Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘I promise we’ll talk again when everyone’s finished doing their tests. We’ll have a better idea of what we need to do to sort you out by then,’ she said, giving the slender hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘In the meantime, you could have a look at the scenery. There are some quite good-looking blokes around here.’

  This time it was Sherilee’s turn to give a brief chuckle. ‘And if I can’t pull a good-looking bloke when I’m lying here in my prettiest underwear…’ she said wryly, then went quite pink when someone in the room gave a wolf-whistle.

  ‘That’s quite enough of that!’ the consultant said sternly, drawing everyone’s attention back to the serious business in hand, but Olivia saw the encouraging wink he gave their young patient as he patted her hand, then stepped back for the radiographer to do her job.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘I AM sorry!’ Gregor apologised when his swift, silent progress along the corridor startled an elderly patient into a shriek of shock when she suddenly realised he was beside her. ‘Perhaps I should have a warning bell to ring, like a bicycle.’

  Or perhaps he should get his bad mood under control so that he noticed that there were other people around him. It wasn’t Livvy’s fault that she was the obvious person to work beside the consultant, nor that he was becoming increasingly convinced that Rick d’Agostino was going to tell him that there was nothing further he could do for him.

  Then there was the way he was letting thoughts of Livvy’s almost-wedding and almost-groom get to him, which was ludicrous, especially when he couldn’t help but admit that the beautifully polished wealthy young man was a far better match for her, socially and financially, to say nothing of the fact that all the man’s body parts were in working order.

  And it wasn’t as if he was in a position to come over all Neanderthal about the situation either. He couldn’t even stand up on his own two feet, let alone fight for her.

  The first person he saw when he reached the doorway was Livvy, and everything within him growled ‘mine’ when he saw the way her slender body was outlined by the shapeless cotton scrubs as she leant towards the array of X-rays and scans displayed on the far wall.

  ‘Livvy?’ he called when she straightened and took a step back, and his heart took an extra beat at the way she immediately whirled towards the sound of his voice with a smile on her face. ‘I got a message. Did you need me for something?’

  ‘Yes, please, Gregor.’ She made her careful way around the leads and paraphernalia surrounding the patient, beckoning him closer. ‘I was hoping you could have a word with Sherilee.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ the young woman gasped in a shaken voice as he came to a halt by her side, his position in the wheelchair only just bringing him up high enough to make eye contact with her when she was still firmly strapped into immobility on a backboard.

  ‘Excuse me?’ He hesitated when he saw the terror in the young woman’s eyes. ‘Is there something wrong? Can I help you?’

  To his surprise, the fear hardened into bitterness in the blink of an eye.

  ‘That’s rather unlikely, isn’t it?’ she pointed out angrily. ‘They probably only wheel you in to prepare the patients to be told they’re going to end up in a chair, like you…useless for the rest of your life.’

  He recognised the choked-off exclamation and knew that Livvy was quite likely to leap to his defence, but in case she or anyone else in the room was thinking of interceding, he put up a single hand to stop them. This definitely wasn’t the time to look away from the open challenge in a pair of devastated blue eyes.

  ‘I’m pleased to meet you, too, Sherilee,’ he began wryly, but he knew that the only way to stop the young woman’s impending hysteria was to confront what she’d just said, head on. ‘My name is Gregor and, far from being useless, I’m one of the A and E doctors who’ve been taking care of your friends.’

  For several long seconds, in spite of the fact that there must have been nearly a dozen people in the room, the only sound was the rhythmic click and bleep of the multitude of monitors and sensors.

  ‘Oh, God, I’m so sorry!’ the young woman wailed, shattering the silence. ‘I don’t know what…why…’

  ‘Of course you do,’ he countered, placing his hand gently over hers so that he didn’t disturb the sensor that was monitoring her oxygen perfusion. ‘It’s because you’re scared, and when you’re scared, it’s perfectly normal to snap and snarl, like a wounded animal.’

