Page 32 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

Looking up, she felt her pulse stumble. Jack was frowning across the table. Unlike most people when they frowned, his features didn’t grow harsh. Instead, it made him appear more as if he had been cast in bronze.

Glancing away, she wondered how long would it take to get used to his beauty? A lot longer than their marriage would last, she thought with a distant sort of jolt.

‘Are you feeling sick again?’

He was leaning forward now, looking concerned, and she knew he was only doing so because Sally was nearby, but she couldn’t stop herself from wondering what it would be like if he weren’t just playing a part but really cared about her.

She shook her head. ‘No, I was just thinking that I’ve never seen such a perfect lawn.’

As his dark gold eyes moved past her shoulder to the rectangle of flawless green grass, she took a steadying breath. She might not be throwing up any more, but she was definitely suffering from sleep deprivation because there was no way Jack Walcott would ever see her as anything but a means to get his life back on track.

And she didn’t want him to. Didn’t want him.

Liar.

Her cheeks felt suddenly as if they were under a heat lamp. Okay, that might be something of an exaggeration. The truth was that whenever she let her mind wander, she could think of nothing but those feverish moments in her bedroom and how his lips had tasted and the way his hands had made her forget everything but the need pounding through her body.

But was it so surprising that memory had imprinted in her head? So much had happened that day, so many big emotions unleashed, a connection formed beneath the water, her breath moving through his body—

‘You need to tell my grandfather that when you meet him.’ Jack was looking at her now, his eyes glittering in the sunlight. ‘The croquet lawn is his pride and joy. We could play a game if you like.’

She laughed. Because it was funny. Not that long ago she had been serving drinks to this man. Now he was her husband and he was inviting her to play croquet with him.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘It’s just the idea of me playing croquet. That’s not who I am.’

He smiled then, a curling, devastating smile that seemed to slide over her skin like sunlight and turn the sun into just another distant, indistinguishable star and she thought, not for the first time, that it had been a lot easier in some ways when they’d had the buffer of their hate between them.

‘Maybe you don’t know who you are,’ he said softly.

She stared at him, his words pinballing inside her head, the slow burn of his gaze making her breath catch. It was a shock to hear him say out loud what she had been thinking for so long. But the truth was Jack was right. She didn’t know who she was. Had never really known even when she was growing up.

But then, it was more about what she wasn’t than who she was. Her mum, her dad and Oli were all so clever, whereas she had struggled at school to be anything but average. For a short time, she had been above average at swimming, but a shoulder injury had forced her to pull out of training. A week later she’d met her first husband.

Garrett had been handsome, hard-working and impatient to begin the life he’d had mapped out. And she had been at the centre of that life. Until she couldn’t get pregnant and then in the space of a few months she’d become a divorcee, an orphan and a surrogate parent to her teenage brother.

Devastated, terrified, adrift, she had stumbled into her second marriage and out the other side into her subsequent divorce. Poorer but no wiser, apparently, she thought, gazing across the table at her third husband. And even just thinking that made her cheeks hot and her skin prickle.

She had married Jack for Oli’s sake, but what did that make her? A sacrifice? A fool?

And what about after it ended? Who would she be then?

Glancing up, she realised Sally was waiting to clear away the plates.

‘I did think about maybe wandering down to the beach,’ she said quickly, wanting, needing to change the subject and drag the path of her thoughts onto a firmer, less unsettling footing. ‘I feel like I haven’t left the house for weeks.’

You could see the ocean from every window, and it was pleasant sitting here in the sunshine surrounded by the artfully arranged shrubs and trees, but now she was feeling more herself, she craved the raw, untouched beauty of nature.

There was a brief blink-and-you’ll-miss-it silence and then he shrugged, his smile still in place. ‘Sure, why not?’

It took six, maybe seven minutes to reach the curving beach. As they walked over the top of the shallow dunes, Ondine felt like a pilgrim stepping off theMayflower.

She had wanted raw and untouched, and this was it.

Pristine, powder-fine, bone-white sand, speckled at the shoreline with pale pebbles, stretched in either direction. In the shelter of the bluff, the bleached remains of a tree lay on its side like a fallen statue. Beyond the sand, the Atlantic rippled like molten glass.

It was absurdly beautiful, spectacular, dramatic, and it seemed astonishing to her that it all belonged to just one family.

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