I Married a Billionaire: Lost and Found (Contemporary Romance) (3 page)

Daniel looked up, sharply. "And who would that be?" he said, a little louder than necessary.

"You might remember them. I believe you were involved in some…legal troubles with a few them, actually."

My husband stood abruptly, rattling the table.

"Maddy," he said. "Let’s go."

I got up to follow him, and the journalist jumped to his feet as well. "Mr. Thorne," he said, tripping over his chair to come after us. "Mr. Thorne, please, if you could just give me a minute more of your time -"

One of the waitstaff appeared out of nowhere, grabbing the journalist by the arm and yanking him back. Daniel was walking quickly back to the lobby of the hotel, and I hurried after him, my feet sinking into the sand as I tried to pick up my pace. He put his hand on the small of my back and urged me forward.

"What was that all about?" I muttered, under my breath, but he didn’t answer.

We’d made it halfway back to our room before I saw someone hurrying towards us - I recognized him as the resort manager, who’d introduced himself to use when we checked in.

"Mr. and Mrs. Thorne," he said, slightly breathless. "Please accept my deepest apologies. I was just informed by the restaurant staff -"

"It’s fine," said Daniel, shortly. "Not your fault."

"All the same," said the manager. "I promise you, he will be removed from the premises. We absolutely do not allow our guests to be harassed."

"Thank you," said Daniel, hurrying me into the room and shutting the door behind us.

***

I didn’t ask any more questions until dinner - which was room service, naturally. Daniel had been doing a lot of pacing and looking out of the open wall, but hadn’t ventured back outside yet.

"What was that guy talking about?"

He was looking at me, so I knew he heard the question, but he paused a long time before answering. "There was a lawsuit," he said. "A long time ago." He took another bite and chewed thoughtfully. "It was frivolous, but I settled. One of the conditions of which was that neither one of us would discuss the details."

I leaned forward slightly. "Not even with your wife?"

He just shrugged.

After he’d opened another bottle of wine, he looked at me again, carefully, and seemed to notice the way my eyebrows were still slightly knit together.

"Don’t worry about it," he said. "It’s nothing."

"I’m not worried," I said. "Just curious, that’s all."

"It’s very boring," said Daniel, smiling. "I promise."

Somehow, that didn’t make me feel any better.

After dinner, Daniel went to take a shower, and I immediately pulled out my phone to see if I could search out some details of the mysterious lawsuit. Normally I tried to avoid searching for his name, for my own sanity, but his reticence had me deathly curious.

I knew that there was a decent chance it wouldn’t have been well-covered, especially if it was more than handful of years ago. But it turned out to be even worse than I’d suspected; there wasn’t a single mention of Daniel Thorne being involved in any sort of lawsuit, ever.
 

This was going to drive me absolutely insane. There was plenty I still didn’t know about Daniel, after all the time we’d spent together, but nothing had ever intrigued me this much. One thing was clear: he didn’t
want
to tell me. I was pretty sure whatever settlement he’d agreed to didn’t actually preclude him from sharing the details with his
wife
, for God’s sake.
 

What had the journalist said? Something about Daniel’s "ability to take action" being the thing that set him apart from the crowd. It had put Daniel on his guard - clearly, that meant something.

I curled up on the sofa and tried, unsuccessfully, to quiet my mind. These last few months had been…strange, to say the least. From time to time, I still felt like I was just pretending to be Daniel’s wife. I still held the secret, deep inside, that our relationship hadn’t started out as something real. No matter what had happened since - no matter what we were
now
- every time we were out together, every time I told "our story," every time he put his arm around me, every time I looked at him, I would remember.

But then there were those other times.
 

A few weeks ago, before we’d left for our second honeymoon, I remembered walking into the kitchen and catching sight of him unexpectedly. He was folded up on the floor, halfway under the sink, and really my first thought should have been
oh God, I hope he’s not trying to fix something himself
. But instead, I just stood there, dead still, and my heart twisted with a feeling so intense I almost couldn’t breathe for a moment.

These little interludes were becoming more and more frequent. I’d grown up as one of those girls who rolled my eyes when people talked about love so strong it was a physical pain in your chest, and now I’d turned into one of them.

But still, I had a hard time to wrapping my head around the concept of Daniel Thorne, the businessman. I was starting to become more familiar with him as a public figure, but that was different. Not too long ago I’d seen him give a keynote address in front of a crowd so large it almost gave
me
stage fright on his behalf. But he didn’t show a sign of nervousness, and he commanded them with an effortless charisma. He was still uncomfortable dealing with people one-on-one, but he’d gotten much better at hiding it. I think I was often the only one who noticed how much he wanted to shrink into the corner, once the speeches were over.
 

The part of his mind that actually came up with ideas, and figured out how to act on them, was still a mystery to me. There were times when I wouldn’t see much of him for a few days - he’d spend nearly all his time in the office, only coming home to sleep occasionally. When it was over, he’d have pages and pages of ideas submitted to the people who actually implemented whatever he came up with. But now, I found myself wondering what his process had been like before he had a whole team of people to do the practical work for him. When he got his first ideas, did he build the prototypes himself? Where had they come from? Were they simply strokes of inspiration, or had he toiled over them for days, weeks, years?

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."

"Thats’ a bit
X-Files
, isn’t it?" Daniel smiled. "Actually, come to think of it - wasn’t there a pinecone or something in the opening credits?"

"Seeds," I corrected, closing my hand around the shell again. "It was seeds sprouting." I went to my bag and started wrapping the shell up in a spare bra.

"I thought that was for me," Daniel said.

"It is." I zipped the bag shut. "I’m just keeping it safe for you."

He didn’t say anything else about it.

We arrived back in New York at six o' clock, right in the heart of the rush hour. After an arduous trip home, when we finally stumbled through the front door, all I wanted to do was lie down. But there was one thing I had to see first.
 

I stopped at the end table in the hall. The doorman had been bringing in our mail. I wondered if it was a service he often provided or a special favor just for Daniel - but I was afraid to ask. I sifted through the pile of envelopes eagerly, and then once more, with slightly less enthusiasm. Finding nothing of interest, I dropped it all back on the hall table with a dramatic thump.

"Nothing from the galleries?" Daniel asked, gently kicking his suitcase towards the foot of the stairs while he stripped off his shirt. I had to smile, in spite of myself. He was such a consummate multi-tasker he sometimes seemed incapable of doing only one thing at a time.

"No," I said. "Not yet."

"Well, I'm sure they must get a lot of submissions," he said, walking down the hallway to the bathroom with the majority of his clothes balled up under one arm. I sort of hated the false cheerfulness in his voice, but what did I want him to say, really?
Well, dear, you're probably buried deep in their slush pile, never to be seen again. 

I wandered into the kitchen and turned the hot water on, scrubbing my arms up to the elbows like I was going into surgery. Daniel always showered after flying, and while I understood the impulse, my skin already felt like a desert. I stripped out of my wrinkled traveling clothes, pulled on some sweats and a tee-shirt from my former life, and collapsed on the sofa.

I dug my phone out of my pocket and began scrolling through it aimlessly. When Daniel came back out, still toweling his hair, I waved the maddening device at him.

"What now?" he said, heading for the fridge.