Page 18 of The Tycoon's Diamond Demand

The strident beep of his phone pulled him out of his favourite fantasy and Jens killed the reminder for his about-to-start meeting.

Standing up, he reached for his jacket and walked out of his office, briefly stopping at his assistant’s desk. He issued a series of orders to cancel all meetings, hold his calls, order a helicopter to fly him to Bergen. Two hours later he was parking the SUV he left at a local airport in the garage of his mansion in Bergen.

He and Maja needed to have a conversation,immediately.

Jamming his phone into the pocket of his suit trousers, he shrugged out of his jacket and left it on the passenger seat. He didn’t bother going into the house. He had a good idea where Maja was. Tucked away into the bottom corner of the estate, surrounded by tall trees, was an art studio built by Maja’s grandfather for her grandmother. The previous owner had left it as it was, and the last time he’d checked, it had been filled with easels and paints, as if Maja’s grandmother had just walked out, planning to return. Maja, as she’d told him years ago, had spent many hours in the light-filled room, drawing, painting and sculpting. It was where her love of art was born and nurtured.

He’d bet his fortune he’d find her there.

He was right. She sat curled up in the corner of the couch, flicking through one of the many art books lying around. Jens noticed an unfinished canvas on the easel and the smell of turpentine hung in the air. And Maja’s fingers were streaked with paint of the same colours as those on the canvas. So she’d started painting again. Interesting.

She didn’t look surprised to see him and gestured to the canvas. ‘Pretty awful, right?’

He could see that she was out of practice, but she still retained some level of skill. It was far better than he could do, ever. But he wasn’t here to talk about her art.

‘Maybe you should be giving your attention to our wedding, not to your rusty painting skills,’ he coldly suggested.

‘Ah.’ She pursed her lips. ‘I was wondering when Hilda would call you.’

He slid his hands into the pockets of his trousers, wishing she didn’t look so fresh, so effortlessly sexy. This would be so much easier if he weren’t so attracted to her. ‘What’s going on, Maja? Why can’t she get a straight answer from you?’

‘I can’t make up my mind,’ Maja told him, her eyes on the pages of the book resting in her lap. Yes, she looked amazing in her skinny jeans and patterned top, but she’d lost a little weight, and her cheeks looked a little thinner than they were a few weeks back. Her skin was pale, and she’d started biting her lower lip.

She was under mental strain. So, he very reluctantly admitted, was he. This was far more difficult than he’d expected it to be.

Every night he went to bed thinking that, in the morning, he’d be strong enough to let go of the past, to move on and that he’d release her from their engagement—his blackmail attempt—and he’d let her go on her way. But every morning, after spending the night tossing and turning and wishing she were next to him, under him—naked and moaning his name—he woke up and realised that he couldn’t let her, or his need for revenge, go.

He wasn’t ready to move on, not yet. Not until he’d left her at the altar, turned his back on her, and walked away. Not until he got retribution.

He needed towin. But winning was costing them more than he’d bargained for. She was obviously deeply unhappy. Strangely, so was he. He couldn’t work out why. This was what hewanted.

He needed to get out of his head and focus on the problem. ‘I am paying Hilda a king’s ransom to organise a huge, glamorous society wedding at short notice, Maja!’

She sent him an ‘I so don’t care’ look before flipping a page in the book. ‘I know, and, because everything is so expensive, I don’t want to make the wrong choice.’

Jens walked over to her, picked the book up and tossed it onto the cushion next to her. ‘That’s nonsense! You know exactly what you want! You are a creative person, money isn’t an object, so this shouldn’t be a problem for you.’

Maja looked past his shoulder, and he sighed. He didn’t have time for this. ‘I’m going to call Hilda, get her over here and we can thrash this out,’ Jens told her.

‘Have your meeting without me,’ Maja said in a flat voice. ‘You’re the one who wants to get married, you can have what you want.’

‘You’re not making this easy, Maja!’

What a ridiculous statement! He was blackmailing her, why should he make it easy for her? But then why should she want to organise the society wedding he so badly wanted? If the shoe were on the other foot, he wouldn’t help her to tie the noose around his neck either.

He gripped the bridge of his nose and sighed. They had five hundred people saving the date, the pre-wedding invitations had been sent and RSVPs were rolling in, but nowhere to stage the wedding, nothing to feed their guests and no cake to cut.

Not that he was going to be around to see all that. By the time any guests arrived at the wedding reception he would be heading for the South of France. Or the Amalfi coast. Or somewhere...

‘I need you to drop this, Jens.’

That wasn’t going to happen. He wasn’t done with her yet, hadn’t got what he needed from her. This was his one chance to come out on top. To get whathewanted. He’d tried to get Flora to acknowledge him as her son, he’d been at war with Maja’s father for over a decade, Maja had already left him once. This was his chance to triumph over the Hagens. And he would. He would not be the one left to pick up the pieces. Failure was not an option.

‘You’ve taken away my stable, normal life and my career. You’ve upended my life, and I don’t know what the future holds. Have you any idea how that feels?’ she cried. ‘I feel completely disorientated.’

Of course, he knew how she felt, it was exactly how he had when she’d left. Alone, bewildered, slapped by the events, and not knowing where to turn or what to do. But he’d also been heartbroken, and unable to speak to anyone, not his co-workers and friends, because Maja made him promise to keep their affair a secret. They had been friends in public, lovers only when they’d been alone. No one knew that she’d once held his heart in her hands.

He’d been forced to nurse his confusion and pain in silence, just as he had when his mother left and never looked back. With the added frustration of dealing with her father, who’d decided to punish him for the temerity to have an affair with his daughter. He’d lost crew members he’d thought were loyal when Håkon offered to pay them triple and every time he’d tried to employ a new deckhand, the person in question suddenly got a better offer from Hagen International. Suppliers stopped ordering from him, his fishing quotas had been revoked, reinstated, rinse and repeat.

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