by Kim Lawrence
Georgie shook her head. ‘They took him to Theatre; they said he had raised inter-cranial pressure. I think they’re going to drill…’ She couldn’t bring herself to tell the older woman that the doctor hadn’t given her a straight answer when she had asked if there was a chance of brain damage.
‘Theos…!’
‘How did you know? Is Angolos here?’ Georgie asked her mother-in-law.
‘No, I’m afraid we haven’t been able to locate him yet, but do not worry, he will be here. Thomasis rang me. At a time like this you need family around.’ She gave an understanding nod at the tears that began to silently run down Georgie’s cheeks.
‘You must put your faith in the doctors. They know what they are doing,’ she said, gently taking the cup Georgie was still clutching from her hand. ‘Sit down, my dear.’ She looked at her daughter-in-law’s bare feet but said nothing.
Georgie did as she was urged. She felt numb and strangely disconnected from the things going on around her.
‘I want Angolos,’ she said.
‘Of course you do, and he will be here presently.’
‘It’s my fault…if I had gone swimming with Nicky none of this would have happened—’
‘I do not want to hear that.’ The imperious older woman cut her off mid-sentence. ‘Accidents happen. There is no point in dealing in “what ifs”. From what I have seen you are an attentive mother.’
The unexpected tribute brought fresh tears to Georgie’s reddened eyes, but she knew that if Nicky’s grandmother didn’t blame her his father would. ‘Angolos would never forgive me if anything happened to Nicky,’ she predicted tragically.
‘My son is a bigger man than that.’
‘I know, but we argued,’ Georgie admitted, biting her lip. ‘He left; he was furious with me.’
The older woman took Georgie’s hand between her own. ‘Angolos is a man with a hot temper, but a big heart, and he loves you.’
Astonished, Georgie stared back at her mother-in-law.
‘And I think you love him also…yes…?’
Georgie nodded.
‘Then if you talk things will be all right. First,’ she added briskly, ‘we must find him, but I have people looking for him so do not worry. He will be here.’
And what will he find when he gets here…? Georgie hardly dared think that far ahead.
The two women sat in silence as the minutes ticked by.
‘Why doesn’t he come…?’
The rheumatic fingers around her own tightened. ‘He could do nothing if he was here. Waiting is hard, I know…’ The older woman heaved a sigh.
‘What will I do if he doesn’t get better? I can’t bear…’ Georgie’s face crumpled. ‘He’s so little,’ she wailed.
Olympia seemed to have no problem following this disjointed, sorrowful sentence.
‘I thought we had agreed there is no point worrying about something that hasn’t happened yet, and Nicky may be little but he is a Constantine and he is a fighter just like his father.’
‘Yes, yes, he is, isn’t he?’ Georgie said eagerly. She gave a wan smile and wiped her damp face.
‘And you are a Constantine now too, so you must be brave. Be brave for little Nicky; he will need his mother.’
Georgie swallowed and lifted her chin. ‘Thank you,’ she said thickly.
A nurse approached. ‘Mrs Constantine?’
Both women got to their feet.
‘Is there news?’
‘Well, the doctor will explain, but…’
Georgie managed to hold back her emotion until she had spoken to the doctor and seen Nicky come round briefly after his operation. But when she left him sleeping peacefully again, then it all spilled out. She leaned against the wall, her body shaking with silent sobs as tears ran unheeded down her cheeks.
‘Theos…!’
She opened her eyes and found herself looking up into the dark eyes of her husband. Weak with relief, she staggered into his arms.
‘Angolos!’ she breathed as his arms closed tight around her. She felt his mouth in her hair; his breathing close to her ear was uneven and laboured.
‘I’m so, so…sorry,’ he said, his voice an agonised whisper. ‘Is he…?’
Then she realised he didn’t know that Nicky had come through the operation and there would be no lasting damage. She lifted her head and took his face between her hands. The depth of pain inscribed in those proud lines shocked her deeply.
