Page 16 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

Before I gave all my secrets away.

CHAPTER FIVE

Olivia

IMMEDIATELYITRIEDto find a way off the island.

I didn’t bother to dress, striding down the deck to the island itself still wrapped in my sheet.

There were a couple of staff members I tried to talk to, but they either didn’t speak English or didn’t want anything to do with me, because they shook their heads and walked away before I could get a word out.

It was frustrating.

The island itself was small and covered with palms and some kind of dense, scrubby trees that made exploring off the pretty white shell paths that wound along the shore next to impossible. Not that I wanted to go charging around in the undergrowth wrapped only in a sheet and a nightgown anyway.

What was very clear, though, was that there were no handy boat sheds hiding boats I could climb into and use to sail away. In the end I had to accept that I was trapped on the island, with no way off it, and wandering around in a sheet wasn’t going to get me anywhere, nor was being inarticulately furious about it.

Eventually, I went back to the villa in search of clothes. In the bedroom there was a wide built-in wardrobe with sliding mirrored doors, and inside were a lot of built-in drawers and shelves. There were rails too, with the prettiest dresses and skirts and long shirts hanging up, all floaty and light and made for wafting about in.

I preferred sharp business suits and tailoring, armour that helped the board of Wintergreen remember who I was—not a mere woman, but Wintergreen’s CEO, and a better leader than my father ever had been.

Except there were no sharps suits and tailoring in this wardrobe, only pretty, floaty things that reminded me far too much of my mother, who was always pretty and feminine because that was how my father had liked her to be.

She’d done whatever he’d wanted, constantly trying to make up for having had me instead of the son he’d always longed for, and then for not being able to have any more children.

She’d blamed herself for that and had always been apologising to him for it. She’d loved him. That had been the problem. And, because she’d loved him, she’d stayed with him, even though he hadn’t respected her and hadn’t even seemed to like her.

I’ve never been able to understand why she’d stayed.

Love, that was the problem. Love turned you into a door mat and I didn’t want anything to do with it.

I had no choice about the clothes, though. If I didn’t want to trail around wearing a sheet all day, I was going to have to wear something hanging on those rails.

First, though, I had a shower in the huge white-tileden suitebathroom, with a bath standing in the middle of the room directly in front of a huge window that looked out over the pristine lagoon.

There was something about the views of the lagoon and the reef, the clear, brilliant turquoise of the water and whiteness of the sand, that tugged at my soul. It reminded me of places I didn’t want to remember and feelings I thought I’d buried.

It was disturbing, so I ignored them as I showered and then walked back into the bedroom, going over to the wardrobe to choose something to wear. There appeared to be no underwear, which was annoying, since I’d been wearing mine for a while now and I wanted something clean. There were only bikinis, so I put on a pretty lavender one with string ties at the hip. It wasn’t something I’d ever choose to wear myself, but, if I thought about it as a bra and a pair of knickers, then that was okay.

Briefly, I wondered why Valentin had a wardrobe full of women’s clothing then decided it was probably better not to wonder. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to know.

There was a lovely light-blue dress that I grabbed to wear over the top of the bikini with a V-necked empire line and long, floaty silk skirts, and it seemed to fit well. It wasn’t my thing at all, and the feeling of the silk brushing over my bare skin made me uncomfortably aware of my own virtual nakedness beneath it, but there wasn’t anything else to wear. And at least it was cool.

Dressed, I went to explore the villa.

It was large and sprawling, panelled in that honey-gold wood, with simple furniture upholstered in white linen. Folk art sculptures had been placed on low tables and there were simple yet effective abstracts on the walls.

Everything about it was low key, mainly because the view of the lagoon—which could be seen from every room—was so spectacular nothing could compete with it.

The only sound was the ocean lapping against the supports of the villa, the sounds of sea birds and, every so often, the drone of a far-off boat or plane.

It was beautiful. Peaceful. And a part of me wanted to lie down on one of the long, low couches with a book and curl up to read. Or throw off the silky dress and dive into the warm, inviting water.

But I couldn’t. This wasn’t a holiday. I’d been kidnapped and brought here by Valentin and I needed to figure out what was going on back home and how I could possibly fix it.

I couldn’t afford the Wintergreen board to think of me as a damsel in distress, which meant getting in touch with my management team to let them know where I was and try to instigate some kind of damage control.

I also needed to get in touch with Constantine and let him know I was okay.

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