Rediscovering Love - A Billionaire Romance Novel (Romance, Billionaire Romance, Life After Love Book 5)

by Nancy Adams

  “Okay. Bye.”

  The phone went dead and the driver pulled over. Claire paid the cab, jumped out and strolled into the hospital entrance, smiling and waving her ID badge at the security in reception as she went through. It wasn’t long before she was ready and reporting for duty on one of the wards.

  The first hours of her shift went by with little in the way of drama. It was early evening on a Wednesday, so ER wasn’t particularly busy, just minor injuries—a woman that had broken her ankle slipping on the sidewalk, a cyclist that had been hit by a car and received grazes and a sprained wrist, and a man that had been given a cut eye and broken nose after an altercation in the subway. It was all work that Claire could have done in her sleep and she went about things with her usual assuredness, her supervising doctor simply standing back and admiring both her ability to engage with the patient and her medical knowledge.

  She was checking the large wound of a man who the day before had crashed through a pane glass window on his motorbike and received a thirty-inch gash around his abdomen. The wound had been stapled together the previous night and Claire was checking it while the man lay on his side, the dressing undone and flapping down his back.

  “That doesn’t feel too uncomfortable for you, does it, Mr. Burn?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” the big man replied. “'Specially not with your dainty little hands poking around there.”

  “Mr. Burn, I’ll have you know my hands are lethal weapons,” Claire joked, “and not as dainty as you might think!”

  “Then I’ll have to be on my guard.”

  “You will.”

  She felt around the wound a little more and was pleased that it was healing sufficiently.

  “Well, Mr. Burn,” she said taking her hands away and allowing the nurse to come in and place the bandage back on, “it’s safe to say that it’s coming together nicely.”

  “Does that mean I get to go home?”

  “In a day or two. With a wound this dangerously placed and so large, we prefer to keep patients in for observation a little longer than maybe they think we should. But it’s all for the better. Imagine your sutures split while you’re at home. It’s gonna be terrible for you. Therefore, it’s better to wait a little longer for a scab to properly form over the wound. Then we’ll send you back.”

  “A day or two, you say? Well, I guess another few nights in this place won’t worry me too much.”

  “You have visitors?”

  “Yeah, my wife, kids, brother, mom, dad and everyone.”

  “Then you’ll be okay.”

  “I guess. Cheers, doc.”

  With that, Claire and her supervising doctor left the nurse to finish redressing the wound and began walking out of the ward.

  However, when Claire looked toward the end of the long room, she almost jumped when she saw the forlorn figure of Paul waiting there for her. He was standing right in the middle of the floor with his hands shoved into the pockets of his jacket and a bitter look on his face, his dark eyes boring into her as she came toward him.

  “Clive,” she said to her supervising doctor, “I’ll meet you on the next ward, I have to speak to someone first.”

  “Okay, Claire,” he answered. “I’ll see you down there.”

  She came up to Paul, who stood stock still and silent as her colleague left.

  “You okay?” she asked him.

  He took in a deep breath and then let it out slowly.

  “I haven’t come here to catch up,” he said after he had.

  “Then what have you come here for?”

  “I’ve come to say goodbye.”

  “You wanna go somewhere else?”

  He looked at her for a moment and she shuddered to see such open hostility in his expression. It was then that she saw the untreated gash on the side of his head.

  “You should get some stitches in that.”

  “It’s too late,” he answered blankly. Then, after a pause, he added, “Maybe we should do this elsewhere.”

  “There’s a nice coffee shop around the corner, you wanna go there?”

  “No, the hospital is fine. We can go out back where the ambulances come in.”

  “Okay.”

  They walked out of the hospital via the back entrance and he didn’t say one word to her the whole time they strolled along the corridors out of there. When they reached the bay at the back of the hospital, they stood to the side of the loading bay, where the paramedics usually smoked, out of the way of anybody.

