Page 30 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

Whether or not there was anyone there to see it.

He got to his feet. This was a mistake on so many levels—

Ondine was sitting on the bathroom floor, her face resting on her elbows, her elbows resting on the side of the bath, her back rising and falling jerkily. Her shoulder blades looked like angel’s wings. Gazing down at her, he felt his ribs tightening. Now what?

‘Ondine?’

At the sound of his voice, she froze, body stiffening, but she didn’t look up at him. Instead, stifling a sob, she turned her head away so that he couldn’t see her face, her arm curving protectively around her stomach.

‘Are you okay?’ He winced inside. Stupid question. She clearly wasn’t. ‘Can I get you anything?’ Better, but not much.

She was shaking her head, not meeting his eyes. ‘No, I... Could you just go?’ She made a harsh little sound as if her throat were too tight. ‘Please. I don’t want you here.’

A muscle ticced in his jaw. Okay, job done. He had asked, and she had answered, so he had done more than most men would in his situation, but for some reason his legs didn’t seem to want to move.

He gritted his teeth. ‘But I can’t leave you. Not like this.’

She was sick then. At first, he just stood there, feeling helpless and superfluous, but the second time it happened, he crouched down and caught hold of her hair, bunching the silky strands into a loose ball. Her neck was hot and damp but she was shivering as if she was cold, and he felt a stab of anger for the man who had let her deal with this alone.

Except she wasn’t alone. He was there, he realised with a jolt.

‘It’s okay, you’re going to be okay.’ He kept talking quietly, calmly, the words forming with an ease that surprised him. It seemed unlikely that she was even listening, but then at one point she looked up at him, her face pale and tearstained.

‘You don’t have to do this—be here.’

The shame in her voice scraped against his skin and he had a flashback, vivid as a photograph, of coughing up seawater onto the sand and Ondine gripping his shoulder, the pulse in her hand steadying the choking panic in his chest.

‘You’re right, I don’t. I’m choosing to be here.’ Heart banging, he sat down beside her. ‘And the only reason I’m here to make that choice is because of you.’ She looked up at him and the soft blue of her gaze tugged at something inside him. ‘Because you saved my life.’

She was only sick one more time after that. He sat on the edge of the bath while she washed her face and brushed her teeth and then followed her back into the bedroom.

‘I’ll be fine now.’ Her voice was husky and the smudges under her eyes looked darker, but her face was no longer pinched with panic.

‘Okay. But if you need anything, I’m just next door—’ He cleared his throat. ‘But you know that—’

She nodded, lifting her head slightly so that she was looking at a point just past his shoulder. ‘I’ll be fine. I just need to get some sleep. We both should.’

We.

The word pinged inside his head, tripping the automatic alarm that was his early warning defence system against any kind of intimacy and obligation.

It was one of the many exhausting contradictions of his life. He hated being alone, but he couldn’t let people get close either. To do that would mean trusting them to stick around when he messed up, and he didn’t trust easily.

Wewas a signal to cool things down.Wemeant that he needed to take a step back.Weconjured up a lifetime of hastily exited hotel suites, arguments and half-hearted promises that made his body brace and his weight shift to the balls of his feet like a sprinter getting ready to run.

His heart skipped a beat.

And yet he didn’t feel like running now, any more than he had in the bathroom when she was being sick. On the contrary, he felt as if there were some kind of forcefield pushing the two of them together.

Of course, that was probably because, as co-conspirators in this sham marriage, he and Ondine were already a ‘we’ of sorts. What other reason could there be? They had no history. No trust. This baby was her future, not his. What else was there between them?

Sex.

The hair on his arms rose stiffly and he glanced over to where Ondine stood watching him in an oversized grey T-shirt he hadn’t even registered before, his whole body tensing as that blunt, unprompted answer was accompanied by a crystalline memory of her lips parting as she rocked against him. Above the sound of his heart, he could hear those noises she’d made in her throat of half need, half abandonment as he’d driven into her.

Was she remembering it too?

Or was she remembering when he’d told her that once was enough?

---