He looked at her patient, at the little boy curled up in the big bed, and something in his face seemed to twist. ‘Sleeping?’
Somehow she found the courage to reply. ‘Y...yes, sir.’
‘How is he?’
‘Obs all good, sir.’ She was struggling to get her voice to work. ‘I mean... Your Majesty. Blood pressure ninety on fifty. Temperature normal. He had paracetamol an hour ago when he woke. He also had fruit and custard and asked for his mother, but he wasn’t anxious when I told him. It seems he’s used to it, sir.’
‘So where’s his mother?’
‘She’s...she’s in Emergency, sir. When Fe... When His Highness went to sleep someone told her how busy we were and she offered to help. That’s why...that’s why I’m here.’
And Marc smiled. ‘I might have known,’ he said. ‘Once a doctor, always a doctor. Thank you for taking care of my son.’
And then he tugged off his beautiful coat, rolled up his sleeves and he turned to the man who’d come in behind him. ‘Okay, Josef, let’s go do something else the media isn’t going to see.’
* * *
There’d been no major drama, but the day of celebration meant the emergency department was filled with a seemingly endless stream of minor injuries. Ellie had seen them on the way in.
Felix was shaken and sore, but he was essentially fine. The drugs he’d been given, plus the fact that he’d woken before dawn to creep to the stables before anyone was stirring, had him fast asleep.
Ellie thus had time to herself, and sitting by herself while Felix slept had been doing her head in. After an hour of Felix-watching she asked if she could be fetched if Felix was needed. She headed for Emergency and that was where Marc found her.
She was in the cubicle at the end of the ward. She heard a stir of people arriving and hoped it wasn’t yet another drama. She’d had enough for one day, as had the entire staff.
But then the curtain was pushed aside—and it was Marc.
He was back as she’d seen him this morning. Breeches, dress shirt with full sleeves rolled to the elbows, boots...
He was the same Marc and yet different.
This was the King, she thought, and her patient’s mother let out a whimper of shock.
‘Ellie,’ he said and it took a great deal to smile back at him as if he were a colleague.
‘Felix...’
‘I’ve just seen Felix,’ he told her. ‘Fast asleep. I’ve come to find you.’
‘I’m dressing Lisle’s leg,’ she managed. ‘Your... Your Majesty, this is Lisle Betier, and her mother, Madame Betier. Lisle decided she wanted her dog to watch the Coronation Parade. They have a tiny attic balcony and their dog is big and very old. Lisle’s papa is one of your soldiers. He was in the parade. As you can see, Lisle’s mama is very pregnant, so Lisle decided to carry the dog upstairs herself. Sadly, she fell. She came in with concussion, but her obs are looking good. I’m fixing her leg now. We can’t put plaster on until the swelling goes down but we’re bracing it to hold it steady.’
Even though she was telling Marc what was happening, she was also talking to Lisle’s mother, doing what she did every day in her medical life. Informing and reassuring. It helped Lisle’s mother and it also helped her. It made it almost possible to pretend Marc was nothing more than a colleague.
‘Lisle will need to stay in overnight, because of the concussion,’ she told Marc. ‘But she’s going to be fine.’
Marc nodded. He drew the curtains closed behind him, effectively blocking out his entourage, but he too was focused on Lisle and her mother.
‘This happened while the parade was taking place?’ he asked. ‘That was hours ago.’
‘You’ve been...everyone’s been busy,’ the woman faltered.
‘And my dog’s been in the car all this time,’ Lisle whispered to Marc, as if he alone was responsible. ‘By himself. And Mama says we have to worry about me, but I’m sure he’s hurt himself. There was blood on his paw.’
‘Where’s your husband?’ Marc asked Madame Betier and she cast him a look that was almost wild.
‘He’s still on duty. He won’t be home until midnight. I didn’t even have time to leave a note. I just put Lisle in the car, but she insisted on bringing the dog.’
