Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘Unfortunately, the bathroom is only marginally better organised for someone in a wheelchair than our own,’ she commented after exploring the en suite. ‘But it does have a pull-down seat in the shower.’

  That was a shame, he thought, realising that there would be no need for Livvy to accompany him while he took his shower. If he’d been able to claim that he needed her to help, that could have led to…

  It was definitely time he turned his thoughts to other topics. The last thing he wanted was for her to feel uncomfortable with him, even though imagining the two of them showering together was a far more pleasurable topic than thinking about his upcoming appointment with Rick d’Agostino.

  Unfortunately, it was obvious from her preoccupied air that Livvy had other things on her mind than taking a shower with him and they prepared for bed with hardly a word being spoken, until finally she slid under the covers beside him.

  After their earlier love-making, he half expected her to turn to him, the way she always had once they’d started sharing a bed, her head nestling against his shoulder as if that place had been specially constructed just for her.

  Instead, there was nearly an arm’s length between them and the way tension filled that space told him that she’d made an important decision.

  He swallowed hard, wondering if the lump in his throat was his heart trying to beat its way out of his body as he waited for Livvy to speak.

  ‘Tell me why, Gregor,’ she demanded, dread a leaden weight inside her as she wondered if she was doing nothing more than hastening the end of their marriage by asking for answers she might not want to hear. ‘I need to know why you didn’t let me know you were alive as soon as you got your memory back…or, at least, as soon as you returned to England.’

  Olivia didn’t dare allow herself to look at him, terrified that, for the first time in his life, Gregor might lose that enviable control and reveal what he was really thinking, rather than what he was allowed to tell her. Knowing the sort of person he was, she was sure there must have been a good reason; something beyond military rules and regulations; something he could only explain as soon as he was free to do so; something that was just about the two of them — Gregor and Olivia — and the relationship she’d believed was strong enough to survive anything.

  She was so busy trying to brace herself for the blow of hearing him say that he hadn’t contacted her because her feelings no-longer mattered that it took her a while to realise that he’d been silent far too long.

  ‘Gregor?’ Automatically, she turned to look at him and her heart clenched to see the unexpected misery on his face before he tried to conceal it.

  Immediately, she castigated herself for being more interested in her own concerns than with his far greater needs. ‘What’s the matter, Gregor? Are you in pain?’ she demanded, reaching out across the expanse of no-man’s land stretching between them.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said hoarsely, but she could feel a slight tremor in the strong fingers wrapped around hers. ‘Well, as all right as any coward can be,’ he added gruffly.

  ‘Coward?’ That was a word she would never associate with this man.

  ‘What else would you call it when I deliberately delayed telling you I was alive?’

  ‘Deliberately?’ Her brain was so scrambled with incomprehension that she was reduced to parroting words. Was he really telling her that he hadn’t wanted her to know that he was alive? That if she hadn’t been about to get married, he would never have told her?

  ‘I wanted to wait,’ he said.

  ‘Wait? Wait for what?’ she demanded hotly. ‘I’d already been waiting nearly two years. Don’t you think that was long enough to find out that you weren’t dead?’

  ‘I didn’t think another few weeks would make much difference, not if it meant — ’

  ‘Wouldn’t make much difference?’ Disbelief roared through her. ‘Wouldn’t make much difference to whom? To you, maybe not, but to me…?’

  How could he be so casually callous? As if she hadn’t missed him and mourned him for every second since she’d been told that he was lost for ever?

  Incensed beyond bearing, she flung the covers back, not knowing where she was intending to go; only intent on being somewhere other than with a man who cared so little for her feelings.

  ‘Livvy, no!’ Gregor reached for her arm, holding her just tight enough to prevent her from leaving. ‘I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.’ He reverted to his native language for several heated seconds. ‘Please…let me explain. Please…!’

  She glared at the hand manacling her wrist but had to admit, when he removed it, that there wasn’t even a temporary mark on her skin, despite the potential power in those long fingers and the training he had undoubtedly received when he’d joined the army.

  ‘So, what did you mean?’ She transferred her glare to that starkly handsome face and the liquid-silver eyes that closed for several telling seconds before he fixed them on her.

  ‘I didn’t want to come to you like this,’ he said starkly. ‘I wanted to wait long enough to get on my feet…so I wasn’t a cripple any more…so I wouldn’t have to see pity in your eyes.’

  ‘And have you?’ she demanded, trying desperately to shore up her anger even though he’d virtually demolished it with one stumbling sentence. ‘Have you seen pity in my eyes, even for one second?’

  One corner of that beautiful mouth kicked up in a wry half-smile. ‘I admit it. Not for one second have I seen pity,’ he agreed. ‘I’ve seen compassion, sympathy, concern…so many emotions.’

  He sighed heavily, and the judder in his breath reminded her that, much as he would hate to admit it, he wasn’t the strong man he’d been before if their recent, highly charged conversation could shake him so badly. In fact, honesty compelled her to admit that while she would like nothing more than to clear the air between them completely — to find out whether he was willing to put their marriage back together or had already decided he wanted a divorce and a fresh start — what he needed more than anything else tonight was at least eight hours of nightmare-free sleep.