  ‘Did you?’ she challenged sharply and he was hard-pressed not to grin because, at that moment, she reminded him so much of Livvy.

  ‘I still do,’ he admitted. ‘Ask anyone here.’

  ‘So you really do work here?’ she asked with understandable disbelief. ‘But what can you do when you’re stuck in a wheelchair?’

  ‘Well, I’m getting to be a dab hand with the superglue,’ he offered, and someone laughed in the background, but he owed it to the panicking young woman to treat her seriously. ‘I’ve also put in several dozen stitches in your friends, where they were cut up in the accident, and hopefully, once they’ve healed, you’ll hardly see where they were hurt.’

  ‘How are they all?’ she demanded, generous-spirited enough to be easily diverted to her friends’ plight rather than concentrating on her own.

  ‘Most of them walked away from the crash with little more than aches and pains and a few sutures.’ And were extremely lucky to have got away so lightly, if the paramedics were to be believed. ‘The passenger behind the driver of the other car had his lung punctured by a broken rib, but that’s under control now, and should heal without any problems. The other one — from the front passenger seat in your car — is in Theatre at the moment while they use a big box of expensive screws to put his legs back together.’

  ‘Will Liam walk again?’ There was an audible quiver in her voice when she forced the question out.

  ‘It might take him several months of hard graft,’ Gregor admitted, ‘and he’ll probably hate physios for ever by the time he gets there, but there is a very good orthopaedic team here, so you chose the right area to have your prang.’

  ‘If they’re so good, how come you’re still in your chair?’ she countered with a sudden return to belligerence.

  ‘Ah. A good question,’ he conceded, deliberately stopping himself from looking at Livvy standing quietly beside him. He hoped he’d managed to hide from both of them the spasm of fear that had clenched every muscle in his body at the thought that the news waiting for him in Rick d’Agostino’s office would condemn him to this life. ‘But I have only come under the care of this hospital very recently. They haven’t had time to work their magic on me yet.’ And in spite of all the tests he’d undergone, he had no idea if there was any magic left to perform.

  ‘I don’t know whether I believe in magic any more,’ Sherilee admitted in an uncanny echo of his own thoughts, her voice suddenly sounding so very young. ‘If there was magic, someone would be able to wave a wand and I’d be able to get up and walk out of here with just a few bruises. As it is…’ Her voice died away unhappily and with the straps holding her to the backboard, she couldn’t even do the apparently nonchalant shoulder shrug that was so much a trademark of teenagers these days.

  ‘As it is, young lady, we’ve taken all our pictures and your mother has finished all the paperwork and will be here in a minute, so we can tell you all the results,’ the orthopaedic consultant announced into the lull.

  Gregor had to give the man his due. It had only been a matter of hours since his last appointment with Rick d’Agostino, and he’d be seeing him again as soon as this emergency had been dealt with, but the consultant didn’t betray the fact by as much as the flicker of an eyelash. Once he’d nodded to Livvy and himself as fellow professionals, his focus had been entirely on their patient and his examination of the results of all the aspects of her tests.

  The increased tension in the room while they waited for Sherilee’s mother to arrive seemed to affect everyone, but especially the injured y
oungster, who’d begun to shake visibly.

  ‘Hey,’ Gregor murmured softly, leaning forward to give her hand a squeeze. ‘Don’t spoil it now. Not with your mother coming in.’

  ‘What do you mean, spoil it?’ she said through teeth that were starting to chatter, even though the room was warm enough to make sweat prickle along his spine.

  ‘Well, you’ve been absolutely brilliant so far,’ he said quietly, keeping his words soft enough so that only the three of them could hear him, and he flicked a glance up towards Livvy. ‘Isn’t that right, Livvy? I think she’s held herself together better than most adults.’

