Kitabı oku: «Reunited For The Billionaire's Legacy»

CHAPTER ONE

FOR A MAN who thought life was wrapped in a sea of irony, this had to take the cake.

Coburn Grant, heir to an automotive fortune and the newly minted CEO of Grant Industries, gave his silk tie a tug so it didn’t feel as if he was choking on his own cynicism. Attending his best friend Tony’s engagement party on the eve of his own divorce was impeccable timing that only he could manage. Having to give a speech to the happy couple in thirty minutes that spoke of hope and rainbows? The icing on that exceedingly unpalatable cake.

He could do this. He could. He just needed one more stiff Scotch in his hand. That and a big set of rose-colored glasses.

“You okay, Grant?” Rory Delaney, the big, brawny Australian who had been a close friend since they’d attended Yale together, lifted an amused brow. “You look a bit green.”

Coburn adopted one of his patented entertained-by-life expressions, the only mask he ever let the world see. “Never better.”

And why wouldn’t he be? He was the leader of the Fortune 500 company he’d helped rebuild after his father’s death, his brother, Harrison, was campaigning for the White House, which was only adding to Grant Industries’ global appeal, and he had a particularly beautiful, slightly wild blonde warming his bed every night—convenient when she lived only two doors down.

Heaven was what he called it.

Rory, a tall, handsome pro basketball player who was immensely popular with the ladies himself, gave a reassured shake of his head. “So glad to hear that, Grant. Right at this particular moment, in fact.”

Rory’s tone was a blend of sarcasm and warning. He was worrying Coburn was still hung up over his soon-to-be ex, who had left him a year ago. Which was so entirely wrong. His marriage to Diana had been a foolish, rash endeavor to numb the pain he’d been in over his father’s death, a passionate, all-consuming obsession with which to direct his emotions. Exactly what he’d needed at the time. Exactly what he needed to get rid of now.

He lifted a shoulder. “I’m not twenty-five anymore, Ror. An amazing body and a smart mouth don’t do it for me any longer.”

Rory’s face tightened in warning as his friend’s definitive elocution carried throughout the room. “Coburn—”

He waved him off. “I don’t know what you’re getting yourself so worked up about. I’ve got this speech in my back pocket.”

Rory gave a spot behind him a pointed look. “Diana is behind you. Three o’clock.”

He felt the color drain from his face. “My soon-to-be ex-wife Diana?”

“Bingo.”

His heart stuttered in his chest, his fingers gripping tighter around the tumbler of whiskey. He’d been ready for this confrontation to happen tomorrow when they had the divorce papers in front of them. When he was prepared to see the woman who had walked out on him without a backward glance twelve months ago, not to be seen since because she’d ensured their schedules never overlapped. Which wasn’t a mean feat in a city like Manhattan, where social circles tended to remain with like social circles.

But then again, Diana didn’t socialize. She worked all the time. Which made it all the more surprising she was here tonight...

Rage surged through him, swift and all encompassing. It moved upward, through his chest, erupting into his brain to turn it a hazy gray until he thought his head might blow off his shoulders. How dare she show up here? How dare she spoil this night for him? These were his friends, not hers.

He drew in a breath through his nose, exhaling slowly as Rory watched him as if he was an overly antagonized bull ready to charge. His turn when he moved was unhurried and deliberate. Unfazed. The stricken ebony eyes that stared back at him revealed she’d heard what he’d said. His gaze moved past his outrageously beautiful wife to the group of people standing beside her. They’d all heard what he’d said. Well, too bad. He wasn’t taking the words back. He’d meant them from the bottom of his heart.

The only thing he did regret was showing his hand like that. He’d intended on approaching tomorrow with a calm detachment Diana would have found unnerving. To demonstrate the man she was now dealing with wasn’t anything like the one she’d married. That he wasn’t a fool for her anymore.

He shifted his attention back to his wife. Her eyes had lost that vulnerable edge now, hardening into the dark, bottomless pools it had once been his life’s mission to get to the bottom of. He never had. She was angry. Furious. Too bloody bad. It had been her decision to come.