  And if she was left wakeful beside him, savouring the fact that it had been nothing more than male pride that had kept him away from her for one extra day, it was worth it just to have him here now. She’d spent nearly two dreadful years missing him — believing that he was gone for ever and with him her only hope for a family. From now on she was going to relish every moment they were together.

  For the second morning in a row, Olivia woke up to find herself wrapped around Gregor as closely as ivy wrapped around a tree…and with absolutely no desire to remove herself.

  This was where she wanted to be, every night for the rest of her life.

  OK, she’d been hurt and angry that he hadn’t let her know he was still alive as soon as he’d regained his memory. But, now that she knew his reason, it didn’t really matter why Gregor had delayed a few days before reappearing in her life.

  Admittedly, if he’d turned up straight away it would have avoided the fiasco in the church, but what mattered most was that he was back, and regardless of how much or how little Rick d’Agostino could do for his mobility, he was still the only man she would ever love.

  When she’d thought she’d lost him for ever, she’d discovered that there had been a gaping hole in her life that only Gregor could fill.

  How many times had she lain awake in the night trying desperately to remember the exact smell of his skin just there, in the tender angle between his neck and his shoulder? How many times had she longed for just one more minute of feeling his steady heartbeat under her palm where it spread, here, across the muscular swell of his pectoralis major? How many times had her fingertips tingled with the remembered pleasure of stroking these silky dark hairs as they formed such an eye-catching design over his chest and…?

  ‘Woman, you’ll drive me insane if you keep doing that,’ Gregor growled, the words rumbling around in the broad chest under her ear.

  She froze fo
r a second, suddenly realising what she’d been doing, but she couldn’t help the happy smile she could feel spreading over her face as she lifted her head to look down at him.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said penitently, lifting her hand away from him and leaving it hovering in mid-air. ‘I hadn’t realised that I was touching you like that. Would you rather I left you alone?’

  ‘What I would rather is that you stop teasing me,’ he said as he caught her hand and brought it to his mouth for a kiss before pressing it to his chest again in exactly the same place. ‘What I would rather — ’ the word emerged almost as a guttural growl, his accent suddenly very obvious ‘ — is that you will make love to me until I can’t see straight.’

  He drew in a shuddering breath, his dark eyes gazing up into hers full of heartbreaking vulnerability. ‘What I would rather is that our love-making could make the last two years disappear, but…’

  ‘I’ll definitely be happy to try,’ she whispered against his lips, wishing there was some way to erase all the misery he’d gone through…was still going through. ‘But all I can guarantee is to make the next hour or so vanish in…in a haze of ecstasy.’

  ‘A haze of ecstasy?’ he repeated with raised eyebrows, then deliberately raised both arms until they bracketed his head on the pillow, leaving himself completely defenceless and at her mercy, then he grinned wickedly at her. ‘I like the sound of that, and you can start as soon as you like,’ he said.

  It didn’t take an hour to have both of them breathless and shuddering with the aftershocks of one of the most earth-shattering climaxes they’d ever shared, but there was lingering sadness for Olivia.

  It wasn’t that they hadn’t shrieked each other’s names, because they never had done, neither of them able to articulate a single word when the ecstasy between them was that intense. No, it was the memory of her own private guilty pleasure throughout their marriage that, whenever he’d impaled her to the hilt in those seconds when he’d spilled his seed deep inside her, she’d always imagined that this was the time that they would start a new life…a child that would embody all that was best and strongest in both of them as proof of their love.

  It had been a crazy, impossible fantasy when they’d agreed that they wouldn’t start their family until he’d finished his tours of duty in the more perilous parts of the globe, and they’d been taking precautions to prevent it. Still, each time it had left her with a little glow that one day…one day soon…when Gregor rose over her to drive himself into the deepest reaches of her body, he would leave a permanent tangible memory of their mating that would take his or her place in the world nine months later.

  Would that ever happen now?

  Her heart gave an extra beat at the thought of the possible consequences of their unprotected love-making yesterday and today, but at this point in her cycle there was little chance that anything would come of it.

  And despite the fact that Gregor was the only man she would ever want to be the father of their children, she couldn’t avoid the realisation that Rick d’Agostino’s verdict could have a profound effect on their plans for a family.

  She was unhappy that Gregor seemed to have deliberately arranged his appointment so that she couldn’t be present, feeling that this was just one more important part of his life from which she was being excluded, but she could hardly complain, not when she still had such a devastating secret of her own to reveal.

  ‘Ah, Livvy,’ he murmured, and even though she shivered deliciously when his fingertips traced the length of her spine and he ended up by cupping her bottom in both hands, she wondered whether this might be the right time to tell him, while they were sated and relaxed and…

  No. Not today, she decided, not absolutely certain whether it was cowardice that made the choice, or consideration for the fact that he had enough on his mind with his upcoming appointment.

