‘Now we get through the next few hours and then I’ll drop you off back home. My home,’ he clarified tightly.
‘Drop me off?’ Oti frowned. ‘Where are you going?’
Her skin was starting to prickle at his unexpected change of tone as she frantically tried to work out what had just happened. He was no longer the teasing, amused Lukas of before. Now he was sharper, colder, more withdrawn. And it shouldn’t have mattered to her.
But it did.
‘I have conference calls to attend to,’ he told her coolly. ‘Work doesn’t stop just because today is my wedding day.’
‘Heaven forbid,’ she remarked, but he didn’t even crack a smile. ‘And what about me? What should I do?’
Lukas looked almost disdainful. ‘You should do...whatever it is that you do.’
And even as she told herself that she should be glad she’d just been presented with the perfect opportunity to visit Edward—the brother who she hated having to pretend had died in that accident—she was powerless to stop a sting of hurt from working its way under her skin.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘LOOK, I’VE DONE my research.’ Oti eyed her brother. ‘I’ve used every contact I could as a doctor, to really make sure, and I truly believe you’re a perfect candidate. Nerve transfer surgery has a high success rate for C5 to C6 spinal cord injuries.’
‘But it won’t make me walk again,’ Edward threw back.
It sliced right through her to hear him so uncharacteristically angry and bitter. Not that she blamed him—how could she?—but the Edward she’d known and loved had always been ready with a light-hearted quip or a joke to lighten the moment.
She missed that Edward, more than she liked to admit.
She needed her brother back. For all that their father had ever put them through, they’d always had each other. For support, for counsel, or even for simple sibling teasing. But the accident hadn’t just robbed Edward of his ability to walk or move; it had also robbed him of his sense of self.
And it had robbed her of her big brother.
Without him, she’d felt more alone these past four years than she could have imagined.
Before she could catch herself, Oti reached for her wedding rings, as though to twirl them on her finger the way she had done virtually all last night, unable to sleep. But she’d removed her rings before visiting Edward—he would have spotted them instantly and demanded to know about them, and she’d never been able to lie to her big brother.
But it was disconcerting how bare her hand felt without them. After less than twenty-four hours. Oti didn’t care to examine what that said about her. She forced her focus back to Edward.
‘No, it won’t help you to walk again,’ she agreed evenly. ‘But this procedure could allow you to regain use of your arms. You might be able to lift a cup and feed yourself. You could be able to lift your arms above your head to dress yourself, or even turn on a light switch. Maybe you could even have enough strength to turn a door handle and push your own wheelchair. You could even make one of your godawful peanut butter sandwiches, which always glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth. You could be independent again, Edward. You wouldn’t have to have carers on hand 24/7. Feeding you, cleaning you, even having to scratch your damned nose for you if it itches. I know how you hate it. But, this way, you could get some quality of life back.’
‘Could. Might. Maybe...’ He echoed the words hollowly. ‘Do you hear yourself?’
It broke her heart, but she couldn’t afford to let him see that. This was Edward, her incredible brother, who had been able to do anything. Everything. He was tough and he wasn’t a quitter. He never had been.
She just had to bring that back out of him now.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, did you have some better plan?’ she forced herself to say. ‘My mistake. I see your life is just how you want it right now.’
‘Funny,’ he threw at her.
But she was sure she saw just a glint of something in his eyes. As though the old Edward was still in there—somewhere. It was more than she’d seen in four years. But, then, this was the first time she’d been able to give him something akin to hope in the past four years.
She made herself press on. ‘Or you could just give up, of course. Prove Father right and be the quitter he keeps saying you are. Is that what you want, Edward? To let him win by giving up on yourself? On me? On your own life?’
For one long, horrible moment he stared at her and Oti felt the words of apology racing up through her, ready to spill out everywhere. And then, all of a sudden, he offered a twisted kind of smile.
It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than nothing.
‘Who the hell wants to let that repulsive old bully win anything?’
‘Right.’ She hesitated. It wasn’t exactly the resounding agreement she’d hoped for. But neither was it the stonewalling for which she’d been preparing herself.
She waited as the silence enveloped them again. Should she say something more? Or wait for Edward to speak?
Oti clenched her fingers together in her lap and forced herself to be patient. If Edward was going to go for it, he would need to be the one to instigate it.
‘Nerve transfers aren’t new,’ he pointed out, after what seemed like a lifetime. ‘But they’ve never really been successful on spinal cord injuries.’
‘You know about them?’
He snorted loudly. ‘You think I haven’t constantly looked for new procedures, sitting here in this damned chair all day, unable to even lift my own glass of water to drink?’
It was all Oti could do not to smile. Or cry. Possibly both. Instead, she focused on keeping her emotions in check and her voice even. Edward wouldn’t thank her for a song and dance—though he might enjoy the irony of her pun—and, in any case, she didn’t want to oversell it.
There were still no guarantees, after all.
She moved around the table, sitting down carefully and trying not to look too eager. And all the while pushing to the back of her mind that all this hinged on their father honouring his agreement to her and paying for the surgery.
