Page 13 of A Diamond for My Forbidden Bride

Damn Valentin. Damn him to hell.

I had to get back. Ihadto. I’d worked too hard to get where I was, to prove I could manage the family company better than any son, and I couldn’t let that slip through my fingers just because of some idiot man.

I strode back along the deck, the wood smooth and warm beneath my bare feet, the sheet still wrapped around me fluttering in the warm breeze.

Valentin had come out to stand on the deck outside the bedroom.

Mercifully he’d pulled on some clothes—a simple white T-shirt and worn jeans—and now he stood there, impossibly tall, impossibly gorgeous, his hands in his pockets, watching me.

His posture was casual, but the smile on his face was the fierce, predator’s smile he’d been wearing when he’d appeared at the wake.

A panther who’d captured his prey and was now contemplating exactly the best way to eat it.

Except I wasn’t prey.

‘There, you see?’ he said as I strode back to him. ‘You can go wherever you want.’

But I didn’t stop.

It felt as if I’d always had this anger burning inside me, an anger I’d had to swallow for the last fifteen years in order to prove myself worthy enough to manage Wintergreen, even though I’d had the misfortune of being born female.

‘They’ll never respect you if come over too emotional,’ Dad had used to tell me about the board when he’d finally had to accept that, if he wanted the family company to remain in family hands, he was going to have to leave it to me. ‘If you want them on your side, you have to be confident. You have to be cold.

‘Be a diamond,’ he’d gone on. ‘Diamonds are beautiful, but they’re also hard and sharp. They’re created under pressure, so they’re strong. And that’s how you will be too.’

And so that was how I was.

But it turned out that, right now, I was not a diamond.

Instead of being hard and sharp and cold, I was seething with frustrated fury. At Valentin for upending my carefully ordered life and putting my company at risk. Not to mention tumbling me back into all the emotional chaos I thought I’d put behind me.

I raised my hand and slapped him hard across the face.

CHAPTER FOUR

Valentin

SHEWASMAGNIFICENTstriding towards me, her hair tossed by the breeze and trailing out behind her like a veil, the sheet moulding to her curves and outlining perfect round breasts, the swell of her hips and slender thighs...

She was perfection, a vengeful goddess with her silver eyes flashing and her cheeks glowing pink.

There was no sign of her hard veneer, not now. No, there was nothing but the white-hot passion that had always lived inside her, that used to make her burn like a star.

And she was burning now.

Desire gripped me, intense and hungry. I’d always used to wonder what she’d be like as a woman, and I’d thought I’d get to see her become that woman too, if it hadn’t been for Constantine. Now here she was in all her glory...

I wanted her. And, since I denied myself nothing, I would have her.

However, since she was clearly going to slap me, perhaps I’d wait to broach the topic.

Sure enough, her hand came up and for a split second I debated grabbing her wrist before she could land a blow. But, if slapping me helped her feel better about the situation, then I’d let her.

Violence was certainly a choice but there were other, far more pleasant ways to get rid of excess emotion. Perhaps I could show her that once she realised hitting me wouldn’t change anything.

So I didn’t move and I didn’t flinch as her blow landed. I’d had worse, much,muchworse, though she wasn’t to know that.

The crack of her palm against my cheekbone resounded in the humid air and it stung—she was surprisingly strong. I smiled. Pain could make pleasure that much more acute and I wasn’t averse to it.

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