Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Livvy demanded. ‘Are you in pain? Does your analgesia need topping up?’

  ‘Why would you think I’m in pain?’ he asked, his words distorted by his position while he silently kicked himself for not controlling his expression better.

  Livvy snorted derisively. ‘Firstly, because I’m a qualified doctor and well-accustomed to reading patients’ faces, and, secondly, because I’ve known you long enough to be able to tell when you’re thinking or feeling something and you’re trying to hide it from me. So, don’t think you can pull the wool over my eyes by turning my question back at me. If you’re in pain, I need you to tell me. If it’s a worry of any other sort, I need to know that, too.’

  Such a determined tone of voice was the best antidote to anaesthetic hangover he knew. Where before he’d been having difficulty keeping his eyes open, now he was wide awake and all-too aware of the concern she was feeling.

  Suddenly, he knew that it wouldn’t be fair to leave the situation hanging for however many days or weeks it might be until he knew how complete his recovery was going to be. They had always been equal partners in their relationship and it would not be right to allow Livvy to think that everything had been solved when their marriage could be ending in the near future.

  ‘Did…did d’Agostino say anything about…about collateral damage?’ he asked in a voice that, even to his own ears, sounded as if it had emerged over a mile of gravel track.

  ‘Collateral damage?’ she repeated with a frown before the penny dropped and the wash of heat that appeared in her cheeks was the most spectacular blush he’d seen since he’d reappeared in her life.

  ‘Well,’ she said after a pause that seemed eons long before she spoke again, ‘he did say that the extent of the damage was less than he’d feared, so the operative field was more contained than he’d expected…but he wasn’t able to give me any idea how long we’d have to leave it before we can start experimenting,’ she finished, completely robbing him of what little breath he had left.

  ‘That’s enough of that talk, Olivia Davidson!’ exclaimed a voice with a pronounced Mediterranean accent from the doorway as the surgeon in question came into the room. ‘At least you could give the poor man time to get over the anaesthetic before you start talking about having your wicked way with him!’ Then it was Gregor’s turn to feel the heat sweep up his throat and into his face in a scalding tide. He was actually grateful that he was lying face-down in the bed so that his embarrassment was largely hidden.

  It seemed like hours later before both the surgeon and the anaesthetist had pronounced themselves satisfied with Gregor’s initial recovery from the surgery so that he could be transferred out of Post-Op, then there seemed to be dozens of minor delays before he could be ensconced in the ultra-swish surroundings of a private room.

  Not that it was just any private room. The hospital had made a financial decision to cater for some of the wealthier international patients who needed to take advantage of the fact that the hospital was a centre of excellence.

  It had been Rick d’Agostino’s decision that his patient should be transferred into one of those individual high-dependency rooms, to give a fellow member of staff a much-needed degree of privacy, but the hospital grapevine was probably already alive with rumours. Perhaps they imagined that there was royalty or a reclusive rock-star in residence?

  Gregor had slept through most of the turmoil, leaving Olivia free to think while she gazed her fill at what she could see of the lean planes of his face, so pale against those thick dark lashes and hair. The light caught several silvery strands at his temples, but that was hardly surprising after the stresses of the last two years.

  As ever, his torso above the crisp white sheet was naked, and if she ignored the stark white dressings over the single operation site she could see, she could concentrate on admiring the amazingly well-muscled breadth of his shoulders. In fact, she was looking forward to exploring his whole body as soon as he was fit enough, with all the time in the world to investigate and reacquaint herself with the man she loved.

  Suddenly she was brought to the edge of tears by the thought that she had come so close to losing him forever; that she might never have seen him again if it weren’t for sheer luck and the dedication of those two women who’d nursed him.

  But mostly she was thinking about what Gregor’s unguarded face had revealed in that first conversation as he’d been emerging from the anaesthetic.

  She had no doubt that, in spite of what she’d said, if the operation had gone badly he’d still had every intention of walking away from their marriage to allow her to find a man who could give her the family they’d planned.

