Hired by Her Husband (9 page)

“Do you want juice?” she asked him.

“Yes, thanks.”

She poured him orange juice, then started washing the pans.

“Aren’t you eating?” George asked.

“I ate.” And she didn’t want to sit down with him, didn’t want more memories to come bubbling back. “And I need to go talk to Natalie. I do have work of my own, you know.”

“I know that,” George said mildly, making her feel guilty for having flung her responsibilities at him. He hadn’t asked her to come after all.

“Sorry, I—” She didn’t finish, just shook her head and hurried out of the room, tugging her mobile phone out of her pocket as she went.

George, predictably, didn’t change his mind about going to teach. So feeling rather like a Sherpa carrying his briefcase while he maneuvered his crutches, Sophy trailed after him down the steps. She thought she might have to battle him about taking a cab, but all he said when they reached Amsterdam was, “We could take the bus.”

“Not today,” Sophy said firmly.

He didn’t reply. One point for our side, Sophy thought, waving her hand to flag a cab. She wondered if she should have fought harder to keep him home, though, when they got in the cab and he sat wordlessly, his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, all the way up to the university.

“Which building is it?” she asked him when they got close to the university.

He told her. And she told the driver so he could get them as close as possible. It was still something of a walk after they got out of the cab. George looked white. He even stopped once.

Sophy bit her tongue to keep from saying, “All right, enough.”

She dogged his steps, and discovered as they got close that she wasn’t the only one.

“Dr. Savas? Oh my God!” A bright-eyed blonde coed came rushing up to them as George crutched his way toward the entrance of the building. “What happened?”

She was joined almost at once by a bevy of other students—virtually all of them female—who fussed and fluttered and hovered around George, practically trampling Sophy in the process.

Bemused, she stepped back, curious to see how George would react to this display of concern, how George would react to so many women all determined to take care of him.

“Sophy!” She heard his voice suddenly ring out over the sound of feminine ooohs and awwws, and then the sea of coeds parted as he swung around on one crutch and very nearly sliced several of them off at the knees with the other until his gaze found her. Something that looked remarkably like relief passed over his features when their eyes met. And there was that smile again—maybe not as potent as it had been at breakfast, but definitely remarkable. The coeds were remarking on it, too, Sophy could tell. There was consternation and muttering going on.

Then one of the girls tossed her hair and said, “Who’s
she?
” as another one answered quite audibly, “Who cares? She’s old.”

Sophy wasn’t going to bother answering them at all. But George did.

“She’s my wife,” he said and shut them all up. Then he
tipped his head toward the door. “This way,” he said and waited until she joined him before he nodded her ahead of him through the doors.

A trail of disgruntled coeds followed. “I didn’t know he was married?” one grumbled.

“Who cares if he’s married?” Sophy heard another say.

Three or four of them giggled.

George kept walking straight ahead. He looked hunted, though, by the time they got to his office. She took the key from him and opened the door. “Shut it,” he said when they had both gone in. And when Sophy had, he sat down heavily in his desk chair and let his head drop back.

“Wow,” Sophy said, dazed. “College has changed since I went. Do they always act like you’re a boy band?”

“Not always,” George said. “Not recently.”

So they had, apparently.

“The ones in my class think I’m tough as nails and the last instructor they ever should have taken.”

“But…” Sophy prompted when he didn’t finish.

He opened his eyes and shrugged wearily. “They’re girls. What can I say?”

“You’re implying that all girls are hormone-driven ditzes?” Sophy glared at him.

“Not all,” George said, but clearly he didn’t think the field of sane sensible females was overly large. “You’re not,” he said finally, surprising her.

About you, I was.
The words were on Sophy’s tongue. She didn’t say them. But they were true, just as once foolishly, she had been about Ari. But the less said about her feelings in either case, the better.

“No,” she said briskly. “I’m not. I can take you or leave you. Now, is there anything I can do to help?”

It was a measure of how much George had already exerted that he simply directed her to the cabinets in his office to assemble the materials he wanted for the day’s class. He was
demonstrating something with bottles and water and ice. She had to get the ice from a refrigerator in the common room down the hall.

“Anything else?” she asked doubtfully.

“That should do it.” George settled his crutches under his arms and led the way to his classroom. And Sophy, with her arms full of bottles and ice and a jug of water, trundled along behind, feeling more Sherpalike than ever.

