IT TOOK Olivia several hours before she felt as if she was starting to make some headway, or perhaps it was just because the early morning rush was tailing off, giving the hospital time to re-group before the afternoon onslaught began.
She’d heard the comings and goings of several traumas arriving at the other end of the department and part of her craved the adrenaline rush that always came with knowing that every second could count if they were to save a seriously injured patient’s life. The other part of her was quite grateful to be down at this end where there had been absolutely no time for her colleagues to grill her about the farce her wedding day had become. Not that they hadn’t wanted to, she admitted wryly, knowing that she’d deliberately delayed taking a break for just that reason.
Now, though, she was feeling the need to stretch her legs, straighten the kinks out of her neck and back and find herself something to drink. And if that meant that she might be cornered and quizzed, at least she had a chance to deflect questions under the pretext of catching up on what had been happening in the rest of the department.
The last thing she expected was to turn the corner and see Gregor’s wheelchair disappearing into one of the rooms further along the corridor.
What on earth was he doing down here? she wondered as she followed on his trail. She could understand if he’d come down to tell her that he’d finished his appointment with Rick d’Agostino, but it was unlikely that he’d be in need of sutures after an outpatient appointment in the orthopaedic department, no matter how urgent. And, anyway, they wouldn’t have sent him down to A and E for that.
She arrived in the doorway just in time to hear him introduce himself over the sound of heartbroken sobbing.
‘Hey, I’m Dr Gregor and I’ve been told that you need some help with a jigsaw puzzle.’
The sudden strange silence that greeted his announcement piqued her interest and she managed to position herself so that she could just see the person he was talking to. Or rather the people, because there were two of them sitting on the bed, obviously mother and daughter from their faces, the little child clutched tightly in her mother’s arms.
Both were tearstained but, more pertinently, both were liberally spattered with blood.
‘Why are you in that chair?’ demanded the wide-eyed little moppet bluntly, clearly fascinated enough by Gregor’s mode of transport to stop crying.
‘Because my legs got tired and I needed to sit down,’ he replied simply, then returned to his original question. ‘So, what about this puzzle you need my help with?’
‘What puzzle?’ The mother’s voice was shaky, obviously still affected by whatever had caused their injuries but apparently willing to play along, especially now that her daughter had stopped crying.
‘Well, I’m the top person in the hospital for putting things back together so you can hardly see where they were apart, and I was told that there were two people in here that needed me to put them back together really, really neatly.’
‘Like a jigsaw?’ the youngster asked warily. ‘But won’t it come apart again?’
‘Not the way I do it,’ Gregor said confidently. ‘Because I’m the best.’
‘So, how do you do it?’ she demanded cautiously. ‘Will it hurt?’
‘Not if I’m extra-careful,’ he promised. ‘And if I have my special helper with me.’ He threw a wicked glance over his shoulder and beckoned, and she realised with a sudden spike of awareness that he’d somehow known that she’d been there the whole time. ‘Come in, Livvy, and meet my new friends.’
Olivia shivered, wondering exactly how he’d known she was there. She was absolutely certain that she hadn’t made a sound and neither of his patients had so much as glanced in her direction, and yet he’d known.
Surely, it couldn’t be that strange sixth sense that had seemed to operate between the two of them, telling each of them when the other was close by? Surely, something like that couldn’t have survived the two years they’d been apart?
Her heart lifted inside her when she realised that one thing that certainly hadn’t changed was the way the two of them worked together. It was almost as if words were unnecessary…apart from the stream of light-hearted nonsense that kept little Kylie entertained while her wounds were cleaned and debrided then sutured with the finest, neatest stitches she’d ever seen.
‘What on earth had happened?’ Olivia asked after they left, Kylie sporting two ‘I was very brave’ stickers on her blood-spattered sparkly pink T-shirt — one for each arm — and her mother clutching a prescription for antibiotics and an instruction sheet.
‘The grandmother came to visit, bringing her cat with her,’ Gregor explained as he stripped off his disposable gloves and fired them unerringly into the bin. ‘Grandmother’s cat attacked Kylie’s cat, so the little girl tried to separate them and got attacked by both.’
