Her shoulders shot to her ears. "I don't know anything of the kind. There is absolutely no reason why I, a perfectly healthy woman in my first trimester, shouldn't be here."
"No reason?" he repeated, the glint in his eyes turning positively flammable. "I stopped at the hospital and met with your supervisor. He had no idea you were pregnant. He said you'd been sick on the job yesterday and he'd been concerned but had put it down to first-day jitters."
Her jaw dropped open. "You talked to my supervisor?"
"Didn't you just hear me, Diana?" His lips curved in a savage twist. "I will do whatever it takes to make you see sense since you obviously can't do it for yourself."
Which meant what? Fury at the boundaries he'd crossed mixed with fear to render her speechless. Her gaze flicked over the clenched muscles of his jaw, the tendons and veins that stood out in stark relief against the strong column of his throat. Anger seemed to vibrate from every pore of him. He was beyond furious with her.
"Congratulations," he rasped, reading her expression. "You have successfully diagnosed my current mood. Now answer the question, Diana. When were you going to tell me? After you had this all figured out in that structured brain of yours? After you'd worked out how we divide our paternal rights? Exactly how you want this to play out... What roles you'd like me to assume in our child's life?" A dangerous glitter stoked his gaze. "Because I can assure you, after this stunt, it has backfired on you."
The breath whooshed from her lungs. "Coburn, I needed time to think, time to process. You can't blame me for that."
"No," he agreed tightly. "I can't. What I can be livid about is you waltzing off to take this assignment when you knew you were carrying our baby. Without telling me." He shook his head, a vicious expression darkening his eyes. "I knew you were selfish, but this, this was unforgivable."
Her heart thudded in her chest. "I was going to tell you this week as soon as I got settled."
"Instead, I found out from a receptionist I was going to be a father. A receptionist. While I was getting into my car on the corner of Fifth and Fourteenth to be precise." He stepped closer, until she could feel the fury emanating from him. "You were afraid I would have made you cancel your trip if you'd told me."
Her jaw dipped. He slid his fingers beneath it and brought her gaze back up to his. "Unbelievable. You are unbelievable."
She pulled out of his grip. "I am exercising my right to be an independent human being. I was planning on consulting you with this pregnancy every step of the way."
His mouth tightened. "Unfortunately for you, the time for consultation and negotiation is over. You gave away that right the moment you elected to leave the country without coming to me."
The ice in his tone spoke a dire warning. She swallowed hard as it slid through her, chilling her despite the sweltering air. "You are upset," she reasoned, laying a hand on his arm in an attempt to redirect the storm. "I agree I shouldn't have left without telling you. Let's sit down and talk about it."
He looked down at her hand on his arm as if it were a pest he wanted to stomp under his feet. "No more talking. We play by my rules now."
Her heart skipped a beat. "What does that mean?"
"It means you have ten minutes to pack your things before we leave. The jet is waiting at the airport."
Her breath snagged in her throat. She shook her head and backed away. "I am not coming with you. I have a contract to fulfill."
"Not anymore, you don't. Your supervisor agrees the best thing to do is to send you home and bring you back another time."
Her dream vaporized before her eyes. She took another step backward, her head moving from side to side. "No, Coburn."
He stalked forward, his hand reaching out to snag her forearm as she wobbled backward, nearly taking a fully clothed dip in the pool. Desperation surged through her as her fingers closed around his waist, her gaze rising to his ice-cold blue one. "Don't do this."
"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."