The entire party was staring at them now, waiting for a reaction from one of them. Mouth tightening, he turned his back on them, but not before cataloging the fact that his soon-to-be ex was even more strikingly beautiful than he remembered her to be. As if life away from him had enhanced her devastating appeal.

He set his glass down on a table, cocked his head toward the bar and he and Rory headed for liquid sustenance. Diana had taken so much from him. But she wasn’t ruining tonight.

Not happening.

* * *

Diana wobbled in her high-heeled shoes as Coburn shut her out as easily as if she was one of his big-breasted floozies he was long done with. Except he would have been more charming with them. He’d always saved his tough love for her.

Love. An aching knot formed in her throat. The emotion burning in his striking blue eyes just now had been crystal clear. He hated her for what she’d done to him. Still hated her. She wanted to say she hated him back, but that would have been a lie. Her feelings for Coburn had always been far more complex than that. Which was exactly why she needed him to sign the divorce papers tomorrow so she could get on that plane to Africa and forget their marriage had ever existed.

Her hand shook slightly as she averted her gaze from the crowd and lifted her wineglass to her mouth. She knew Coburn had been talking about her. Everyone at the party knew he’d been talking about her. They’d been eating it up like vultures, waiting for the drama to ensue. It was why she hated these damn affairs so much. People with too much time on their hands to speculate and provide yet more salacious tidbits to the gossip mill tomorrow. She’d come only because Annabelle had begged her to.

An amazing body and a smart mouth don’t do it for me any longer...

Coburn’s words reverberated in her head. She bit back the tremble that wobbled her lower lip and took a sip of the wine. What a bastard he was. She wanted to walk over there and slap his face with the anger that had been festering for twelve months. But that would be letting him win.

She was a surgeon—she put people back together. She would not let Coburn pull her apart. Again. Ever.

She made an attempt to circulate, to say polite things to people she hadn’t seen in a while and really didn’t care to now, but when Coburn was in a room, he was impossible to ignore. He was too beautiful in the male definition of the term. Too tall, with muscles honed by his predilection for daredevil sports, too stunning with his dark hair and arresting blue eyes and too charismatic, with that wicked, effortless charm a woman didn’t stand a chance against.

She removed her gaze from the muscles rippling under his shirt, his jacket long ago discarded per usual. Her husband wasn’t even that aware of his physical perfection. He traded on his charm, on his ability to get people to do the things he wanted them to do—to make them beg to do the things he wanted them to do, without even knowing they were doing it.

Her mouth twisted. She’d never really stood a chance. Her time spent with her nose buried in medical school textbooks, then sequestered in the hospital as a young resident working 24/7 had meant zero time for relationships. When Coburn had swept her off her feet on a rare night out at another Chelsea party very much like this one, he’d just taken.

How many people had told her to watch her heart? To use her head. She hadn’t listened to any of them. She’d married him despite her father’s advice to the contrary.

A dull ache throbbed inside her. She shouldn’t have come. She really shouldn’t have. She comforted herself knowing soon none of it would matter. Soon she would be on that plane to another continent. She would escape her claustrophobic life with her claustrophobic parents and her claustrophobic job, which was more politics than the Hippocratic oath she’d taken to heal the sick. The suffocating feeling she got every time she remembered Coburn was still sharing this city with her...

Her mouth twisted. If she thought she might be slightly crazy giving up her job at one of New York’s most prestigious hospitals to go work in a war-torn territory where the only certainty was complete uncertainty, she wasn’t alone. She’d been getting that sentiment a lot lately, particularly from her father, who’d forbidden her to go.

Her gaze drifted to her husband instead of focusing on the conversation happening in the group she’d joined. It hadn’t always been bad between her and Coburn. One particular night stuck in her head, in the early days of their marriage. She’d been a rising star as a resident, demonstrating surgical skills way beyond her years. But that night, she’d lost her first patient, a sixteen-year-old boy who’d been in a horrific car accident. His parents had sat in the waiting room for almost eight hours as she and the other specialists had attempted to save him, but the hemorrhaging from his internal injuries had eventually defeated them. She’d arrived home at 7:00 a.m. bruised and battered, her face telling the whole story. Coburn had held her in his arms and rocked her until she’d fallen asleep, then put her to bed. He’d been late for his board meeting that morning, but he hadn’t cared. Then, they had been the most important thing in each other’s orbit.

