Her Long-Lost Husband

by Josie Metcalfe

‘Instead, you told them they were giving you a headache,’ she chuckled, remembering what he’d said before. That reminded her of something else he’d said.

  ‘What did you mean, earlier?’ She broke the silence that had been weaving itself almost comfortably around them and peered up into his face, wishing that there was just a little more light to be able to see him properly.

  ‘What did what mean?’ She saw the dark slashes of his eyebrows draw together in a puzzled frown.

  ‘You said something about dreaming about me even when you didn’t know who I was. What did you mean by that?’

  She didn’t need a bright light to see the discomfort appear in his expression and for a moment was certain that he would refuse to explain. Then, suddenly, there was a new determination in the set of his jaw and her heart lifted with the realisation that he wasn’t going to fob her off this time.

  ‘It was after the explosion,’ he said, the rough edge to his voice telling her that the memories of that time were still raw. ‘At first, I just hurt too much and was too terrified that whichever faction had found me was going to finish the job off to worry about how many injuries I had.

  ‘Then, once I realised that they weren’t going to kill me — that they actually wanted to help me — I began to realise how badly hurt I was.’ He drew in a shuddering breath that was her only clue to just how much of the detail he was leaving out. ‘It was only when they got me to the nearest hospital…a place not much bigger than a small GP surgery and with virtually no equipment or supplies left, due to the ongoing conflict surrounding it…that I realised how much trouble I was in, especially as I couldn’t remember where I was, what I was doing there or even who I was.’

  ‘Was it difficult to make yourself understood; to explain that you were a doctor and knew what was wrong with you?’ How she was managing to ask a reasonably intelligent question when she was still reeling from that shocking revelation, she didn’t know.

  ‘I had no difficulty communicating — once my ears stopped ringing from the explosion — because they were speaking the language I grew up with…although I probably shouldn’t be telling you that for reasons of operational security.’

  ‘You mean, they’d sent you back into your own country; to the place you were born?’ She couldn’t imagine how difficult that would have been for him. From the little he’d told her about his disastrous childhood, it couldn’t have been a place he’d been eager to re-visit.

  ‘To a different area,’ he corrected her, ‘but close enough that they still spoke the same dialect, thank goodness, because that’s what saved my life. That, and the children,’ he added wryly.

  ‘Were you able to do anything to treat yourself, or did you have to explain what needed doing to the local doctor?’

  ‘What local doctor?’ he said wearily. ‘The only medical services available to anybody in the area were an elderly midwife with no formal qualifications and one of the local girls who’d been part-way through her training as a nurse when her mother had been killed and she had to come back home to take care of her younger brothers and sisters. The doctor had been marched away at gunpoint in the middle of the night several months earlier, and no-one had seen him since.’

  Olivia was almost afraid to ask what treatment he had — or hadn’t — received for his injuries, but he didn’t wait for her to voice the questions teeming inside her head.

  ‘Between them, Lena and Mariska managed to clean me up and stitch the worst of the gashes…without anaesthetic,’ he added in a grimaced aside, ‘and they did a good job of setting my arm — using strips of wood for splints, moss for padding and lengths of fabric to bind it all together — but there wasn’t much they could do for my legs.’

  And suddenly, when the question was there, on the very tip of her tongue, Olivia couldn’t make herself ask.

  Cowardice had never been something she’d succumbed to, but all the time she didn’t have to confront the full details of the damage that had been done to his back and his legs, somehow she could pretend to herself that it was something from which he could recover; that one day, in the not too distant future, he would be standing tall and straight, the same Gregor she’d met and fallen in love with.

  And perhaps a selfish tiny part of her didn’t want to know just how little time she would have him to herself; to have him lying in their bed with her arms around him and talking in the quiet shadows of the night.

  ‘I’d better let you rest so the painkillers can get to work…so you can get some sleep,’ she murmured, straightening up to put her feet on the floor even as she regretted leaving the warmth and comfort of his arms and walking away.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said, then instantly contradicted himself. ‘No. You need to sleep, too. The drugs will probably help me to sleep deeply enough that the nightmare can’t come back.’ But he didn’t sound certain, and she was sure that she heard dread in his voice.

  ‘I could stay…just until you fall asleep,’ she offered, hoping she didn’t sound as pathetically eager as she felt. She hadn’t had time to process the ramifications of the fact that Gregor had suffered from traumatic amnesia; was only too willing to excuse him for not contacting her without having any idea just how long the condition had persisted.

  How pathetic did that make her?

  She had every right to be angry with him for not trying to get in contact with her as soon as he’d arrived back in Britain. She wouldn’t have ended up in the embarrassing position of having to cancel a wedding in front of hundreds of prominent guests if she’d had some kind of warning that her husband was still alive.

  But…all she had to do was remember the sound of the pain and despair in his voice when he’d been calling out and she knew that she couldn’t leave him to go through that alone.

  That’s if he really wanted her to sit with him?

  There was no reason why he would, given that he’d stayed away so long. He must have had a reason why he hadn’t contacted her, and the fact that he’d asked to stay in the flat could just be for the sake of convenience or because he couldn’t stand being hospitalised any longer.

