Reunited for the Billionaire's Legacy(12)

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.”

“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.

Coburn 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.