Reunited for the Billionaire's Legacy: Christmas at the Castello (bonus novella)

by Jennifer Hayward

  “Put Dr. Gibson on the phone.”

  “What? I can’t do that. She’s with a patient.”

  “Then, unpatient her now or I will get in my car, drive over there and do it myself.”

  A pause. “Just one minute.”

  He drummed his fingers on the midnight blue paint of his car, a complete sense of unreality enveloping him as he digested what he knew the receptionist had been about to say. This could not be happening. He’d worn a condom that night. He’d very definitely worn a condom that night. But condoms weren’t foolproof...

  Cars whizzed by him, the height of Manhattan rush-hour traffic jamming itself onto the streets. The voice of an older female finally came on the line. “Coburn?”

  “Yes,” he said tersely. “Your receptionist just called me by mistake, as I’m sure she told you, and mentioned in passing my wife is pregnant. My wife who is now on a plane bound for Africa. Could you confirm this rather important piece of information?”

  “Coburn...” He heard the hesitation in her voice. “Rebecca should not have given that information out. It breaches doctor-patient confidentiality laws.”

  “I understand that. But since the cat’s out of the bag, I suggest you confirm it right now so I don’t have to spend all my money suing you for the information.”

  Joanne sighed. “I am so sorry this happened. I truly am. But Diana really needs to be the one to tell you this.”

  He held the phone away from his ear and stared at it as if it was a toy he would like to crush. Rage zigzagged through him, singeing his skin. She had just told him everything he needed to know.

  “You know what, Dr. Gibson?” he bit out, pulling the phone back to his ear. “Forget it.”

  He disconnected the call, picked up his briefcase, tossed it into the car and headed uptown to Diana’s parents’ place. He was two blocks into the journey before he remembered he’d left his espresso on the roof of the car. An expletive flew from his lips. He wasn’t a violent man, but the urge to slowly strangle his wife was profound.

  Traffic was filthy. He spent the first fifteen minutes crawling at a snail’s pace behind cabs that wove in and out of his lane, not helping his temper. By the time he got stuck a few blocks from the Taylors’ penthouse, his head was in total disarray. He leaned back against the seat and attempted to take it all in. Could Diana have been pregnant the night she’d been with him? Was it someone else’s baby? The shattered look on her face after he’d taken her that night sliced through his head. No way. There was no way she was dating someone else and had been with him like that. He knew his wife. It wasn’t in her DNA. Which left him with the mind-numbing conclusion that this baby was his. He was going to be a father.

  And his wife was on her way to Africa. To an unstable city in the interior that had just come out of a period of dangerous unrest. And she had known she was pregnant. Known she was carrying his child.

  By the time he’d crawled the last couple of blocks to the Taylors’ building, he knew one thing. He wasn’t waiting around for Diana to deign to tell him the news. She had taken a liberty with information, information about his child. Action was required.

  The doorman of the Taylors’ building caught the keys he threw at him as he swept past without breaking stride. Barking his name at the concierge, he fixed the man with an unrelenting stare until he put the phone down and waved him through. Be civil, he told himself while stalking toward the elevator. This was not the Taylors’ fault; it was their daughter’s. He was here only to get the information he needed.

  The elevator stopped at the Taylors’ tenth-floor penthouse. Wilbur Taylor opened the door seconds after he rapped on it, hard.

  “Coburn,” the other man murmured smoothly. “What an unexpected surprise.”

  “You can dispense with the pleasantries,” Coburn suggested tersely, walking past him into the foyer. “We all know how much you like me.”

  Wilbur blinked at the open aggression Coburn usually managed to hide beneath a cloak of civility. Diana’s father closed the door and faced him, a light firing in his eyes at the opportunity to take the gloves off. “I’d like you more if you gave my daughter the divorce she’s asking for.”

  “That might be wishful thinking, since she’s pregnant with my child.”

  Wilbur’s jaw dropped. Diana’s mother, who had appeared behind her husband, immaculately dressed in pants and a sweater, went chalk white. “Pregnant?”

  He was heartened to see it hadn’t been a conspiracy against him. “You didn’t know?”

  Her mother shook her head. “She wasn’t well when she was here for dinner on Sunday but we thought it was the flu.” She shook her head, her blue eyes flickering. “She left knowing that?”

  “The height of stupidity, don’t you think?”

  “Now, listen,” Wilbur interjected, “You can’t talk—”

  “I can,” Coburn raged, pointing a finger at him. “Right now I am capable of anything given what your daughter has done. But all I want from you is the address where she’s staying.”

  Wilbur gave him a long look. “You’re going to bring her back.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  A long silence wrapped itself around the three of them. Wilbur scratched his head. “This may be the only time we’ll ever agree on anything, Grant.”

  Coburn cocked a brow at him. “The address?”

  “She’s staying at the Lione Hotel in the capital.”