George in the classroom was a revelation.

There was none of the ivory-tower professor about him—and none of the tough-as-nails teacher he’d assured her he was. Oh, she was quite sure he had high standards and his students had to work hard to meet them. But he engaged them immediately—charmed them at the same time he taught them.

While they were concerned about his injury, he didn’t let them dwell on it. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he said brusquely. “Let’s get to work.”

And nine-tenths of the girls might have been infatuated with him, and all of the students might have wanted to impress him, but George was focused on physics—and on making physics come alive for them.

They were a freshman class, Sophy began to understand. Not the crème de la crème of the postgrad population, but the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who were getting their first taste. And George was determined to make it a memorable one.

Sophy knew enough about the university system to know that professors of George’s status only took freshmen if they wanted to, if they cared. George cared.

When a couple of the girls turned around to give her the once-over, he said, “She’s not teaching you, I am. Pay attention to me.”

And when one of them said, “What’s she doing here?” he gave Sophy one of his heart-stopping grins over the top of his
students and said, “She’s making sure I don’t fall over. Aren’t you, sweetheart?”

He’d never called her that before, and she knew he was only saying it for effect. But she couldn’t quite ignore the leap in the region of her heart. Still she did her best to tamp it down as she said, “That’s exactly right.”

And she apparently said it with enough emphasis that the girls in his class began to get the idea that coming on to George was a waste of time.

So they turned around and started paying attention to what he was actually saying as he gave them a minilecture on the topic to set the stage for the experiment to follow.

Sophy suspected that she was the only one who noted that he was hanging on to the podium so fiercely that he really might have fallen over without it. His students seemed to think he was just white-knuckled for emphasis.

After he’d set the stage and turned them loose to prove the theory he’d explained there was much sloshing of water and dropping of ice. Sophy imagined George would go sit down. But he didn’t. He moved from group to group, advising, nodding, encouraging.

It was costing him, Sophy could tell. A muscle in his jaw ticked occasionally, and when he was in pain there were brackets of white around his mouth. He watched as they worked, but refrained from directing them too closely.

He shook his head at several questions, saying, “You have to figure things out on your own. It’s the only way you’ll really understand.”

And finally, it seemed, they did.

So did Sophy. She understood about the experiment, but even more she also understood a little bit more about George.

He was everything she’d ever thought he was—strong, determined, hard-working, responsible. He didn’t have to be here. He had sick leave. He could have stayed home. But he
wouldn’t because what he was doing mattered to him—and as long as he could remain upright, he was going to do it.

Just how long he was actually going to remain upright was debatable, Sophy thought, as after the class was over, he propped himself against the classroom wall and continued to give his students every bit of his energy and attention. But even as he spoke and listened she could see a thin film of perspiration on the bridge of his nose, and she noted the deepening grooves at the sides of his mouth.

She considered trying a tactful maneuver to extricate him from the situation, something that wouldn’t make her look managing and wouldn’t annoy George. But then she saw his jaw lock, the muscle tick again as he tried to focus on whatever one of the students was saying, and she decided there wasn’t enough tact in the world.

“Excuse me,” she said in the strong but brisk tones of the preschool teacher she’d been before she and Natalie had become Rent-a-Wife, “but time’s up.”

They turned to look at her, astonished. She gave them her best no-nonsense smile.

“Just doing my job,” she told them quite honestly but with a confiding smile, and when they looked blank, she added cheerfully, “making sure Dr. Savas doesn’t fall over.”

The penny dropped, and they fell all over themselves apologizing as they helped carry the bottles and jugs back to the office while she handed George his crutches and waited until he preceded her out the door.

She expected he would chew her out as soon as the students left and they were alone again in his office. Instead he sank into his chair, bent his head, shut his eyes and said, “Thanks.”

She was shocked and not a little alarmed. She wasn’t used to seeing George in anything other than command mode. Now she had to resist an impulse to fuss. Instead she simply put the bottles and jugs away and tidied things up while she waited.
And worried and tried to marshal the arguments she would need to get him to see sense and go home rather than head to the lab where his grad students were working on projects.