‘So, how did you get roped-in to dealing with it?’ she asked as she kept pace with his chair on the way to the staffroom and her much-delayed infusion of coffee. A sudden thought struck her. ‘When did you have your last painkillers?’
Gregor threw her a dark look. ‘Surely you know me better than to think I would treat patients if I was under the influence of analgesia that strong,’ he growled. ‘As for dealing with some simple suturing…I was here, I was available, and I was ready, willing and able to pitch in, especially as it’s something at which I’ve become rather proficient,’ he added as he negotiated a path through the scattering of chairs littering the staffroom.
‘Dealing with injured children, or suturing?’ she asked, and found herself automatically fixing his coffee without needing to ask him how he wanted it.
‘Both,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Even when I didn’t know who I was or where I came from, somehow I still knew that I was a doctor, and once I’d recovered enough to make myself useful…’
He didn’t really need to say any more because that was just the way Gregor had always been…incapable of sitting around if there was someone who needed his help.
‘But you’re not a member of staff here,’ she pointed out. ‘If someone took it into their head to make a complaint, HR would go ballistic.’
‘The A and E consultant contacted the human resources department and told them to get the paperwork sorted by the time he sent me in to see my first patient so that I’d be covered by the hospital’s insurance.’ He grinned. ‘It was amazing to see how fast they arrived with the paperwork to get my signature.’
‘It probably helped, the fact that you’d actually worked here during your training. It wouldn’t have taken very long to check up that you hadn’t been struck off in the meantime. Oh!’ A sudden thought struck her. ‘I wonder if the computer tried to tell them that you’re not alive any more!’
Gregor chuckled aloud, the sound strangely rusty as if he hadn’t had much opportunity to laugh since he’d disappeared from her life. ‘I wonder if that’s why the young woman from HR gave me that funny look? Perhaps she was expecting to see a corpse?’
‘So — ’ she sank gratefully into the nearest chair and kicked her shoes off ‘ — how did your appointment with Rick d’Agostino go?’
If she hadn’t been looking for it, she probably wouldn’t have seen the way his whole body seemed to grow unnaturally still…almost like prey sensing the presence of a hunter. And yet what possible danger could such a question pose?
Unless…
Unless, after examining all the results, the orthopaedic surgeon had given Gregor bad news at the end of his appointment?
Had he had to tell him that there was little more that could be done for him, surgically or otherwise, or was there something else…?
‘It was a relatively short appointment today,’ Gregor volunteered, his tone far too casual. ‘Just the last of the nerve-conduction tests.’
‘So, when will you get the results? Were you given any idea?’ Olivia was certain that there was a secret sub-text to this conversation — one to which she hadn’t been given the code.
‘I’ve made another appointment for tomorrow morning. Rick’s going to fit me in between his other patients,’ he said tersely.
It was only when she realised that he must have guessed that she would agree to cover another shift in the morning that she suddenly understood what was going on. Gregor didn’t want her to go with him when he went to see the orthopaedic surgeon for the results, so he’d made it as unlikely as possible for her to be able to accompany him without letting her A and E colleagues down.
Gregor felt sick when he saw the way Livvy’s expression changed and knew she’d realised that he didn’t want her to go with him to his next appointment.
It wasn’t true, exactly, because he would love to have her there with him; craved the support he knew she would give unstintingly. But that was also the reason why he couldn’t have her there, because if it was bad news, he knew she would be determined to stick by him, no matter how disastrous that would be for her own life and happiness.
He couldn’t allow that.
The last two years had been hellish, between not knowing who he was and feeling so utterly powerless, but that was nothing compared to the way he felt about the situation now that his memory had returned. He couldn’t describe how he felt, being back with Livvy, the love of his life, but if the results tomorrow were bad, there was no way that his pride would let him be a burden on such a giving, caring woman.
