Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

  Her heart ached with the realisation that what should have been an impossibly joyful reunion had quickly been marred by anger and resentment on both sides, but with each little revelation…deliberate or otherwise…the animosity had been melting away.

  But if the anger was largely gone, the same couldn’t be said for the questions that still needed answers, and she was going to make sure she got them, one way or another.

  ‘Gregor,’ she began, her heart in her throat, dreading the possibility that she was going to learn that there was very little more that Rick d’Agostino could do for him but anxious that he might be missing out on a better quality of life simply because he couldn’t bear the thought of going through the trauma of yet more surgery, ‘why didn’t you take up the offer of the surgical slot straight away? I know Rick’s willing to operate, so I don’t understand why you’re hesitating. Did he tell you something…about your current situation, or the prognosis after the operation…that put you off? Did he shoot down the idea that he could get you on your feet after all?’

  It was a good job she wasn’t holding her breath as she waited for an answer because the silence seemed to stretch on for ever.

  ‘Please, Gregor. Talk to me!’ she begged, tears still horribly close to the surface. ‘All I know is that you’ve had an enormous number of tests and have been offered surgery. I need to know more. I need to know what he found. Did he say the damage you suffered makes it hopeless? Or perhaps it was the other surgeons’ attempts that caused the problems? Would this operation just be aimed at stabilising things to reduce your pain?’

  ‘Not at all,’ he said in a strangely grim tone. ‘He seems pretty confident that the operation will finally get me out of this thing.’ He slapped both hands on the arms of the chair for emphasis, but she could tell that there was something else on his mind…something that he wasn’t telling her.

  So, if it was something that he couldn’t tell her openly, perhaps she could work her way round to it somehow.

  ‘Have you contacted his secretary yet to confirm your place on Monday’s list?’ she asked, certain that everything was connected in some way to the surgery.

  ‘No,’ he growled.

  ‘Why not?’ If he thought his surly expression was going to deflect her, he had another think coming.

  ‘My body, my decision.’ It was more of a snarl this time, but she could sense that it held more of the wounded animal about it than a threat, no matter what he’d intended.

  ‘Of course,’ she agreed lightly. ‘And knowing that you’re someone who’s undergone rigorous military training and has probably spent time he can’t talk about in innumerable hell-holes, it couldn’t possibly be fear that’s preventing you from going under the knife again…or perhaps it is? Perhaps you don’t trust even someone as good as Rick d’Agostino?’

  ‘No! It’s not that I don’t trust him!’ he exclaimed immediately, and she was relieved that she’d been able to sting him into delivering a whole sentence.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t that, what is it?’ she demanded. ‘Is it just that you don’t want to talk about it with me because you’ve decided I don’t have the right to know any more? Have you decided that you want a divorce after all?’

  ‘No!’ If anything, the response was even more emphatic this time, but then she saw an unexpectedly uncertain expression seep into his eyes. ‘Unless that’s what you want?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ she said impatiently. ‘If I’d wanted a divorce, I certainly wouldn’t have shared a bed with you, or my body.’ She was tempted to shriek with frustration, wondering how such a clever man could be so dense. Only the fact that it would upset the people staying in the rooms around them made her hang on to her control.

  ‘Gregor, I think I fell in love with you the first day we met and I was devastated when I was told you’d died, but unless we can clear the air between us…unless we can start talking to each other and sharing our thoughts and feelings…we won’t stand a chance of — ’

  ‘Face facts, Livvy,’ he interrupted grimly. ‘With me in a chair we don’t stand much chance anyway. I’m not the person you married any more, so all the plans we’d made — ’

  ‘Neither of us is the same person.’ It was her turn to butt in. ‘Yes, you’ve been changed by what’s happened to you — and I don’t just mean the obvious physical changes — but I’ve changed too. The things that have happened to me over the last two years…believing that I’d lost you…then losing your b — ’

  She screeched to a halt but it was already too late.

  She could feel the colour draining from her face as those liquid-silver eyes watched, their intent gaze telling her that his far-too-sharp brain was already dissecting all the possible endings to that sentence.

  ‘You were pregnant?’ he whispered with such certainty that it wasn’t really a question. ‘You were carrying our baby when I left?’ Horror mixed with sadness and was followed closely by anger. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep it a secret? How far — ?’ He stopped himself and shook his head. ‘What does it matter, now, how far along you were?’ he exclaimed heatedly. ‘What happened to the baby?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly how many weeks pregnant I was because it was accidental,’ she said, deliberately starting at the beginning. ‘We’d decided we wouldn’t start our family until the end of your time on active service in the unit, but…possibly it happened during that clostridium outbreak when our shifts got changed around at short notice. I vaguely remember having to take a couple of my Pills later than I should…’ And she wouldn’t have remembered that much if she hadn’t gone over and over it obsessively in the dark days after she’d lost everything that mattered to her.

  ‘Once I’d taken the test, I was only waiting for you to get in contact with me, and if you were able to tell me that you’d been sent somewhere relatively safe, I would have…but the next thing I knew…’ She could barely see him for the tears and her throat was so tight that she had to force the words out to finish the telling.

