Billionaire Doctor (House of Kolovsky) - Carol Marinelli Page 0,49

lie still. Just because a body was ceasing to live, it still functioned.

‘Gede? ’ Fading grey eyes held hers as over and over he used a word that was said with such desperation and pleading it didn’t need translating.

‘Soon, Ivan,’ Annie and his family repeated a hundred times over the next few hours. ‘Levander will be here soon.’ Eyes turning and looking at the clock, praying that Aleksi would ring with news that Levander’s plane had landed. And though on a humane note it was all Annie wanted for her patient, on a personal level, when at midnight the news came that Levander and his wife Millie had cleared customs with their new baby, Sashar, Annie closed her eyes as she knocked on the doctors’ on-call room, tried like she never had before to somehow be professional as she stepped in.

‘Your brother’s on his way—they should be here in half an hour or so.’

‘Has my father had any morphine yet?’

‘He’s still refusing—he says he needs to speak to Levander.’

‘I apologize for landing all this on you.’

She could hardly see him in the dark room, which helped, the pain behind his strong voice making her want to hold him. To be able to see that pain in his eyes too would be the last straw.

‘Don’t worry about that now. Just concentrate on tonight.’

‘I’m sorry about tonight, for asking for you to nurse him. I know it must be hell for you...’

‘Don’t worry about me, Iosef. I’m fine.’ She turned to go, nails biting into her palms as he called her back.

‘I need to tell you something—and you’re the only person here I think I can tell. It’s about my father. My brother—if the person looking after him can understand...’ And she didn’t want to hear it, yet really she had no choice, and she took the deepest breath before flicking on the light then she walked over, sat on the edge of the on-call bed and gave a nod, hating it that he was still pulling her in deeper, promising herself that tomorrow she’d start to dig herself out again.

‘My mother, Nina, is not Levander’s mother.’

‘OK.’ Staring down at her skirt, she pleated the hem between her fingers.

‘My father had a brief fling with his cleaner, I think before he married my mother—I’m really not sure—but when my mother was pregnant with Aleksi and I, they left Russia to come here.’

‘So Levander stayed behind?’ Annie checked, ‘with his mother?’

‘It didn’t work out like that. Very soon after they left, Levander’s mother died, only my parents apparently didn’t know...’

‘Apparently?’

‘He sent money back, he wrote letters, only it turned out that Levander never got them.’

‘Maybe communication was difficult... And if her family...’

‘From the age of three he was raised in an orphanage.’ He halted her with the terrible truth. ‘He lived through hell, Annie.’

‘That’s why the abandoned baby upset you so much, why you didn’t want to deal with his mother... ’ Annie gulped as she recalled his outburst that day, understood now why he hadn’t wanted to deal not just with the mother but with his own thoughts.

‘My own brother, inadvertently perhaps, but unforgivably carelessly, was abandoned. Raised in a detsky dom with nothing, and no one even knew. We didn’t know about him till he was a teenager and he came to live with us.’

She rued her own words—the spite that had been in her voice as she’d taunted him that she was glad to live somewhere that balked at a parent turning their back on their child.

‘I’m sorry!’ She shuddered out an apology. ‘Sorry for him and sorry for you and for the terrible things that I said.’

‘You didn’t know,’ Iosef responded. ‘No one knows—it’s one of our many family secrets.’ And she wasn’t looking at her hemline any more but at him, listening as he told her about his pain.

‘I could never look at Levander when he came to live with us—he was angry, hostile and I just felt guilty. I tried to talk to him, only not hard enough—I guess I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say. I didn’t really want to know what he had been through because it made me feel worse. Made me hate my parents more than I already did. The only time I have been able to look at him is since he married Millie. For the first time I could see that he was happy, that someone understood him. She knows more about my family than I do.’

‘I