  ‘Certainly better than most of the men we get in here,’ Livvy agreed with a grin that teased a glimpse of one from Sherilee’s pale face. ‘And the bigger they are, the harder they seem to fall. It’s we women who know how to focus on the really important things — like you did when the emergency guys were taking so long to get you out of the car safely. They told us how you kept it all together while they were making all that noise cutting through the glass and metal to take the top off, so they didn’t have to waste any time dealing with tears and tantrums.’

  ‘So, if you can hang on just a little bit longer — until this lot has gone on to the next patient — ’ he gestured towards the busy throng surrounding her, every one of them performing some essential task or other ‘ — then, you can have the longest, noisiest tantrum of your life and none of them will ever know. They’ll still be telling everyone about this absolutely amazing patient who never lost her cool.’

  ‘Did you lose yours?’ she challenged suddenly, her eyes suspiciously bright as she clung to his hand.

  ‘Yes…and no,’ he said with a grin to hide the dark memories of all the nights he still woke from the nightmares quivering and soaked in sweat. ‘One of the things about the country I come from is that we have the most amazing-sounding swear words…and lots of words that sound as if they should be swear words, even though they aren’t.’

  There was a disturbance over by the door and a red-eyed woman with a large handful of paper hankies stood there whimpering and gasping for breath with a horrified expression on her face as she caught her first sight of her injured daughter without the paramedic’s blanket covering her.

  ‘Promise me something,’ Sherilee begged urgently, tugging him closer as her mother started across the room towards her.

  ‘If I can,’ Gregor agreed, in spite of the warning frown that Livvy was sending him.

  ‘If I can hold it together through the next ten minutes, promise me you’ll teach me some of those swear words?’

  ‘You’re not really going to teach her to swear, are you?’ Livvy demanded as the two of them paused in the corridor, watching Sherilee disappear into the lift on her way up to the surgical floor.

  ‘I’ll have to, after the way she kept her part of the bargain,’ Gregor said with a grin, grateful for any conversation that kept Livvy at his side just a little bit longer. They might be temporarily working in the same department but he’d hardly caught more than a fleeting glimpse of her until he’d been surprised by that call from Livvy that she wanted him to come and talk to a patient.

  ‘It’s difficult to remember that Sherilee’s only seventeen,’ Livvy mused as he watched her lean against the nearest wall, pressing her back and shoulders against it to relieve the ache that always came with long spells of bending over a patient. He wondered if she realised that it was a position that thrust her breasts into prominence against the thin cotton of her scrubs top, then had to drag his eyes away before he had to rearrange his own clothing.

  The fact that he hadn’t had to think about such a problem for longer than he cared to remember wasn’t important. It had been a surprise and a delight to discover that those parts were definitely in full working order, but now he needed to concentrate on the other aspects of their relationship. If his meeting with Rick d’Agostino went well, he had every intention of making sure that Livvy had no excuse for wanting to end their marriage…in fact, he was determined that she would want him in her life every bit as much as he needed her in his.

  When she glanced at him with a quizzical look he realised that she was waiting for a reply but for a moment he couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about. The fact that he was still sat facing the lift into which Sherilee had recently disappeared gave him the clue he needed.

  ‘She definitely isn’t your average teenager,’ he agreed easily. ‘She not only held herself together but managed to stop her mother breaking down completely.’

  ‘How many hours do you think she’ll be in Theatre?’ she mused, but that was one topic he’d rather not think about it, not with the possibility of similar surgery in his own near future. Sometimes, the fact that he was a doctor was a real disadvantage. At least most of the patients were in happy ignorance of everything that would happen to them and exactly how many things could go wrong while they were under the surgeon’s knife.

  ‘Long enough for us to finally get something to eat,’ he said firmly, pivoting the chair towards the cafeteria at the other end of the ground floor of the hospital. ‘We’ll both be in danger of screwing our kidneys up if we don’t get some liquid going through our systems.’

  ‘That’s part and parcel of working in A and E, I’m afraid,’ she grumbled as she kept pace beside him. ‘There are always too many patients and too few staff and there’s no way we can drink when we’re surrounded by who knows what…unlike the office staff, who can have a mug of coffee on their desk and top up at will.’

