Page 10 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

One fine dark eyebrow arched upwards. ‘Sounds like a plan. So, what was the fight about?’

The fight? For a moment, he stared at her blankly. He had forgotten telling her that detail. Now, thinking back to it was like looking into the wrong end of a telescope. It seemed tiny and distant and unimportant.

‘It was nothing—’

The evening had started well enough. They had gone to Blackjacks, and everyone had been dancing and drinking whisky sours. Everyone except him. He had wanted to, needed to, but that need had given him the willpower to stay on the soft drinks.

Only then Harry had pulled out some pills.

His shoulders tensed. He still wasn’t entirely sure why, given that he had neither brought the drugs or taken them, but Harry’s girlfriend, Lizzie, had got completely out of shape with him, kicking off about his ‘attitude’ and his ‘behaviour’, both of which were apparently substandard. To add insult to injury, Carrie had got involved. He couldn’t remember every word but the gist of it was he was irresponsible, selfish, made poor life choices and she pitied his mother.

The tension in his shoulders spread down his spine. Even just hearing his mother mentioned had been enough to punch a hole through his chest.

That was when he’d known it was time to end things.

He felt Ondine’s gaze on his face, and he tilted his head back to meet her eyes.

‘Harry said something stupid about Sam’s girlfriend, Maeve, and he should have just apologised but we’d all been partying pretty hard, and he was stoned, and Sam tried to hit Harry, but he punched me by mistake and the drinks went everywhere, and Maeve lost it completely and she ended up telling Harry’s girlfriend Lizzie that he’d hooked up with some waitress last week—’

In other words, a fairly average night out. Only for some reason, the whole thing sounded appallingly silly and self-indulgent. He felt suddenly exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept at all, and there was a weave of tension pulling his chest tight. To shake it off, he glanced over at Ondine and gave her a small, conspiratorial smile. ‘Wasn’t you, was it?’

She didn’t laugh. Nor did she look upset or annoyed. Just stern.

‘Excuse me?’

He held up his hands as he had done out on the beach. ‘It was a joke.’

‘A joke? You think lying to people is funny.’ Two red spots of colour were burning high on her cheekbones.

Lying? He frowned. Maybe he had skimmed the truth but—‘I didn’t lie.’

Her chin came up. ‘I asked you at the beach and you said you hadn’t taken anything. You told the doctor the same thing. Now you’re telling me you’d all been “partying pretty hard”.’

He felt a sting of impatience, and frustration at the injustice of her accusation. ‘First off, Little Miss War-on-Drugs, who made you judge and jury? Secondly, I wasn’t lying. I hadn’t taken anything. Not that it’s any of your business.’

‘Right. That’s why you jumped into the sea fully clothed, was it?’

Her eyes were the same clear blue as the ocean, and he silently replayed the moment of impact and the accompanying head rush of relief at having something real to fight for even as his thoughts flinched at the memory. It was an act of dark folly. But he had thought he was alone, and he didn’t like knowing that she had seen him at his most desperate.

‘You lied about that too,’ she said coldly. ‘You said you were messing about on deck but I saw what happened. Oh, and by the way, it is my business if I have to go fish you out of the ocean.’ She shook her head. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Jack. Next time you want to “mess about”, stick to something that doesn’t end with a trip to the hospital.’

He’d had enough.

‘Seriously? You think I need advice from some waitress-cum-lifeguard?’

She blinked and her face stilled, and he felt her reaction as if it were his own, but his head was still spinning with shock that she knew what he’d done and that drove him to push aside any restraint or consideration.

‘Maybe you need to take a good, hard look at how, where you live? Because what I think is that you should get your own life on track before you start picking holes in mine.’

She took a step backwards, and he knew he had gone too far, pushed back too hard as he always did. Even if she hadn’t been inching towards the door, he could sense her withdrawing from him, and all of the certainty he’d felt as she’d waited with him at the hospital and sat by his bed began to melt away—

‘Ondine, don’t go.’ His fists tightened, a nameless panic swamping him, pulling him under. ‘Please. I don’t know why I said that. I didn’t mean it—’

Ondine stopped. Her legs seemed to be rooted to the floorboards she and Oli had painted when they moved in. Her eyes were fixed on Jack’s face.

He looked pale and his hair was still damp from the shower, just as it had been when she’d pulled him from the sea. And maybe that triggered some kind of reflex need to help and comfort him or maybe it was the strain in his voice, but she knew she couldn’t leave him. ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ she said quietly.

He sat down on the bed abruptly, almost as if his legs had given way, and she realised that the shock of the morning was finally setting in.

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