, and that involved some truth on his part, as well. He had used those women to get Diana out of his head. To satisfy the numbness he craved. And, admittedly, if he was to be honest, to punish her for leaving him.
He had been addicted to distraction. Addicted to never letting himself care because that had been the example set for him by his own parents.
Had it cost him his marriage?
A chime sounded an incoming email. He pushed his focus back to the screen of his computer. And read the email that changed everything.