‘He’s hurt,’ Lisle said stubbornly and Marc lifted an eyebrow at Ellie.
‘Has Lisle’s leg been treated?’
‘It’s stable, dressed and braced. Greenstick fracture of the tibula.’
‘I want to see my dog,’ the little girl whimpered and Marc grinned.
‘Well, seeing as your dog—and you—were injured because of my parade, the least I can do is check out your dog. Is he in the car park?’
‘Yes.’ Lisle’s mother was bemused almost to the point of gibbering. ‘He split his pad and there was a lot of blood but I did run out and check...’
‘But Lisle needs to check too, and this is an imperative.’ He tugged back the curtains to reveal Josef and his two shadows. ‘Can you find a wheelchair?’
‘There isn’t one,’ someone called from the far side of the ward. ‘The nursing home borrowed them to take the oldies to the parade and they haven’t returned them yet.’
‘There is indeed a lot I’m responsible for.’ Marc sighed and looked at Ellie again and smiled. ‘But priorities must be maintained. We have an injured dog in the car park, Dr Carson. No other priorities?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she managed.
‘Then could you find disinfectant and bandages?’ He turned back to Josef. ‘I’ll need a chair if I’m to work out there, and a decent torch.’ He turned back to Madame Betier. ‘There have been priorities all day, but maybe this is the last. I, madam, propose to carry your daughter out to the car park. Dr Carson and I will attend to your dog, so Lisle can see for herself that he’s fine. While we do that, I’ll send word that your husband is to be released from his duties...’ he eyed the lady’s very pregnant bulge ‘...for the foreseeable future. On full pay. Starting tonight. Right, team, let’s get this priority sorted.’
* * *
Which explained why Ellie was standing in the hospital car park at midnight holding a flashlight while Marc assessed the injured pad of one ancient golden retriever. He treated the dog as he’d treat a child, with all the care in the world, cleaning its split pad, making sure there were no foreign bodies, then carefully padding and binding—and all the time chatting to the dog, to Lisle and to Madame Betier, as if he had nothing more important to do but this.
The bodyguard and Josef were still in the background, but to Marc they might as well not exist. He was totally focused.
He’d been focused all day, Ellie thought. One thing after another...
‘There,’ he said softly, patting the old dog’s head. ‘You’ll be going home soon.’ And then he looked thoughtful. He grinned at Lisle and lifted the old dog out onto the grass verge nearby. He lowered him onto the grass and held him by his collar. The dog didn’t put any weight on his injured paw but promptly did what he’d obviously needed to do for hours. And everyone laughed.
Marc took the dog back to the car and then went to pick up Lisle. She needed to be carried back to the ward.
‘Marc?’
Ellie’s voice made him pause. ‘Yes?’
‘Could one of your bodyguards carry Lisle back? Lisle, would that be okay? I’m afraid His Majesty has another imperative he needs to deal with.’
‘I do?’
‘You do,’ she told him and took a deep breath because some things were blindingly obvious. Maybe if they’d seen things this clearly ten years ago they would have saved themselves a whole lot of heartache, but sometimes sense took time.
But now...
Sense was all around her. She just needed to shake off his entourage and make Marc see.
/>
* * *
They weren’t allowed to stay in the car park and talk. That’d be too much for the security contingent to swallow. ‘Go back to the palace and have your talk in private,’ Josef urged, but some things were too urgent to wait. So Ellie grabbed Marc’s hand and led him through the first door marked Staff Only, which happened to be the door through to the scrub room.
No one was there. The row of metal sinks, the bright white lights overhead, the sterile, scrubbed environment, it lent a sense of unreality to what she had to say. And yet it made sense too. She’d met Marc as a doctor. That was what they both were under the trimmings.
And because that was how she felt, stripped bare, in a place where only essentials mattered, she turned and faced him and said the thing that had been pounding in her head for hours. When she’d watched a lone figure take the crown. When she’d seen past the glitz and pageantry to the lone man, solitary, taking on a burden that was surely far too heavy for him to bear alone.