  He promised to update Diana’s parents when he could and left.

  At home, a glass of Scotch in his hand to numb the furor in his head, he called Frankie and told her to clear his schedule for the next week. If she thought this strange given his jam-packed slate of important meetings, she didn’t comment. Next he called his pilot and had him file a flight plan for the day after next—his destination, the large, landlocked nation in the center of Africa his wife was headed to.

  He dropped onto the sofa, tipped his head back and swallowed a mouthful of the Scotch, welcoming its fiery burn as it warmed his insides. Diana clearly had an idea of how she thought this was going to play out. Unfortunately for her, that wasn’t going to happen. He’d had more than enough time to think while gridlocked in Manhattan traffic, and he knew exactly how his version of events was going to unfold. It had nothing to do with choices or selfishness and everything to do with repercussions. Responsibility.

  He refilled his Scotch and took it out onto the terrace with him. A rare smattering of stars dotted the New York sky. He studied them, wondering exactly how far away they were. How many light-years from his own life were they? How many light-years had his life moved today?

  It had changed irrevocably with one piece of earth-shattering news. He’d always known Diana wanted children, knew he likely didn’t, but had reserved judgment for the moment he had to make that decision. And now that choice had been taken out of his hands.

  The combustible way he and Diana had come together here that night three weeks ago filled his head. The premonition that making love to her in his bed was a road he couldn’t return from. His mouth twisted. How right he’d been. He was going to be a father. He was now tied to the woman he’d vowed to forget. His intuition had been telling him something and he had not listened.

  A low curse split his lips as he looked up into the night sky. He supposed his reluctance to be a father stemmed from his need to not be tied down. To preserve his freedom at all costs. The dysfunctional nature of his own family. But presented with the facts, he was surprised to discover absolute clarity that stemmed from someplace deep inside him. Maybe it was biology, maybe it was because this baby was his flesh and blood, but he knew that no matter how bad the timing, no matter what state his dismal marriage was in, this was a responsibility he could not shirk. He and Diana were going to have to make this work.

  A knot formed in his stomach.
His wife had taken a piece of him with her when she’d walked out of their apartment that night, proclaiming what they had dead. Now she was about to learn what it was like to be bound to a person forever with no hope for the future. Because that was his plan.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IT WAS STILL smoking hot at eight o’clock at night as the sun sank behind the skyline of the central African capital Diana had been posted to, blazing a fiery path as it scorched everything within its reach. She put up a hand to shield her eyes as she left the hospital with her armed escort after her second day of work and walked the short distance to her hotel. She was normally good with heat, loved it in fact, but since she’d arrived here, the heat wave that had racked the country had been beyond anything she’d ever experienced. Sweltering and bone-dry, it invaded every cell, sucking out all your bodily fluids along with it.

  Which would have been manageable if she hadn’t been pregnant and losing hydration to the ever-present nausea that continued to plague her. The work had been even more emotionally draining and physically taxing than she’d imagined. She’d been posted here to treat patients at the hospital and clinic who had been directly or indirectly injured in the violence between the rebels and the armed self-defense groups battling over the city. Although the arrival of international forces had stemmed the violence for now, there were still random acts of aggression taking place on civilians, and the fallout from the hostilities had provided a steady stream of patients through the hospital doors.

  She had performed surgery today on a sixty-year-old man who’d stumbled upon a grenade that hadn’t been defused and almost lost a leg, done a cesarean section on a young mother and helped the other doctors work through dozens of patients suffering from everything from malaria to respiratory and skin infections. All of it had been performed in an emergency room that lacked much of the high-tech equipment she was used to, requiring instinct and ingenuity on her part to make do.

  She knew what she’d seen today would haunt her for a lifetime. And that was just one day in the life of this besieged city. It was enough to break your heart, something her supervisor had counseled her about. “You need to keep your professional detachment,” he’d told her. “Even more so than you would normally do. You are going to see things here that will affect your perspective forever. Which will test your belief in your fellow man. You’ve got to move past it.”

  The gleaming facade of the Lione Hotel loomed in front of them, sparkling a burned-gold color in the dying rays of the sun. She smiled her thanks to her escort and arranged to meet him the next morning. If it seemed incongruous for a five-star hotel to still be operating in this city after what it had endured, it should be noted things weren’t working entirely as usual.

  There still wasn’t hot water when she went to take a shower in her lovely whitewashed room with its four-poster bed, nor was the AC working particularly well. Wanting only to drink and sleep, but knowing she had to eat for the sake of the new life growing inside her, Diana went down to the restaurant and ordered a light dinner. She managed to eat her salad and half the chicken before she gave up and took her tea out onto the terrace, which seemed to be cooler than the poorly air-conditioned restaurant.

  At least the air moved out here, she thought, sinking into a chair at a table by the pool.