  There was a moment’s pause, and then Paul remarked, “So the world doesn’t know yet.”

  “No,” she replied in a sad tone, instantly feeling the malice in his words.

  “You thinking of putting something in the local paper?” he joked. “Or you thinking bigger? Maybe a poster up outside town hall?”

  “Why did you come here?”

  “To say goodbye, why else?”

  “To annoy me.”

  “I’m annoying you!? Oh, I’m sorry.”

  They were silent for a while as Paul faced forward, gazing blankly ahead, biting his lip, tapping his heal and fidgeting on the spot. He seemed a restless bag of motion and Claire watched him with unrest. He appeared to want to say something. But what, she didn’t know.

  “I guess Beth already told you,” he began after their pause, his eyes still facing forward on some indiscriminate spot, “but I go back to my parents’ place tonight. I fly out from Kennedy in three hours.”

  “Yeah, she did tell me. For what it’s worth, I think it’s good.”

  “Yeah, me too. For what it’s worth.”

  Again they were silent, and again she observed his jittery movements, his hands moving in the pockets of his jacket, his teeth nibbling away at his bottom lip.

  “You know the worst thing you ever did to me,” he suddenly announced, turning to face her, his voice seething with inner spite, “was to allow me to live in a dream. I suspected that your feelings for Sam were incredibly strong the moment I first saw your reaction to seeing him on the news after giving birth to your son. I mean, when I saw it, I thought to myself that I would die for someone to react like that to me. To lose all the color in their face. To become speechless. To bring tears to their eyes at the mere presence of my image. What I’d do for a love like that; for a girl like that. What I’d do for you—Claire Prior—to love me like that. I asked you several times about your feelings for him and you told me a different lie every time.”

  “I didn’t lie to you, Paul. Everything was so complicated. I told you that he was the past and it was true. I thought I’d never see him again.”

  “But you did see him again. You did and it all came back. You never let me know the true capacity of your feelings for him. You never let me know that you loved him more than me and always would. You could have let me go. Stopped me from going through life thinking I was happy. Thinking I had it made. All that time I was fucked though, wasn’t I? Smiling and waving to everyone as I sailed toward a waterfall. Walking around in a daze while the world crumbled around me. All the time—”

  “Lower your voice, Paul,” she snapped at him.

  He stopped and glanced around him. It was true. Throughout his rant, his voice had become louder and louder, until Claire was forced to act when she noticed that many of the paramedics by the entrance were looking over to see if everything was okay between them.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking a little sheepish.

  “Look, Paul, I don’t want to argue. If that’s what you’ve come for, then you best leave.”

  He was quiet for a short while, biting his lip even more rapidly, facing away from her once again. He appeared to be weighing something up in his head.

  It was then, with a sharp movement, that he turned to her and said, “I came to say one thing. You started our relationship with a secret in your heart. You secretly loved someone else and that meant that you could never love me the way that I loved you. You kept that secret from me and it meant that I cou
ld never get fully into your heart. Secrets destroy relationships, Claire. They’re like a small bruise on an apple. At first it’s just small and insignificant, so you ignore it. But gradually it festers and begins to spread, until it’s rotted all the rest of the fruit.”

  They were silent for a moment, both of them gazing out across the loading bay. The sun was now below the horizon and the city was drenched in golden twilight.

  “And that’s all you came to say?” Claire asked, breaking the silence.

  “Yep,” he said sharply. Before adding, “And to wish you good luck.”

  He turned abruptly to her and offered his hand. She looked down at it curiously, a little put off by his odd behavior, until she gingerly took it and he shook her hand warmly.

  “Anyway, adios!” he said, before turning and walking away, back into the hospital, not once turning back to her.