  Well, she was going to have to tell him some time soon. If they were to have a chance of making their marriage work, there would have to be honesty between them, after all, there was no point pretending that she wanted anyone else in her life. She loved Gregor more than she’d ever loved anyone else in the world and that wasn’t going to change, no matter what verdict Rick d’Agostino gave him.

  ‘So, what you’re saying is that you’re confident that, if you operate, you’ll be able to get me back up on my feet?’ Gregor recapped to give his whirling thoughts a few extra seconds to process the information.

  If he went under Rick d’Agostino’s knife, it would be a matter of weeks — well, months, if he was being more realistic — but he would finally be out of this hateful chair for ever… Well, at least until old age finally took its toll.

  ‘Obviously, there are no guarantees,’ the orthopaedic surgeon cautioned.

  ‘There never are,’ Gregor agreed wryly.

  ‘But all the tests confirm that there is no basic neurological reason why you can’t walk. It’s purely the fact that there was mis-union and non-union after your initial surgeries…for whatever reason…and this has resulted in the fact that your pelvis and legs are non-weight-bearing.’ He pointed again to several images among the array of X-rays lined up along the bank of light boxes. ‘We’ll need to do some fairly heavy-duty bone-grafting here…and here…for which we’ll probably need to use donated or cadaveric bone. Do you have any objections to the use of donated bone matter?’

  ‘None whatever, if it can get me on my feet again,’ Gregor said, marvelling that some people were generous enough to donate their bodies for the use of others after their deaths. With the advent of the use of donated skin, bone, tendons and ligaments, the number of people whose lives could be improved by just one person’s foresight could now be counted in dozens rather than the two or three when it was only possible for hearts and kidneys to be transplanted.

  ‘Now we come to the other side of the “advised consent” equation,’ d’Agostino warned. ‘There are, of course, the usual possibilities for problems to occur during surgery, including unexpected allergic reactions to drugs used during the anaesthetic leading to anaphylactic shock or even cardiac arrest.’

  Gregor waved a dismissive hand. As far as he was concerned, a doctor was only too well aware of the myriad variables that could go wrong, so this part of the speech was just a waste of both their time, although the hospital’s ethics committee would no doubt disagree.

  ‘Then there are the potential side-effects if the surgery doesn’t go as well as we expect.’ The serious expression on the man’s face made his heart give an extra thump.

  ‘Side-effects other than the fact I could go through all of it and still end up in this chair?’ Suddenly he had an awful feeling where this conversation was going.

  ‘Unfortunately, until we get in there, we won’t be able to see how much scar-tissue was left — both by the initial injury, then by the surgeries — so, at this point, in spite of all the scans, X-rays and MRIs, some of our plans are pure guess-work,’ he admitted. ‘But one of the dangers is that we’ll need to deal with the area through which the nerves leading to your genital area travel, and unfortunately there’s a chance that…’

  He hardly needed to complete that sentence. Gregor understood only too well what permanent damage to that bundle of nerves could do to him. In fact, he’d spent nearly two years believing that it had already happened, until he’d seen Livvy again and his body’s natural reaction had proved otherwise.

  At that point, and especially the last two mornings, when Livvy had demolished two years of longing with her generous love-making, he’d believed that worry had been banished for ever, but that obviously wasn’t the case.

  ‘You’re saying that the operation could leave me permanently impotent. That there’s a chance that I’d never be able to make love again,’ Gregor said for him, feeling as sick as if he’d taken a body-blow.

  Somewhere, there must be some cosmic laughter going on.

  As he’d told her last night, when he’d regained his memory he’d been determined
not to contact Livvy until he could meet her on his own two feet. Her imminent marriage had scuppered that plan, forcing him to go to her as a wreck of the man he’d once been.

  Now, when the probability of walking again was almost within his grasp, he was hit with the possibility of having that which was most male about him rendered useless. And after the mind-blowing love-making he’d shared with Livvy just hours ago, that was an irony beyond belief.

  How was he supposed to make that sort of choice?

  He certainly didn’t want to remain in the wheelchair for ever…for one thing, statistics showed that it would significantly shorten his life, to say nothing of the fact that it would limit his career prospects and probably prevent him from earning a good enough living to support a family.

  Then there was the fact that he wanted Livvy to be his wife and the mother of the children they both wanted, not reduced to the permanent role of carer while also taking on the burden of being the primary wage-earner for the two of them.

  And if he did have the operation and the worst happened, leaving him impotent, how long would Livvy stay with him if he was never going to be able to satisfy her? How would he cope, his male ego reduced to nothing when the only way he would be able to give her the family they’d planned was by resorting to mechanical means?

  Livvy deserved a whole man…one who could support her and satisfy her both in and out of the bedroom. If the worst-case scenario happened, it looked as if he was going to be left with an either/or choice, and that wasn’t good enough — not for his Livvy.

  ‘So, what do you say?’ Rick d’Agostino closed the file on his desk and spread both hands over the cover as he met Gregor’s eyes straight on. ‘I can put you in the schedule as early as Monday, using one of my allocated theatre slots. Shall I book it?’