Читать книгу Modern Romance October 2015 Books 5-8 - Дженнифер Хейворд - Страница 18

CHAPTER NINE

“BRING HER AROUND!”

Coburn’s shout was eaten up by the roar of the wind and the water. Diana nodded and eased up on the headsail to turn them toward the cove he was pointing to. The thrill of commanding such a big, beautiful boat washed over her like a shot of adrenaline. She tacked sharply again to bring them all the way around so they were headed directly into the mouth of the bay. Her blood pumped in her veins as they sped over the sea like the smoothest of silk. She’d forgotten how much she loved the spray of the water on her face, the freedom of flying across it and how perfectly she and her husband worked together when it was just them, sweating it out in tandem to master the elements.

Riding a strong gust of wind, the sleek sixty-five footer cruised toward the shore. Coburn eased off on the mainsheet and slowed them into an easy, graceful glide. Expertly, effortlessly he brought them within striking distance of the shore, and they dropped anchor.

She helped him secure the boat, then dropped to the sun-soaked deck, her breath coming in shallow, harsh pulls. Her limbs felt weighted down, heavy. She leaned back on her forearms and took in deep, restorative pulls of air while Coburn went downstairs to get their lunch. This pregnancy was not only making her nauseous, it was zapping her of all of her energy.

It was nearly one o’clock, the sun blazing right above them in a perfect, cloudless blue sky. She drank in the idyllic little cove they were moored in. Surrounded by palm trees and bounded by a stretch of pristine white sand beach, it looked as if it had never seen a human trespasser.

They were in the British Virgin Islands, Coburn had revealed this morning, nestled within a cluster of private islands owned by the world’s richest men. Inaccessible to anyone but those issued an exclusive invitation to explore such nirvana.

She closed her eyes and drank in the heat. Her husband emerged from below deck with a picnic basket and two glasses, a pair of low-slung navy swim trunks and a Yale T-shirt his only adornment. His innate grace, the way the athlete in him used his strong, muscular thighs to steady himself as he moved across the swaying boat, drew her eye. The sun was already picking up his natural tendency toward a swarthy, dark complexion, emphasizing the magnetic blue of his eyes, no less hypnotizing than the vast sea behind him.

He was still the most physically beautiful male she’d ever encountered. Hands down.

“All yours, sweetheart.” He caught her stare, dumping the picnic basket beside her and lowering himself to the deck. “Take what you will.”

She closed her eyes to the magnificence of him. She’d lain awake after he’d left her last night thinking about his offer. Thinking about how she shouldn’t be thinking about it. He was utterly unselfish when it came to pleasing a woman, wickedly sensual in his methods.

“You can’t help it, can you?” She jumped as he purred the words in her ear. “Was my offer last night a little too tempting?”

“Hardly.” She shimmied to the side to put some distance between them. “I meant what I said, Coburn.”

“You forget I know every variation of you. Every expression. That was lust.”

She closed her eyes. “It’s the pregnancy hormones talking.”

The sound of the waves lapping against the boat filled her ears. His soft laughter joined it. “I had no idea pregnancy increased a woman’s sex drive. I would have thought the opposite.”

Her cheeks fired with a warmth that had nothing to do with the sun. This was the last conversation she wanted to be having with him when sex was most certainly off the agenda. When she was still angry at him for assuming she was going to give up her career while he played the golden-hued CEO.

She focused her gaze on him. “I have a question for you.”

“You did your homework. Good girl.”

She rolled her eyes. “I want to know why you agreed to take the CEO job at Grant when you said you never wanted it.”

He cracked open a Perrier bottle and handed it to her. “I decided I wanted it.”

“Why? What changed your mind?”

He shrugged. “It was clear the business community was going to back Harrison’s run for president. The only question was whether he would take it. I needed to be ready with my answer, and I realized that answer was yes, I did want Grant to be mine. It’s in my blood. But I wanted to do it my way, not Harrison’s way, not my father’s way.”

“And now? Do you think it was the right decision?”

He frowned. “I’m only six months in. I am not my brother. There are growing pains... But yes, I think it was the right thing to do. I’m excited about the future.”

She could sense it. There had always been a restlessness about her husband, a low-level frustration with anything that had to do with work, because playing second fiddle to his brother had never been easy for him. The intense, focused man beside her now was a very different creature. She had seen it in him instantly that night at Tony and Annabelle’s—the ruthless edge that made her all jittery inside.

“Harrison is not an easy act to follow.”