  It was just the sort of unselfish thing that Gregor would do. He was the product of a childhood in which he’d had everything stripped away from him in the blink of an eye, and now he automatically reacted by finding ways to help others in similar situations, even if it meant putting his own life in danger.

  This time, though, she didn’t know whether to admire his impulse toward self-sacrifice or berate him for it. As if finding someone else to be the father of her children could ever be a simple matter of substituting one sperm donor for another!

  Those thoughts were uppermost in her mind when he finally opened his eyes again, their liquid-silver depths gleaming at her in obvious delight when he saw her sitting at his bedside.

  ‘It wouldn’t have mattered, you know,’ she blurted, almost startling herself as the words burst out of her involuntarily. ‘We’d have found a way.’

  ‘W-what wouldn’t have mattered?’ His voice sounded almost rusty and he was as adorably rumpled-looking as if he’d woken up beside her after a long night of love-making.

  ‘If it had turned out that you couldn’t…perform,’ she offered, and could have kicked herself for using such a ghastly euphemism when she was a medical professional with all the correct terminology at her disposal. All she could do was ignore her self-inflicted embarrassment and plough on, the words almost a gabble, they emerged so fast.

  ‘It’s not as if there’s only one way for us to satisfy each other or show our love and…and if we decided we wanted to go down that route, we could opt for semen collection so I could get pregnant. In fact, if we’d thought of it sooner, we could have collected some and had it frozen before you had your — ’

  ‘I did, Livvy,’ he interrupted, stopping her in her tracks.

  ‘W-when?’ she croaked. ‘You only knew three days ago that you were having surgery, so — ’

  ‘The process doesn’t take very long,’ he pointed out with a teasing grin, then crooked his finger and beckoned her closer, wrapping long lean fingers around her hand to pull her closer still until she had to lean against the side of the bed, her face almost as close as if they were sharing the pillow.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ he murmured as he distracted her by stroking his thumb over her knuckles. ‘I knew, logically, that I shouldn’t be selfish…shouldn’t tie you to me if everything went wrong…should set you free to find someone to give you the babies you wanted…’ He closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. ‘But I also wanted to be prepared…to have all the ammunition ready to fight for you…to persuade you that I could give you those babies even if they couldn’t be conceived in the normal way…’

  ‘Oh, Gregor…’ she breathed, touched beyond belief, and had to battle with the hot threat of tears.

  She angled her head to press a cautious kiss to the corner of his mouth. ‘Surely you know by now that the only babies I would want are yours, no matter how we have them. And even if we could never have children, you’re still the only husband I want; the only man who’ll ever share my bed and my heart.’

  The brief tap at the door was almost welcome, cutting through the turbulent emotions that threatened to overwhelm her, and the nurse who came in to take Gregor’s vital signs gave her time to remember some of the questions that had plagued her while she’d waited those interminable hours for t
he surgery to be over.

  ‘Tell me about Oksana,’ she invited when they were alone again.

  ‘Which one?’ he countered, and she blinked.

  ‘I didn’t know there were two,’ she said. ‘Which one was in your nightmare?’

  ‘Both of them, probably,’ he admitted grimly, then told her of the young girl he’d rescued from the cellar who had survived both artillery shelling and an exploding boiler with little more than scratches and bruises.

  ‘And the other one?’ Olivia prompted eagerly, glad that Gregor’s sacrifice had resulted in such a successful outcome.

  ‘She was my sister,’ he said, and his sombre tone told her that this story didn’t have a happy ending.

  It was several minutes before he continued and the pain in his eyes almost made her regret asking, but finally he began.

  ‘It was the school holidays and because our parents both went out to work, it was my job to take care of Oksana and Janek and keep them safe because I was the eldest. Then my parents were killed while they were queuing for bread and sausages, and there was only me to look after them. Then the explosions came closer and closer to our apartment building and I was so sure that the only safe place was down in the cellar…but then the walls collapsed and when the neighbours came to help, I was the only one they found alive and the authorities sent me to an orphanage.’

