Page 44 of Prognosis Irreconcilable Differences

Nathan took a moment to gather his thoughts — a little difficult when all his blood was stubbornly stuck down yonder. He’d got carried away with the moment, with that mouth. He needed to take it back a step or two.

‘Come with me. I want to show you something.’

Jacqueline looked at his outstretched hand and blinked at the abrupt request. ‘I have to go.’

‘Please, Jacq. It won’t take long.’

She shut her eyes at the way his voice sighed her nickname. His gaze was roving over her as if he had X-ray vision. Her skin tingled in the wake of those knowing green eyes. Where did he want to take her? And what did he have in mind?

She knew exactly where they’d end up if she went with him now. But she had the rest of her life to be sensible.

To be alone.

Tonight she needed to be with her man in the most carnal way possible. To say goodbye. She took his hand. ‘Okay.’

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‘What are we doing here?’ she asked as Nathan pulled the car up in his space at Paradise Private Hospital ten minutes later.

Nathan’s heart thudded in anticipation. This was his last ace. ‘I told you. I want to show you something.’

Jacqui sat motionless for a few seconds, looking out of the window. And then he was opening her door and ushering her out, and before she knew it they were standing in the middle of his office, where she had watched him with Sonya that fateful day.

‘What are we doing here?’ she repeated.

Nathan shrugged. He wasn’t sure why he’d brought her here — he’d just gone with his gut. Maybe he felt more comfortable with her here in a hospital, as a doctor, than he did in a business suit in his sixtieth-floor apartment.

This was the man she knew him as — the man she saw underneath the billionaire veneer and through the mists of ten years’ separation.

The man she’d fallen in love with.

‘Just wanted to get a feel for it again, I suppose.’

He wandered around his office, his desk, touching things. He shrugged out of his jacket and discarded it on the back of his chair. He picked up his stethoscope and loved the feel of the heavy bell in the palm of his hand. He stopped in front of his examination couch and looked at the pictures on the corkboard.

All those satisfied customers, all those happy families. Couldn’t he have that too? Was that too much to ask?

‘I wasn’t totally honest tonight, Jacq.’

Jacqueline leaned against his desk, watching the pull of white cotton across his broad back and the way his hair just brushed the collar. ‘Oh?’

He turned. ‘Medicine doesn’t complete me.’

She frowned. Okay. Where was he going with this? ‘Oh?’ she said again, a slight squeak heightening her reply.

‘I’m nothing without you.’

Despite everything, her heart leapt as if it had been prodded with a defib paddle.

‘I love you. I don’t think I ever stopped loving you. I don’t want you to go.’

She clutched the desk and reminded herself to keep her head. One of them had to be the voice of sanity.

‘I was a fool to let you walk. A fool not to see that you were the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m so very sorry I wasted a decade of our lives chasing a dream that wasn’t even mine.’

Jacqui swallowed, her heart nearly blowing a hole in her chest, it was beating so forcefully. ‘Nate. This is insane. It’s too late. We’ve been apart for too long.’

‘But I’ve never stopped thinking about you, Jacq. You were always there at the back of my head, with your bangles and your crazy hair. Why do you think I went into fertility?’

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