As she’d watched him face what he must face and she’d known she couldn’t leave.
‘If you still want...’ The words had been forming in her head for hours and yet they were still hard to say. But they were the right words. ‘If you still want, then I’ll stay,’ she managed. ‘Marc, if you want to make another go of our marriage...’
And there was such a blaze of hope on his face that she took a step back. Almost as if she was afraid.
But then his face stilled. ‘Make a sacrifice, you mean?’
And how to explain this?
She was tired, overwrought, overwhelmed by the emotions of the day, yet she still had to get the words out.
‘It’s no sacrifice. I love you.’ The hope flared again but she held up her hands, as if to fend off any interruption. She had to get this right. ‘You know I always have.’
‘You know I’ve loved you. But, Ellie, I have no right...’
‘And I thought I had no right either,’ she told him. ‘Ten years ago we stood in that airport and knew what we were both facing was impossible. We saw no way to be together so we parted. But, Marc, we were married. We loved each other. Surely we could have done it better.’
‘Forcing you to join me in a war zone, you mean?’ How many times had he thought this? ‘And you halfway through your training. With your mother ill.’
‘And me? Forcing you to return to Borrawong with me because that was where Mum needed to be? Both were impossible. So we did the only thing that seemed possible. We ended our marriage. But these last few weeks, I’ve realised... Mark, you can’t end a marriage. Sure, a marriage can end if two people fall out of love. If two people should never have married in the first place. A marriage can stop being a marriage, but has ours?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying...’ She took a deep breath because she wasn’t sure. It should be the guy, she thought, the man who went down on bended knee, but Marc had already done that. He’d already married her in all honour and then he’d walked away because that had been the honourable thing to do too.
He’d asked her to stay now. That had taken courage, she knew, but what had taken more courage was his acceptance of her response. He wanted her. She could see it every time he looked at her. And Felix was his son, and he had a right to be here for him, as he’d had the right these last ten years.
So say it.
‘Marc, we haven’t been able to be together for most of these last ten years,’ she managed. ‘And yet...and yet...do you still feel married?’
‘You know that I do.’
He was past exhaustion too, she thought. Up at dawn, riding to search for their son, then going through surely the most demanding, emotionally overwhelming day of his life. He looked almost grey with tiredness. There was a trace of blood running down his sleeve. That’d be from washing the dog, she thought, and she looked up into his tired, careworn face and thought, Of all days, to be carrying an unknown little girl into the car park and caring for her dog...
‘There’ll always be other priorities.’ She said it surely now, the sudden remembrance of Marc’s tenderness towards Lisle and her dog almost overwhelming her. ‘And...and we need to accept that. But if we decide that being married is a given, something that can’t be revoked just by getting on a plane, then won’t everything else fit in around that? And maybe, maybe we can work on priorities. Not accept them as given. Like your boxes...’
‘I don’t—’
‘Marc, you’ve been told they’re a priority,’ she said, urgently now because this was important. This was at the heart of who he was. Yes, he was now Falkenstein’s sovereign, and maybe he was also her husband, but part of Marc was also a surgeon. A fine surgeon. He’d told her once he couldn’t even remember deciding to be a doctor—he just knew he would be one. So that was a given.
‘We can work on this,’ she said, urgently now. ‘Together. But you need room for your medicine because that’s who you are. Tonight you came in here exhausted, and yet fixing a little girl, fixing her dog...it’s who you are and I love you for it. And your country has to learn to love you for it too, because they can’t ask you to ignore what’s part of you. Marc, maybe for now the boxes take precedence, but there’s another priority as well, and that’s choosing people we trust to share—’
‘We?’
‘We,’ she said, firmly now because this was in her heart. ‘If you want me, I won’t leave you to face this alone and it can’t be a sacrifice because I love you. Marc, if you’d still like me to stay, to share the burden...’