  Claire simply stood their stunned, watching him leave, a trepidation growing inside of her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jules was stuck underneath the car repairing the break fluid. He’d been there most of the day trying to repair it, as well as do some other light repairs on the manifold with his welding torch. Meanwhile, Juliette was inside the trailer with David and Gwen’s two boys. They were playing away on David’s Joy-Box and Juliette was doing some light housework. Gwen was on a date with a friend of hers she’d met online, so they were due to have the boys all night. He hadn’t heard a peep out of the house for some time, but he was too engrossed in fixing the car to notice.

  Jules was fixing the car because he didn’t know if they would have to suddenly leave in a hurry. The visit from the social services the other night had unsettled him, and he worried for his family’s immediate future. In the nights since, he had had many nightmares of Juliette being locked away somewhere that he was unable to reach, crying out to him from some hidden room that he wasn’t allowed near.

  It was then, as he worked away, that Jules began to smell the aroma of smoke. His first reaction was to check down by his feet to see if he hadn’t left his welding torch on. But when he looked, he saw that it was off. He sniffed the air again. Yes, he definitely smelt smoke.

  He began sliding himself out from underneath the car and when he was all the way, he stood up. Straightaway he saw smoke in the kitchen through the window of the trailer and he ran to the door. Looking inside, he saw that the cooker was on fire, flames reaching all the way up the wall and spreading out across the ceiling in a giant plume. His immediate reaction was to pull the door open, but when he did, it let a gust of air into the room and the flames erupted, the heat throwing Jules back away from the door.

  Covering his eyes as the smoke billowed out the door at him, he realized that he couldn’t enter via the kitchen.

  It was then that Jules heard the screams and cries of the boys inside.

  “PA! PA!” David cried out to him.

  “GO TO THE FAR END O’ THE CORRIDOR,” Jules shouted with all his might into the trailer. “GO THERE AND I’LL BREAK THE WINDOW AND GET YOU OUT.”

  Jules instantly grabbed ahold of a large wrench from his toolbox and ran to the other end of the trailer to the large window there. Looking inside, he immediately saw the three boys come running up to it.

  “STAND BACK!” Jules shouted to them.

  They did as they were told and got as far back as they could, the smoke reaching into the corridor from the kitchen behind them, the light of the flames reflecting off of the walls. When they were back far enough, Jules took the wreck and smashed the window in one go. He stood back as the glass showered down and then began beating away all the jagged pieces at the edges.

  Once he had, the boys came to the window.

  “David,” Jules said, “go in the bathroom and get the rug that’s on the floor.”

  “Okay,” the boy replied, before dashing off into the bathroom, which was right next to him.

  When he returned, Jules took the rug and laid it across the bottom of the window. He then climbed inside and, one by one, fed the boys outside and to safety.

  Having gotten them all out, he popped his head outside and asked David, “Where’s Mom?”

  “I don’t know, Pa. I looked for her in your bedroom, but she ain’t there. I couldn’t get into the lounge, because of the fire.”

  “Okay, I’ll go search for her. Meanwhile, you take the boys across the road and wait for me at Mrs. Jefferson’s and get her to call 911.”

  “Okay,” the boy replied, before turning to leave. But, as he did, he stopped, turned back to Jules and added with a worried face, “Please, find her, Papa.”

  Jules craned his head forward and kissed David on the forehead.

  “Go,” he instructed.

  Jules turned away from the window and began venturing down the corridor, the heat getting more intense with each step forward, surrounded by the sound of the crackling fire eating through the trailer. “JULIETTE!” he called out over and over as he entered the thick smoke that came streaming through the door from the kitchen. Passing their bedroom, he opened the door just in case. But he found nothing and continued toward the kitchen, which would lead him to the lounge. When he was within a few feet of it the heat almost pushed him back and he covered his eyes so as not to burn them. “JULIETTE!” he cried once again as he reached the intense heat of the fire.

  But he could get no further. The whole of the kitchen was consumed in flames licking every surface, and he did well enough to get in the doorway. The fire was beginning to spread into all the other rooms, and soon it would be with him in the corridor. He realized that the only way to get to the lounge would be through the window from outside.