‘Nicky is going to be fine, Angolos,’ she told him. ‘The operation was a total success.’
He froze, hope suddenly flaring in the shadowed depths of his eyes. ‘But I thought, they told me, and when I saw you breaking your heart I thought he was…’
‘It was relief; I was crying with relief.’
‘This is true?’ The big hands that took her shoulders were shaking. ‘Nicky is going to be well…?’
She nodded, unable to speak past the emotional constriction in her aching throat. ‘He was bleeding…’ she touched her own head ‘…inside. They relieved the pressure.’
‘Will there be any complications?’
She shook her head. ‘No, they say he’ll be a hundred per cent.’
She stood to one side and gestured towards the door. ‘He’s in there. Would you like to see him?’
The brown muscles in Angolos’s throat worked as he nodded.
The nurse who was sitting beside the small figure whose head was swathed in bandages rose as they entered.
Angolos said something in Greek to which she replied in the same language. With a nod towards Georgie she moved away from the bed to make room for them.
‘She said he’ll sleep for a while yet,’ Angolos said, his eyes trained on the sleeping figure.
Georgie nodded. ‘He did wake up, though.’
‘Did he ask for me?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied with a smile in her voice. ‘He asked for a dog…a big dog and he also said that it wasn’t his fault.’
The admission drew a short laugh from Angolos. He exhaled and dragged his long fingers through his dark hair. ‘He looks so small.’
‘I know.’
Angolos turned and looked at her. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said thickly.
‘You’re sorry?’
‘I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.’
The self-recrimination in his voice made her shake her head in denial. ‘But you couldn’t know, and your mother was here.’
He looked astonished. ‘My mother?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, your mother, and actually she was pretty fantastic, a real hero. She stayed until Nicky woke up and then I made her go home. She looked exhausted; she left cousin Sabine with me.’
Angolos grimaced. ‘That was kind of her,’ he said drily.
Georgie’s lips twitched. ‘She is really a very nice woman.’
‘She’s a nitwit,’ he retorted.
‘She has a kind heart, actually, and she hates hospitals so it’s very kind of her to offer to stay.’
‘More like she’s too scared of my mother to disagree.’ Head turned slightly from her, he pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. For the first time she registered the lines of exhaustion scoring his handsome face. The ache in her chest became a physical pain.
‘I was going to get a coffee when you arrived. Would you like me to fetch you one…?’
At her soft words Angolos’s head lifted. He looked at the small hand curved over his arm and then at her face. A slow smile that made her heart flip spread slowly across his impossibly gorgeous face.
‘Actually, I think I’ll come with you. Nicky will not wake yet for a while…?’
She shook her head and turned to the nurse. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
The nurse nodded.
‘And if he does they’ve given me a bleeper,’ Georgie added, producing the item from her pocket.
Angolos nodded and placed a hand on her shoulders and steered her towards the door. ‘There are
things we need to talk about.’
A finger of dread traced a path down her spine. Oh, no…!
‘Are you cold?’ asked Angolos, who felt her shiver.
‘No.’
Up to this point Nicky’s condition had been the only thing occupying Angolos’s mind. Now that he knew Nicky was out of danger, Georgie, who knew the way his logical mind worked, knew that he would move on to the next obvious question—namely who was responsible for Nicky’s accident?
‘The café is this way,’ she said when they got out into the corridor.
Angolos shook his head. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll take a rain check. Hospitals,’ he confided, ‘are not my favourite place. Maybe we could sit outside…?’
‘Sure.’
Angolos shot her an enquiring look when she hung back instead of following him.
‘I know what you’re going to say.’
His darkly defined brows drew together in a frown. ‘That I seriously doubt,’ he said drily.
‘I do. And I just want to say that nothing you can say could make me feel worse than I already do,’ she stressed in a tremulous voice. ‘If I hadn’t been busy with that wretched party I would have gone swimming with Nicky as I promised and none of this would have happened.’
‘If I hadn’t flounced out of the house like an adolescent…if we had never met…’
She went pale. Was that what he wished…?
