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‘It sounds clear,’ she murmured, pushing him gently back and out of reach.
Nathan shut his eyes, the effort to sit up rendering him completely exhausted. He was drifting off when something was pushed into his ear canal. ‘Hey,’ he protested, opening his eyes.
‘Shh. It’s just a thermometer,’ Jacqueline said, pulling the tympanic device out of his ear and looking at the digital display. ‘Thirty-eight point nine degrees.’
Nathan looked at her for a long moment, trying to work out why his wife was here. Jacqui was here? ‘I s’pose I should be grateful you only stuck it in my ear,’ he murmured, before the effort to keep his eyes open became too much again.
Jacqueline rolled her eyes at the old vet joke she’d heard a thousand times. She looked down at him. His stubble was heavier now, but no less fascinating. She sighed. He’d drifted off again. He was bound to do that for probably most of the day—maybe even tomorrow as well. So she’d better get used to him lying on her couch looking all shaggy and fascinating. It was going to be a very long weekend indeed.
Saturday evening, after a slow, rainy day in her clinic, and multiple trips up the stairs to check on Nathan, Jacqueline put an Enya CD on low, collapsed on the couch opposite a still sleeping Nathan and an ever-present Shep, and opened her book. Not that she could get into it. Her gaze kept flicking to his face, checking on him. His lashes, so long they cast shadows she could see from across the room on his cheekbones, were endlessly fascinating.
An hour later she realised she’d read the same page over and over. The clock said eight and the evening stretched ahead of her. She looked at him again, and was startled to find him looking back at her.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi.’ Neither of them said anything for a moment. ‘Are you feeling better?’ His gaze was clearer; the fevered glitter it had been sporting since he’d landed on her doorstep had dulled.
Nathan shook his head, and winced as his neck protested the sudden movement. ‘Marginally.’
‘Are you hungry? I can make you something. Some toast, maybe?’
He gave a weak smile. ‘Ah, toast. Jacqui’s cure for everything.’ He knew she would have been happy to eat tea and toast the rest of her life. It was like the sixth food group to her. His stomach turned at the mere thought of food. ‘Pass.’
She ignored his dig. ‘You’re due a couple more tablets.’
Good. His sore throat had settled, and he didn’t think his head was in imminent danger of exploding from his shoulders, but he did feel as if he’d gone ten rounds with a giant. ‘Where’s your bathroom?’ he asked.
‘Out the door to the left.’
Nathan sat gingerly. He took a moment to gather his energy and stood, his legs disgustingly weak. A wave of dizziness hit him square in the solar plexus, distracting him momentarily from the sudden realisation that he was naked. And then Jacqui was there, holding him around the waist, the thin multi-coloured bangles adorning her wrists jangling, the metal of her rings cool against his heated flesh. He figured it wasn’t anything she hadn’t already seen a thousand times before.
‘Sorry.’ He grimaced.
Jacqui swallowed, her face hot. Was he apologising for needing her, or for his full-frontal nudity? ‘It’s fine. Just hold on to me.’
He allowed her to lead him to the toilet, and while he was taking care of business she placed his clean underwear and a spare toothbrush on the vanity. She hovered outside the bathroom, waiting for him to finish, relieved to see him slightly less exposed for the return trip. She handed him the tablets and water as he climbed back under the covers.
‘Thanks,’ he said, swallowing the entire contents of the glass, grateful beyond words for her help, just too exhausted to convey it adequately.
He shut his eyes and felt instant relief. But a strange nagging sixth sense pulled at his leaden lids and he looked up to find her watching him.
‘What?’ he croaked.
He’d been here for less than twenty-four hours, but already her house was filled with him. After he left she’d never be able to sit on that couch again without thinking of him laying there buck naked. ‘Why are you here, Nate?’
Good question. If only it didn’t hurt his head so much to think. He shut his eyes. And then he remembered.
He fixed her with an intense stare. ‘I need my wife back.’
