baby. She wanted to cry aloud to the heavens that it wasn’t fair of life to do this to him. Why was there nobody to defend him?
But there was, she thought with sudden resolution. She was here now. She would defend him.
‘Has he been unconscious all the time?’ she asked softly.
‘No, he’s come round and muttered something, but of course most of the time we keep him heavily sedated against the pain.’ Mr Royce examined a chart. ‘Going by the time of his last injection, he should come round quite soon.’
‘You can leave me alone with him,’ Dee said. ‘He’ll be safe with me.’
‘I’m sure he will.’
When the door had closed, Dee came closer to the bed. As a nurse, she was used to horrific sights, but nothing in her experience helped her now. This was the man she loved, lying alone and in agony.
His eyes were closed and his breathing came with a soft rasping sound that was almost like a groan. Now she could see just enough of his face to recognise him. The mouth was the one she knew, wide and made for laughter, but tense now, as though the pain reached him, even in sleep.
Dee drew a chair forward and sat down, leaning as close to him as she could get. ‘Hello, darling,’ she whispered.
Nothing. He didn’t move or open his eyes, but lay almost like a dead man.
‘It’s me-Dee,’ she persisted. ‘I heard you’d been injured, and I had to come and see you. Even after what happened, we’re still friends, aren’t we? You still matter to me, and I want to see you well and strong again.’
Silence but for his soft breathing. No sign of life. Refusing to be put off, she continued, ‘You really will be all right in the end, although it may take some time. They say you’re pretty badly hurt, but I’ve nursed men with worse injuries and they come through it because they can’t wait to get up there in the sky again.’
She was stretching the truth here. She knew how unlikely it was that Mark would ever return to being an airman, and how long it would be before he could live any kind of normal life, but she couldn’t afford to think of that. Only one thing mattered and that was bringing him back into the land of the living. If she could do that, and even one day see him smile again, she cared for nothing else.
She went on, forcing herself to sound cheerful. ‘I wish we were still engaged. Oh, don’t think I’m trying to trap you. You were always too clever to be caught by any woman. But you don’t seem to have anyone of your own.’
The truth of that struck her with force. The star of the squadron, the man every girl wanted to flirt with, and more. But he had nobody; no family, nobody had been allowed to get close to him. Except herself. She had crept closer than anyone, yet even she hadn’t suspected his essential aloneness before now. He’d always worked so hard to conceal it.
Had he done so knowingly? she wondered. Had he really understood himself that well? Somehow she doubted it. Whatever Mark’s qualities, insight wasn’t one of them. That was why he had needed her. But she hadn’t seen it either, and had rejected him.
‘Are you glad I came to see you?’ she asked him. ‘I hope you are. I know you’re asleep but maybe you can hear me, somewhere deep inside you, and perhaps…perhaps your heart is open to what I want to say. Oh, I do hope so because there’s so much I want you to understand.
‘I was clumsy before. I loved you so much that I was afraid to let you know, in case it embarrassed you. You see, I knew you didn’t love me-well, maybe a little, but not as I love you. I was so happy when you asked me to marry you that I didn’t let myself worry about how it happened. All I saw was that I could be your wife.
‘I was fooling myself, but I wouldn’t face it because you were everything to me. And when I did face it-I went a bit crazy. I blamed you for not loving me, but you can’t love to order. Nobody can. You have to accept people as they are, or back off. I backed off. I thought I was doing what you wanted. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I still have something to give you-something that you need.’
A soft rumble came from between his lips, almost as though he was signalling agreement. Of course, that was fanciful, which she never allowed herself to be. But perhaps, just this once-
‘Oh, darling, if only I could believe that you hear me and know what I’m trying to say. I came here as soon as I knew you were hurt because if there’s anything I can do for you, I’ll do it. It doesn’t matter what it is. Do you understand that? Anything at all.’
She looked down at his hands lying on the blanket; one bandaged, the other uncovered. How fine and well shaped it was. How well she remembered it touching her, teasing softly through her thin clothes, making her want him in ways that she knew she shouldn’t.
Inching her way forward cautiously, she took his free hand in hers, caressing it softly with her fingers. He neither moved nor showed any sign of a response, and her heart ached to see his power reduced to this helplessness. She would have given everything she possessed to see him restored to his old self-mischievous, disrespectful, outrageous, infuriating, magical. Even if it meant that she would lose him again, if her heart broke a thousand times over, she would accept it if, in return, she could see him happy.
‘You’re going to get better,’ she told him, more confidently than she felt. ‘You can count on that because I won’t settle for anything else. I can be a bully when I set my mind to it, and that’s what I’m going to do. You told me once you weren’t good at taking orders, but you’ll take mine. Get well! There! That’s an order, do you hear?’
She struggled to keep the jokey note in her voice, but at last it was more than she could bear. Her words trembled into silence and she laid her face against his hand while the tears flowed.
‘Come back to me,’ she whispered. ‘Come back to me. I love you with all my heart. I’ll never love anyone else. You don’t have to love me. Just let me care for you.’
After a while she raised her head again and looked closely at the man who lay without moving, barely breathing.
‘I have to believe that somewhere, deep inside your heart, you can hear me,’ she told him. ‘Perhaps you’re even conscious of it now, and soon you’ll wake and remember. Or perhaps my words will come back to you without you even knowing how or when you heard them. Oh, my love, my love, can I creep into your heart without you even noticing, and then just stay there?’
A long sigh came from him. Summoning all her courage, she laid her lips gently against his. ‘I thought I’d never kiss you again,’ she murmured. ‘Can you feel me? Can you feel my love reaching out to you? It’s yours if you want it.’
Another sigh. She looked down on him tenderly. ‘Yes, oh, yes,’ she breathed. ‘You’re coming back to me. You are.’
Her joy soared as Mark opened his eyes. For a long moment they looked at each other.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
CHAPTER TEN
FOR a long time now everything in his life had been jagged. It started with the danger that threatened whenever he took to the air, but he accepted that. It was the life he’d chosen. But then he found that the sunlight was jagged and threatening, making him reluctant to face it. Worst of all was the soft jaggedness of darkness and the insidious fear that kept him awake, all the more alarming because he didn’t understand it.
It had started when she broke their engagement. He’d been cool and self-contained, as befitted a man who could have any woman, shrugging off her desertion. She’d set him free. She’d said so herself, predicting that the other women would throw a party.
‘You won’t remember that I exist,’ she’d said.
Then the numbness that shielded him had begun to disintegrate and a spark of temper had flared. He’d accused her of cruelty, something he’d never felt from any woman before. When she’d gone the anger stayed with him, making him act unlike himself. He’d gone drinking with friends that night, casually remarking that his engagement was over. One of the others, a hearty, shallow young man called Shand, had made the mistake of congratulating him. Overwhelmed by rage, Mark had launched himself on the imbecile and might have killed him if his friends hadn’t hauled him off in time.
After that, everyone regarded him differently. His friends kept watchful, protective eyes on him, lest he break