He’d told her during the cab ride from his place that this introductory course was the only one he taught on campus. The rest of his work, overseeing their research and doing his own, took place at the university’s research facility north of the city on the Hudson River. That was where he needed to go after the class, he’d told her.

Now she finished her housekeeping and sat down, knotting her fingers together and waiting for the argument to start.

George still hadn’t moved. But at last, when it was obvious that she’d stopped moving around and the only sounds were from outside the building, he raised his head and opened his eyes to look at her.

Sophy, steely-eyed, looked right back, ready for battle.

Slowly a corner of George’s mouth tipped up. “Why am I sure that I know what you’re going to say?” he murmured.

Sophy opened her mouth, but before she could get a word out, he pushed himself up out of his chair and looked down at her.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

S
HE GOT HIM HOME,
but not up the stairs. He was breathing shallowly and teetering a bit by the time they reached the front door. And once inside, the couch in the living room was as far as he went.

“I’ll just hang out here for a few minutes,” he said, sinking down onto it with the relief of a camel driver reaching an oasis. He stretched out, sighed and was almost instantly asleep.

Sophy stared at him, taking in his unnaturally pale face and the lines of strain that still persisted around his mouth, and she worried, sure he’d overdone things, but unsure if she ought to call Sam.

“What do you think?” she asked Gunnar.

Gunnar went hopefully to the back door down to the garden, then to the front door and looked at his leash. Sophy supposed she should take him out. Their run this morning had been brief.

“This one will be brief, too,” she told the dog, clipping his leash to his collar. She didn’t suppose George would wake and need anything, but she didn’t want to take chances.

She changed her clothes, left George a note on the coffee table in case he woke, then took Gunnar to Central Park. He looked disgusted that she didn’t take off his leash. But when she ran with him along the pathway, he didn’t seem to mind
too much. They were gone barely half an hour. When they got back it didn’t look as if George had moved.

She got her laptop from the bedroom on the second floor and brought it back down to the living room. That way she could work and keep on eye on George at the same time. That was the theory, at least.

In fact she spent far more time watching George. His body had barely moved but, as he slept, his face relaxed. He looked younger now, the bandage on his head gone, his dark hair drifting across his forehead, his cheeks still smooth from the morning shave, his lips no longer pressed tight with pain, softer now and slightly parted.

He looked the way he had when she’d first met him. Not a good thing because it stirred up all those same feelings—feelings that had been as wrong then as they were now. Then she had been “Ari’s girl.” Now she was George’s “rented” wife.

Yes, she was still his wife in name—but only in name. There was no point in pretending anything else. Their marriage had never been real—and there was no point in sitting here staring at him now and wishing for the thousandth time that it was.

She got up deliberately and went to the back door. “Come on,” she said to Gunnar.

After their run he’d been lying on the rug next to George. Now he bounded up and looked amazed. Another walk? he seemed to say.

Sophy shook her head. “No, but I need to burn off some steam.”

She was losing it, she told herself. She was talking to the dog as if he knew what she was saying. Apparently, though, he did. He went to the basket by the door to the kitchen and picked up one tennis ball, then two, then looked hopefully at her. So she picked up the whole basket of them and took him out in the back garden.

She didn’t know how long they were out there. She checked on George several times. He never moved. She threw tennis balls for Gunnar until it got dark.

And when they came back in, she left Gunnar to lie by the sofa while she carried her laptop into the kitchen. She could hear George from there if he needed anything. But she wouldn’t have to look at him. Wouldn’t have to remember.

She wouldn’t let herself wish.

George slept the rest of the day.

When he finally woke briefly it was nearly eight thirty. He was about to simply go back to sleep again when Sophy insisted that he eat some dinner.

She expected he’d argue because that’s what mule-headed men did. But George surprised her.

He took a couple of painkillers because his head still hurt, but then he sat up on the sofa and took the tray with the bowl of soup and the piece of fresh sourdough bread she handed him.

“I can come out to the kitchen,” he protested mildly.

But when she said no, he didn’t argue, just sat there and ate obediently. It made a nice change. And it was a relief to see him sitting up and actually being coherent. He’d been so exhausted and in such pain when they’d got home from his class that she’d been really worried, had given serious thought to calling Sam.

Now she was glad she hadn’t. George seemed more alert. He had a good appetite, eating both the soup and the bread with relish. And Sophy lingered to watch.