CHAPTER TWO
NATHAN woke to the smell of frying bacon and toast and his stomach grumbled. He was starving. His mouth watered. He rubbed at the stubble on his jaw, momentarily wondering where the hell he was. The ceiling didn’t look familiar and he wasn’t in his bed.
He turned his head and saw a half-drunk glass of water on a coffee table and Shep dozing nearby. Then it returned. Driving to see Jacqui. The Porsche getting bogged. Walking in the rain. The flu.
He stretched, feeling only a vague ache now, but malaise sat heavily in his bones. He thought about sitting for a few moments before he attempted it, and was surprised how weak he felt as he levered himself up. The duvet bunched around his waist and he pushed it aside.
Shep woke and lurched slowly up off the floor. ‘Hey, boy,’ he murmured, ruffling the dog’s ears.
He’d missed Shep in the beginning. Terribly. Almost as much as he’d missed Jacqui. Then all too soon life had consumed him and he hadn’t thought about Shep for years. Maybe that was what he was missing from his life now? Maybe a dog, a pet, would help fill up this strange emptiness that afflicted him from time to time? Give him something to come home to? He made a mental note to check into it when he returned home.
Nathan stood, feeling vaguely light-headed, leaning heavily against the arm of the couch for a few seconds before pushing off and following his nose. He wasn’t sure what day it was, but his stomach felt as if it had contracted down to the size of a walnut, so it had to have been a couple of days since he’d eaten.
He passed a window filtering grey light and vaguely acknowledged the continuing rain. He could hear the sounds of cooking and singing coming from the room ahead, and forced his wooden legs to take bigger strides.
Nathan reached the doorway and stopped abruptly. Jacqui had her back to the door, standing in front of the stove, singing in a fake falsetto and dancing along barefoot to a song from a battered-looking radio nearby.
She was wearing some loose pants that sat low on her hips—probably that hemp stuff she loved so much—and a white strappy singlet that had ridden up to reveal the small of her back.
Her bottom was swaying, and she was clicking her fingers to the beat above her head. The bangles on her arms jingled and the metal of her rings blurred as her fingers wiggled and her corkscrew curls bounced in time.
He smiled at the scene before him. ‘You haven’t changed, I see.’
Jacqui nearly had a heart attack as his voice broke into her tuneless singing. She whirled around abruptly, her heart thundering. He was lounging in her doorway in nothing but his underwear and his stubble as if he belonged there. He had that just-rolled-out-of-bed look she’d always found utterly irresistible, and she was overwhelmed with a surge of lust she hadn’t felt in a decade.
Oh, God! No, no, no. She would not make this easy for him. He couldn’t show up at her door on a dark and stormy night, collapse on her couch for two days, tell her he needed his wife back before lapsing into unconsciousness, and then just expect her to melt into a puddle of desire at his feet.
‘You have.’
And he had. Even with next to nothing on, with his body essentially the same—familiar on so many levels—the changes were undeniable. He wasn’t the boy she’d lain naked with, spinning happy dreams on endless nights. Who’d been content eating cold spaghetti and drinking wine from a cardboard box. Who had thrived under killer shifts and arrogant consultants because he’d loved his job.
That boy was long gone. He was a man now. Successful beyond his wildest dreams. Aside from the designer threads, it was in the way he held himself, the proud tilt of his head, the commanding angle of his jaw. Even knocked flat by the flu, lying naked and vulnerable on her couch, there had been an undeniable authority, a tangible aura of power about him.
Nathan’s gaze was drawn to Jacqueline’s bare midriff, where the top had ridden up. Her belly button was as fascinating as it had always been. He moved higher. As usual she was braless, and he could see that despite her life-long aversion to supportive measures her breasts were still firm, her nipples just visible through the white fabric.
He shrugged. ‘We all change, Jacqui. Evolve.’ His gaze dropped to her chest again. ‘Well, most of us anyway.’
