Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

For several endless seconds she caught a glimpse of the turmoil that raged inside him but then he released her with almost insulting haste.

  ‘I don’t think so, Livvy,’ he said, rawly. ‘You’ve tucked me in, but I think we’d better forgo the kiss goodnight, under the circumstances, don’t you?’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  OLIVIA had no idea what woke her.

  She’d made herself a bed on the make-shift single tucked against one wall in the room that was now her office, then, in spite of her exhausting day, had found that her brain refused to switch off.

  She hadn’t even realised that she’d fallen asleep, having lain there for ages in the dark imagining she could hear Gregor breathing at the other end of the flat.

  She could certainly hear something now.

  ‘Janek? Oksana!’ came a hoarse shout.

  That was definitely Gregor’s voice, and before she even realised she was moving, she was out of the door and speeding towards his room.

  ‘Gregor?’ She didn’t know what reflex had her pulling her hand away from the light before she had a chance to turn it on. Probably the memories of the misery she’d suffered in boarding school when the bedroom lights had been unceremoniously switched on as the bells had rung each morning.

  Anyway, the bar of light from the open door was streaming far enough across the bed to tell her that Gregor definitely hadn’t been calling out for her.

  In fact, from the agitated way his head was tossing and turning against the pillow, it was unlikely that he was awake at all.

  His sudden groan made her jump, especially when it was followed by an indecipherable shout and what was obviously a stream of invective.

  Olivia’s eyes stung with the threat of helpless tears while she hovered by the side of the bed, uncertain what to do for the best.

  He’d had nightmares before when he’d come back from some of his deployments, and when she’d tried to ask him about them had airily passed them off as one of the inconveniences of the job. But this was something more than that; something far worse.

  And what about his back? How much harm could he be doing to himself? He’d been in so much pain today, doing nothing more than sitting in his wheelchair. How much damage could he be doing twisting and turning like that?

  ‘Gregor?’ she called again, and warily reached out a soothing hand towards his naked shoulder.

  She only just remembered in time the moment, in the early days of their relationship, when she’d playfully grabbed him when he’d only been half-awake. In an instant, she’d found herself pinned to the floor with his forearm across her throat and a murderous expression in his eyes.

  ‘Gregor…Gregor Davidov!’ she called, sharpening her tone and making her voice as close to authoritarian as she could when she was trembling all over. She had absolutely no idea what instinct had her using the original form of his surname rather than the Anglicised one he’d been using ever since he’d come to England.

  To her relief he grew still…almost eerily still when his breathing was too fast and his pulse was racing in the hollow at the base of his throat.

  ‘Gregor, are you awake?’ she demanded in a softer tone. ‘Do you know where you are?’

  She was almost holding her breath while she waited to see if he would answer and was quite light-headed with relief when his husky voice sounded in the gloom.

  ‘Yes, Livvy. I know where I am,’ he said with a sigh. ‘I’m sorry. Obviously, I woke you. Was I making so much noise?’

  ‘Not so much,’ she temporised. ‘I was just worried that you were in pain and I remembered that I’d left your tablets out on the dining table. Do you want me to get them for you?’

  He was silent and she shivered with the sudden awareness that she was standing just inches away from his largely naked body wearing nothing more than an oversized T-shirt. She only hoped the light wasn’t good enough for him to see that her cheeks sported a fiery blush, or that he could recognise that it was one of his T-shirts that she’d taken to wearing for emotional comfort when she’d believed she’d never see him again.

  It was only by the slightest glitter of reflected light that she could tell that he was looking at her, and just when the silence had stretched to the point of embarrassment he spoke, gruffly. ‘Please. Then I’ll need to go to the bathroom, too,’ and she realised that she’d also left his chair too far away for him to reach unaided.

  They would get beyond this, she reminded herself while she hovered outside the bathroom just in case Gregor called her for help. She would learn to put things where he needed them to be so that he could be as independent as possible, and hopefully there was the prospect that he wouldn’t be needing that level of help for very long. Otherwise, she didn’t know whether she would be able to hang on to her sanity; not when she was having to work so hard to seem unmoved by his plight; not when she knew he would hate to be pitied; not when her stupid heart just wanted to wrap him safely in her arms and refuse to let him out of her sight ever again.

  Unfortunately, the sooner he didn’t need her any more, the sooner he could be insisting that the legalities for ending their marriage were put in motion, but in spite of her anger that he’d left her for two years thinking he was dead, she recognised that it would be selfish in the extreme to hope that his recovery took any longer than necessary.

  Olivia recognised that Gregor’s groan as he subsided onto the bed again was one of mixed frustration and exhaustion, and she wasn’t surprised when he fell asleep almost immediately, no doubt helped by the recent dose of analgesia.

  She wasn’t surprised, either, when she found herself hesitating in the doorway, unable to make herself walk away from him when he was lying there, in their bed, for the first night in two long years.

  It only took a moment to unfold the antique quilt draped over the end of the bed to wrap it around her shoulders, and once she was settled in the wing chair she’d lovingly restored in the long lonely evenings during one of Gregor’s earlier deployments, there was nothing to stop her giving in to the sheer pleasure of looking at him lying there…the man she’d never stopped loving even at the height of her anger and the depths of her despair.

