Lily whispered after Laura had scurried from the room, “Call Fazire, please.”
“Of course,” Nate assured her quietly.
“Tell him not to come.”
Nate didn’t respond.
“He’ll want to come but tell him you’ll take care of me.” Her eyes fluttered open and slid to him but her head didn’t move. “Tell him I said that.”
Nate should have reacted to the importance her words, wanted to, but at that moment he couldn’t. He heard his personal physician, Dr. Sims coming into the room with Laura.
Lily closed her eyes and Nate rose from the bed to allow the doctor access.
“What’s happened?” Dr. Sims asked.
“She says it’s a migraine,” Nate replied, his words clipped.
“Does she have them often?” the physician went on.
Nate couldn’t respond because he didn’t know. And this caused the control he had on his fury to slip a notch. If they’d had the last eight years together, he would have known.
“Yes.” It was Lily who answered.
“How often?” Dr. Sims asked her gently, taking her pulse.
“Not often.”
“Do you know your triggers?” he enquired, his voice soft and low.
“Stress,” she answered and Nate’s fury mingled immediately with a surge of guilt which caused it to slip another notch, “sometimes my period.”
“Are you on your cycle now?” Dr. Sims asked.
“It’s coming. The pain only comes just before,” she replied.
“Let’s get you sorted.” The doctor glanced at Nate then to Laura. His meaning clear, they were to leave.
“I’m not going,” Nate stated firmly.
Dr. Sims moved away and motioned Nate to follow, this he did but halted before they even came close to the door.
“Migraine sufferers need quiet, darkness, rest. I’ll give her something to help her sleep. We’ll talk outside but now she needs to be left alone and we need to get her to sleep. It’s the best thing, sometimes the only thing for it.”
Nate stared at Lily still pressing the flannel to her head and then glanced at the doctor.
Wishing only to speed the process of her recovery, he nodded and walked out of the room. Laura had already gone.
In the living room Laura was gathering her things, she heard rather than saw Nate come into the vast room.
“I’ll go to the shops, get her a nightgown, a change of clothes…” Laura needed something to do and she had nothing therefore she was creating busy work.
Nate stopped her hasty exit. “I need you to call Fazire. Tell him she’s here and she’s not well. Tell him that I’m taking care of her. Please tell him Lily said that.”
At the words “I need you”, Laura’s head jerked around. At the word “please” her face melted and her eyes began to shimmer with tears.
Nate had never said the former to her in his life. And the latter he rarely said to anyone.
She immediately dropped her bag and rushed toward the kitchen saying, “I’ll do that now.” Then she stopped and swung around. “What’s the number?”
He smiled at his mother, feelings of immense gratitude at her being there when he needed her, when Lily needed her, warring with his anger. Nate told her the number he’d only used once but, as per usual, he’d memorised.
She muttered it over and over to herself as she ran to the kitchen.
Nate stopped himself from getting a drink which he very much needed. He couldn’t get Lily’s appalling whimpering out of his head and he couldn’t lose his fury at his feeling of powerlessness. That was not a feeling he was used to and he very much did not like it.
But he couldn’t have a drink. It was before noon and furthermore, Lily might need him.
Laura came back in the room. “Fazire says he wants Lily to call him when she’s better. He wants her to know he’ll take care of Natasha. And he wanted to know why she was here,” she reported.
Nate pulled his hand through his hair and then stopped it at his neck to squeeze away some of the tension that had settled there. “I’ve no idea why she’s here. She showed up at my office and by the time I arrived at reception, she was barely able to stand.”
When his secretary had told him a Lily Jacobs was waiting in reception, he’d immediately thought it was a good sign. She had been consistently adamant they talk through their solicitors. Her solicitor was a pit bull, constant demands, constant threats and Nate was told in no uncertain terms (through his own solicitors, of course) to stay away from Lily.
This Nate ignored.
Lily’s arrival in London was an unexpected surprise.
He knew he’d broken through on the first day with her. She responded to him and what’s more, Tash had, spectacularly.
He also knew by the way Tash talked, a great deal, about what her mother had said about him, that Lily had been pining for a “dead” Nate for years.
And finally, Nate definitely knew that she’d gotten lost in him the last time they were together. One didn’t get as angry as she was without feeling something.
Nate knew a fair few things about anger. There was the mean kind and there was the emotional kind. Lily didn’t have a mean bone in her body. Lily’s anger was emotional, something deep inside her driving it. And whatever that something was drove her to react to his kiss, his touch, in her familiar, uninhibited way.
That something, whatever it was, at this point was everything to Nate.
Nate could work with something.
Furthermore, with one look at their daughter’s hopeful, happy face, she had given into a family dinner. He’d known eight years ago she’d never break up a family and he was betting on the fact that hadn’t changed.
When his secretary had told Nate she was there, he’d wasted no time in going to her. But, regardless of this, the reason for her visit was a still mystery.
It could be a yes or it could be a no. He was counting on a yes.
He dropped his arm and shook off his thoughts. He’d know soon enough and Nate was a patient man.
He watched as Laura glanced at the hall that led to his bedroom then back at Nate.
“Do you think Natasha sees her like that?” she asked quietly.
Nate thought of his daughter and the coat of Teflon that Lily had obviously painstakingly crafted around Natasha to ward off anything that would affect their daughter’s high spirits and good humour. They had little but Natasha needed for nothing and had no idea what she was missing or, indeed, from her personality, any of her mother’s struggles or sacrifices.