  ‘But would you rather have their job than your own?’ he asked, already knowing the answer because he’d known how dedicated she was to their profession right from the first day he’d met her.

  ‘When is she going to give up?’ Livvy demanded, clearly exasperated as she deleted the latest batch of messages from her mother.

  ‘At least that’s something you can do remotely,’ Gregor pointed out with a grin. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her to be sitting outside the flat, waiting for us to sneak back in.’

  ‘Please!’ Livvy scoffed. ‘My mother sitting waiting outside the flat? Not likely! It would be some paid minion, bored out of their mind.’

  ‘Well, in that case, I hope they’re being well paid,’ he said, keeping the conversation going rather than letting himself think about what was going to happen in the next few minutes.

  So far, he had no idea what arrangements Rick d’Agostino’s secretary had made for his stay in the hospital, and the last thing he needed was to find himself on a ward where all the staff knew exactly who he was. When the nightmares came…as they always did, sooner or later…he would far prefer to be anonymous. Otherwise word would be all round the hospital that the doctor in the wheelchair had more than a few screws loose, and that wouldn’t do his professional reputation any good at all.

  But what option did he have?

  The last thing he wanted was to burden Livvy with caring for him in surroundings that hadn’t been set up to facilitate the daily care of someone who was essentially paraplegic. She already looked exhausted after a stressful shift in A and E, and he could only guess what sort of toll it was having on her to be aware of everyone’s curiosity about her aborted wedding.

  She hadn’t said anything to him, but, knowing how much she detested being in the limelight, she must be hating the fact that she was surrounded by colleagues who were just dying for her to provide all the juicy details.

  On top of that, there was his appearance on the scene, and even though Rick d’Agostino’s secretary had registered his surname as Davidov, it probably hadn’t taken the gossips very long to join up the dots and realise that he was Livvy’s husband, especially as there were some who would still remember him from when he’d been training.

  ‘Here we are,’ Livvy said brightly as she swung the door open then stopped in consternation, clearly surprised by what she could see.

  He craned his neck around the door frame and found himself looking into what must be on
e of the newly-appointed family rooms that he’d been hearing about today, built so that parents could be close to their sick children.

  ‘You’re sure we’re supposed to come here?’ He paused in the doorway, trying to come to terms with this development. ‘I was expecting…well, I’m not really sure what I was expecting, as I’m not an in-patient — yet!’

  He was intrigued to realise that she looked almost embarrassed. ‘I thought Rick d’Agostino was arranging for one of those grotty rooms for single staff for you while I used on-call accommodation. I couldn’t understand why he winked when his secretary handed me the key and said he’d decided that this would be the best solution for you, as his patient. Anyway, you should only be taking those elephant-strength painkillers under hospital supervision, so…’

  Her words died away and he realised that her eyes were riveted on something across the room and, for the first time, saw that the sofa-bed had been pulled out and made up as a double bed.

  This time it was harder to control his response to thoughts of sharing a bed…that bed…with the woman standing so uncertainly beside him.

  Not that he was in the least bit tempted to give her the option of sleeping elsewhere. If he’d been handed the possibility of spending the night with Livvy at his side, he was going to grab it with both hands and hold on tight. After all, once Rick d’Agostino told him the verdict, it might turn out to have been the last time he slept by her side…ever.

  ‘Thank you, Livvy,’ he said quietly, and she frowned.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I was worried that I was going to have to sleep in a ward, and even if it was a single side room, there’s no way that the whole ward wouldn’t hear me when the nightmares come. So, thank you for not objecting to sharing a room with me.’

  She was silent for several moments and while he could almost hear her thoughts as she processed what he’d just said, he couldn’t help feeling guilty for manipulating her like that. Knowing Livvy’s soft heart, even if she hadn’t liked the fact that his consultant had organised a double room for them, there was no way, now, that she would ask for the arrangements to be changed.