  He’d always been a good-looking man, dark haired and with those amazing silvery eyes that seemed all the more unearthly surrounded by such long dark lashes. His face was a sculptor’s delight, composed of the sort of lean planes and strong lines that would still look good no matter how old he was.

  And that body…

  One of her worst nightmares when she’d been told about the way he’d died had been the devastation her vivid imagination had painted of the effect of his injuries on the body she’d delighted in exploring.

  She pressed her clenched fists into her belly in an attempt at quelling the visceral reaction she’d always had when she remembered the first time she’d seen him naked.

  If ever a man could be said to have a beautiful body…that would be Gregor.

  He must have been born with the perfect combination of genes to give him the classic broad shoulders, slim hips and long legs that had been seen as the epitome of male perfection ever since mankind had first started drawing on cave walls. In his case, even though he’d loathed the narcissistic body-building mentality of most men who frequented gyms, his dedication to being in the peak of fitness to fulfil his duty towards his colleagues meant that he’d always taken care of himself with a good diet and fitness regimen, and she’d thoroughly appreciated every lean muscular inch of the results.

  It had been a real shock to see those once powerful legs looking so weak; to see him tremble with the effort of holding the weight of his body. Before, he’d thought nothing of carrying her in his arms all way up the stairs to the flat when his desire for her had been so urgent that he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the ancient lift to arrive.

  At least, in the shadowy darkness of the bedroom, his chest looked much the same. Against his pallid skin, the dark whorls of hair still formed an intriguing crucifix from one tight mal
e nipple to the other and right down the centre of his body to disappear under the bedclothes at his waist.

  Her fingertips tingled with the need to trace that pattern; to know if the dark hair still felt as silky as she remembered and if the strands would still coil themselves around her exploring fingers.

  Suddenly, Gregor began to grow restless again, his dark tousled head tossing restlessly against the pillow and his chest rising and falling irregularly with his agitation.

  ‘Gregor,’ she called softly, hoping her tone would sound soothing if it reached him through the dark images plaguing him. ‘Gregor, you’re dreaming again. It’s only a dream.’

  ‘Janek,’ he moaned, his distress increasing, and she knew she had to do something, even at the risk of a few bruises of her own. She’d learned to her cost that startling him awake in the first few days after he returned from a deployment was likely to result in finding herself pinned down by a man who was every inch a warrior prepared to fight for his life.

  ‘Gregor, it’s me…it’s Livvy. I’m here,’ she said as she grabbed his nearest hand between both of hers and held on tightly. ‘You’re safe now, Gregor… I’m here.’

  As if the physical contact between them was a signal, his eyes flicked open, the silvery irises only a slender gleam around the darkly dilated pupils as he stared wildly up at her.

  ‘The children,’ he gasped hoarsely. ‘Save the children. Please…help me. I must save the children.’

  Olivia felt her own eyes grow wide.

  Children? What children? No one had mentioned children to her so she’d automatically assumed that he’d been with his colleagues when the explosion had happened…but, then, they’d told her as little as they could when they’d informed her that Gregor would never be coming home again.

  And, anyway, this definitely wasn’t the time to ask.

  ‘You’re safe, Gregor. It’s all over,’ she told him. ‘The children are safe,’ she added, mentally crossing her fingers that it was true. The thought that there might have been defenceless children in the area where he’d been so badly injured just didn’t bear thinking about.

  He stared up at her for a long time and she could almost hear the cogs whirring in his brain while he tried to sort out the facts from the images inside his head.

  Her back started to complain about being hunched over the side of the bed — just one of the unpleasant penalties of working long hours in Accident and Emergency — and she gingerly perched one hip on the edge of the mattress to ease the strain.

  ‘Livvy,’ he said on a shuddering sigh, and she felt the tension begin to leak out of him like the start of the spring thaw after a long hard winter. ‘Is it really you, at last?’

  His other hand reached out tentatively to trace the side of her face with gentle fingertips, lingering at the corner of her mouth for several heart-stopping seconds.

  ‘I dreamed about you,’ he said softly, and she couldn’t help chuckling.

  ‘So that’s why you’re having nightmares?’ she teased.

  ‘Not you. Not nightmares.’ The words were swift and fervent. ‘Even when I didn’t know who you were, I dreamed of you, and seeing your face made me feel…’

  He stopped speaking suddenly, as though he’d said too much, but before her old frustration could surface, he continued in a voice she’d never heard before. ‘For more than a year, my head was filled with terrible images…explosions…people…bodies…parts of bodies…flying through the air with dirt, rocks, pieces of buildings. And the noise…’ Even in the muted light she could see him shake his head. ‘It was like the worst vision of hell, and I was living in it.’

  ‘You were re-living the explosion when you were injured?’ she suggested, for the first time since she’d begun her medical training feeling completely out of her depth. The brief time they’d spent learning about psychology and psychiatry certainly hadn’t equipped her for anything more than to recognise when a patient needed to be referred to someone with greater expertise.

