The Billionaire Claims His Wife

At the top she guided him to the lounge room. ‘Sit,’ she instructed him.

A hundred questions vied for front-line attention in her head as she scurried off to the linen cupboard. She pushed them aside. Nate was obviously unwell. Why he’d turned up on her doorstep after a decade could be discussed when he was better.

Nathan sneezed as his shaking fingers attempted to undo the buttons of his shirt. The warmth of the house was a welcome haven, but he needed to get out of his wet clothes. He cursed as he fumbled the job, the buttons refusing to budge.

‘Towels and blankets,’ Jacqueline announced, reentering the room with an armful of linen. She stopped in front of him, watching his feeble attempts at undressing himself.

Nathan looked up at her. Backlit by the light, her crazy ringlet hair of russet and gold looked almost angelic. Was he hallucinating? ‘I’m sorry. I can’t do it.’

Jacqueline gazed down at the whole lot of man sitting in her lounge, looking like a drowned rat and helpless as a kitten. It was an admission she knew wouldn’t have been easy for him. She sighed and knelt. ‘Let me.’

She briskly undid the buttons, ignoring the chest she’d known like the back of her hand ten years ago, and pushed the wet shirt off his shoulders and down his arms. She grabbed one of her towels and threw it around his shoulders, cocooning him in it while she attacked his dripping hair with another.

Nathan drew the soft fluffy towel closer. It smelt like soap and sunshine and Jacqui, and he closed his eyes, hunching into it, absorbing its warmth. The fabric rasped against his heated flesh, goosing his skin. A wet nose nudged his hand and he opened his eyes.

‘You still have Shep,’ he said, stroking the dog’s head. He’d given her the golden retriever as an anniversary gift years before.

Jacqui’s heart skipped a beat. ‘Yes,’ she said briskly, continuing the job.

He sat placidly, his hand on Shep’s back, as she towelled his hair, incapable of offering any assistance. A shard of a memory from their past undulated through the fevered quagmire of his brain.

His eyes fluttered open. ‘You used to like to play with my hair,’ he murmured.

Jacqueline’s hands stilled, and she looked into his amazing green eyes. They were glazed with fever, and she could see the lights were on but no one was home. She ignored him, taking his shoes off. ‘You’re going to have to stand so I can get your pants off.’

Nathan heard the words come towards him from far away. They sounded disconnected, and he gave a goofy laugh. ‘You used to like to get my pants off, too.’

Jacqueline gritted her teeth, reminding herself it was the delirium talking. ‘Up you get.’

He rose slowly and leaned against her as she reached for his fly. He gave another juvenile laugh, and she rolled her eyes as she dispensed with his soaked trousers and underwear, trying to channel a mother superior–like indifference.

He stood still while she briskly rubbed him down, drying his legs with as much clinical detachment as she could muster, ignoring another part of his anatomy she’d once known like the back of her hand.

He swayed again, and she held on to him with one hand while the other arranged some bedding on the couch. ‘You can sit now,’ she murmured.

Nathan collapsed back onto the couch. He felt icy cold all over and he shivered, tucking his legs up towards his chest. ‘Freezing,’ he murmured, wrapping his arms around his knees.

He looked incredibly vulnerable, naked on her couch in the foetal position, the overhead light bathing his superbly tanned body in a soft golden hue. He almost looked like the boy she had met at uni, not one of the most influential men in the country, and she threw a one-hundred-percent-duck-down duvet over him to block the image from her sight and her mind.

She looked down at him for a long time. ‘What are you doing here, Nathan Trent?’ she whispered.

Jacqui placed Nate’s clothes into the washing machine, ignoring the ‘dry clean only’ advice next to the designer label. She hung his jacket up and parked his equally expensive-looking shoes near the front door.

She crept back into the lounge. Shep had taken up position on the floor near the couch, and thumped his tail as he spotted her. She switched off the overhead light and reached across Nathan’s supine form to snap on the nearby lamp.

He looked totally out of it, his cheeks flushed, his full lips slack with slumber. She stroked the back of her hand against his roughened jaw. He was hot. So hot. He murmured something unintelligible, shifting slightly, and she withdrew her hand abruptly, scuttling away to the couch opposite.

Her heart drummed a crazy beat, matching the inclement weather in its ferocity, and she held her breath. Fortunately Nathan settled quickly—which couldn’t be said for her pulse—and she sank gratefully into the leather cushions, pulling her feet up under her.

God, how she’d used to love watching him sleep. Of course his hair had been longer then. A curly mop that she had loved to push her fingers into, rub her face against. It was shorter now, cropped closer to his head, its tendency to curl severely denied.