  ‘They sent two of them, all dressed up in their best uniforms — as if that would somehow make it better — to inform me that you’d been killed in an explosion and that they couldn’t even find enough of you to bring home for me to bury…just…just your mangled ID tags. That’s…’ She had to pause to draw in a shuddering breath, only then realising that she was sobbing as she spoke and that tears were streaming down her face.

  She’d been harbouring the secret too long and it had been festering inside her ever since the moment she’d realised she couldn’t even tell her mother about her dreadful loss, convinced that all she would receive were expressions of relief that there would be no permanent reminder of her ‘ill-advised’ marriage, rather than the sympathy she’d needed for losing the last precious part of the man she loved.

  This man, she thought as she ran despairing eyes over him, trying to imagine, as she had so many times before, which parts of him their child would have inherited…his thick dark hair with its unruly tendency to curl, the strangely liquid quality to those silvery-grey eyes, or perhaps the lean, almost aristocratic profile and high cheekbones?

  She tried to draw in a steadying breath to continue speaking but the pain of loss was too great for anything more than one last broken statement. ‘That’s when I l-lost the b-baby.’

  Gregor had never felt so helpless, trapped in a wheelchair by his useless legs when Livvy needed him to be able to take her in his arms, to cradle her against his heart and share her sorrow for the child they’d lost.

  ‘Oh, Livvy, I’m so sorry,’ he whispered. ‘So sorry I wasn’t there for you…so sorry you had to go through all that alone…’ He tasted salt on his lips and realised that he was crying, too.

  That was something he couldn’t remember doing for many a long year but, then, he’d never before learned that he’d lost what might be the only chance he would ever have of a family.

  His heart clenched inside his chest, and he finally understood the agony
of all those people he’d seen in countries all around the world, trying to cope with similar losses.

  Somewhere in the depths of his mind, images flickered of children screaming, surrounded by all the chaos of explosions and gunfire, and something told him that these faces were significant in some way to his own life. He tried to focus on them, hoping for recognition, but there was too much else going on inside his head at the moment.

  He tried to wipe away the evidence of his unmanly weakness on a raised shoulder, but the tears kept coming as he mourned not just the death of their baby but everything this lovely woman had endured in the last two years.

  Then, too, there was the inescapable fact that in his present condition there was so little he could do to make the future any better for her than the past.

  There was little chance that he would be able to secure a job that would fulfil both his financial and emotional needs, and the prospect of spending the rest of his life doing little more than suturing lacerations was not enticing.

  Perhaps he should look further into the possibilities of returning to his own country? Half a doctor would be better than none, until their medical services finally returned to normal, and he was certain that Lena and Mariska would welcome him with open arms.

  Then there was the question that had haunted him since his teens…the fact that he’d never been able to bring himself to return to the place where his family was buried to tell them how sorry he was for letting them down.

  But they were problems for another day.

  Now all that mattered was giving Livvy the comfort she needed while his soul soaked up the solace she offered like a desert absorbing life-giving rain at the end of an interminable drought.

  ‘I knew you’d been holding something back…’ he mused in the darkness, and she realised she could hear the rumble of his words in the broad naked chest under her ear, too.

  ‘Ever since I turned up at the church and you agreed to let me go back to the flat, I knew there was something you weren’t telling me,’ he continued, ‘but I had no idea what it was.’ He gave a soft growl of exasperation.

  ‘I’d been going over and over it, trying to work it out. Was it the fact that I’d prevented you from marrying Ash? Was it the fact that I’m injured and don’t know how much I’m going to improve? Perhaps you’d decided that you no longer loved me and were trying to find a way to break it to me that you wanted to go ahead with a divorce? But then you told me about your arrangement with Ash and you’ve explained that you were only getting the lawyer to check on the legality of our marriage after I’d been declared dead, and I was just left wondering if you were dreading having to care for a paraplegic for the rest of his life and — ’

  ‘No!’ The relief she felt at having finally told him about the baby was almost overwhelmed by her guilt in delaying the telling.

  To think that he’d been going over and over things in his head like that, believing that she was seeing him as an unwelcome burden when nothing could be further from the truth. ‘Gregor, if you decide not to have surgery, I’d be unhappy…but only because I’m hoping Rick d’Agostino is going to be able to take some of the pain away.’ She huffed out an exasperated breath. ‘I know you hate being dependent on anyone or anything…and that includes painkillers. But if you think that you being in a wheelchair makes any difference to how I feel about you…well, you’re an idiot!’

  ‘But at least I’m a fully functioning idiot, even if I’m in a wheelchair,’ he snapped, the mixture of anger and misery suddenly clear in his voice.

  Suddenly, with her brain working at lightning speed to untangle the relevance of that single sentence, Olivia knew they’d finally reached the heart of the problem.

  ‘That’s what he told you?’ she asked while everything inside her clenched tight in sympathy with his desolation. ‘Rick said that if he operates, he can give you back your legs but you’ll be unable to perform sexually?’