  The terrace was deserted except for a man leaning against the facade of the restaurant smoking a cigarette. She focused her gaze on the smooth surface of the oval-shaped pool, a jewel in the center of the perfectly landscaped space. It looked heavenly. Almost good enough to inspire a trip to her room to get her bathing suit, but even that was too much energy in her current state. She sank back in the chair and looked up at the dusky sky and the different placement of the stars on this side of the world.

  The man dropped the butt of his cigarette to the concrete, ground it under his foot and went back inside. The night blanketed her in silence. Her eyes fluttered shut. Exhaustion reached out to claim her with greedy, grasping hands. She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, three, four minutes, when a sixth sense made her open her eyes. A man strolled from the shadows of the building, dressed all in black. A bolt of alarm zigzagged through her, penetrating the fog she was in. Move, her brain told her. But by the time she got to her feet, her hands balled at her sides ready to engage, the tall figure had stepped into the light, not ten feet from her.

  Her eyes widened. It was not an unknown assailant. It was someone much more dangerous.

  “Coburn.” The word came out half croak, her eyes moving over his tall, lean body clad in black jeans and a black T-shirt. “What are you doing here?”

  He stepped fully into the light, moving lithely, catlike, toward her until he was so close she could see the ominous glitter in his beautiful blue eyes. A shiver went down her spine. She was in trouble. So much trouble.

  His gaze locked onto hers. “When were you going to tell me, Diana? How long did you deem it acceptable to keep from me that I’m going to be a father?”

  Her heart leaped into her mouth. He knew. Of course he knew. He was here. She pushed a breath past her locked set of lungs. “How did you find out?”

  “Your doctor’s office called looking for you. Apparently the new receptionist hasn’t yet learned the ropes because she let your big secret slip.”

  Oh, God. Her knees went weak at the thought of how angry he must have been. Still was...

  “And the hotel?” she asked weakly. “How did you find out I was here?”

  “Your father. He was more than happy to address this insane behavior of yours.”

  Her heart dropped. “You told him about the baby.”

  His mouth compressed into a straight, forbidding line. “I did what I needed to do. And believe me, they were just as shocked as I was that you would travel halfway across the world pregnant and suffering from morning sickness to take up a physically grueling position you know you shouldn’t be doing.”

  Her shoulders shot to her ears. “I don’t know anything of the kind. There is absolutely no reason why I, a perfectly healthy woman in my first trimester, shouldn’t be here.”

  “No reason?” he repeated, the glint in his eyes turning positively flammable. “I stopped at the hospital and met with your supervisor. He had no idea you were pregnant. He said you’d been sick on the job yesterday and he’d been concerned but had put it down to first-day jitters.”

  Her jaw dropped open. “You talked to my supervisor?”

  “Didn’t you just hear me, Diana?” His lips curved in a savage twist. “I will do whatever it takes to make you see sense since you obviously can’t do it for yourself.”

  Which meant what? Fury at the boundaries he’d crossed mixed with fear to render her speechless. Her gaze flicked over the clenched muscles of his jaw, the tendons and veins that stood out in stark relief against the strong column of his throat. Anger seemed to vibrate from every pore of him. He was beyond furious with her.

  “Congratulations,” he rasped, reading her expression. “You have successfully diagnosed my current mood. Now answer the question, Diana. When were you going to tell me? After you had this all figured out in that structured brain of yours? After you’d worked out how we divide our paternal rights? Exactly how you want this to play out... What roles you’d like me to assume in our child’s life?” A dangerous glitter stoked his gaze. “Because I can assure you, after this stunt, it has backfired on you.”

  The breath whooshed from her lungs. “Coburn, I needed time to think, time to process. You can’t blame me for that.”

  “No,” he agreed tightly. “I can’t. What I can be livid about is you waltzing off to take this assignment when you knew you were carrying our baby. Without telling me.” He shook his head, a vicious expression darkening his eyes. “I knew you were selfish, but this, this was unforgivable.”

  Her heart thudded in her chest. “I was going to tell you
this week as soon as I got settled.”

  “Instead, I found out from a receptionist I was going to be a father. A receptionist. While I was getting into my car on the corner of Fifth and Fourteenth to be precise.” He stepped closer, until she could feel the fury emanating from him. “You were afraid I would have made you cancel your trip if you’d told me.”

  Her jaw dipped. He slid his fingers beneath it and brought her gaze back up to his. “Unbelievable. You are unbelievable.”

  She pulled out of his grip. “I am exercising my right to be an independent human being. I was planning on consulting you with this pregnancy every step of the way.”

  His mouth tightened. “Unfortunately for you, the time for consultation and negotiation is over. You gave away that right the moment you elected to leave the country without coming to me.”

  The ice in his tone spoke a dire warning. She swallowed hard as it slid through her, chilling her despite the sweltering air. “You are upset,” she reasoned, laying a hand on his arm in an attempt to redirect the storm. “I agree I shouldn’t have left without telling you. Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

  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.”