But then she caught herself looking at him and wishing, and abruptly she excused herself.

“Things to do,” she said. “I’ll just go finish the dishes.” And she hurried back into the kitchen, where she clattered determinedly around making a racket as she tried to distract her weak will and feeble powers of resistance.

She thought she was doing pretty well. Then she heard a noise behind her and turned to find George standing in the doorway holding his bowl in his hand.

“I feel like Oliver Twist,” he said wryly, a corner of his mouth turning up, as he loomed over her. He looked very adult, very male and not like a poor starving waif at all. “Any second helpings?” he suggested hopefully.

“Of course.” She snatched the bowl out of his hands. “You could have just called me. Why aren’t you using your crutches?”

“Can’t carry the bowl with them.” George shrugged. “Plus, my ankle isn’t broken. It’s just sprained. The boot helps keep it steady. But I can go without the crutches.”

“Well, you’re not carrying the soup back with you,” Sophy said. She turned her back and began ladling the soup into his bowl. “Go sit down.”

But when she turned around, he hadn’t moved. He was still standing there, still looming, still watching her, his dark hair tousled, his eyes hooded. “It’s good,” he said. “The soup.”

“Thank you,” she replied shortly, then looked expressively toward the living room again, in the hope that he would go sit back on the sofa. Instead he hobbled past her and, wincing, hitched himself up on one of the bar stools in the kitchen.

“That can’t be comfortable.”

“It’s fine. I’ll eat here,” he said. “Keep you company.”

Just what she needed. Sophy shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

She turned away again and focused on the last of the dishes. Unfortunately there weren’t a lot of them left.

“Thanks for coming along today,” George said to her back.

She turned, surprised. “I enjoyed it. I never knew much about what you did.”

George’s mouth quirked. “I do other stuff, too.”

“I’m sure. But that was interesting. I wouldn’t have expected you to teach freshmen.”

“I like it. They’re rewarding. Some of them,” he qualified. “When you can wake one or two up to see the world in a new way, you feel like you’ve accomplished something.”

“I can see that. Did you—” she hesitated, then decided to ask “—teach freshmen in Uppsala?”

George hesitated for a moment, too, then shook his head. “No.”

She thought he was going to leave it there, expected that he would because he’d always shut her out of that part of his life.

But then he said, “I didn’t teach in Uppsala.”

She blinked, digesting that, then nodded. “So, you did research?”

He drew a breath. “I wasn’t in Uppsala. Not often.”

Now she frowned. “You went there to teach. At least I assume you did. You were gone.” She shook her head, then shrugged. “How do I know what you did?” she muttered.

“I was working for the government. Several governments, actually. It was a multinational effort. Top secret. Not teaching. Not Uppsala.”

She stared at him.
Top secret?
“Not Uppsala,” she echoed faintly.

“No.” He opened his mouth again, as if he were about to say something else, but then he pressed his lips together briefly and cast his eyes down to focus on his bowl once more.

Sophy stood there, disconcerted, studying him, trying to rethink, to fit this new bit of information into the puzzle that was George. “I had no idea.”

He lifted his gaze and met hers. “You weren’t supposed to.”

She understood that much. “You wouldn’t have taken us with you,” she said, understanding, too, now why he’d never talked with her about any plans for them to move. There had been no plans.

“I wouldn’t have gone.”

That made her blink. “What?”

“If we’d stayed together, I’d have told them no.” His gaze didn’t waver.

Sophy shook her head. “I don’t understand at all now,” she admitted.

“It was a job that came up before…before Ari died. Before we—” He gave a wave of his hand.

He didn’t have to explain. She knew what he meant: before Ari’s girlfriend turned up pregnant and alone, in need of a Savas rescue mission.

The memory stiffened her spine. “Another reason you shouldn’t have married me,” she said flatly.

George gave a quick shake of his head. “No. It was a matter of priorities.” He made it sound cut-and-dried—and as if he’d made the obvious choice. “Anyway,” he went on, “if we’d stayed together I would never have gone.”

“Why not?”

“It wasn’t a situation to take a wife and child into. It was potentially dangerous, certainly unstable. No place for dependents. I wouldn’t have risked the two of you.”

“But you risked yourself!”

He shrugged. “It was my job.”

