A Gift of Time (Tassamara) (4 page)

“That’d be my guess. So maybe the rangers and some frantic parents are searching for her already.”

“You’re thinking she just wandered off?” Nat asked.

“Maybe, yeah.”

Nat looked skeptical. “On Christmas Day?”

Colin shrugged. “Big meal, maybe the parents took a nap afterwards. Kid gets bored, next thing you know…”

“It’s a long walk from the nearest campground. I don’t think a child could cover that much distance in an afternoon.” Nat pulled into the parking space closest to the cobblestoned walkway leading to the front door. A lamppost shed a warm glow of golden light, while the bushes and shrubs that lined the path and bordered the building were sprinkled with the delicate white glimmers of hundreds of tiny holiday lights.

“Next possibility then.” Colin glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping child, then gestured to indicate they should talk about it outside. Stepping out of the car, he turned, leaning on the roof. In a quiet voice, he suggested, “The parents could have been in a car accident on one of the back roads.”

Nat winced. “Okay, that sounds more plausible. But still, to get to where we found her? It’s more likely she was on a trail. Maybe an ATV accident?”

“Yeah.” Colin nodded in agreement, his face grim. “No helmet, though.”

“And wearing a dress and sandals.” Nat shook her head, but not as if she were ruling out the possibility, more as if she were regretting the chances parents were willing to take. “It makes sense.”

“With any luck a couple of phone calls will clear it up. We’ll get her home before morning.”

Nat didn’t say anything, but then she frowned, blinking a few times as if perplexed.

“What is it?” Colin asked immediately.

She licked her lips. He felt an immediate and unsurprising surge of lust. Haloed by the light from the lamppost, Nat’s dark hair glinted with color, while the shadows made her blue eyes mysterious and smoky. She was beautiful. And he was alive.

Alive.

The smile felt like it started in his chest and built its way up until it reached his face. He knew he was grinning at her like an idiot, but he couldn’t stop himself.

Alive.

And with Nat.

Sometimes it felt as if he’d loved Nat forever.

He hadn’t, though.

It had only been thirty years.

He’d been a stubborn five-year-old, desperately trying to convince his mother—who already had seven children—that he needed a baby sister, one who would be all his. He would get to boss her around like his older brothers and sisters bossed him around, but he would never, ever hit her and he would play with her whenever she wanted. She could be Princess Leia when they played
Star Wars
. He needed someone to be Princess Leia. Unfortunately, his mother had remained resolutely unconvinced of the importance of his need.

Then, on the first day of kindergarten, he’d met Lucas. Lucas didn’t just have a baby sister; he had a baby brother, too. He didn’t seem to be as convinced as Colin was of his incredible luck, though, and he’d generously offered to share. Colin distinctly remembered his first visit to the Latimer house. He hadn’t even seen baby Zane. One look at the wide blue eyes and round cheeks of Natalya’s three-year-old self and he’d decided.
Mine.

The arrangement had worked well for a long time. Through high school, through college, past graduation, up until the moment he got his first job as deputy and she had her premonition of his death—and then they’d hit a dead end. He’d let her go. Made her go, really, and not without hurting her.

She’d gone to medical school and they didn’t speak for years. After the bitter words of their last fight, the first time he’d spoken to her had been at her mother’s funeral. He couldn’t remember what he’d said, but she’d said, “Thank you,” her voice calm, collected, but her eyes showing the depth of her pain. After completing her residency, she’d returned to Tassamara.

He’d managed to draw her into a precarious almost-friendship—he could say hello to her on the street without her glaring at him—but it survived through a careful dance of manners and caution and patience on his part. He knew—or suspected—that if she had her choice, she’d never speak to him again. But Tassamara was a small town. That hadn’t been an option.

And now—well, he was alive. Now everything changed.

“I can’t—nothing,” she said abruptly, ignoring his grin. “Let me get the security guard to carry her in.”

She turned away. Before she’d gone two steps, Colin called out. “I’ll get her.”

She turned back. “Unconscious, remember?”

“Not without warning.” He dismissed her concern as he reached for the car door. “If it happens again, I’ll have plenty of time to set her down.”

The girl had fallen asleep slumped against the door. Her hand had crept up to her mouth, the thumb not quite inside but tucked next to her lips as if she would have been sucking it if she’d been a little younger. Carefully, Colin opened the door, slipping one hand in to catch her before she started to slide out. She stirred but didn’t open her eyes.