Jacqui placed a hand on her hip and raised an eyebrow. ‘Evolve, Nate? Or sell out?’
Nathan laughed, and regretted it as the dull ache behind his eyes gave a vicious pulse. ‘Evolve.’
Jacqui gave him a silky smile. ‘You say potato. I say po-tar-toe.’ She preferred cold-spaghetti-boy to medical-tycoon any day.
The toast popped behind her and she turned away, grateful for the reprieve from the gorgeous stranger in her husband’s skin.
‘You’re obviously better,’ she said, slathering butter onto the toast. ‘Hungry?’
Nathan’s stomach growled as he watched her, the sway of her hips as mesmerising as it had always been. ‘Ravenous.’
Jacqui gripped the knife hard as his voice, still a little husky from his flu, carried an entirely different meaning towards her altogether. She was conscious of him watching her every move as she bent and pulled the perfectly crisped bacon from the oven, adding it to the tray of goodies. She took a calming breath before lifting the tray and turning to face him, still unprepared for the familiar kick down low as his jade gaze slid over her.
‘Why are you really here, Nate?’
Because he needed his wife back. That was what he’d said. Needed. Not wanted. He needed her back. His choice of words had been curious. Very curious. And she’d turned them over in her mind a hundred times since he’d uttered them. Had he said he wanted her back she would have dismissed it as a flight of fancy issued from the depths of a flu-ravaged brain. But need. Need indicated necessity rather than desire. Need was an entirely different word altogether. It was more … calculated.
‘I told you. I want a reconciliation.’ And this time it wasn’t fever that glinted in his eyes but stone-cold purpose.
There was a moment of silence. Jacqui’s head spun and she gripped the tray so hard she was surprised it stayed in one piece. He just stood there, looking at her, his expression deadly serious. Oh, God! He hadn’t been delirious that night.
She swallowed. She couldn’t do this. Not on an empty stomach. Her gaze dropped to his naked chest. Not with him in his underwear. She moved forward, tossing her hair, praying her tremulous legs would carry her to her destination.
‘For God’s sake, Nate,’ she said as she passed by him, injecting as much bored-with-the-view into her voice as possible. ‘Put some clothes on.’
Nathan smiled as she strutted by, her nonchalance not fooling him for a moment. Her perfume embraced him in a hundred rekindled memories, and none of them involved her asking him to get dressed. In fact he doubted she’d ever uttered those words to him. ‘I remember a time when you would have asked me to take my clothes off,’ he said to her back.
Hell, he remembered a time when she would have ripped them off for him.
Jacqui almost stumbled with the tray as she set it down on the table. She took a moment fussing with the plates before she raised her face and looked him square in the eye. ‘Those times are long gone.’
Nathan noticed the determined jut of her chin and the hardening of her toffee eyes. Yes, they were. They seemed about a million years ago now. He pushed away from the doorframe. ‘I’ll be right back.’
He climbed into his trousers and his business shirt, doing up three buttons, rolling up the sleeves, not bothering to tuck it in. He joined Jacqui in her braless singlet and hemp pants, feeling way overdressed.
He smiled to himself as she swiped at some egg yolk that had dripped down her chin. ‘You are a disgrace to hippies everywhere—you know that, don’t you?’ he said as he took a seat opposite.
‘Not all hippies are veggies,’ she protested.
‘Just as well.’ He grinned, enjoying how she devoured her food. He’d used to love watching her eat. Like everything else, she did it with gusto. ‘They would have revoked your card years ago.’
Jacqui savoured the salty flavour of the free-range bacon and the warm squelch of locally churned butter, ignoring Nate’s familiar patter. He’d always teased her about her lackadaisical approach to the alternate lifestyle she’d embraced in her teens. A ‘hybrid hippy’, he had affectionately called her.
‘Mmm, but it tastes sooooo good,’ she said shutting her eyes in rapture. At the moment eating was preferable to thinking. Eating gave her a focus other than Nate’s preposterous statement.
