Seeing Stars: A Loveswept Classic Romance by Fran Baker Read Free Book Online

mountain cat stalking its prey, he made a perfect cast. His lure arced high in the air, catching a bitter angling breeze that carried it twenty feet or so before it landed with a soft
plop
and sank.
    Upstream a flash of silver suddenly caught her eye.
    Then another.
    And yet another.
    Incredible as it seemed—especially on the first cast—he’d flushed a school of trout feeding in a small chute of water between the rocks.
    Dovie had been so absorbed in watching Nick that she hadn’t moved; she was still a dozen yards behind him. But now, her fishing fever soaring to an all-time high, she ran to the riverbank and rigged up. With any luck she’d catch her Christmas dinner this morning!
    “You’re late.” He said it solemnly, but his warm smile bid her welcome. The opaque sunglasses that hid his eyes were identical to the ones he’d lost yesterday.
    “Appears to me I’m just in time,” she replied sassily as an enormous trout circled, white-mouthed, around his lure.
    Nick wanted to tell her that truer words were never spoken. That he’d been a dead man inside before her musical laughter and womanly bodyhad brought him back to life. He wanted to say he was sorry he’d made her mad yesterday morning … sorrier still that he hadn’t kissed her. But knowing it was too much too soon he said, “You certainly are,” and let it go at that.
    The trout seized both his lure and his attention then, snapping cold spray in his face as it turned abruptly and sped for shallow water. He slammed the bail of his reel open and let the line sing free in spiraling loops so it wouldn’t break, then clinked the bail shut and began working his rod.
    Dovie stood in utter awe of Nick’s strength. Last night she’d lain awake in her lonely bed, thirty-four years old and fast heading upward, and found herself wondering if perhaps she’d endowed him with powers he really didn’t have because she craved some excitement in her life. But the moment she saw his lithe muscles rippling beneath his hunter’s-plaid shirt, she knew he was everything she’d remembered … and more.
    “Oh, hell!”
    His words pierced the still, frosty air, startling her. She looked closer and saw that the trout had run up under a rock and tangled his line. He reached to clear it, his pliant fingers expertly plucking the eight-pound test.
    The trout darted into deeper water, fighting him ferociously, and Dovie could hear the stressed fiberglass strands in Nick’s rod humming like high-tension wires.
    She couldn’t begin to guess how long the fightlasted. It might have been five minutes, or fifteen. She only knew that her arms ached for him as he strained against losing the fish. That her legs grew heavy and her breath came hard while he stoically stood his ground. And that her knees went rubbery with relief when he finally brought the trout home.
    “Hand me the net, will you?” Nick reached out behind him, and she rushed to do his bidding.
    “It’s beautiful,” Dovie murmured after he’d scooped up his second big rainbow in as many days.
    The trout had nearly torn the hook free, and it slipped out easily.
    “The next best thing to breakfast at Tiffany’s,” he stated with justifiable pride. His fingers were numb from the fight and the freezing water, but when he cradled his prize with both hands he felt a pang of shame.
    For reasons she couldn’t define, Dovie sensed his change of heart. “You’re not keeping it.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Why not?”
    Nick held the trout upright. “Feel her sides.”
    “
Her
sides?” But as she ran her hands along those bulging flanks, she suddenly understood that the deep and eternal force of life was trying to repeat itself in the trout’s body. “She’s ready to spawn.”
    “Her eggs are so ripe, she’s about to explode.”
    And Dovie, who’d once decided against marryingand having children because she’d raised so many relations, now felt her own biological clock ticking like a time bomb and