‘You see how foolish and futile it is to think that way?’
‘I suppose so,’ she said in a small voice. ‘I don’t blame you for walking away. I was mean to you. The party was a stupid idea anyway. I only arranged it because I wanted to impress your mother and your friends and,’ she admitted, ‘Sonia.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I wanted to show you I was as good as her.’
He looked astonished. ‘What on earth gave you the impression I wanted you to be like Sonia?’
‘She’s beautiful, and she knows what to say to important people, and your family thinks she was the perfect wife for you…also I suffer from terminal stupidity,’ she added with a shrug. ‘Actually I stopped caring about Sonia some time earlier this evening.’ She took a deep breath and met his eyes. ‘This morning I left my purse in the office of a private investigator I employed to trace my mother.’
‘You did what?’
‘I was going to tell you but there didn’t seem much point if he didn’t find anything.’
‘And did he?’
She nodded. ‘He told me she died two years ago and I have a half-brother and two half-sisters.’ The words emerged in a rush.
He held open his arms and she walked into them. ‘You did that all alone and then I shouted at you… I was frantic when I thought you were in danger. I’m so sorry.’ She felt his lips in her hair.
‘I don’t know why I laughed…I just couldn’t stop…’
‘Hysteria, I should imagine.’ He framed her face in his hands and turned it up to his.
The kiss was hard, hungry and at the same time breathtakingly tender. It drove every thought from her head.
‘Oh, gracious,’ she gasped shakily before he kissed her again.
When they disengaged he was breathing hard, but nothing else in his demeanour suggested he had done anything more extraordinary than say hello. Georgie’s legs were shaking so much she could hardly walk but Angolos led her through a door and out into a quadrangle. It was an unlikely oasis of greenery in the middle of the miles of antiseptic corridors.
She touched a lemon tree. ‘How did you know this was here?’ She was pretty sure there had been no signposts in any language, and a person could walk this way a hundred times without discovering it.
‘Insider knowledge?’
‘Insider…?’
He nodded. ‘It used to be just a few paving stones and benches. I had a landscape architect friend of mine make it over.’
‘It’s beautiful, and a lovely gesture, Angolos.’
She had already learnt that though Angolos donated generously to several charities, he did so on the strict proviso that his contributions were never made public. This, though, felt different. It was somehow…personal…?
‘That door over there…’
Georgie’s eyes followed the direction of his finger.
‘It leads to the oncology unit.’
In her chest, her heart started beating fast. ‘That’s cancer treatment.’
His dark eyes held hers. ‘That’s right,’ he confirmed.
‘Did you know someone who was a patient here, Angolos?’
‘In a manner of speaking. I had most of my treatment in London, but I did spend some time here when…well, I won’t bore you with the details. I was here for a few weeks on and off.’
‘You were ill?’ The world started spinning in a sickening fashion. ‘You had c…c…?’
‘Cancer. I had cancer.’
She looked at him, but his dark lean face—the face she loved more than life—kept slipping in and out of her focus. There had to be some mistake. Yes, that would be it—she had misunderstood. Angolos was strong, he was… She was not conscious of the choking sound that emerged from her bloodless lips in the second before Angolos helped her sit down on a slab of smoothly polished tree trunk.
‘This is nice,’ she said vaguely, running her hand along the smooth wood that had been carved to provide a seat.
Angolos dropped to his knees before her.
‘I didn’t mean to shock you,’ he said, taking her hands and fitting his long fingers to hers.
She looked at their interlinked fingers. Fear was a metallic taste in her mouth. ‘You’re well now?’ she said, lifting her terror-filled eyes to his. ‘It went away?’
‘It went away,’ he confirmed.
A tremulous breath hissed from her parted lips. Obviously it had; the man literally oozed vitality. ‘When did it happen?’
‘I had just been given the all-clear the day we met.’