  ‘It’s a serious possibility,’ he admitted, ‘and knowing how much you’ve always wanted children…and especially now that I know you’ve already lost one…it just wouldn’t be fair for — ’

  ‘Whoever told you life was going to be fair?’ she interrupted heatedly. ‘You know better than most that bad things happen to good people, too. And anyway,’ she added quickly, preventing him from butting in, ‘having sex isn’t the only way of having babies, any more than it’s the only way of showing you love someone or of finding fulfilment with them. So you certainly can’t use that as an excuse for pushing me away…unless you don’t love me any more and want that divorce after all.’

  Her heart was in her mouth as the challenging words seemed to echo in the compact little suite and time seemed to stretch into infinity as she waited for his reply.

  ‘Will you pass me the phone, please?’ he asked softly, and she blinked, suddenly wishing there was more light in the room so that she could see his expression.

  ‘The phone?’ Automatically, she reached out to the bedside table for it and passed it to him, but instead of taking it from her he wrapped long lean fingers around her hand and tightened his other arm around her to pull her closer.

  ‘Well, assuming you meant what you said, I’m going to need it to phone Rick d’Agostino’s secretary to leave a message to put my name down for that theatre slot.’

  ‘So, does that mean you don’t want a divorce?’ she challenged in a distinctly wobbly voice as she realised that it felt as if he never intended letting her go.

  ‘I never did,’ he said, ‘but I still can’t bear the thought of you being stuck with someone who can’t — ’

  The only way she could think to stop him voicing any sort of doubt was to press her lips to his and rely on the combustive nature of their kisses to empty his mind of anything but their need for each other.

  ‘We’ll deal with it,’ she whispered when they surfaced some time later, both of them breathless and already well on the way to naked. ‘Whatever happens to you…to us…we’ll find a way to deal with it, together.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  ‘THE operation’s over, Gregor,’ he heard Livvy say reassuringly, then felt the soft press of a kiss on his cheek. He couldn’t even force his eyelids open, let alone move, although he tried, the effort wringing a hoarse groan out of him.

  He had a vague memory of Rick d’Agostino telling him how pleased he was with the way the complex operation had gone, or had that just been wishful thinking while he had still been under the influence of the anaesthetic?

  And he couldn’t even summon up the words to ask.

  One thing he was determined to do was open his eyes to catch his first glimpse of Livvy’s face. One glimpse would be all he needed to know whether the surgery had been a success or not…to know whether he was going to have to leave her to find a man who could give her the family she wanted, while he spent the rest of his life reliving the images stored in his memory.

  And even if the operation had been a success, that was only the first part of the battle to become something resembling his former self. At the moment, he knew there would be tubes and wires galore snaking to and from the drains and monitors connected to his body. Then there was the fact that he’d needed bone harvested from other sites on his body as well as donated cadaverous tissue to rebuild his damaged legs, pelvis and spine, so he had numerous surgical sites needing analgesia to dampen the pain while they healed. And that was all apart from the necessity of spending who knew how long face-down to allow the major incisions on his back to begin healing.

  And it wasn’t as if waiting for bone, muscle and skin to heal after the surgery was going to be the end of the story either. As he knew from his previous operations, there would be months of gruelling physiotherapy to build up his wasted muscles and restore their function, and all of that would have to happen before he could even start to put weight on his legs to see if he could once again use them for walking.

  And he still didn’t know if that was going to be possible, this time, any more
than the last.

  Finally he managed to force his eyelids open just a crack.

  The light in the room seemed almost painfully bright and it took him several seconds before he could focus on Livvy’s face…and his heart nearly stopped when he saw the tears sliding steadily down her cheeks to drip off her chin.

  Livvy was crying.

  She was sitting at his bedside, crying.

  That must mean that the operation had been a failure — but in what way?

  Did her tears mean that he still wouldn’t be able to walk…wouldn’t be able to go back to the sort of medicine that left him satisfied at the end of a day, no matter how gory or how mundane the cases had been? Or did it mean that Rick d’Agostino had been forced to tell her that her husband would never be able to make love to her again?

  His crushing disappointment must have forced a sound out of him because suddenly she looked up from the hand she was holding to see that he was awake and looking at her…and she smiled.

  It was the smile he’d seen in his dreams for two long years; the smile that had saved him from going mad when he’d had no idea who he was, let alone who she was…

  ‘Oh, Gregor,’ she whispered, more tears brimming in her eyes. ‘It went well. Everything went well.’ And he suddenly realised that, in spite of the tears, her eyes were glittering with happiness. ‘Obviously, you’re going to have to do a bit of work to get fit before I’ll be able to send you back to work…’

  They shared a wry grin at the irony in her choice of word because they both knew just how many gruelling months of effort it was really going to take, but at this moment he didn’t care about that. All he could think about was the fact that there was still a chance that he could keep Livvy in his life, forever…or at least until he knew whether there had been any collateral damage done during the operation. There would be plenty of time to contemplate a life without her if he discovered that he could no longer give her the family she deserved.