Livvy deserved better. She deserved the chance to start a new life with a man who could give her everything she wanted — a whole, healthy husband and the chance to begin the family they’d been talking about starting, just before he’d gone away. She deserved a second chance to marry the man her parents had always known would be the best husband for her.
As for him…he could always go back to the village and the courageous people who had fought to keep him alive even though he’d been a stranger to them. With the compensation he would eventually receive for his injuries, he could do a lot to restore the medical facilities destroyed during the fighting. And even if he was condemned to the wheelchair for the rest of his life, he already knew that he could contribute to repaying his saviours’ generosity by passing on his knowledge about piecing people back together.
If only he could manage to do the same for his own life…or, at least, for his heart.
Perhaps he could find some sort of closure for one set of nightmares, at least, if he were to search out the final resting place of the family he’d lost so many years ago. He knew it hadn’t been his fault that his parents had died, but Janek and Oksana had been in his care…as their big brother, it had been his responsibility to keep them safe and he’d failed, disastrously. But maybe there was a chance that, if he found their graves and told them how sorry he was that he hadn’t been able to protect them, they might stop haunting him.
In the meantime, there were any number of patients waiting for attention and Tricia seemed to be only too willing to cherry-pick the ones he could easily deal with. At least his finely-honed skill with a needle, gained through many painstaking hours of piecing together the villagers fighting to protect their families, was standing him in good stead.
So, why was it that he could feel so little satisfaction when he managed to salvage the face of the pretty girl who’d been an innocent bystander pushed through a shop-front window during a gang fight? Why was it so hard to appreciate the fact that his careful piecing together of the torn muscles in a young motorcyclist’s arm would eventually give him the power and mobility he would need to continue to earn his living? Why was it that all he could see replaying in an endless loop inside his head was the hurt in Livvy’s eyes when she’d realised that he was shutting her out of his life — again — and knowing that he couldn’t tell her why…might never be able to tell her why.
It was the first time in hours that Olivia had managed to find the time to come to the treatment room that had swiftly been dubbed ‘Gregor’s room’, and she found herself smiling when she realised the subtle changes that had already been made to accommodate him.
The hated wheelchair had been relegated to a corner, replaced by a wheeled stool that looked almost as if it had an enlarged bicycle saddle for a seat. The ubiquitous scrubs he was wearing seemed to camouflage the unnatural thinness of his legs, her eyes being drawn, instead, to the impressive muscular width of his shoulders and the teasing glimpse of dark hair in the V of the neckline.
His concentration had been legendary, even when he’d been training, and with his dark head bent towards the latest gruesome laceration highlighted by the bright task light, that obviously hadn’t changed.
But it was his hands that she noticed most.
There were a couple of plastic surgeons on staff at the hospital who could equal the perfection of the reconstructive job he was doing, but not one of them could have done it at that impressive speed.
‘Did you want me for something…or have you just come to watch me working?’ he challenged with an unexpected gleam in those liquid silver eyes as he glanced at her over his shoulder.
Once again he had known she was there, and she knew very well that he realised that she’d been watching him working and cursed her pale skin as she felt the heat of a blush rise up her throat and into her face. She had always loved watching his apparently effortless skill, even during his training, but hoped he had no idea that she’d also spent a fair amount of time just admiring him. He glanced up again and the expression in his eyes had the blush deepening when she realised that the answer to both questions was yes.
Yes, she loved watching him work, especially with the new confidence he’d somehow acquired during the last two years that almost elevated what he was doing to artistry. And, yes, she wanted him; desperately wanted him in every way there was, in spite of the core of anger that still burned deep inside her — justifiable anger that he’d cared so little for her feelings that, as soon as his memory had returned, he hadn’t contacted her to let her know he was alive.
‘I just came to tell you that Trish says you’re to go for your break. Apparently, she’s already told you twice and doesn’t want to be seen as a nag!’
‘Well, I’ve nearly finished here,’ he said as he bent over his work again, his hands working swiftly and surely as he placed the last few stitches in what must have started off as a daunting gash in the silent woman’s arm. ‘There,’ he said in a voice full of satisfaction when the dressing was in place and he straightened up to pull off his gloves. ‘They will give you a leaflet with instructions in Reception, Mrs Northam. It will tell you how to take care of your wound and when you should make an appointment with your GP to have the stitches taken out.’