  ‘That’s what I thought, for a long time,’ he said heavily. ‘I presumed that it was a symptom of post-traumatic stress, in the time when I couldn’t remember what I did for a living.’

  ‘Even so, as an army medic, you’re usually involved with patching people up well enough for them to be shipped off to the nearest hospital. You haven’t been anywhere near the explosions before…as far as I know,’ she added meaningfully, and caught a glimpse of his wry grimace acknowledging her point.

  ‘And, of course, no-one knew who I was or who I was connected with in the region — there were at least two armies that were government controlled, ours and theirs, as well as various private outfits of thugs and mercenaries that were far better equipped through drug money — so there was no-one with the expertise to make a diagnosis or get me treatment to deal with any of it.’

  There were so many issues buried in just that one rambling sentence that it would take hours to talk them through, but for the moment Olivia reasoned that it was just better to let him speak; to let him choose his own way through the thoughts and images that filled his head.

  ‘It was only recently… There had been aid workers almost before it was safe for them to be there, but then there was a crew who arrived to begin some of the massive reconstruction that was needed in the area, and some of them were ex-forces…electrical and mechanical engineers, mainly, but a couple of them had some paramedic training…’ He gave a brief, disbelieving laugh. ‘You have no idea how weird it was to hear someone say, “Bloody ’ell, Doc, what’re you doin’ ’ere? You’re supposed to be dead,” in a broad Yorkshire accent.’

  Olivia managed to chuckle, but it was a watery affair, almost drowned under her growing need to cry for everything he’d endured.

  ‘Suddenly, it was as though someone had flicked a switch on inside my head and I remembered that my name hadn’t been Gregor Davidov for a long time. Unfortunately, I also remembered what had been going on before I ended up in the hospital,’ he ended on a sombre note.

  ‘How much can you tell me?’ she prompted softly, aching with the need to hold him; to reassure him that she was there for him…would always be there for him because, no matter what else happened between them, she would always love him.

  ‘There were children…a whole school full of children — some of them refugees from the fighting, but most of them from the surrounding villages — all ages from five years old to about ten or eleven. It was close enough that they could hear the fighting going on in the distance, but everyone said they were safe and so were we and our patients. Then, suddenly, there were shells coming in our direction, closer and closer, and we were told to pack up; to get everyone into some sort of transport and grab as much of the equipment as we could.’

  He was silent for some time, but she didn’t push, guessing that he’d become lost in the memories for a moment.

  ‘We’d done it in record time and were just pulling out,’ he resumed, a touch of gravel roughening his voice. ‘The road ran quite near the school and someone ran towards the column of vehicles shouting and waving his arms. They nearly shot him, thinking he was some sort of decoy for an ambush,’ he said, the words coming faster and faster. ‘Then we realised he was asking for help, saying that the school had been damaged. The children were trapped in the cellar, where he’d taken them for safety, and there was an old boiler down there that could explode at any minute.’

  ‘So, you went to help,’ she said quietly, wondering how and when she’d ended up on the side of the bed with him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders to try to contain the shudders that racked him.

  ‘Several of us did,’ he confirmed. ‘The old man was the retired headmaster who’d taken over again when the younger man had been conscripted. He was too frail to do anything very physical but he showed us the grating where we could get down into the cellar.’ With her head against his chest she could hear his heart pounding as he relived the events, the heat pouring off him as though he was once again lifting ea
ch of the children up through the opening to be pulled clear by one of his comrades.

  ‘Then there was only one little girl left. Her name was Oksana…the same as my sister. She was one of the refugee children and had seen so much horror that she was too terrified to come near me, and by the time I got her to trust me, the shelling had begun again.

  ‘We got her out, but when they tried to hurry her away, she refused to leave me, so when the next shell landed, scoring a direct hit on the school, she was blown off her feet. I found out, later, that she landed some long way away in the headmaster’s vegetable garden, completely uninjured. I was almost blown out of the hole, coming out of the cellar like toothpaste out of a tube and expecting the whole building to collapse on me at any minute. Unfortunately, the impact on the school had been the final straw for the old boiler and it exploded, sending me cart-wheeling in the air before landing with half the school on top of me.’

  ‘So that’s why your colleagues were so sure that you’d died,’ she murmured with a shudder of her own for the realisation of exactly how close he’d come to losing his life.

  ‘And they couldn’t afford to hang around to find all the pieces, not with all those injured people depending on them,’ he said, resignation in his tone. ‘The idea of a unit taking their comrades home with them, dead or alive, is a good one, but not if it means risking more lives, and that’s what they would have been doing if they had stopped to shift half a school to find me.’

  ‘So, how did you survive?’

  ‘Apparently, the boiler ended up saving my life, because it blew the chimney stack over in almost one complete piece, and that ended up holding most of the rest of the debris off me…enough that it was fairly simple to uncover me without doing any further damage. I was still barely conscious when some people in uniform arrived, ready to finish the job the explosion had started on me in spite of the old schoolmaster’s objections. If I hadn’t spoken in the local dialect, they probably would have done just that.’