  ‘Oh, Gregor…’ Her heart ached so badly for everything he’d been through…not once, but twice. She was sorry she’d made him relive such a harrowing experience but glad that he’d told her because it explained so much about the man he’d become.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ he demanded suddenly, leaving her nonplussed.

  ‘Come where?’

  ‘To my home town to find their graves. Maybe the nightmares will go away if I can tell them I’m sorry that I didn’t — ’

  The brisk tap at the door interrupted him, then the unit’s senior sister stuck her neatly-styled head around it. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s a Lieutenant-Colonel on the phone for Mr…Dr…Captain…’ Olivia had to chuckle at the poor woman’s flustered stumbling over the correct form of Gregor’s name.

  ‘It will probably be easier if you just call him Gregor,’ she suggested, before she turned to the man lying unusually silently beside her. ‘I presume he’s one of your superiors. Do you feel up to speaking to him or shall I take a message?’

  ‘You might as well,’ he said. ‘He’s a good senior officer — cares about his men. He’s probably only checking up on me to make sure I survived the surgery.’

  Except that wasn’t anything like the message that Olivia was given to pass on, and when she hung up the phone it took her several seconds to catch her breath.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Gregor demanded impatiently, and stirred her out of her shock.

  ‘He said your unit was contacted by someone from the embassy. Apparently, the nursing staff you worked with and the villagers whose children you saved from the explosion have been making enquiries of all their friends and relations.’ She smiled briefly at the similarities between such a close-knit community and the hospital grapevine she’d been thinking about just a little while ago.

  ‘He said that it’s taken a while because so much of the communications infrastructure was damaged during the fighting, but one thing led to another and…’ She paused to grip his hand tightly. ‘Gregor, they think they’ve tracked down some surviving members of your family!’

  ‘What?’ he gasped, then groaned when he tried to shake his head too violently. ‘That’s impossible! There was no-one left…no-one at all. I didn’t manage to save any of them…my parents, my brother, my sister…they were all gone.’

  ‘Didn’t you just tell me they were called Janek and Oksana?’

  ‘Yes, but — ’

  Olivia had one eye on the monitor that was recording his blood pressure and pulse, wondering if this was the wrong time to be having this whole conversation. But how could she not tell him when it was such good news?

  ‘The embassy just informed your Lieutenant-Colonel that there are a Janek and an Oksana Davidov who have believed, ever since they were children, that their big brother Gregor was killed while saving their lives.’

  The next few hours were full of frustration for Olivia as she waited for all the necessary strings to be pulled; hours of watching Gregor fret at the delay even as he tried to school himself to expect disappointment.

  Finally, without any sign of the fanfare that the momentous call deserved, the phone rang and she handed it to Gregor.

  ‘Da. Etta Gregor Davidov,’ he said in a voice made guttural by tension, his knuckles bone-white as he gripped the plastic so tightly that she was afraid it would shatter in his hand.

  She couldn’t hear what the voice on the other end said, but she didn’t need to, not when she could see the tears of joy gather in Gregor’s eyes and the tremulous smile that began at the corners of his mouth and grew until it filled his whole face.

  ‘Janek?’ he whispered in disbelief. ‘Etta Janek?’

  He looked across at her and held his hand out to beckon her closer, wanting to share with her the delight of hearing his brother’s voice for the first time in so very many years, and her heart overflowed with the soul-deep realisation that she loved this man with every fibre of her being and would love him for the rest of her life.

  ‘Yalki palki!’ panted the young woman as she sweated her way through the last series of repetitions under the supervision of the physiotherapist. ‘Starrest ni radest!’ she shouted at the end, swiping at the rivulets of sweat beading her face and throat.

