Dancing in the Moonlight - Harlequin.com

148 DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT
through her veins when he had looked at her out of those
hot and hungry blue eyes. She had wanted his kiss, and
as the kiss deepened, she had wanted far more.
How could she be foolish enough to let herself crave
the impossible?
She reached for the bedside light again, then pulled
the blankets away and tugged her nightgown up to her
thighs. For a long moment she actually looked at her
legs, something she tried to avoid as much as possible.
Her aversion was ridiculous, she knew. She was a
nurse practitioner and had served in hospitals in a war
zone, for heaven’s sake. She had seen far worse than a
stump of a limb that ended just below the knee. It was
only skin and bone and nerve endings, not the essence
of her entire psyche.
So why did it feel like she was nothing more than this
now?
Intellectually, she knew losing part of her leg wasn’t
really the end of the world.
Just the end of the world as she knew it.
She sighed, despising herself for the melodramatic
thought. If she’d been her own patient, she would have
told herself to grow up, to put on her big-girl panties and
just deal with what had been handed her.
She wanted to. At times she thought she did a pretty
damn good job of coping.
At others, like now, she couldn’t seem to move past
this deep feeling of sorrow at what she had lost, at all the
things she wouldn’t be able to do in the future—or at least
the things she would no longer be able to do easily.
As she looked at her stump, she tried to picture a