Page 47 of Her Diamond Deal with the CEO

‘It’s fine. I’m fine now. I was angry before. With Garrett, and Vince, but I’m not any more.’ She seemed confused, as if she had only just realised that fact. ‘I don’t know what changed, but I’m glad it did. They’re behind me now.’

‘What about after Vince?’

‘There hasn’t been anyone.’ Her eyes were clear and blue; she was telling the truth, but if that was true—

Something was creeping up behind him like in a game of grandmother’s footsteps. He felt goosebumps on his neck.

‘But what about the condoms? Why would you have those if there hasn’t been anyone?’

‘I didn’t even know I had them. They must have been from when I was with Garrett. But we stopped using them when we started trying for a baby—’

‘When was that?’

‘Seven years ago maybe.’ Her voice was so faint now he could barely hear it. ‘I was on the pill with Vince. I came off it when we broke up because I couldn’t handle another relationship.’

Jack stared at her in silence, his heart hammering. He didn’t know the expiry time on a condom but he was pretty sure it wasn’t seven years. He felt the air quiver as if a giant, underground explosion had happened beneath their feet. But it was inside his chest.

This baby was his. His lungs were burning. He couldn’t,shouldn’tbe a father. But he was. He felt a rush of panic and fear and then a joy that scared him more. He heard her swallow, knew she was watching him, and he knew that his face must be showing his shock. His understanding.

‘I didn’t think I could get pregnant. And I know you feel differently, but I can’t regret this baby.’ Looking down into her face, he felt something tear inside her. The shine had gone from her eyes. She looked small and lost. Because of him.

‘It’s okay. We’ll work it out.’ He pulled her closer, his head spinning. ‘It’ll be okay,’ he repeated, and he kept repeating it like a mantra.

Since its inaugural match nearly fifty years ago, the annual Walcott Cup had become one of those dates in the diary that was not an official holiday but was often treated as such. For football fans, the second Sunday in February was Super Bowl Sunday. Those who preferred to mix equine talent with the chance to dress up, the first Saturday in May was reserved for John D. Walcott IV’s charity polo tournament.

Normally, Jack looked forward to the tournament. He enjoyed playing and watching polo, and he was proud of what his grandfather had created. What had started out as an impromptu match between friends now raised millions of dollars for charity.

But this year, he had more important things on his mind than polo. Heart twisting, he glanced over to where Ondine sat opposite him, her eyes fixed on the view outside her window.

It was twenty-four hours since he’d worked out that he was the father of the baby in her womb. Worked out. Accepted. But not acknowledged. Not out loud anyway. So in that sense nothing had changed outwardly.

But everything had changed. All changed...changed utterly, like that Yeats poem his grandfather loved so much.

He had held her close for a long time but they hadn’t talked again. Instead they had walked in silence back to the bedroom and reached for one another wordlessly.

There had been no words to express the chaos inside his head. There still weren’t any.

And maybe Ondine felt the same way too.

She hadn’t changed yet or done her make-up and he wished that she didn’t have to. That she could just stay as she was, with her hair casually spilling over her shoulders. That they could stay on Whydah and make love and play croquet and go for a swim. Because she had kept her word. He could tread water now and move forward and back and soon he would be swimming.

Only none of it was real. At best, it was window dressing.

He was Ondine’s husband in name only, and soon enough he would be named as the father on his child’s birth certificate. So many signatures on so many pieces of paper.

Switching his gaze to the window, he stared across the expanse of blue to where a dark line edged with gold cut across the sky.We’ll work it out.That was what he’d said to Ondine. But how to do that, and what ‘worked out’ would look like were as distant and unreachable in his mind as the horizon.

It wasn’t like all those weeks ago when Ondine had told him she was pregnant. Back then he had been so focused on the statistical improbability of his being a parent that his mind had been impervious to any persuasion. Of course, the truth had been there all along. If he had paid a little more attention to what was right in front of his face, asked a few pertinent questions, he would have known that it wasn’t just possible he was the father, but highly probable. But blinkered by the fear that he would be unable to undo the damage of the past or, worse, that he would recreate it, he had deliberately, determinedly done neither of those things.

Now, though, he knew he was the father. Knew it with the same, unshakeable certainty that he knew his name, almost as if he had always known, right from that moment in the gallery when she’d bolted for the restroom.

And it blew his mind that he had created a new life. Every time he thought about it, it felt like an earthquake inside him.

Because making a baby didn’t mean you were qualified to raise it. Just look at his own mother and father. He felt his throat tighten so that it hurt to swallow. After the divorce they had been so eager to get rid of every reminder of one another that they had got rid of him too. They had edited him out of their lives so that now he was their son in name only.

But maybe, though, that would change today.

Thanks to the considerable gravitational pull of his grandfather’s money, the Walcott Cup was the one day of the year when both his parents deigned to be in the same space as one another. Usually they were too wrapped up in their new lives to pay much attention to him. But this year would be different. For once, the spotlight would be on him, and for the right reasons. On the face of it, he had turned his life around. Finally, they would have to notice him. See the change.

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