I Married a Billionaire: Lost and Found(7)

A unpleasant notion was growing in my mind, and I tried to shake it off, but it had already taken root. What if there was someone else? In the vague lore of Daniel’s rise to success, which I’d seen written and re-written in many different articles, there was never any mention of someone else. To hear him tell it, he’d been completely alone from the beginning.

But that didn’t seem very likely, did it?

No, no, no. I had to stop. There was absolutely no use in this line of thought. I was allowing myself to speculate coldly, as if he were some distant figure I knew nothing about, instead of my husband. The fact that I hadn’t come to terms with the paradox in my own mind didn’t give me the right to make ugly assumptions about his past.

Daniel came out of the bathroom smiling and toweling his hair. And completely naked.

Every single thought vanished from my head.

"Don’t look so pensive," he said, turning and slinging the towel over a rack nearby. "The interview’s not still bothering you, is it?"

"Not so much at the moment," I said, eyeing him.

He grinned. "It’s a good thing you don’t still work for me. I could have you fired for inappropriate behavior based solely on the way you’re looking at me, Ms. Wainwright."

"Yeah, I think it might actually be more inappropriate to walk around naked in front of your employees," I said, sitting up and stretching out across the sofa as he came closer. "But I won’t tell if you don’t."

He knelt on the sofa, leaning down over me, one of his legs planted firmly between my thighs. "But how do I know I can trust you?"

I smiled innocently. "I’m told I have a trustworthy face."

I wasn’t used to seeing him like this. Usually, at this point, he’d still be at least mostly dressed. I found myself unable to tear my eyes away from the angles of his naked body as he loomed over me - watching the way his muscles tensed and stretched, how they moved under his skin. He worked hard to maintain his body, presumably more for his health than for my personal benefit, but I appreciated it nonetheless.

"There might be something you could do," I said, softly, letting my fingers trace each taut little swell of muscle on his stomach. "But I don’t know if you’ll like it very much."

He brushed his lips against mine, so softly it almost didn’t count as a kiss.

"Try me," he whispered.

My throat tightened. I needed him, suddenly, urgently, and I didn’t have the patience to carry on with our little game. And judging by what I could feel resting hot and heavy against my stomach, I wasn’t alone.

"Daniel," I whispered, intending to say more, but he read my face and hushed me with a kiss, pulling my panties aside and slipping inside me quickly. I sighed at the familiarity and how perfect it was. Every time. I locked my ankles around his waist and tilted my hips up to meet him, trying to ignore the wonderful, painful twisting in my chest when I looked at his face.

The sun was sinking down low in the sky. By the time he shuddered and stilled on top of me, I could hardly see his face.





***

Before I knew it, we were packing for the journey back home. The time had flown by, as vacations always do, even with the few unusual hiccups along the way. As I rolled up my dresses and tucked them into my bag, I couldn’t help but wonder if every vacation was going to be like this now. Were we going to be warding off wannabe-muckrakers at every turn?

And what on earth had that journalist been talking about?

As I passed by the little table on Daniel’s side of the bed, I noticed the little nautilus shell was still there. As far as I could tell, it hadn’t moved from when I’d set it down the other day. I picked it up and looked at it again. It was even more pristine than I’d noticed out on the beach, every little compartment and membrane intact. Even if Daniel wasn’t impressed, it was pretty amazing to me that nature could create something this complex and beautiful.

I heard the boards creak under his feet as he came into the room.

"Still infatuated with that shell, aren’t you?" he said. But he was smiling.

"I just think it’s pretty amazing, is all." I turned it over in my hand. "Did you ever learn about the Fibonacci sequence in school?"

"Can’t say that I did." He was gathering up his socks.

"It’s a series of numbers," I said, still staring down at the shell. "Starting with zero and one, and then every number after that is the sum of the previous two. So it goes zero, one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen…like that. And it turns out, if you draw a bunch of squares with sides of those lengths all nested together in the right order, and draw a spiral around them…" I demonstrated the curl pattern of the shell with my index finger. "It’s the exact same pattern as this shell."

"Remarkable," he said. I honestly couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

"I think it’s cool," I said, turning the shell over in my hand. "Sometimes everything seems so chaotic all the time, it’s nice to remember that it’s not, always."

He sat down on the bed, finally looking at me with something vaguely like interest. "Why do you suppose that is?"




"Why the shell?" He nodded at this, and I shrugged. "Who can say for sure? I mean, it’s not just shells. It’s everywhere. The seeds in a sunflower, the spirals of a pinecone - like things just sort of…want to be a certain way, you know? They’re following some kind of ancient pattern they don’t even understand."