A Gift of Time (Tassamara) Read Online Free PDF Page B

say?”
    Colin’s gaze met Nat’s. Her face was open, her eyes clear. He could feel the warmth of the girl’s arm against his neck, her heartbeat against his arm. He opened his mouth to answer and then stopped, staggered by the moment.
    This.
    This should have been his.
    Theirs.
    If their lives had been what he wanted, what they wanted, how many times would he have already carried a sleeping child from a car while Nat held the door for him? Dozens? Hundreds?
    This should have been theirs.
    “Da,” he answered, his tongue feeling thick in his mouth, not able to hide the sorrow he felt.
    A flicker of a frown passed across Nat’s face as if she were confused by his reaction, but he could see the exact instant she recognized what he was thinking as her face stilled and her chin angled up. They stood there, motionless, staring at one another.
    He wanted to say so much to her. He shifted the sleeping child, but before he could summon the words, a security guard was pushing open the door.
    “Dr. Latimer. Everything okay?” The guard’s eyes were wary, his hand close to his weapon, but he nodded at Colin in acknowledgement of the uniform. Colin nodded back, not sure whether to be annoyed or grateful for the interruption.
    “Everything’s fine,” Nat said smoothly. If her smile looked forced, Colin didn’t think the guard noticed. “We’re just here to run some tests.” She stepped inside the building, moving briskly.
    Colin followed more slowly. Maybe it was a reaction to almost being dead, but he felt close to battered by the intensity of the emotions flowing through him. Joy, relief, grief, regret on high-speed cycle.
    Feeling so emotional was damn exhausting, he thought. He hoped he’d get over it soon.

Chapter Three
    Natalya rubbed her forehead, then pinched the bridge of her nose. It was late, she was tired, could she be misreading? Could she have done something wrong?
    “Aren’t you done yet?” Colin’s call from inside her scanner was louder than it needed to be. She’d told him she could hear him if he whispered. His volume probably indicated his mood: she’d had him in the machine for almost forty-five minutes, longer than any typical scan.
    But then this wasn’t typical. She pressed her speaker button and said flatly, “No.”
    She picked up the test stick again. It was idiot-proof. She couldn’t have done anything wrong there. Drip some blood on the piece of plastic, wait fifteen minutes, look for a line. The line said, clear as day, that Colin had suffered a heart attack.
    She looked back at her screen and began rapid cycling through images. Doctors, typically, neither gave the blood tests nor ran the scanner. Technicians did both those jobs, leaving doctors more time to treat patients. But when Natalya had returned to Tassamara, she’d retreated to a lab and research with relief. It wasn’t that she didn’t like working with people. She did. But medicine and foresight made for an uneasy combination.
    She closed her fingers around the test stick, closing her eyes for good measure. She didn’t often try to induce her foresight; it came on its own, unwanted, ill-timed. But now, when she did want to know what the future would bring, she saw exactly nothing.
    Nothing. 
    She opened both fingers and eyes, letting the plastic stick drop to her desk with a slight clatter. Reflexively she glanced over her shoulder at the tiny figure curled up on a nest of cushions on the floor behind her, but the girl hadn’t stirred at the noise, any more than the sound of Natalya’s voice had moved her. She’d been out cold since she’d fallen asleep in the car, her exhaustion overruling her hunger. Natalya hadn’t wanted to leave her alone in a more comfortable room, so she’d grabbed some over-sized pillows from the couch in an upstairs reception room on their way down to the scanner.
    Natalya turned her gaze back to her computer screen. Colin’s heart was perfect. Her hands flew over her keyboard,