Her eyes burned at the memory. When they had been good, they had been very, very good. And when they had been bad, it had been unbearable.

Coburn raked a scathing gaze over her from where he stood, talking to Rory. She squared her shoulders, turned her back to him and did what the proud, perhaps foolish Taylor women had perfected as a family art. She turned a blind eye to the humiliation blanketing her and moved on.

To be among such happiness when her heart was so bleak was torturous. The only thing that made it bearable was the thought that in three weeks she’d be following her heart for the first time. Just her. Just Diana.

She wondered what she was going to find when she discovered who she really was.

* * *

Coburn’s third Scotch had his blood humming through his veins in a heated pull that tempted him to engage with the long-legged thing of beauty who’d once convinced him he needed no other. It was almost irresistible the force that drew him to her, that had always drawn him to her, despite the bitter recrimination he knew she could dish out with that stiff, superior manner of hers. But he resisted. His speech was happening in minutes and he needed all his composure to do it.

He watched Diana circulate through the crowd, her exquisite manners easing every interaction into the perfect sixty seconds of social repartee no matter what the partygoer’s background. Diana always knew what to say, even when bent on sticking a dagger into his back.

She was tall for a woman, five foot nine, downplaying her height as usual with a lower heel than most of the females in the room. Her slim boyish figure was the same lithe silhouette, her sensual, exotic features still utterly arresting, but the hair she used to wear well past her shoulders was shorter now, skimming her collarbone. He’d never let her cut it. He’d loved the feel of it sliding against his skin when she’d leaned down to kiss him as she’d taken him inside the tight sheath of her body, always in tune with him at that moment when he filled her completely and wiped any barriers from between them.

As far as makeup sex had gone, and there’d been a lot of it, he and Diana had perfected the art. Hot and filled with a dozen unspoken emotions, it had been a ride he’d become addicted to, until it had destroyed them.

His body reacted to the memory with a tightening his anger could not prevent. Every man at that party in Chelsea the night they’d met had pinpointed his wife as the ultimate conquest. The ice princess who had swept them all with a disdainful look that had said, “Don’t bother.”

It had been like waving a red flag in front of a bull. He hadn’t been able to resist. Diana’s quick comebacks and complete lack of awe when it came to him had entranced him. She’d known she was deserving. She’d been born deserving. And he’d been up to the challenge. What he wasn’t to know at the time was the extent to which her innocence would enslave him with a far greater power than his sexual prowess had claimed her. He hadn’t been able to bear the thought of her with another man after he’d taken her, and had put a ring big enough to sink a ship on her finger shortly thereafter to make sure it never happened.

How foolish to think a ring could ever command her complete attention. He hadn’t been enough for her. He suspected no man ever would be.

“You ready?” Tony appeared at his side.

He nodded. A lifetime of happiness. He was going to wish his friends the best, then shut his mouth. It wasn’t that hard.

He waited with Rory and Tony at the front of the room while Annabelle’s maid of honor made sure everyone had a glass of Veuve in their hands, courtesy of the Grants. Then he strolled to the center of the room at Tony’s nod. The crowd stood gathered around him, a festive cheer in the air at an occasion full of such promise. His eyes picked out Diana in the second row, her gaze carefully averted from his. His blood fizzled in his veins, his prepared speech flying out the window.

“I’m sure you’ve all heard the joke that love is temporary insanity, cured by marriage.” He paused as scattered laughter filled the room. “While I think that is hardly the case with Tony and Annabelle, who are two of the most perfectly matched people I have ever encountered, make no mistake about it,” he underscored harshly, “marriage is hard.”