Nathan shook his head and smiled at the look of bliss on her face. The corner of her mouth glistened with a smear of butter that in another time and place he would have taken great pleasure in removing with his tongue. Her corkscrew russet curls framed her face in the same wild abandon they had a decade ago, and she looked so happy, so sated. Like a goddess.
The hippy goddess of abundance.
‘How did I end up with you?’ he mused.
Jacqui opened her eyes and stared into his puzzled gaze. His beautifully sculpted lips sported a Mona Lisa smile. Their gazes locked, and for a moment neither of them said anything, contemplating their wild glory days when neither of them had needed anything but each other.
‘I don’t know, Nate. I don’t know.’
Nathan’s stomach grumbled and he broke their eye contact, helping himself to some toast and placing an egg on top. As hungry as he was, he didn’t think it wise to pile up his plate after two days of starvation. Jacqui was right, though, it did taste good. Damn good. He could feel the residual weakness from the flu virtually disappearing as he ate, the restorative effects of protein, carbohydrates and coffee making him feel bulletproof again. Preparing him for the verbal sparring to come.
‘So, I take it that’s your Porsche bogged down the road a bit?’ Everyone who had come into the clinic on Saturday had reported the unusual sighting.
He looked up at her and nodded. ‘Is it okay?’
Jacqui frowned. ‘Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Sports cars attract attention.’
She laughed. ‘Isn’t that the point?’
‘Sometimes not the good kind.’
‘This is hardly the Bronx, Nate. Don’t worry, your mid-life-crisis toy is safe here.’
Nathan chuckled, well used to her disdain for the trappings of wealth. ‘What makes you think my car represents a mid-life crisis?’
Jacqui shrugged. ‘You’re forty-two and you’re here.’
He laughed again. ‘Sorry to disappoint. I’m crisis-free.’
Although that wasn’t entirely true. He did have a problem or two. One she could help him with. The other … that odd, restless feeling that kept rearing its ugly head … that was best left undefined. Best left well alone.
‘Well, the car certainly doesn’t represent option number two.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes—you know. The I’m-compensating-for-a-lack-of-what-I-have-in-my-shorts toy.’ God knew she’d been reminded of that too often this weekend.
This time Nate roared laughing. ‘No. Nothing Freudian about it.’
Jacqui had forgotten how magnificent his laugh was, and she felt goosebumps feather her skin and her nipples tighten in blatant response to his sexy baritone. She watched over the rim of her coffee mug as the crinkles around his eyes and mouth relaxed. But the amusement still sparkled in his jade gaze.
God, she’d missed this. Sharing a meal with him.
She placed her coffee mug down on the table. Time to lay their cards on the table. Her stomach was full and he was dressed. She couldn’t bear the suspense any longer.
‘Okay, Nate. Spill. Why the bizarre request?’
Nathan watched her watching him, her gaze wary. Would she listen to him? Would she hear him out? Would she agree? ‘I have a … problem only you can help me with.’
Jacqui’s heart started drumming in her chest. It seemed so loud in the intense silence that followed his statement it was real competition for the rain on the roof. Surely he could hear it? ‘Go on.’
‘You ever heard of a guy called Vince Slater?’
Jacqui frowned, the name vaguely familiar. ‘Some rich old guy who’s on to wife number six?’
Nathan chuckled. Good summation. Except he was also a world-renowned financial genius, with razor-sharp business acumen and the Midas touch. And a friend.
‘That’s the guy. He’s agreed to join the executive of TrentFertility, which will put us in a very strong position for the float.’ He looked at Jacqui, looking at him as if he was speaking in tongues. ‘You do know about the float?’
Jacqui nodded. Her mother kept her up to date with all Nate’s goings on. She received regular clippings from the nation’s newspapers, all featuring Nate’s very commanding presence.
TrentFertility was about to go public.
