Free Midnight Kiss by Marcia Evanick Page B

settled naturally under his body. She watched as his hand started to reach out to caress her cheek, only to jerk back. Without breaking eye contact she slowly pulled the hand between them. “What do you see, Thane, when you look at this hand?”
    Thane glanced at his large scarred hand being cradled by Autumn’s small smooth one. “Scars.”
    She held the hand up and ran her thumb over a faded scar. “I see a hero,” she said sadly. “I see a man who risked his life to save a child. You should be proud. Not many people possess such courage, Thane.”
    If he hadn’t been searching for the right words to tell her what he really thought, he would have heard the sadness and shame in her voice. His gaze followed her thumb as it stroked the longest scar. The faded marks didn’t bother him. He knew he was lucky to have as much movement and control in his hand as he did. Scars were as natural to a surgeon as screaming babies were to a pediatrician. Three major reconstruction operations and months of intense therapy had given him a normal hand, if he discounted the scars. He didn’t want a normal hand; he wanted his gifted, talented hand back.
    Autumn frowned as Thane sat up, pulling her with him. “Thane?”
    He slumped his shoulders, rested his forearms on his knees, and stared at the floor. “I lied. I stopped seeing the scars two years ago.”
    “What do you see?”
    “Failure.” His voice broke. “My failure.”
    Autumn studied his bent head. “I don’t understand.”
    He stood up and turned the volume on the television all the way down. Without looking at Autumn he walked over to the large picture window and stared off into the peaceful darkness. “The other night at dinner I told you about how I loved to bandage up people.”
    “You mentioned people, dogs, and inflatable dummies.”
    Thane turned and saw her anxious, lovely face in the flickering glare of the television. Why was this woman so easy to talk to? “By the time I was twelve, I knew exactly what I wanted to be, an orthopedic surgeon.” The faint sound of her indrawn breath seemed to echo across the room. “Out of over a thousand students I ranked number one in my high school graduating class. I was with the cream of the crop in medical school. My internship was labeled brilliant. I was the youngest orthopedic surgeon ever to head the entire department at Shenandoah General.” His voice was low and filled with anguish as he turned back to the darkness. “I had it all.”
    Autumn allowed Thane a few moments of silence. “Until a five-year-old boy stepped in front of a speeding car.”
    “In that split second everything I had ever worked for was beyond my reach.” He watched her reflection in the dark glass. She seemed to be on the verge of saying something a couple of times, but something held her back. Her hair was a mass of curls begging to be tamed. The gold blouse she wore hung to midthigh over a pair of black stretch pants, and a pair of gold socks kept her toes warm. She looked young, innocent, and entirely too inexperienced to understand his feelings of failure.
    “Knowing the outcome, if you could go back in time, would you still pull the child to safety?”
    Thane was surprised by her question. Everyone who had been around years before and knew of his loss had made the usual comments: The Lord works in mysterious ways. Fate has a better purpose for you. And the worst: Some things weren’t meant to be. No one but Autumn had the guts to ask the ultimate question: Would he do it again? His mind wanted to scream, No, I wouldn’t do it again. He’d let the boy take his chances against the bone-crushing metal. Maybe someone else would have played hero and saved the boy, even though he knew no one else had been within reach. His heart knew the answer the moment Autumn voiced the question. “Yes.”
    “Did you say something?”
    Thane cleared his throat. “I said, yes, knowing everything that would happen, I would still save the