The room went so silent you could hear the clinking of swizzle sticks as the bartenders mixed drinks. “Marriage isn’t just about finding a person you love,” he continued, oblivious to the agitated stare Rory was throwing him, “because I think that does happen. I do think falling in love is possible. What’s far harder is staying in love. Finding someone you can live with. Finding someone whose hopes and dreams, whose ideologies, mirror yours so when the going gets tough, when the inevitable realities of life intrude, that bond has the strength to support you both past the attraction that drew you together.”

He paused, the voices in his head warning him to stop, but his heart wouldn’t let him. Rory looked panic-stricken now, his gaze imploring him to rein it in. Annabelle was chewing on her lip, staring at him. Tony was frowning with that deliberate calm of his.

Coburn shrugged. “Someone neglected to tell me that you can love a person madly, blindly, but it still isn’t going to work if you can’t accept each other’s flaws and imperfections. That,” he added deliberately, looking at Diana, “sometimes love isn’t enough.”

Diana’s dark eyes shone almost black in her chalk-white face. Every party, every social function, every night he’d come home to an empty house flashed through his head in rapid-fire succession to counter the stab of pain that lanced through him.

He removed his gaze from his wife and pinned it on Tony and Annabelle. Tony had an arm around his fiancée’s waist now, his expression furious. Coburn dipped his chin. “All of this to say, sometimes one of those once-in-a-lifetime unions comes along you know will never suffer the fate of others. That you know is the deep and everlasting variety. Tony and Annabelle, I know that you will thrive and prosper together because you are one of those unions. I am so looking forward to watching you grow old together.”

The look on Tony’s face said their friendship might not last the next ten minutes. He ignored it and lifted his glass. “Here’s to Tony and Annabelle, one of the special ones... A lifetime of happiness to you both.”

The crowd lifted their glasses in stunned silence. Coburn drank deeply, moved to embrace Tony, who muttered an expletive in his ear, then dropped a kiss on the cheek of a bemused Annabelle, who looked as if she wanted to kill him only slightly less than Tony did. “You might want to address some of those repressed feelings,” she suggested drily.

Or not. He stepped back as the couple was surrounded by well-wishers, ignored Rory’s scowl and headed for the terrace and some much-needed fresh air. In fact, he thought, perhaps the whole disaster of an evening might lie in breathing the same air as his erstwhile wife.

The crisp, cool late-August night wrapped itself around him like an embrace, a slight breeze teasing the hair at the base of his neck. He yanked his tie looser and undid the top couple of buttons of his shirt. He had been way out of line in there, but some inexplicable force had insisted he tell the truth. And why the hell had she chosen tonight to resurface?

High-heeled shoes clicked on the concrete. He didn’t have to turn around to know it was Diana. He knew her tread, her gait, how those long legs of hers ate up the distance.

“How could you?”

He wheeled to face her. “How could you? These are my friends.”

She came to a halt in front of him. A flush spread across her perfect alabaster skin, staining her cheeks a soft pink. “They’re my friends, too. Annabelle asked me to come.”

“Then, you should have declined,” he said harshly. “You’ve spent twelve months avoiding me, avoiding anything about us, and you choose tonight to resurface?” He shook his head. “Usually your social etiquette is dead-on Diana, but tonight it’s been left sorely wanting.”

Her eyes darkened into furious black orbs, her fingers clutching her evening bag tight. “I would say your social etiquette is what’s lacking tonight, Coburn. First your insulting throwaway comment everyone heard, then your telling speech about how much you hated being married to me.”

“What?” he drawled mockingly. “You didn’t like the joke? I thought it particularly apt given our present situation, because it certainly was insanity what we shared. Or perhaps you didn’t like me suggesting you have flaws? Letting the world in on your dirty little secret?”

“No,” she said slowly, the flush in her cheeks descending to stain her chest with a matching rosy hue. “Your poor taste in the speech I can take, although I’m sure Tony and Annabelle won’t be thanking you later. It was your inappropriate comment to Rory I thought excessively juvenile.”

“You mean the one about being over a smart mouth and a great body?” His mouth twisted. “Really, Di, that could have been about anyone. Although,” he conceded, raking his gaze over her lithe body and small, high breasts, “it certainly does ring true in your case.”

His bald-faced lie had her clenching her free hand at her side. “You’re still a bastard, Coburn Grant. That hasn’t changed, either.”