  ‘Please, stay.’ His whispered words were so soft that if she hadn’t been listening for them — hoping against hope that he would say them — she might not have heard them at all.

  Gregor was exhausted, but for the first time in far longer than he cared to remember, he felt good about it.

  For nearly two years he’d welcomed whatever drugged oblivion he’d been able to achieve each night, just to escape from the misery of his existence.

  Now he couldn’t care less that it was already several hours past the time he could have taken his next dose of analgesia. Hopefully, that meant that the increased level of pain brought on by the rigorous testing he’d undergone was beginning to diminish to a more manageable level.

  Anyway, the last thing he wanted to do was move when he had Livvy curled up against his side with her arm laid protectively across him and her hand spread over his heart.

  He’d never imagined, when he’d asked her to stay with him, that she would agree to stretch out on the bed beside him instead of sitting up in the chair, still less that she would have accepted his invitation to slide her cold feet under the covers and curl up beside him to share the warmth. He’d hardly dared to breathe when he’d realised that she was drifting off to sleep, revelling in the delight of having her in the bed beside him…albeit with several chaste inches between them.

  And if he never told her that he’d waited until she was sound asleep before he’d taken the chance to coax her into his arms, she’d never know that she hadn’t been the one to gravitate towards him the way she’d always done when they were in bed together.

  When he’d been lying in the primitive remains of that once-proud little hospital, all but naked and feeling as if every bone in his body had been broken, it had been hard to believe that a day would come when he would welcome the long hours of darkness.

  For so long, each day had been something to end
ure, with no prospect of the damnable mists that clouded his memory ever lifting enough for him to find out who he was and where he belonged.

  But at this precise moment, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that he was exactly where he wanted to be — in a warm comfortable bed and with the one woman in the world who meant absolutely everything to him wrapped around him as closely as ivy around a tree trunk.

  What might happen when Livvy woke up and found herself here with him, he had no idea, but in the meantime, he had every intention of enjoying the time he did have with her.

  Time to feel again the familiar weight of her against his side, aware with every molecule of the soft soughing of her warm breath against the curve of his neck, feeling the catch of her silky hair tangling on his emerging stubble and breathing in the soft, utterly female scent of her that surrounded him.

  Then he had to stifle a groan of agony as his body responded in a reassuringly male way to those thoughts, having to suppress the fear that he might never be able to do anything to assuage needs that had already been in abeyance for two long years…and that was even if the current uncertain state of their relationship didn’t preclude it.

  ‘Gregor?’

  The sleep-hazy murmur of her voice emerging from somewhere under his chin told him that she was more asleep than awake and he deliberately kept quiet in the hope that she would go back to sleep again; that he would have a little longer to savour the pleasures of having her in his arms.

  The new day was barely starting to break with only the slightest hint of sunrise lightening the darkness, but neither of them had ever been the sort to lie in bed when there was work to be done, their internal clocks fine-tuned during the long years of training to wake them when it was time to get up.

  Once upon a time, this had been one of their favourite times to indulge in fast and furious love-making, their passion only seeming to be heightened by the fact that they had to have one eye on the clock to get to work on time.

  Today was very different. Neither of them had any pressing reason to leap up and get going. Livvy had probably booked herself at least a fortnight’s break for her honeymoon with the Honourable-Baronet-in-waiting, while he…

  Well, he had absolutely nowhere he had to be, even if he were capable of getting there…at least, until he made another appointment at the hospital.

  A change in the pattern of Livvy’s breathing told him that this precious time with her was about to end. Then she stretched like a cat, arching her back and making that sweet mewing sound that had fascinated him from the first time he’d heard it.

  She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, obviously still more asleep than awake, and it was almost as if the intervening years had never happened. The sound in her throat deepened almost to a purr when her position draped across him told her of his body’s all-too-eager reaction to her presence, but when he expected…dreaded…the moment she would realise exactly what she was doing…anticipated the way she would shoot backwards across the bed to break any contact, probably with a glare of accusation skewering him to the mattress…he was stunned into speechlessness when none of that happened.

  Instead, he was being drawn into an almost dream-like state that was eerily similar to the dreams he’d woven around his mystery woman when he’d hovered between nightmare and agony. Only this time he wasn’t imagining gentle hands exploring his body, tracing every dip and hollow, winnowing through the dark hair as she teased her way from one exquisitely sensitive nipple to the other, then following the trail down his quivering body.

  He was half-afraid to slide his hands up from her waist to draw the solitary item of clothing over her head, convinced that losing it would bring her to her senses, but when the air swirled around the soft pink globes of her breasts to tighten the deep rose of her nipples into demanding nubs, instead of beating a hasty retreat, she instinctively tried to satisfy her body’s demands by undulating her body over his.

  His own body was so tightly wound from a combination of years of abstinence and the fear that this unexpected pleasure would be snatched from him — the way it always was when he woke from his dreams — that the first touch of her questing hand at his waistband almost broke his control.