Looking at her brother’s face, agreeing to marry Lukas in return seemed like a small price to pay.
She wasn’t an idiot. Her father would have always found someone to marry her off to—and some way to have leverage over her to do so. She was lucky it was Lukas and not one of his boorish friends. Or one of their hard-partying sons.
And it wasn’t as though she had someone of her own to love. Not that she wouldn’t have liked that...but her social circle, and her job, made that rather difficult.
She ignored the sensation that rippled through her when she thought of Lukas. A fleeting chemical attraction. Nothing more.
‘It’s a combination of nerve transfer for dexterity, and tendon transfer for strength. Both of these are well-established procedures, just for other areas. For example, tendon transfer is well described in the area of hand surgeries.’
‘I need upper arm strength.’
‘Right,’ Oti agreed. ‘So they would remove a working nerve from a donor site in the shoulder, close to the damaged section of nerve preventing the signal from reaching the lower arm, and then use that working nerve to effectively bypass the damaged section. Then it is connected back to the spinal cord. But where, previously, they might have used one donor, here we would be talking about two, or even multiple.’
‘And then I can move my arms again. As if by magic,’ Edward ground out, getting angry again, his bitterness intertwined with frustration and sheer exhaustion.
She couldn’t blame him; she could only imagine what he was going through. He’d been like this for the better part of four years.
Oti weighed her options. She could go in gently, or she could see if the tough love option was still her best bet.
‘Not by magic,’ she told him firmly. ‘The s
urgery is just the start of it. After that you have months of rehab and hard work.’
‘Sounds appealing,’ her brother gritted out.
‘Or years of rehab, if you don’t put in the effort.’
He didn’t answer for a moment. But when he finally did speak, Oti wasn’t prepared for it.
‘So, what you’re saying is that I’m going to need to put my back into it.’
She blinked at him.
‘But I will,’ he continued, deadpan. ‘Because I know that you, my sweet baby sister, will have my back.’
‘Hilarious,’ she managed, still shocked.
It was a terrible pun, but she wasn’t sure she cared. It had been so long since Edward had made a joke about anything—certainly not his disability—that she couldn’t help feeling this was progress.
It was certainly better than calling himself a head on a stick.
She thought that particular self-description had broken her heart worst of all.
‘Edward...’
‘It’s going to be just spine.’
And then, without warning, he laughed.
It was a slightly stiff, awkward laugh. But it was a laugh all the same. And Oti didn’t know if it was hearing Edward make bad puns, or the emotion of her marriage to Lukas—or perhaps it was the fact that she knew she never could have dreamt of offering Edward this glimmer of hope had she failed to go through with the marriage to Lukas—but she lost it.
It rushed over her and she dropped her head in her hands and sobbed.
‘Don’t cry, Oats,’ Edward growled.
He hadn’t called her by that childhood nickname for years. Somehow, that only made her cry a little harder.
‘Please, Oats,’ her brother tried again after a moment. ‘I feel useless—I can’t give you a hug. I can’t even take your hand.’
Sniffing hard, half crying and half laughing, she took his hand. What she wouldn’t give to have her brother haul her into one of his old bearlike hugs and tell her everything would be okay.
But he couldn’t.
And she needed to be the one to be strong for him. There was no one to be strong for her.
Lukas?
The question popped, unbidden, into her brain. Oti stuffed it back down hastily.
Lukas Woods couldn’t be trusted with the truth.
No one could.
‘Sorry.’ Pulling herself together, Oti wiped her arm across her eyes. ‘It’s just been a long couple of days. But it’s done now. So let’s get back to the rehab after your operation.’
‘The gruelling bit, you said.’
‘True. But since when were you ever bothered by a little hard work, Edward?’
‘I’m not.’ He blew out a frustrated breath. ‘But do you really think they’ll take me on, Oats? The candidates they’ve chosen were all less than eighteen months post-spinal-cord accident. I’m nearly five years.’
‘They’re making strides with it all the time, Edward.’ She focused on her brother. ‘The experiences they had with the first few groups have informed their understanding of the procedures. Of nerve topography itself.’
‘Which means...?’
‘It means they studied how spasticity allows preserved muscle function and stops atrophy.’
‘I have no idea what you’re saying to me.’ Edward frowned. ‘You might as well be speaking Sudanese for all I know.’
‘Nuer,’ she corrected absently. ‘Or Dinka.’
‘Which raises another question,’ Edward cut in. ‘These trials are new, and I don’t qualify for any current clinical trials, which means we’d have to pay for this surgery.’
Oti schooled herself not to panic. ‘No, there’s a new trial...’
‘There isn’t.’ He stopped her again. ‘How are you intending to pay for this, Oats? Because volunteering as a doctor in Sub-Saharan Africa might feed your soul, little sister, but it doesn’t do much for your wallet. And I don’t have anything since Father seized control of my company after the accident. If I hadn’t had private insurance, I wouldn’t even have this place.’
‘Father will...’
‘Spare me,’ Edward snorted. ‘He wouldn’t throw a pound my way even if he had it. Which he doesn’t, given that he’s gambled away everything owned by the Sedeshire estate, bar the damned Hall itself.’