She disentangled her hands from his and wrapped them around her shaking body in a defensive gesture. This shock fresh on the top of the previous one had an oddly numbing effect. With her eyes closed she suddenly saw his beautiful, fallen-angel face exactly as it had been that day.
‘That’s why you were so thin.’ She suddenly turned accusing eyes on him. ‘You jumped in the sea to rescue me and you were ill.’
‘Not as ill as you’d have been if I hadn’t jumped in.’
‘This isn’t a laughing matter,’ she rebuked. ‘Oh, I should have known…why didn’t I know?’
‘I had come down to give Paul the news.’
If it weren’t for him… His shoulders lifted. ‘Basically if it hadn’t been for Paul I’d be dead.’
‘Don’t say that!’ she pleaded. The idea of a world without Angolos in it was too appalling to contemplate. ‘I always liked Paul.’
He grinned.
It suddenly struck her what all this meant. ‘Basically when you met me you’d just had a death sentence lifted.’
‘In a manner of speaking I suppose I had.’
‘And you weren’t what most people would call in your right mind… Oh, that explains a lot.’ In fact it explained everything.
A dangerous expression entered his eyes as he watched her putting two and two together. ‘What does it explain?’
‘Do me a favour, Angolos. In your right mind you’d never have looked at someone like me twice let alone marry… No wonder all your family and friends disapproved.’ She let out a weak laugh and covered her face with her hands.
He had got rid of her as soon as he’d recovered his senses and that situation would have been made official if he hadn’t discovered he had a son. Why was she making this such a big thing? It weren’t as if she hadn’t always known that the marriage was all about Nicky.
Angolos took hold of her wrists and prised her hands away. ‘Look at me!’ he commanded.
She shook her head and heard his frustrated curse.
‘Nobody goes thro
ugh an illness like I did without it changing them, even profoundly changing them,’ he conceded.
She lifted her chin. ‘I’d say I can imagine, but I can’t,’ she admitted.
‘It makes a man…or at least it made me,’ he corrected, ‘reassess things. I discovered that I didn’t much like the person I had become. I was wealthy and what was I doing with my wealth? Making it grow… Yes, I’m good at making money, but was it making me happy?’ He shook his head. ‘I decided that if I got a second chance things were going to be different. Far from suffering from some sort of temporary insanity, I think the day I walked along that beach and saw you…I think that I was the sanest I had ever been.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Angolos?’
‘Because I didn’t want to see you look at me differently.’
‘I wouldn’t have…’ she began to protest.
He looked at her. ‘Are you sure?’
She sighed. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘When you’re ill people don’t see the person, they see the disease. And some don’t know how to deal with it; maybe it reminds them of their own mortality. With you there was none of that. They told me that the likelihood was the treatment would make me sterile. A trade-off, they called it. Basically I think the reason I didn’t tell you was I knew you weren’t really in love with me and I couldn’t risk losing you, agape mou…I couldn’t.’
The pain in his voice brought tears to her eyes. ‘But you wouldn’t have lost me, darling,’ she protested. ‘Of course I loved you. I always have and I always will.’
‘I should have let you go… Hell, I tried, but I couldn’t…’
‘I didn’t want to be let go. I wanted you.’
He shook his head. ‘You were in love with the guy who saved your life. You were in love with a hero figure who could walk on water. I wasn’t that man, but,’ he added bitterly, ‘I wanted to be, for you.’
‘I didn’t want a hero, I wanted a husband.’
‘A husband who had had his body pumped full of chemicals? A husband who couldn’t give you a baby? You asked me why I didn’t tell you, why I didn’t give you the opportunity to say, Thanks, but no, thanks.’
‘I wouldn’t have!’
He stilled her instinctive protest with a brush of his pain-filled eyes. ‘The truth is—’ He paused, swallowing hard, and Georgie, who couldn’t bear the pain and self-loathing in his voice, pushed her fist in her mouth to stop herself crying out. ‘I knew if I told you the truth there was a good chance I would lose you. My behaviour from the moment I met you was totally reprehensible. I fell in love with you at first sight.’