Page 36 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

Only how could she be both?

He felt his body tense. It was a perplexing question but now that his savage anger at being caught up in her pregnancy had subsided and he was spending more time with her, it was one he wanted and needed to answer.

Who was Ondine Walcott? At various times he had cast her as opportunistic, devious, manipulative and yet he had seen no evidence of any of those qualities. Instead she was bright and funny, intermittently furious and, on occasion, downright infuriating. But she was also patient, compassionate, a good listener. And sometimes, when she didn’t know she was being watched, he could sense a shadowy fatigue that had nothing to do with the pregnancy.

Only if he had been wrong about who Ondine was, then could he be wrong about other things too? Could this baby be his? He felt a twinge of panic in his chest. Someone as damaged and incomplete as he was had no business fathering a child. He wouldn’t know where to start.

But Ondine would, and maybe she could teach him.

He thought back to how she had offered to teach him to swim. If you’ll let me, she’d added.

Would he let her? He stared down at the pool, his heart bumping against his ribs, remembering the moment out on the bluff when there had been other, more urgent things he’d wanted to let her do. Other things he’d wanted to surrender to. And not just surrender to. He had wanted to seize with both his hands—

His groin tightened, a shiver moving through him and over his skin as his body relived those heated, frantic moments in her bedroom when his mouth was hard on Ondine’s and he was hard inside her, harder than he’d ever been.

He couldn’t forget it; he’d wanted to. Especially after she’d told him about the baby. And he assumed he would forget as he always did, although sometimes forgetting merged with pretending it had never happened. Either way, afterwards, he’d been certain that it was just a kind of PTSD, a feverish, lost-in-the-moment compulsion to hold onto something, to someone that had been feverishly and swiftly satisfied.

A pulse of heat beat across his skin as he pictured Ondine’s upturned face out on the beach.

Except he didn’t feel satisfied. He felt like a person crawling out of a desert who was handed a beaker of cool water only for it to be snatched from his lips.

But if he couldn’t forget, then the only other option was to avoid the teasing, treacherous rip currents of desire that seemed intent on pulling him under. His eyes fixed on the pool. Only to do that, he would need to learn how to swim.

Gazing up, Ondine watched transfixed as the coin spun up into the mid-afternoon sunshine. It seemed to hover momentarily as if defying gravity and then, still spinning, it fell back down. Jack caught it. ‘Your call.’

‘Tails,’ she said quickly.

The corners of his mouth curved very slightly. ‘Looks like you’re going first, Mrs Walcott.’

Jack had invited her to play croquet after lunch and, once he’d explained the rules, including the option to ‘roquet’ which involved hitting your opponent’s ball as far as you could, they were now standing on the immaculate green lawn. Up close, it looked even more perfect, and she had almost winced when Jack had pushed in the wickets.

Now he was handing her one of the long-handled mallets. ‘You ready?’

To play croquet: yes.

To play croquet with him: less clear.

What was clear, however, was that she was having to steel herself for every interaction. She tried her hardest to ignore the effect Jack had on her, but it was getting more difficult by the day. It didn’t help that he always looked so damn sexy. Today he was wearing chinos, a white button-down and a baseball cap. It was the kind of preppy look favoured by so many of the male guests at Whitecaps that when she was tired they seemed to blur into one person. But there was nothing blurry about Jack Walcott. If he had been a sketch, every angle and contour of his face would have been a clean line.

‘Yes, I’m ready.’

As she nodded, he made a small bow. ‘Morituri te salutant.Those who are about to die salute you,’ he said softly. ‘It’s what the gladiators are supposed to have said when they went into the Colosseum.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that you trying to put me off my game?’

He grinned. ‘I just want you to be fully prepared.’

‘It’s croquet, Jack, notBattle Royale.’

Still grinning, he backed away from her, shaking his head. ‘You clearly have never seenHeathers. Croquet is the most brutal, unsporting game you will ever play. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’

It pained her to even think it, but he wasn’t exaggerating, she thought thirty minutes later as Jack whacked his ball into hers with the force of a door ram to send it spinning out of orbit to the edge of the lawn.

‘Sorry.’ He grinned, looking about as un-sorry as it was possible to look. ‘I was going easy on you before, but I wouldn’t be teaching you properly if I didn’t demonstrate the correct use of the roquet,’ he said, positioning his mallet and then tapping his own ball expertly through the fourth wicket. ‘You see, there are two aspects to the game. The physical and the strategic. The best players are strategists.’

The same was true of life, she thought. And given that her strategy was about on a par with pinning a tail on the donkey blindfold, was it any wonder her life was such a mess? Although, strangely, given everything that was going on right now, it felt less messy than it had in a long time.

It took several fruitless, frustrating attempts but at long last she got her ball through the final wicket.

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