  Jules darted out of the trailer through the back window and ran all the way around to where the lounge window was, picking up the wrench as he passed it. When he reached the window, he peered inside. It was very smoky and his visibility was almost zero, just outlines and shapes, nothing moving. Not wanting to take the risk of her being asleep on the couch, Jules smashed the window and hopped inside, cutting his hand on the ledge as he did.

  When he landed in the room, he instantly darted his gaze about the place, sweeping the smoke out of the window with his arms, trying to clear the room a little so he could see if she was in there, calling her name out frantically as he did. Soon he’d cleared the room enough to see, and when he searched it with his eyes, he saw that she was nowhere to be seen, not asleep on the couch, knocked out on the floor or any of the other things that he had expected to find.

  With the flames reaching inside the room, Jules decided to get out of there and go back to the boys. As he did, he wondered whether Juliette could have been in the kitchen. But as he passed that side of the trailer on his way across the road, the street now full of people, he saw that the kitchen was currently consumed in flames and he would never get close enough to see for sure.

  “Oh man, I’m sorry,” Jackson said as he came past.

  “Was Juliette in there?” Mrs. Jones, a middle-aged neighbor of theirs asked.

  “I couldn’t find her,” Jules answered blankly as he continued to walk toward David, who stood in the street outside Mrs. Jefferson’s place with the two other boys and the old woman.

  When he reached the boy, David threw himself into Jules’s arms and the old father scooped him up and held onto him while everyone asked questions.

  “Where’s Momma?” the boy asked.

  “I don't know, son. That’s the God’s honest truth. I searched all around for her and didn’t find anything.”

  “I called the fire service,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “They say they’re gonna be about five minutes. I do hope that Juliette is okay.”

  “Me too, Beau. Me too.”

  “You know you’re gonna wanna remove that automobile,” Mr. Freeman from a few doors along suggested to Jules. “May catch fire.”

  “That’s a good point,” Jules said blankly, his head in a whir. He turned to Jackson and said, “Hey, Jackson. You wanna help me move my
car?”

  “Sure thing, Jules.”

  Jules put David down and ran over to move the car with Jackson as the flames licked off of the trailer and threatened to consume everything around it. Soon they’d removed the car from the jack, pushing it off the drive and then several meters up the street. Once they had, Jules rejoined David to stand with everyone else and watch the trailer disintegrate.

  Several minutes later, the fire service and paramedics arrived, the fire crew immediately attacking the smoldering trailer and the paramedics taking a look at the boys. They tried to take a look at Jules too, but he refused, even though he had a slight cough from the smoke. Instead he just stood there and watched the fire service battle away with the blaze, the flames reaching high up into the air. Eventually, the inferno succumbed to their efforts, and only a few minutes after they’d arrived on the scene, they had it under control and Jules got to see the total damage done to his home by the fire.

  A whole end of the trailer was missing, the roof all caved in and hanging off, the rest of it just a melted mess of timber and plastics. When the firemen approached the debris of the kitchen, Jules followed them, even when they recommended he stay back. Of course he wouldn’t listen. He was too eager to see if his wife was part of the remains of everything. He was worried greatly by the fact that the kitchen remained the only room he’d been unable to see into. If she had been in the house—which was where she should have been—then she had to be in the kitchen.

  “Please, you have to check if she’s there,” he said to them as they climbed up inside the smoking mess.

  “We’ll see,” one of them reassured him. “Just stay back here at the edge. It’s still really hot and you could burn yourself on something.”

  Jules did as he was told and waited impatiently at the edge, watching their every move through the great cavity that now stood as the trailer’s end. He watched with nervous anticipation as they began flicking through the mess that was once his kitchen cabinets and table, all intermingled with the plastic flooring. Sifting through the junk, tossing large pieces of it outside, they didn't appear to find anything and eventually shrugged their shoulders.