It was as if the room was suddenly super-powered, pierced by a jolt of something so strong it threatened to blow them both away.
Or blow them together?
She couldn’t remember moving. She couldn’t remember Marc moving, but suddenly she was in his arms. Her face was somehow thrust upward to meet his and his mouth claimed hers, with all the power of a long line of ancestral kings, with all the power of a man who’d hungered for his wife for ten long years, with all the power of a man who loved her.
How had she ever thought her marriage was ended? She knew as she melted into his arms, as she felt the heat, the strength, the longing, as she felt the absolute knowledge that this was home, that this was priority number one.
Or maybe it wasn’t a priority. Maybe it was simply what was.
Ellie and Marc.
If she thought of the future it might well overwhelm her. She didn’t want royalty. She didn’t want media attention. She didn’t want the baggage that would inevitably distract her from her medicine, even from Felix.
But some things were not arguable. She’d fight for what she needed, she thought, but, as Marc’s arms held her close, as he lifted her high and swung her, his face ablaze with joy, she thought she’d never need to fight for this.
This was Marc. Her husband.
Hers.
* * *
Three months ago Felix had missed out on riding in his father’s coronation parade. This parade was just as good. Actually, Felix thought as he rode his beautiful grey mare beside the great golden carriage containing his mother, this might even be better.
A royal wedding.
His mum had been horrified when the idea was first mooted. ‘Marc, no. Let’s just do it quietly at the council offices.’
‘There’s no such thing as quiet when you’re the King,’ Marc had said cheerfully. ‘Josef said the coronation did wonders for the economy. How much more so a royal wedding?’ He’d smiled, and he and Ellie had shared one of those goofy smiles they did so often, the smiles that Felix was learning to live with—and even like. ‘Besides, I’m proud of my wife. We had a registry office wedding once before, if you remember, and we didn’t take our vows seriously enough. Let’s show the whole nation we mean business.’
So here they were, heading for the cathedral wi
th all the pomp and pageantry the country could possibly crave.
And Felix was on a horse of his choosing. The mare wasn’t quite as magnificent as his father’s Mer Noire but she galloped like the wind. His leg was good—almost back to normal—and by normal they were saying it’d stop him doing nothing. Which meant when his mum had asked him to be in the carriage with her, there’d been negotiations.
His first idea was to ride behind the carriage in his new car. Or sort of new. For Marc had presented him with an ancient, battered hulk of a 1922 Austin Seven for his birthday. They were doing it up together. Half an hour a day was all Marc could afford, and sometimes there were gaps, so it wasn’t nearly ready—for which Ellie seemed profoundly thankful.
‘Then I’ll ride,’ he’d declared. ‘I’ll be an outrider.’
She and Marc had considered. ‘If it’s important to you,’ Marc had said at last. ‘Do it.’
There’d been a bit of that over the last few months. Discussions as to what was important, and what wasn’t.
It had seen Ellie sitting up late at night helping Marc sort through interminable boxes, working out priorities.
It had seen Marc insist on a slab of time three days a week, three hospital sessions where he abandoned his royal persona and operated as the surgeon he was.
It had seen Ellie fly out to Borrawong and arrange for locums to become permanent, funded in part by the Royal Household of Falkenstein. ‘It seems crazy when there’s so much need here,’ Ellie had told Marc but Marc had kissed her and hushed her.
‘It lets you stay with me without worrying,’ he’d told her. ‘And that means Falkenstein has a stable government. It’s a small price.’
So Ellie, too, was working whenever she could. The hospital was accustomed to the bodyguards now; in fact the junior nurse who’d cared for Felix the night of the coronation was now wearing a diamond, and Ellie’s chief bodyguard was never without a great, goofy smile.
More mush, Felix thought, but he grinned as he kept careful pace with the carriage. He couldn’t get distracted. He was accompanying his mother to the cathedral to marry his father, and that had to be priority number one.
Reunited with Her Surgeon Prince Page 17