Dreaming Of... Bali. Fiona McArthur

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       PROLOGUE

      “HE MIGHT DIE any minute of any day or he might live to be a hundred. There’s nothing to be done for it.”

      Nathaniel Ramirez looked up at the snowy, whitecapped mountain peak and gulped in a big breath. The words he had overheard the cardiologist say to his mother all those years ago reverberated inside his skull. The cold air blasted through his throat, his lungs expanding greedily.

      Would this be the day?

      He raised his face to the sky as his vision cleared and his heart resumed its normal beat.

      At some point during the trek, he had realized he couldn’t finish the climb today.

      He didn’t know whether it was because, after almost twelve years of courting death, he was finally bored of playing hide-and-seek with it, or because he was just plain tired today.

      For a decade, he had been on a constant go across the world, without planting roots anywhere, without returning home, making real estate deals in corners of the world, making millions.

      An image of the roses in the garden his mother had loved, back in California, their color vividly red, the petals so soft that she had banned him from touching them, flashed across his mind’s eye.

      A stab of homesickness pierced him as he followed the icy path down. Sweat drenched him as he reached the wooden cabin he had been living in since he closed the Demakis deal in Greece six months ago. Restlessness slithered under his skin.

      And he knew what it meant. It meant he was thrashing against the cage he had made for himself; it meant he was getting lonely; thousands of years of human nature were urging him toward making a home, to seek companionship.

      He needed to chase a new challenge, whether clinching a real estate deal or conquering a new corner of the world he hadn’t stamped with his name yet. Fortunately for him, the world was vast and the challenges it presented numerous.

       Because staying still in one place was the one thing that made him weak, that made him long for more than he could have.