‘Can’t you take them out?’ she pleaded softly, and for the first time Olivia really looked at the woman, and the expression in her eyes — an indescribable mixture of desperation and defeat — was something she’d seen far too often before; something that made her blood boil, but before she could say anything, Gregor was speaking.
‘I would be delighted to do that for you,’ he said gently as he pulled the instrument-laden trolley out of her way to allow her to get to her feet, ‘but in return, will you do something for me?’
‘Me? Do something for you?’ There was a flash of disbelief in her tired eyes as she flicked a glance towards Olivia standing quietly by. ‘Well…if I can. What did you want me to do?’
‘I would like you to go with Olivia, here, and have a word with the security man outside.’
‘S-security?’ Now she looked terrified. ‘But, I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘I know you haven’t,’ he said reassuringly, then fixed her with the sort of steely glare that would have had strong men quaking in their boots. ‘But if you don’t report the person who did this to you, the next time I see you it might be too late to save your life.’
‘Oh, but…I couldn’t do that.’ She was shaking her head wildly, her eyes as frantic as a hunted animal’s searching for a way out of a trap. ‘He would kill me if I said anything.’
‘Mrs Northam…Iris…he’ll kill you anyway, one of these days,’ he pointed out bluntly, even though his tone was gentle. ‘It doesn’t matter what you did or what you said that he used as an excuse to attack you, he doesn’t have the right to hurt you. No one does. It’s only because you were lucky this time that he didn’t hit anything major when he took that knife to you.’
‘I didn’t tell you that.’ The pulse at the base of her pale throat was fluttering at twice its normal speed and she was trembling visibly. ‘I…I told you. I…I scratched myself…on…on some barbed wire.’
Gregor sat looking at her, a single raised eyebrow telling her without a word being spoken that he knew how her injury had really occurred.
Even though everything in Olivia was prompting her to wrap a supportive arm around the poor downtrodden woman’s shoulders, she waited, trusting Gregor’s instincts. The tension in the room became so sharp that she found herself holding her breath, her crossed fingers hidden in the pockets of her scrub top.
‘Oh, God help me,’ the woman wailed suddenly, and tears began to pour down her face. ‘I can’t b-bear it any more. I’m so f-frightened all the time and he…’
‘Shh! Shh!’ Finally Olivia could offer her the comfort she needed, settling her back on the trolley when her legs no longer supported her. ‘You sit here while I go and fetch a cup of tea.’ She handed the box of paper hankies to Gregor on her way out of the door, nodding when he mouthed the word ‘police’ to her.
It was nearly an hour before the woman police officer escorted Iris Northam out of A and E, all of them having waited until they had confirmation that her brutish husband had been arrested in their blood-spattered kitchen and charged with grievous bodily harm against his wife. Even then, Iris wasn’t returning home but was being taken to a women’s shelter where there was an expert counsellor waiting to speak with her.
‘I will never understand,’ Gregor said grimly, the words almost exploding out of him. ‘How can a man call himself a man if he will terrorise a defenceless woman like that? He is less than an animal.’
Olivia couldn’t answer, especially when she knew of old that such questions were sometimes prompted by the memories of some of the dreadful things he had seen when he had been away from her. Perhaps, if he had been allowed to tell her where he’d been and what he’d done — and seen — it would help to banish some of the nightmares…but, then, Gregor’s protective nature would probably see the fact that he needed to burden her with such things as a sign of unmanly weakness in himself.
‘We’re both overdue for something to eat and drink,’ she said firmly, sidestepping the topic completely as she brought his wheelchair across to him.
They hadn’t even had time to make a decision about which of the unappetising choices they were going to use to refuel themselves for the second half of their shift when pagers started going off in several pockets simultaneously.
