Page 7 of Prognosis Irreconcilable Differences

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’d rather 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.

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