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He looked down at her hand on his arm as if it were a pest he wanted to stomp under his feet. “No more talking. We play by my rules now.”
Her heart skipped a beat. “What does that mean?”
“It means you have ten minutes to pack your things before we leave. The jet is waiting at the airport.”
Her breath snagged in her throat. She shook her head and backed away. “I am not coming with you. I have a contract to fulfill.”
“Not anymore, you don’t. Your supervisor agrees the best thing to do is to send you home and bring you back another time.”
Her dream vaporized before her eyes. She took another step backward, her head moving from side to side. “No, Coburn.”
He stalked forward, his hand reaching out to snag her forearm as she wobbled backward, nearly taking a fully clothed dip in the pool. Desperation surged through her as her fingers closed around his waist, her gaze rising to his ice-cold blue one. “Don’t do this.”
“It’s already done.”
Helplessness plunged through her. “In nine months I’m having this baby, and once that happens I won’t be able to do anything for years. This is my time, Coburn.” She punctuated the words with the slap of her palm to his chest. “I won’t let you take it away from me.”
He looked down at her palm pushing ineffectually against his chest. As if she was a juvenile in need of restraint. “Pull yourself together,” he advised coldly, lifting his gaze to her face. “You have your entire life to do this. Just not now.”
She gritted her teeth. She wanted to tell him his outrageous arrogance wasn’t winning this time. That he couldn’t tell her what to do, not any longer. But a tiny part of her, a part she’d been ignoring ever since she’d arrived here and seen the physical challenges she’d face if this nausea went on, which it might for another few weeks, had already been questioning the wisdom of her decision. Was scared.
Did she need to accept that Coburn was right? That the timing was the timing and she was powerless to fight it except with the knowledge that she would come back. She would do this.
A tear slid down her face. Then another. She lifted her fingers to brush them away, but the hot drops of desperation kept rolling like runaway bandits down her cheeks. Once, just once, she’d wanted to do something for herself. Something to bring her soul back from the depths it had sunk to.
Coburn reached up and brushed her fingers aside, sweeping the tears away with his thumbs. The hard glint in his eyes softened a fraction. “This is not over,” he said quietly. “It’s just postponed.”
“And what’s been postponed for you?” she asked bitterly. “You are a CEO. You have the ultimate power. You don’t even want a baby. You want to control me. This.”
His mouth tightened. “I never said I didn’t want a baby.”
“Your complete avoidance of the subject said it for you. Every time I tried to talk it through so we were on the same page, you said it was a future conversation.”
“It was a future conversation. The timing wasn’t right for either of us. But regardless of how I feel on the matter, the fact is, we are pregnant. We need to deal with it, and running away and hiding isn’t going to work.”
“I wasn’t running away. This was planned.”
“Before you added our baby’s health to the equation.”
She studied the taut, sharply defined lines of his face. This was a Coburn she didn’t know. The tough, impenetrable iteration of him that had emerged from their bitter split.
A total stranger.
“Show me where your room is,” he ordered. “We have one shot to get out of here tonight, and I’m not missing it.”
Her shoulders slumped, exhaustion taking her in one fell swoop. She didn’t have the energy to lift another finger, let alone go through another day like the one she’d just had.
She lifted her gaze to his. “I will come with you because I agree it’s the right thing to do. But you will not order me around, Coburn. Not anymore.”
His rock-hard expression didn’t change. “Let’s go.”
She led him into the hotel and upstairs to her room. She didn’t have much to pack because she’d brought only the bare essentials. They checked out and traveled to the airport in a dark sedan with blacked-out windows manned by two big burly security types.
With an ease only the Grant family’s connections could produce, they were ushered through a quick separate security check and onto the company jet. Diana buckled into her seat and watched her dream fly out the window as the plane took off, banking over the sprawling capital city and heading west. So angry with Coburn, so angry at everything, she laid her head back against the cushiony seat as soon as they were airborne and closed her eyes.