‘There must be something nasty coming in,’ Gregor commented, putting the tray back on the pile when a glance around the room showed a surgical registrar and his corresponding SHO catching up with the CT radiographer and anaesthetist already on their way towards the door.
‘You don’t need to come,’ Olivia said as she switched off her own pager. ‘Stay here and get something to eat.’ But she may as well have saved her breath. The stubborn man was already sending his chair hurtling towards the nearest bank of lifts.
‘What have we got?’ she demanded of the nearest member of staff as they reached the majors end of the department, annoyed to find she was considerably more out of breath than Gregor.
‘Listen up, everybody,’ the A and E consultant called, and the hubbub of voices instantly died away. ‘We’ve got two cars full of kids — mid to late teens. Head-on impact. Luckily, most are walking wounded but there are three coming in on blue lights. One front-seat passenger had the dashboard pushed back onto his legs. Multiple breaks. One rear-seat passenger, not wearing a belt so impacted with the front seat. Broken rib punctured a lung. Third major casualty was only wearing a lap belt and has a step deformity to her spine. It’ll be at least another half an hour before they can extricate her safely, but the others are due to start arriving at any minute.’
He didn’t really need to say anything more to anyone who’d been working in A and E during the last ten years because they could guess what was coming.
The department was becoming depressingly accustomed to dealing with sudden influxes of injured youngsters. Luckily, most were relatively minor wounds, garnered during drunken brawls, but when powerful cars driven at high speeds were added to the mix, the department could rapidly become so stretched trying to cope with the severity of the injuries that very little could be done for any of the other patients who might need attention.
‘Gregor, are you up for another hour or two of sticking and stitching?’ called a voice somewhere on the other side of the mêlée of personnel hurrying to their new assignments.
‘Of course,’ he called back, the deep resonance of his voice carrying easily over the hasty gaggle of conferences as supplies were ordered and the labs and blood bank were given a heads up. ‘I’m always up for it,’ he added as he threw a wicked glance at Olivia.
She glowered at him, knowing that the rat remembered only too well what that particular phrase, spoken with his own particular husky accent did to her. How many times, in the early days of their marriage, had he said those words just for the pleasure of seeing her blush, knowing that she would be imagining all the ways he could prove the truth of them when they went back to their flat?
‘Olivia, you’re with me,’ directed the A and E consultant briskly. ‘Hopefully, between us, we’ll have time to stabilise both the chest and the legs and get them transferred elsewhere before they get the spinal injury here.’
‘OK,’ she agreed automatically, but for a second she stood there, unable to move her feet as she stared after Gregor’s back, feeling almost as if she’d just run into a brick wall.
If she hadn’t been watching him when the consultant had called for her to assist in beginning the care of the most life-threatening cases she would never have seen the expression of desolation and loss that crossed his starkly handsome face. For the first time she had an idea of the extent of the devastation Gregor would feel if there wasn’t anything Rick d’Agostino could do to get his legs functioning properly again.
That thought hung over her head like a big black cloud, not in the least bit lifted even when their first two patients turned out to be relatively easy to stabilise, thanks to the expert immediate care by the paramedics on scene.
The patient with the collapsed lung had been swiftly transferred up to a ward once the tests had confirmed that there was no uncontrolled bleeding in the chest cavity. The young man with the broken legs hadn’t been quite so quick to be transferred up to Theatre, the diagnosis of a fractured pelvis on top of bilateral tibiae and fibulae causing a delay until everything had been stabilised well enough to ensure that there would be no catastrophic haemorrhage en route.
‘Here we go again,’ warned the senior nurse in charge of managing their resus room as she put the phone down. ‘Mother’s insisting on being with her and she’s heading towards hysteria.’
‘Keep her out of the way, somebody,’ the consultant ordered briskly, and Olivia saw him wince at the wailing that was coming closer by the second. ‘Paperwork…anything to keep her out of our hair until we know what we’re dealing with.’
Olivia could understand a mother being distraught at the thought of her child being injured, but for the moment her sympathies were entirely with the consultant and his team who would need all their concentration to take care of the injured youngster.
