Page 17 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

The Miami-Dade courthouse was surprisingly busy for a Wednesday.

Then again, maybe it wasn’t. Jack glanced at the people crossing the foyer. Maybe he was just feeling claustrophobic because today was the day.

He felt his shoulders stiffen as a door opened and a couple stepped into the hallway, hands entwined, faces lit up with happiness and relief. They might as well have hadNewlywedstamped across their foreheads.

‘Congratulations,’ he murmured as they walked past. But they only had eyes for one another. Because they were in love. They believed in the power of love.

More fool them, he thought, watching them leave. He caught sight of his reflection in the mirrored lift doors. He was not, despite what people assumed, vain about his appearance. Mostly, when he looked at himself he saw the parents who had abandoned him. But it wasn’t every day that a man got married.

Married.

He glanced down at the bouquet of cream roses in his hand, his heartbeat accelerating. Theoretically, he could have asked Carrie. But then it had all blown up that night on the boat and she had said that thing about his mother and after that he couldn’t even look at her.

And this was better. He was calling the shots and that meant it would be easier when he wanted to extricate himself. Which he would do at the earliest possible moment. But he still couldn’t shift the feeling that he was caught in a trap. Was this really his only choice?

He could have begged his grandfather to let him come back to work. Try and prove himself worthy. Only it would be harder to quantify the change because his work ethic wasn’t that far removed from his grandfather’s. And he was just as, maybe more, proud of the family business as John D. Walcott IV. The difference between them was that nobody knew that because he acted as if he didn’t care. It was the same with school and university. With friends and partners.

But he had learned the hard way that there was a downside to caring, and that downside was too high a price to pay.

And that was why this was his only option. Why today, just eight and a half weeks after he’d proposed to her, Ondine was going to become his wife.

Ondine Wilde: he knew her surname now, but what else did he know about her?

Truthfully, not much.

They had hardly seen one another since she had knocked on his door. Partly that was because she worked such long hours. But he also didn’t want to draw attention to their ‘relationship’ and have it filter back to his grandfather before he was ready.

For his plan to work it needed to look as though they had married on impulse after a whirlwind romance but, as with his grandfather, that moment of recklessness would lead to a lifetime of unshakeable love and devotion.

His eyes locked with their mirror counterparts. It was going to be a tricky conversation. His grandfather might be in his ninth decade, but he was not some dithering old man. He had a fierce, enquiring mind and much as he hoped to see Jack settle down, he would want it to be with the right woman.

Jack breathed out silently. And for the kind of wife he needed—temporary, emotionally detached, pragmatic—Ondine was the right fit.

He had a sudden, sharp memory of her frantic fingers, the press of her mouth, her body fusing with his, and his groin tensed painfully. She was the right fit in other ways too. But her mouth, her body were not part of this particular equation. Neither of them had specified that in the paperwork but they hadn’t needed to. Sex meant intimacy and intimacy meant complications, and the point of this ‘marriage’ was to keep things simple.

His hands tightened around the bouquet. What had happened in her bedroom was a one-off. And yes, it had felt right in the moment but—

A pulse of heat ticked across his skin.

Actually, it had felt sublime. There had been a honeyed sweetness to her touch, hot and fierce, soft yet strong, so everything he wanted in a woman but had never found. But it didn’t mean anything. Or rather it meant nothing more than the obvious, which was that there had been a bed, and they’d been alone and she was a woman, and he was a man. Nothing to see here, folks. Just hormones and hunger and—

He felt his pulse slow, and almost let the door slam in his face.

A woman was standing at the top of the staircase, and for a moment he didn’t recognise her out of her various uniforms. And then he did.

Ondine was wearing an ivory-coloured jacket with a matching skirt that flared out above her ankles and some kind of veiled sunhat. Her glossy brown hair was loose and she wore no jewellery. But beneath the veil, her blue eyes gleamed like sapphires.

‘Hi,’ she said quietly.

He stared at her in silence, holding himself still. They had agreed to dress up for the ceremony, not too over the top. No morning suit or frothy meringues, but enough to make it feel romantic.

At the time, it had been just words. He didn’t have a romantic bone in his body, as more than one of the women who had referred to themselves as his girlfriends had reminded him on more than one occasion. For him, romance, like falling in love, was a closed book, but then he’d had no experience of either. His grandparents were devoted to one another, but his grandmother died before he was born and all of his memories of his parents’ marriage were of the two of them shouting and slamming doors. As for their remarriages—

A knot tightened in his stomach.

Even before the accident, it was clear there was no place for him in either of their reconfigured lives. Their houses, possessions, even their photographs had all been carefully separated and curated to edit out their shared past.

Nothing remained. Except him. He was the only reminder of the mess they’d made and that was why they kept him at arm’s length.

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