  ‘You didn’t actually teach Sherilee to swear!’ Livvy demanded in a hushed whisper, clearly horrified.

  ‘I promised I would, so I had to keep my word,’ Gregor said piously, then spoilt it by grinning at her. ‘I just hope I’m not anywhere in the vicinity if she feels the need to swear at someone from my country. If they fall about laughing and tell her what she’s actually saying…’

  ‘So, what did you teach her?’ Livvy demanded, clearly intrigued. ‘What does yalki palki mean?’

  ‘Yalki is Christmas tree,’ he explained, ‘and palki is the tree after Christmas, when all the needles have fallen off.’

  ‘But if it’s said with the right degree of venom…like someone saying sugar instead of using a less socially acceptable word… So, what about the other thing she said? Starrest something?’

  ‘You have a good ear for the language,’ he complimented her. ‘Perhaps I should have thought about teaching you before now, when we’re about to fly out there. At least you would have been able to greet some of the older people who haven’t had a chance to learn any English.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll have time for a crash course on the flight,’ she suggested. ‘But don’t think you’ve sidetracked me. What was that other phrase?’

  ‘Starrest ni radest?’ he repeated, making certain to accentuate the guttural roll of the words, knowing full well the visceral effect it had on her. ‘That’s one I’ve been saying fairly often myself while I’ve been getting these damn legs working again. It means “growing old is no fun” but whatever you do, don’t tell Sherilee.’

  The young woman in question was making her way over to them, a slender, glowing picture of health who looked as if she’d never had a day’s illness in her life.

  ‘So, doctor big-shot, who won the race?’ she challenged with a grin.

  ‘Well, you’ve been signed off fit to go dancing tonight, and I’ve officially handed in my wheelchair for good, so how about we call it a tie?’ he suggested.

  The brave young woman knew she would have to come back into hospital later in the year for a further operation to have some of the metalwork ‘scaffolding’ removed from around her spine, but the way her body had healed already after coming so close to paraplegia was amazing.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Sherilee conceded. ‘You said you might have to invest in a really trendy walking stick — like that
Dr House on TV — and I’ll probably never be quite as flexible as I once was but, hey, nobody ever promised that getting older was going to be a picnic.’

  Gregor smiled at Livvy over Sherilee’s head as the youngster hugged him, sharing with her the irony that the young woman had paraphrased the words he’d taught her all those weeks ago when they had both been in the early stages of their rehabilitation.

  Livvy threw a meaningful glance towards the large clock on the far wall, reminding him that they really didn’t have time to linger. This meeting had been squeezed in when Sherilee had told him that she was coming in for her last physio session, so that he could congratulate her in person. The two of them had formed an unexpectedly close alliance during their rehab, alternately egging each other on and vying with each other to make the greatest progress and commiserating when improvement was slow and depression threatened.

  ‘Hey, you two don’t have time to hang around here!’ Sherilee exclaimed suddenly. ‘You’ve got a plane to catch, haven’t you? You’re off to visit your family so you can pick up some new swear words.’

  ‘Something like that,’ he agreed as he gave her shoulder a farewell pat. ‘Enjoy your dancing tonight.’

  ‘Send me a postcard?’

  ‘I’ll send one to the physio department,’ Gregor said, and winked at her. ‘Now that you’re not a patient any more, you’ll have to ask one of the physios to let you see the card.’ The wash of pink in her cheeks told him he hadn’t mistaken her interest in one of the newest members of staff. He’d told Livvy of his suspicions that Sherilee’s new-found determination to become a physiotherapist herself had begun when the handsome young man had started work in the department.

  ‘Ready to go?’ Livvy asked with the lilt of laughter in her voice, and all thoughts of other people’s budding romances were banished.

  ‘With you? Anywhere,’ he agreed as he held his elbow out for her to slip her hand through it. The manoeuvre was their own personal compromise and had been Livvy’s suggestion, knowing just how much he’d hated being dependent on mechanical aids for so long.