  ‘Livvy!’ he growled, certain she must be able to hear the agony of anticipation so clear in his voice. He could have wept when she immediately froze, lifting her head to look down into his face.

  Then he saw the expression on her face…her darkly dilated pupils and the way they focused so intently on his mouth.

  ‘Please… I’m sorry, but…may I kiss you?’

  Her stumbling request robbed him of any words to answer, but he didn’t need words. All he needed to do was reach up to frame her face in his hands and guide her towards him, every molecule in his body taut with expectation.

  It was like the first time he’d kissed her — the ripple of fierce sensation that had scythed through him at the first touch of his lips on hers…the fierce possessive heat that had flared through him as he spread his hands open on her back, pulling her closer…and the jolt of disbelief when he heard his own groan, deep and low, its rumble vibrating right through his body, and her softer whimper confirming that she shared the same overwhelming desire.

  Yes, this was like that first time — the jolt of total awareness, the firestorm of heat, the visceral desire, but, oh, so much more overwhelming this time because, even though he hadn’t known the name of the woman in his dreams, he’d known for two long years exactly what he’d been missing.

  ‘Gregor…no!’ she gasped, and he stifled a groan of agony as she tried to disentangle herself from him. ‘We can’t…you can’t…’ she panted. ‘You’re injured.’

  ‘But you’re not,’ he countered, guiding her mouth back to his.

  For several endless seconds she did little more than meekly accept the evocative thrust of his tongue into the dark sweetness of her mouth, then, to his everlasting relief, she suddenly dispensed with any delaying tactics.

  In seconds, it seemed, she had both of them naked and their bodies joined in the way he’d been dreaming of for so long. And it was even better than in his dreams…hotter, faster and so very much more explosive, leaving both of them panting as though at the end of a race but with infinitely more pleasure lingering as they relaxed into a familiar post-coital fugue.

  Gregor had no idea how long they slept…hadn’t had any intention of sleeping at all while he had that soft, lithe, achingly familiar body sprawled bonelessly over the top of his.

  Unfortunately, he’d been woken by the gnawing pain that settled into the base of his spine whenever he lay too long on his back — the pain that had driven him to take the first available appointment for a surgical consultation, even though it had been at Livvy’s hospital — the pain that, after the events of the night that had just passed, somehow seemed a little less unbearable.

  Even so, much as he didn’t want to disturb her — or want to lose the precious head-to-toe contact between their bodies — he was forced to try to slide Olivia to one side.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘GREGOR… What…? Oh…! I’m s-sorry,’ she stammered when he roused her in spite of his efforts. ‘I — I meant to go…not to fall asleep… I should have left…’

  ‘Shh,’ he whispered, unbearably tempted to banish her endearing embarrassment with a kiss, but knowing that a single kiss would never be enough…never had been enough…and with the level of his pain escalating, he really wasn’t in a fit state to do anything about it, even if she were to do most of the work. ‘I have no complaints over the fact that you stayed…nor any regrets,’ he added.

  ‘You don’t?’ He wondered if she had any idea how enticing the dawning look of hope in her eyes could be.

  ‘No, Livvy, I don’t,’ he said firmly. ‘My only regret is that I need to move; that I need to take my tablets and visit the bathroom, preferably in very quick succession.’

  The reminder that he might need her help to achieve the simplest and most basi
c of tasks was enough to have her switch instantly into carer mode, much to his disappointment.

  If he hadn’t been watching her closely, he wouldn’t have recognised that it was only a cover for her discomposure over what they’d done during the night, so much so that she was hardly able to look at him as she pulled on the oversized T-shirt she’d flung off in the half-light of the night, tugging in vain at the hem of it to try to cover those mile-long legs.

  He didn’t know whether to smile at her unexpected embarrassment or groan aloud at the vivid mental images of those legs straddling his body as she rose above him in all her slender naked glory, but he certainly didn’t want her to regret what had happened. The last thing he wanted was for her to avoid him when his only chance of sorting the situation out between them was to spend as much time as possible with her…in or out of their bed.

  ‘Thank you, Livvy,’ he said quietly when she silently positioned the chair beside the bed, obviously still searching for some innocuous topic of conversation to break the uncomfortable silence, and she blinked, clearly confused.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she responded automatically, then a quick frown pinched her eyebrows together. ‘What for?’ she demanded warily and he wondered if her thoughts had been as discomforting…and as arousing…as his.

  ‘That was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in nearly two years,’ he said honestly, wondering if he was doing the right thing to try to side-track both their minds off the unexpected explosion of passion between them. ‘I don’t usually manage more than a couple of hours — between the painkillers and the nightmares. Then I end up spending my days feeling as if I haven’t slept at all.’

  ‘Could you have slept better because your pain is less than it was — because the analgesia the hospital gave you is dealing with it more effectively — or was it because you told me about what had happened to you…about what happens in your nightmares?’

  He shook his head. ‘Talking about it usually brings the nightmares back worse than ever, and even though the pain’s subsided to its usual level and I’m on different painkillers, I still need them…much as I wish it weren’t so,’ he admitted, glad to see that, even though she’d retreated behind her medical persona, at least she was looking at him, now.