As he unbuckled her seatbelt, he considered his approach before taking the most straightforward route. Sliding his hands under her arms, he tugged her out and up, lifting her high and drawing her close, before tucking one arm underneath her legs. She wasn’t light, but something about her weight balanced in a way that made carrying her totally unlike picking up a fifty-pound sack of mulch for the yard. As if automatically, she wrapped her legs and arms around him before dropping her head into the curve of his neck.

“Da,” she muttered.

Colin froze. The tiny voice, the weight of her head, the soft tickle of her hair against his skin, the smell of light soap and sandy dirt, no hint of the tang of sweat—it was a visceral punch to the gut. Somewhere out there, in the forest or not, a man, a father, had lost this child. He’d get her home to him, he swore silently. He’d find her da for her.

“Colin?”

He could hear the worry in Nat’s voice. He turned and started toward the door, before saying, his own voice hushed so as not to wake the girl, “She spoke.”

“Oh, good,” Nat answered, hurrying to catch up with him. “Selective mutism from trauma isn’t uncommon, but maybe when she wakes up she’ll be willing to tell us what happened.”

At the door, she pressed a keycard against an unobtrusive black pad, reaching for the handle at the sound of a loud click. As she opened the door, she looked back at Colin. “What did she 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.

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, increasing the magnification of the images by two hundred percent, then three, then four. She stared at the screen, searching for evidence of microinfarcts, subtle tissue damage, but there was none. His arteries were lovely. His entire cardiovascular system looked stellar. If she’d been reviewing these images for a physical, she would have happily signed off on any activity.

“Come on, Nat. You’ve gotta be done by now.” Colin’s tone this time was closer to a mumble, a protest he didn’t expect her to hear.

Natalya rested her forehead on her hand for a second or two, trying to think. With a long exhale, she stood. She’d run the troponin test again.

She pushed the button to slide the table out of the scanner. Standing, she crossed to the door between the two rooms, and as Colin sat up, told him, “I need to take more blood.”

His sigh of relief at being out of the machine turned into a sigh of exasperation. “Seriously?”

“If you were in Gainesville or any reputable hospital, they’d be checking the enzyme counts in your blood every hour. Don’t be giving me a hard time about this.” With one last glance at the sleeping child—still motionless—she gestured for Colin to follow her and headed to the small exam room down the hallway. GD was a research facility, not a clinic, but she routinely checked her subjects’ basic vital signs, including blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature, before proceeding with their imaging.

Colin didn’t complain, but as she slid the hypodermic needle under his skin, he grimaced. “I think you’re turning into a vampire.”

“Overgrown mosquitoes. Not a chance,” she responded automatically, as she watched the syringe fill with red. Pulling it out, she pressed the cotton ball she had ready onto his skin and slid her hand up his forearm, gently forcing him to close his arm around the insertion point. And then her eyes met his. 

His were hot, almost smoky. She could see the thought, the memory, as clearly as if her gift were telepathy. His old apartment. The television on. Him trying to convince her to watch. Her huffing in disgust. Vampire shows. Pfft. And then… how many times had five minutes of television turned into heated kissing on the couch, his hand sliding up her shirt, her hand sliding down his?

Too many.

Her lips parted, the heat rushing into her cheeks, flooding the rest of her. She dropped his arm as if it burned, turning away and fumbling with the vial of blood.

Without a word, she marched off into the adjacent storeroom.

He followed her. He was bare-chested, only half-dressed so she could scan his heart without interference from his shirt. She’d look like an idiot if she told him to put some clothes on, but she was much too aware of his presence behind her as she set the vial of blood down on the counter.

She opened the industrial-size refrigerator. Her eyes skimmed down the full boxes to the one she’d located earlier and she grabbed it and slid another test pouch out.

“Why do you guys have all this stuff?” The question was casual, but she could hear the tension underneath it.

How many years had it been since the two of them were alone together?

Too many.

Not enough.

Natalya frowned down at the test instructions, trying to focus on the present, not the past. What had he asked? Oh, right. The over-stocked refrigerator.

“Zane. And Grace,” she added, to be scrupulously fair. Really, Grace should have known what she was doing. She scanned the instructions, looking for any place where she might have gone wrong before. She was no expert but they seemed perfectly straightforward. Drip whole blood on the test unit, wait fifteen minutes, check the line.

“Not really an answer,” Colin murmured.

She glanced at him, surprised, and then chuckled. It felt like a complete answer to her, but then she’d been working with her siblings for the past few years. “Grace didn’t have time to do her usual emergency preparedness planning this year. So she told Zane to take care of it.”