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“A sail?”
“Arthur has a beautiful sixty-five footer. Assuming you still remember how to man a boat?”
“I’m rusty, but yes. What does this Arthur do if he owns million-dollar islands and beautiful yachts?”
“Airlines. Railroads. He’s an old friend from my cycling days.”
She eyed him. “So this is what we’re going to do? Address our marriage like a grocery list?”
He lifted a shoulder. “You took sex off the table. I’m just following your lead.”
He left then. She needed rest. And if he wasn’t going to spend his night buried in his wife’s delectable body, he had a handful of pressing emails to address.
He took a glass of brandy into the library, sat down at the desk and flicked on his computer. But he couldn’t seem to focus. His head was too busy processing the raw and unabridged version of his marriage according to his wife. She had chosen to call out “irreconcilable differences” on the divorce papers sitting in his office, which would have made sense to him given their different philosophies on life. But unbeknownst to him, she had also apparently spent their entire marriage waiting for him to call it quits and walk out the door. Just as her father had.
Heat moved through him. He was nothing like Diana’s father. Wilbur Taylor was a megalomaniac with a god complex that came from being a world-renowned surgeon everyone treated like a rock star. He considered everything and anything in this world his domain, including the women in it, his affair with a fellow surgeon simply being the longest standing of his string of indiscretions. Yet Diana’s mother had chosen to stay. Why?
He took a slug of the brandy, twisting the chair to look out at the sea, now shrouded in darkness, its great mass an inky pool you could lose yourself in a million times over. Wilbur Taylor’s infidelities were just one reason he didn’t respect the man. The way he treated his daughter had been inexcusable to him, the tactics and subtle threats he had used to nourish Diana’s need for perfection coming at the cost of her happiness. So that she would follow in his footsteps—so that she wouldn’t let the family name down.
It had always taken him hours to soothe Diana after a visit with her parents. That was why he disliked them so much. That and the fact that Wilbur had never considered him good enough for his daughter...
His mouth curved in a bitter twist. How would Diana’s father react now if his daughter had brought him home with stars in her eyes? Perhaps the newly minted CEO of a Fortune 500 company, instead of the overlooked second-in-command, would meet with his approval? Would have been a suitable alternative to the young surgeons Wilbur had kept shoving down Diana’s throat even after they were married.
He sat back in his chair and took his brandy with him. It would make sense given her family history that his wife might have harbored a fear he might do to her what her father had done to her mother if, at any time, he had given her pause to doubt him. If he had spent his time admiring other women as he’d watched Wilbur Taylor doing. Instead, he had consistently deflected the attention of women who hadn’t cared if he’d worn a ring on his finger or not because he was rich and good-looking and being a wealthy man’s mistress wasn’t the worst gig in town.
He hadn’t needed to stray. He’d loved his wife. He hadn’t given any of those women more than a passing smile when Diana had abandoned him on social nights out for work. And yet here she was doubting him? His supremely confident wife who had never been fazed by the women who had chased him.
What were those women to you? A salve for your embittered soul? A way to prove I meant so little to you?
Her words from the night they’d conceived their baby came back to him. He had taken it as her usual arrogance. Bitterness. What if it had actually been a whole other side of his wife he’d never known existed? A vulnerability at her core she’d never displayed. The fact that she’d left him, shattered him, when he’d taken those women didn’t seem to matter. In her eyes, he had proved her right all along.
A fatalistic feeling enveloped him as he ran his finger along the blunt edge of the tumbler. How would he know? The woman he had married had been a total enigma he’d thought he could one day solve and never had. The woman he’d removed from Africa another Diana again. Who was the real Diana? He’d be damned if he knew.
The ocean stared back at him, dark, silent. I could do an emotional autopsy on you and I’d still never get to the bottom of you. Had Diana been right? Had he been just as guilty of not showing his true self to her? Had he even known who he was? Taking over Grant had changed him. Had illustrated just how lost he’d been since his father’s death. However cutting Diana’s appraisal of him had been, she had been right about him not fighting Harrison for control of Grant. About him running. He hadn’t wanted any part of a power struggle with his brother. Wasn’t sure a legacy that had seen his father blow his brains out was something he wanted.