He shrugged. “It’s like comparing apples and oranges. Harrison was a known quantity—steady, dependable. He rarely worked outside of the box. With me, the board isn’t sure what they’re getting. I’m doing things differently. I’ve ruffled some feathers. It’s going to take time.”

She studied him then, the tension etched into the grooves at the sides of his mouth. His father, Clifford Grant, had been an icon of American business, a success story that was corporate folklore. Harrison was so widely respected he had been chosen to represent the interests of business in a presidential race. It made the pressure her father had put on her seem like child’s play.

“What was that phone call this morning? You looked stressed.”

He cracked the other bottle of Perrier open and took a long gulp. “Just business.”

She scowled. “Is it just me playing this game or have you checked in, too?”

He swiped the back of his hand over his mouth. “This is about me and you figuring this out, Di, not business. I’m not interested in sidetracking the discussion.”

She thought him sharing why he had been distracted all morning was them understanding each other, but she left it for the moment. “Fine. I would like to understand you and Harrison. You would never explain what happened between you two.”

Dark lashes swept down over his brilliant eyes. “We’ve had some major philosophical differences over the years. Although, like I said last night, we’ve worked a lot of it out.”

“Philosophical differences over what?”

“Does it matter?”

She gave him a pointed look. “You don’t get to veto every topic I throw out there.”

He set the bottle down and crossed one of his long legs over the other. “My father’s illness put a strain on all of us for many years. Harrison and I were focused on keeping things running when my father was in a depressive state and out of the picture and attempting to keep the ship upright when his brilliance was running amok. We were a good team. But after my father shot himself, everything changed between Harrison and me.”

The fact that Coburn’s father had been a severe manic-depressive for many years before he had committed suicide was something she’d known. But she’d thought the rift between him and Harrison had preceded that, had been because his father and Harrison had such similar personalities and, according to his mother, had been closer than he and Coburn.

Her husband sat back on his forearms and looked out at the sea. “Harrison pretty much lost his mind. There were...extenuating circumstances around my father’s death. It was a period during which he was hell-bent on expansion, intent on stealing market share from competitors. He made a deal to buy a company from a Russian named Anton Markovic. Outwardly, it was an excellent deal. What my father didn’t know was that Markovic had sold him a false-bottomed company. It wasn’t until after the deal had closed that it became clear the company was pretty much worth nothing.

“It wouldn’t have been a big deal,” he continued, “if Grant hadn’t been so highly leveraged. It nearly bankrupted us.”

“Couldn’t you have gone after Markovic?”

“We tried. He declared bankruptcy shortly thereafter.”

She sunk her teeth into her bottom lip. “Your father blamed himself.”

He pulled his gaze from the water and brought it to rest on her face. “It was a perfect storm. He lapsed into depression, the stress of the run for governor hit him and he took his life.”

A lump formed in her throat. “Oh, Coburn. I’m so sorry.”

“Harrison was the one who found him, sprawled over his desk. I’ve never seen a rage even come close to him that night. He tore my father’s study apart. He went for the gun in the safe. An eye for an eye, he said.”

Her breath caught in her throat. “He was going to kill Markovic.”

“I managed to talk sense into him. But Harrison vowed he would destroy Markovic the same way he had destroyed our father. I told him to let it go, that he would destroy himself in the process. That nothing would ever bring our father back, but it was this holy grail for him, the only thing he ever wanted. It blinded him to anything else.”

“He spent seven years laying the groundwork, until we had rebuilt Grant and Markovic had risen from the ashes. Then he quietly bought up every global supplier Markovic had to cripple him, to destroy him. He arranged a meeting with Markovic in Washington last year, intent on bringing him to his knees face-to-face. But he didn’t do it.”

“Why?”

A wry smile curved his lips. “I’d like to say he finally listened to me, but I think it was Frankie. He said she was his conscience.”

She absorbed the horrific, tragic tale and what it must have been like for Clifford Grant’s two boys to go through it. To watch their father shattered like that and the shame they must have felt along with their grief. She had always known her husband was a product of his heartbreaking past, that his need to be in constant motion was motivated by a consuming desire to forget. But only now did she understand how much that night must have colored his life. Shattered him.

“And what of you, Coburn?” She pinned her gaze on his face. “If you didn’t have vengeance to fuel you, how did you cope?”

He shrugged. “I moved on. Righting a wrong with another wrong is never a solution. Harrison hated that I felt that way, hated that I wouldn’t back him in his plan. He thought it showed a lack of loyalty. But selling my soul to the devil was something I wouldn’t do.”