“Sorry, no.” He watched as his perusal elicited the agitated response it always did in her, turning the rosy hue in her skin a dark red and sending the pulse at the base of her neck fluttering. “You could have avoided it by showing up at our meeting tomorrow and not among my closest circle of friends.”

She exhaled on a long sigh. “You won’t have to worry about me being around much longer. You can have New York all to yourself.”

His gaze sharpened on her face. “What does that mean?”

“I’m leaving in three and a half weeks to join Doctors Without Borders in Africa.”

“Africa? What about the job you are so in love with you couldn’t find time for me?”

“I left.” Her chin rose, gaze tangling with his. “I decided our divorce was the perfect opportunity to wipe the slate clean.”

He studied the mutinous set of her full mouth. “You left your job?”

“Yes.”

He was unprepared for the searing pain that sliced through him. Now when they were about to end their marriage with two signatures on a piece of paper she’d done the one thing that might have saved them. “Why?” he bit out, his hand clenching tight around his champagne glass. “Don’t tell me...you needed to find yourself.”

Her chin lifted another notch. “Something like that.”

He was at a true loss as to where to go with that information. All he’d ever wanted was for them to have time to devote to each other. For her to act like his true partner. But she’d never allowed it. She had refused to pull back on her grueling schedule, which had once seen her home only two days in a month as a resident, claiming it would impact her career.

“Forgive me,” he said finally, “if the whole idea of this confounds me at this particular moment.”

Her long lashes fanned over her pale cheeks. “It’s time one of us grew up, Coburn. And since that clearly isn’t going to be you with your floozy-a-week love life, I guess it has to be me.”

He absorbed the insult like a boxer taking a misguided, poorly aimed punch. “You never could get past them could you, Di? What was history never was for you.”

She opened her eyes, an amber glint firing amid a mahogany canvas. “Hard when it was thrown in my face every second minute. Why do you think I stopped attending parties with you? Who could stomach knowing that half the women in the room had had my husband?”

“You mentioned that before,” he countered, enjoying the fact he was getting to her. “A complete exaggeration I’ll tell you once again. You made me a mythological figure in your head, Di. None of it bore anything close to reality.”

“It’s hard to separate the fool’s gold from the real thing,” she scoffed. “I suppose you will have to tone it down now that you are lording it as CEO. Are you sure your ego can handle all the power?”

“It’s in fine shape,” he murmured on a low warning as he bent his head to her. “And thank you for the sincere congratulations on my promotion.”

She moistened her lips as he impaled her with his gaze. His satisfaction at how he still got to her knew no bounds. “Perhaps we should continue this discussion somewhere else? Rather than hijacking the happy occasion any more than we already have?”

“I—I don’t think that’s a good idea.” Her gaze dropped to the skin exposed by his unbuttoned shirt. “I should go anyway. I have a ton of things to do before I leave.”

He closed his hand around her slim wrist. “I disagree,” he countered in a silky-soft tone. “This is a discussion we should have had twelve months ago. Why not have it now before you run off to prove to your father you have a mind of your own?”

“And you.” The words tumbled out of her mouth before she censored herself.

He watched dismay cloud them. “Yes, Di,” he bit out. “Exactly that.”

Ebony eyes bound to blue. Emotion, something he couldn’t remember seeing in her for the last interminably painful year they’d spent together, flared in the eyes staring back at him. It made something elemental fire inside him. This was his chance to scratch beneath the surface of his wife. And although that was the last thing he should be doing the night before they ended their relationship with a resoundingly civilized divorce settlement, it was a temptation his white-hot curiosity couldn’t resist.

“We’re leaving,” he muttered, wrapping his fingers firmer around her wrist and pulling her toward the French doors.

She tugged on his arm. “You’re making a scene.”

“Not as much as we’ve made already.” He directed her toward their hosts and the happy couple to say their goodbyes. Eyes followed them as they went, sending regret lancing through him. Tonight had once again proved his wife brought out the worst in him. It was time to put an end to it once and for all—an end that had nothing to do with paperwork.