Wedding Party Collection: Don't Tell The Bride: What the Bride Didn't Know / Black Widow Bride / His Valentine Bride

‘Private or public?’

‘Private.’

‘Take taxi—is faster,’ said a woman, but the man held up his finger and shook his head, and then started arguing with the woman, too fast for Trig to even try to understand. They weren’t a threat. They were trying to help. He thought the man might be the proprietor of the nearby stall.

Lena stirred and Trig wiped the cloth across her forehead again. Her eyelashes fluttered.

‘Lena?’

But she didn’t come round fully.

Another person handed him an unopened bottle of water. ‘Thank you,’ he said as the crowd around them grew larger and talk turned to the pickpocket gangs and notifying the police that they were back in the area. Lena opened her eyes again and this time they stayed open while Trig checked her pupils for unevenness and then covered her eyes with his palm.

‘Try and keep your eyes open and in a few more seconds I’ll take my hand away,’ he told her quietly, while his heart thundered and his mind flashed back to the ambush in East Timor. Some injuries were messy. This one was not. Didn’t mean the outcome couldn’t be catastrophic. ‘I’m going to check your pupils for responsiveness to light.’

‘You’re a doctor?’ asked Trig’s new best friend, the one who’d called for an ambulance.

‘Medic.’ He had some combat first-aid training, that was all. ‘Not a doctor.’ Please don’t let her pupils be blown.

He took his hand away from Lena’s eyes and her pupils responded. Lena looked bewildered. Her eyes searched the crowd and finally came to rest back on him.

‘Where am I?’ she asked.

‘The Grand Bazaar.’ And when that didn’t seem to ring any bells, ‘Istanbul.’

‘Oh.’

‘You fell and hit your head. Pickpockets. They got your wallet.’

‘Gonna be sick,’ she said and rolled onto her side, but she wasn’t sick, she just closed her eyes and put her cheek to the floor and slipped into a state of not-quite-thereness.

He tried not to let that worry him as he held the wet flannel to the bump on her head, and damn but it felt bigger.

She opened her eyes again a few minutes later. ‘Just rest,’ he told her. ‘Don’t need to move you yet. An ambulance is on its way.’

‘Here’s hoping I have insurance,’ she murmured, and fixed him with a dazed gaze.

‘’Course you do.’

‘Next question—’

He had to lean down to even hear her.

‘—Who are you?’

* * *

She didn’t like hospitals. She could barely remember her own name, but she knew with utter certainty that she did not like hospitals. And that she’d been in them a lot. Her body confirmed it when they sent her for the MRI and asked her to change into a gown. The scars on her lower belly and high on her leg told of a major collision between her body and...something. Car crash, maybe.

She couldn’t quite remember.

‘You have titanium pins and plates in your left leg and hip,’ the big guy had said when he’d helped her fill out a medical history form, finally taking the clipboard and pen from her and filling out the information sheet himself. ‘You’ve had several recent operations and intensive and ongoing physiotherapy.’

He knew her blood type and he knew her name.

Lena Sinclair.

She knew her name was Lena. Bits and pieces of her memory were starting to come back. The scarves hanging in the marketplace. The impression that someone, or several someones, had been following her. Her name was Lena, Lena Sinclair, and the big guy, who she couldn’t quite remember...

He was her husband.

His name was Adrian. She’d read it on his credit cards and on the hospital forms. Adrian Sinclair. Husband. And he seemed so familiar, hauntingly familiar, and he made her feel safe, and he’d hovered while the doctors had seen to her, and if she couldn’t quite remember much about him at the moment, well, there were a lot of things she couldn’t quite remember at the moment.

He was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.

‘My name’s Lena, Lena Sinclair,’ she told the doctors. ‘I’m Australian and I was shopping in the Grand Bazaar when thieves knocked me to the ground and took off with my wallet.’

There’d been mutterings then, about the crime rate in the city. The police had been notified. Cards would be cancelled. Her husband would take care of it. ‘Lena, relax,’ he’d told her firmly. ‘First things first. Just get the MRI done.’

Lena. Lena Sinclair.

She could remember pretty much everything that had happened since waking up in the bazaar. As for her life before then... She was Australian and she’d grown up on the beach with two brothers and a sister whose names she couldn’t quite recall.

‘Concussion,’ the doctor told her. ‘Minor head trauma.’

A cracking headache, nausea and, heavens, why did the lights have to be so bright?

‘Temporary confusion and memory loss are both symptoms of concussion,’ the doctor told her when Lena confessed to scrambled memories and a whole lot of fog. ‘The painkillers I’ve given you won’t have helped. You remember who you are?’

‘Lena. Lena Sinclair.’

‘You remember your family and your past?’

‘Sort of.’

‘It’s common not to remember the events leading up to the knock on the head.’

Good to know she was common.

‘Do you remember your husband?’

‘Yes,’ she said. She remembered that he made her feel safe. She remembered his hands.

‘You need to rest your body and your brain,’ the doctor told her. ‘I’ve given you pain medication and something to minimise the swelling. I’m releasing you into the care of your husband, and if he hovers or wakes you several times through the night, it’s because I’ve told him to. If you start to feel anxious, let him know. Should your headache or nausea worsen, should you become disoriented, should your co-ordination worsen...you let him know and he’ll bring you back here.’

‘Okay.’

‘You already have co-ordination issues due to your previous injuries. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about new limitations, just so we’re clear.’