‘He’s...made some money.’ Oti tried to sound convincing, but she’d never found it easy to lie to her big brother.
It was one of the reasons she worked in Africa—to avoid having to lie to his face. That, and the fact that he’d banned her from visiting for the first couple of years after the accident, and she hadn’t been able to stand being just down the road from his hospital whilst he’d refused to even see her.
The fact that their father had been only too inexplicably happy to wash his hands of a tetraplegic son had only heightened her sense of injustice.
As though, somehow, the Earl felt that Edward’s lack of mobility might somehow reflect on his own image of apparent virility.
How many more ways could their father have left to disappoint either of his children?
‘No, he hasn’t,’ Edward contradicted smoothly. ‘If he had, he’d have gambled it away again faster than you could say Quit whilst you’re ahead.’
He pinned her with a sharp stare, and it was all Oti could do not to squirm. She smoothed down her grey jersey trousers, picking off a sliver of some imaginary lint.
‘What gives, Oats?’
A hundred different excuses darted around her head, though nothing that she thought her brother might believe. But then he spoke again, his voice cracking as he asked her not to bring him hope of an operation there was no chance they could afford.
‘Of course not. I wouldn’t...’ The words tumbled out in her horror. ‘Trust me. We can afford the operation.’
‘How?’
Another skewering gaze. Her heart pounded in her chest. There was nothing else for it but to come clean.
‘I got married.’
He didn’t answer; he simply stared at her. And that was worse, somehow. Without knowing what she was doing, Oti reached inside her pocket and retrieved her wedding rings and slid them nervously back onto her finger.
It shouldn’t have felt so...comforting to do so.
‘You got married?’ Edward managed at last, his expression little short of thunderous. ‘For me?’
‘No,’ she lied, far more smoothly than she might have thought possible.
‘For me,’ he confirmed in sheer disgust. ‘Not one of those lecherous old sops Father kept pushing you to marry, just so his own debts could be expunged?’
‘No.’
‘Not Louis Rockman?’ Edward’s face twisted. ‘After what he tried to do to you as a kid?’
‘No.’ Oti couldn’t suppress a shudder at the thought. ‘He’s a successful businessman. And he’s...nice.’
And there was no reason at all for her to feel quite so guarded.
‘But he’s still paying Father off, isn’t he?’ Edward demanded harshly.
‘Yes, but this time I made him promise to pay for this surgery.’
Her brother snorted. ‘He’ll never honour it. You know that.’
‘He’ll have to—it’s written into the contract,’ she lied.
‘So you see,’ she continued loftily, ‘everyone wins. I can’t be married off twice.’
Her father might try it, of course, but once Edward had undergone the surgery, the old Earl would have no more leverage over her.
‘And at least this way it’s someone with whom I can actually stand to be in the same room,’ she continued when Edward still didn’t reply.
It was supposed to be an explanation that would placate her brother but, even as she said the words, Oti realised there was a grain of truth in it.
A memory
of Lukas in the cathedral, and that kiss, lit up her brain as heat flushed through her.
Okay, more than a grain, then.
‘Who is it?’ Edward demanded abruptly, his eyes raking over her face. ‘Which of his cronies did he force you to marry, Oats?’
She fought to compose herself.
‘Lukas Woods.’
He stared at her for such a long moment that she wasn’t sure if he’d actually heard her. And then he spluttered with disbelief, ‘Lukas Woods?’
‘He’s...’
‘You can’t be serious, Oats?’
Well, at least he wasn’t back to calling her Octavia, which meant he couldn’t be that mad. Now that she considered it, he didn’t look even half as cross as she might have expected.
‘Have you ever met him?’ She wasn’t sure what made her ask the question, but she hadn’t really expected it to be true.
‘I have, actually. Yes. A couple of times, several years ago. Once at a business event, and once at the racetrack.’
‘Lukas races cars, like you?’ she asked, before catching herself. ‘Like you used to do.’
‘No, he was more into the mechanics side. He liked to build them, and just raced to see how they performed. He told me one of his first jobs was for a car mechanic when he was a kid, and in his spare time he used to go to the scrapyard and he used what he could find to build old engines. I guess when his company took off he kept it going as a hobby.’
But a serious hobby, by the sound of it. Just like Edward’s racing used to be.
Her first thought was that she liked the fact that her brother kind of liked Lukas. Her second was that it shouldn’t matter what her big brother thought.
‘I thought he was a decent bloke. So why did Woods marry you? What did he get out of the deal?’
She didn’t want to tell him, but at the same time she couldn’t bring herself to lie to him.
‘Father sold him a controlling interest in Sedeshire International.’
For a moment Edward dropped his head down and her heart suddenly lurched. His hair would once have fallen in his eyes when he did that, and he’d had this habit of thrusting his fingers into it to rake it back. It was a mannerism that she’d never really paid attention to before. But now he couldn’t even lift his arm to do that. And his hair was so short that it didn’t move a single millimetre when his head moved.
Tempted by Her Convenient Husband Page 5