He had slept naked then too. They both had. Clothes had seemed such an inconvenience when neither of them had been able to get enough of each other. Even at the end, when they had drifted apart, their desire had still been a potent force, keeping them bound to a marriage that no longer worked.

Jacqui shut her eyes against the memories. There was no point dredging up the past. The man lying on her couch might be the man she’d married all those years ago—was still technically married to—but he was as much a stranger to her now as he had been at the end. And wishing things had been different didn’t make it so.

It was five a.m. when Jacqui next awoke, her neck stiff from falling asleep in a semi-upright position. The rain still pelted against the roof like a platoon of tap-dancing soldiers, and a grey watery dawn was breaking through the window. And Nathan Trent still slept on her couch.

Except the duvet no longer covered him. At some stage he had moved onto his back, pushed the blanket down to his hips, exposing his smooth, bare chest and only just covering what lay a little further south. The long leg closest to the edge of the couch jutted out too, escaping its covering, its foot flat on the floor. The opposite arm was thrown up over his head, his face turned away from her, pressing into the bulk of his bicep.

Dear God, he was gorgeous. She’d tried not to look before, as she’d been undressing him, but now she couldn’t stop. Maturity had given his body an edge, a hardness that youth hadn’t. He’d always had a good body, but now he looked … fit. More honed. As if he worked at it now instead of relying on a God-given gift.

He murmured and turned his head, and she held her breath. His eyes fluttered open. The clocks stopped. The rain faded. Her breath stuttered to a halt. It took a second or two for those incredible jade eyes to focus on her.

‘Thirsty,’ he croaked.

It took another beat or two for her functions to return. She sucked in a breath. ‘Right. Okay. Be right back.’

Nathan watched her leave, trying to figure out where he was and why Jacqui was here. But his head felt as if it was stuffed with cotton wool, and it hurt too much to think anyway. He sat up and the room shifted. He vaguely felt Shep lick his calf as he buried his forehead in his hands and waited for everything to stop moving.

Jacqueline entered the room and paused momentarily. He looked even more imposing sitting upright, his back and chest and both legs exposed, the duvet bunched around his hips.

‘Take these,’ she said, injecting a businesslike note into her voice, forcing herself closer. She nudged his hand with the glass, two pills on the flat of her palm.

‘What are they?’ he asked, looking at them.

‘Cold and flu tablets.’

Nathan reached for them as they swam out of focus. He located them through sheer force of will. He felt as if someone had been lighting spot fires in his joints, and would have taken any pill she’d given him to extinguish the flames. He pushed them past his lips, into a mouth that tasted sour and furry, and gulped the whole glass down.

‘Thanks,’ he murmured, collapsing back against his makeshift bed as a coughing spasm took hold. The aches intensified, pulsing in protest as each cough tore through his spine, his chest, his head.

Jacqueline frowned. The cough sounded nasty. Maybe it was more than the flu? Maybe he’d managed to give himself bilateral pneumonia in the pouring rain last night? She left him for a moment and retrieved her medical bag from the clinic downstairs.

His eyes were shut when she returned. She opened her bag, pulled out her stethoscope, and perched herself on the edge of his couch. She rubbed the stethoscope in her hands to warm it, and then placed it on his still exposed chest.

Nathan opened his eyes. Jacqui. Jacqui was still here. ‘What are you doing?’ he murmured.

‘That cough sounds nasty. Just checking your lung fields,’ she said briskly. ‘Sit up.’ She grabbed his arm and pulled.

Nathan couldn’t muster the energy to resist. ‘It’s just the flu,’ he protested. He was a doctor, damn it. He knew flu when it had the audacity to invade his usually impenetrable immune system.

Her long fingers felt heavenly against his skin, the wide bands of her rings like icicles. He studied the chunky jewellery adorning her fingers. The intertwined strands of metal set with earthy stones took him way back, to days when they’d eaten spaghetti straight from the tin before crashing together in a tangle of limbs after night duty. When they’d stayed up late eating honey toast and watching old black and white horror films in bed.

‘I could have given you diamonds,’ he muttered.

But even his feverish brain recalled she hadn’t given a damn about diamonds. It had been her funky eclectic style, sourced from garage sales and op shops, that had attracted him all those years ago. And cheap and cheerful still looked better on her than any diamond on any woman he’d ever seen.

Jacqui heard his voice rumble through her earpieces as she moved the stethoscope around his back, but his eyes were shut and she dismissed the odd statement as his temperature talking. His skin was warm under her touch, and the urge to rub her cheek against his oh-so-close shoulder was surprisingly powerful.