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