‘This is Sherilee. She’s seventeen,’ began the paramedic as the trolley was wheeled swiftly into position. While he continued to make his report, hands all around the immobilised slender figure were transferring the connections of all the mobile monitoring equipment to the hospital system and the resulting cacophony of shrilling beeps was almost deafening for several minutes.
‘Please,’ Olivia saw her say, the word completely lost behind the mask and the surrounding activity.
Pausing to lean closer, she lifted a hand to warn her colleagues to keep the noise down for a moment.
‘What’s the matter Sherilee? What did you want to say?’ Her heart clenched when she saw the panic in the young woman’s wide dark eyes, wondering if it was the same terror that Gregor had felt when he’d first realised that he might be seriously injured.
‘What are they talking about?’ Her voice, when it emerged, was barely above a whisper. ‘What’s a step deformity? Why am I strapped down? I was wearing a seat belt…honestly, I was.’
‘We know you were, sweetheart,’ Olivia reassured her, wrapping a gloved hand around the trembling fingers, careful not to dislodge the oxygen perfusion monitor from her finger. ‘But some seat belts are more efficient than others, so we’re taking all the right precautions to make sure that you don’t do yourself any further injury.’
‘But — ’
‘That means we’re going to be doing a whole lot of tests and taking pictures and asking questions, and all you have to do is lie there and relax,’ she encouraged with a smile.
‘I won’t be able to relax until someone tells me what a step deformity is,’ she insisted, the tremble in her voice doing little to mask her determination.
Olivia smiled. She should have realised that the young woman wasn’t going to be put off until she’d had the answers she wanted as soon as she’d seen the stubborn intelligence in those eyes. She’d been seeing something similar ever since the first day she’d met Gregor.
A quick glance up at the consultant gained her a nod to make an explanation, but his pointed glance towards the radiographer told her it wouldn’t be long before she had to move aside for the first set of pictures to be taken.
In a sudden blinding flash she remembered that she and Gregor had made love without any thought for the potential new life they might have been creating, so the last thing she needed was to be too close to X-rays.
‘Who told you about the step deformity?’ she asked, trying to find out just how much she might have overheard.
‘One of the rescue guys practically shouted it in my ear when they were getting ready to get me out of the car,’ she said with a grimace. ‘I’d just told him that I’d been sitting still for so long waiting for them to cut the roof off and get the others out that my legs were feeling all pins-and-needles. He slid his hand down my back, almost to my waist, and then he shouted, ‘Step deformity’ and everyone suddenly stood still, as if…as if they were playing a game of statues.’
There were several chuckles at that, and Olivia felt a strange sense of pride that the seventeen-year-old should be able to show such resilience in spite of her fear.
‘Well, what he meant was that when the car crashed, the lower half of your body was held still by the lap belt, but the top half wasn’t held at all, so it was thrown forward.’
‘And?’ she prompted shakily, still obviously determined to have her answer.
‘And that can stretch — or even tear — the muscles and ligaments that hold the bones of the spine in position, letting them move further forward than they should. So, what we have to do now is a whole load of tests to see how far out of line the bones have moved, and whether they’re going to be able to go back on their own or whether we need to do something to help them.’
‘But — ’
Olivia was loath to interrupt when Sherilee obviously still had more questions to ask, but she was getting the signal that, for the moment, there was no time left for talking.
‘I promise we’ll talk again when everyone’s finished doing their tests. We’ll have a better idea of what we need to do to sort you out by then,’ she said, giving the slender hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘In the meantime, you could have a look at the scenery. There are some quite good-looking blokes around here.’
This time it was Sherilee’s turn to give a brief chuckle. ‘And if I can’t pull a good-looking bloke when I’m lying here in my prettiest underwear…’ she said wryly, then went quite pink when someone in the room gave a wolf-whistle.
‘That’s quite enough of that!’ the consultant said sternly, drawing everyone’s attention back to the serious business in hand, but Olivia saw the encouraging wink he gave their young patient as he patted her hand, then stepped back for the radiographer to do her job.