Duty. Always and forever, duty.

And she had just been another one, Sophy thought heavily. She turned away and went briskly back to cleaning up the kitchen, then put the leftover soup in the refrigerator. George finished his bowl and gave it to her when she held out her hand.

“It was good,” he said with one of his heart-stopping smiles. “Thanks.”

Sophy resisted it. “You’re welcome,” she said stiffly. “Are you going upstairs now?” she asked as he struggled to his feet.

“I think I will.” His mouth twisted a bit ruefully. “Head’s
not pounding quite so much, but I’m beat. I may have overdone it a bit today.”

His admission made her eyes widen. There was something George couldn’t handle? But she didn’t say that.

“Can you make it on your own?” she asked. “Or do you want me to stand behind you to catch you if you fall?” She was only half-joking.

“I believe I can make it.” One corner of his mouth tipped up. “I’ll call if I need you.”

So she let him go on his own. It didn’t stop her keeping an ear out for any sounds of trouble, though. And she ventured over to peer up the staircase more than once to see how he was doing. It took him a long time, but at last the stairs stopped creaking and she didn’t hear him anymore. Sophy didn’t know how George felt after his climb, but she breathed a sigh of relief when he was up the stairs.

“Come on,” she said to Gunnar, who jumped right up. “Let’s go out one last time.”

She didn’t take him for another walk. They’d get up and go to the park in the morning early, she promised him. He seemed almost to sigh, but he went out back willingly enough. Sophy went out with him. If she stood in the garden and stared up at the windows, she could see the light on up in George’s bedroom. There was, every once in a while, a shadow as he moved slowly around the room and passed in front of the lamp.

“He needs to lie down,” she said to Gunnar.

Gunnar looked hopefully at his bucket of tennis balls.

“Tomorrow,” Sophy promised him. “Let’s go in now.” When they had, she shut off the lights, picked up her laptop and climbed the stairs, Gunnar bounding on ahead to wait at the top of the stairs.

She put the laptop on the bed in the second-floor room, the one she’d used the day she’d arrived—the one she’d use
again tonight because she certainly would be sleeping with George again.

She even flipped it open and turned it on, thinking she’d get some work done because it wasn’t all that late yet. She might give Natalie a call and perhaps get a chance to see Lily on a video call before her daughter went to bed.

But before she did that, she should check and make sure George was settled. She didn’t know what on earth he was hobbling around for. He needed to go to bed. And if he needed something, she didn’t want him calling her while she was on the phone. So she climbed the stairs and went down the hall to George’s room.

“Do you need anything?” she began—and stopped dead.

There was George—in all his muscular naked glory—on his way to the shower.

A slow grin spread across his face. “You could wash my back.”

Sophy blushed.

George loved it when she blushed.

In four years he had never forgotten the way her eyes snapped with emotion and her cheeks grew redder than her hair. It was rewarding when her normally quick wits seemed—for the merest instant—to desert her. He reveled in it.

She didn’t turn and run. No. She stopped in the doorway, her fingers lightly touching each side of the doorframe as she let her gaze rove over him. Then she said slowly, still considering him, “Now there’s an idea.”

He knew her tone wasn’t soft and sultry intentionally. It didn’t have to be. It sent a shaft of longing straight through him. And it was certainly no secret which part of him found the words most enticing.

Now it was his turn to feel his face burn. Face, hell. It wasn’t his
face
that felt as if it was going up in flames.

George cleared his suddenly parched throat, then casually
turned and limped as nonchalantly as possible into the bathroom where he’d left the shower running.

“Right this way,” he suggested over his shoulder. He only hoped his voice didn’t sound as rusty as it felt.

He stepped into the shower, shut the door behind him and waited. And waited. Hoped against hope.

But he wasn’t really surprised when minutes passed and Sophy didn’t come and open the shower door and step in behind him.

He had turned the water on to let it warm up when he’d first come upstairs. He’d decided on the way up that a nice hot shower would soothe his aching body and make him feel better.

Now he thought that cold water—
ice water
—would have been a damn sight smarter.

Still, if he turned the tap to cold right now, while his ardor might fade, his muscles would seize up and his head would start pounding again. Hell of a choice. The proverbial rock and hard place, he thought, and groaned at the appropriateness of the cliché.