He had run instead. Her heart broke a little bit more for him.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me this?” she asked quietly.

His gaze skipped away from hers. “You don’t need to know our dirty family secrets.”

Something throbbed inside her at that. “I’m not an expert at this, obviously, but isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Confide our deepest, darkest secrets with each other so we can deal with them together?”

“Like you do?” he shot back. “You apparently spent our entire marriage thinking I was going to walk out the minute things got hard and yet you never thought to inform me of how you were feeling.”

“I have now,” she returned evenly. “It’s clear how little we actually communicated about what really mattered. We were too busy fighting about everything else.”

He was quiet, his gaze raking over her face in an intense, indigo-blue perusal. “Why hasn’t your mother left Wilbur? Why does she let him humiliate her like that?”

She blinked at the sudden turn in conversation. It was an answer she had to think about. “She said she loved him,” she finally responded. “That her marriage hadn’t turned out the way she’d expected it to, but that was life.”

“That was life?” An incredulous look spread across his face. “Your mother is a beautiful, charismatic woman. She could find someone else in a heartbeat.”

Her mouth flattened into a grim line. “My father kept telling her it was the last time and she kept believing him. When I called her on it, when I was old enough to understand just how twisted it all was, she asked me what she was supposed to do. She gave up her career for him. She gave up everything for him because his life was so demanding, because she had me to take care of. And then you’re fifty and it doesn’t seem so likely you’re going to walk out and find someone else.”

He shook his head. “It still doesn’t make sense to me. Where was her pride?”

“In appearances. My mother idolizes my father. She belongs to the cult of Wilbur Taylor. She thinks he’s just being a man. That every marriage has its issues.”

“And you think I’m just like him.” He raised himself up on one elbow and scored her with his gaze. “You asked me that night on the terrace if those women were a salve for my embittered soul. You want the truth, Diana? The real truth? Yes. Yes they were. I used those women to try to forget you...to get over you. They were your collateral damage. Because I was hurting. My wife had walked out on me. My marriage was over.”

She stared at him, her head spinning at the unexpected admission. She had always suspected the woman had been just that for him, but marking them her collateral damage?

“Do not use me as an excuse for your behavior,” she said sharply. “You are fully responsible for that.”

“You’re right,” he agreed. “I did it all on my own. I have to take responsibility for it. But you don’t get to act hurt and self-righteous about it, not when you relinquished your claim on me in such an abrupt and decisive fashion. The blame goes both ways, sweetheart.”

She clamped her mouth shut. She had no idea she’d hurt him so badly. She’d thought he was looking for an excuse to get out of their dysfunctional marriage with that argument they’d had. But his raw emotion now came from the very heart of him—emotion she’d never seen him exhibit. And for the first time since she’d walked out on him, she allowed herself to consider the fact that she had been very wrong in leaving him. That he was as good at hiding his emotions as she was.

He pushed himself upright, his hand reaching for hers to tug her to him. Her chest collided with the heat of him, her fingers coming up to grasp his biceps. His gaze when it latched on to hers ran roughshod through every defense she had. “You have to get over it,” he said roughly. “Those women meant nothing to me. I apologize, Diana. I apologize for unwittingly digging up your past and hurting you. I apologize for my behavior the night we conceived our baby. But now is the time to wipe the slate clean. Now is the time to build on what we do have to make this work for the sake of our baby. But you have to let me in.”

Her stomach contracted. She knew he was right. But the thought of him making love to, having sex with those women... She wasn’t sure she could ever get over it.

“I want to hate you for it...those women.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop them. “I see it in my head and I want to be physically ill.”

His face grayed. “Then, we are both grappling with what we think is the unforgivable. For the sake of our child, we need to move past it.”

She swallowed hard. He still had feelings for her, however much he tried to hide them. He was saying everything she’d wanted to hear that night she’d gone to that party before ending their marriage. Except that he still loved her.

He was willing to slug it out together for their baby. To attempt to meet somewhere in the middle of their radically different approaches to life to make this marriage work.

Was it enough?

Would not having all of him ever be enough?

She rolled to her feet. “You promised me time. Give it to me. No more subtle seduction, no more pushing, no more manipulation of everything I say. Just give me the time I need and I promise you I will consider this.”

His eyes darkened. He jerked his head in silent accord. She walked to the edge of the boat, slipped off her shorts and dived into the cool, heavenly turquoise water.

Her head knew what she had to do. Now she just had to get her heart to agree.