Seeing Stars: A Loveswept Classic Romance

by Baker, Fran

  Touching trembling fingers to lips still deliciously damp from him, she swallowed the bitter pill of his rejection and forced herself to speak calmly. “That’s funny; I thought I gave you the green light.”

  His harsh laugh ripped a big hole in her heart. And a bleak wind whistled through the opening when he flipped his sunglasses back in place and turned on her. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m color-blind!”

  “Well, if you’re looking for sympathy, you can find it in the dictionary.” Dovie’s voice shook dangerously as anger flooded in to fill passion’s void.

  “I’m not.” Nick’s tone held all the warmth of surgical steel. “But if I were, you can damned well bet you’d be the last one I’d look to.”

  “Thank God for small favors,” she snapped. Then, stricken by guilt at what she’d just said, she spun away from him, her rubber waders slisking in the snow. Through all the years, all the crises … no one and nothing had ever rattled her as much as Nick just had!

  “Listen”—he sighed heavily and reached for her arm, trying to make amends—“that remark I made about being color-blind was a real cop-out.”

  From the corner of her eye she saw his hand coming at her, and stepped sideways to evade it. “Yes, it was.”

  “And I really can’t believe that I was stupid enough to let a good thing end so badly.” He grabbed a fistful of freezing air and ground his teeth in frustration. Then he lashed out with his left hand.

  Dovie’s conscience warred with her pride as she dodged him again. She wasn’t playing fair, of course, but she’d be hanged for a horse thief before she’d stand still for any more of his abuse! “Me either.”

  “About the only excuse I can offer is that shortly after I was blinded, I was surrounded by women who thought I needed them to ‘take care’ of me.” Remembering all the nameless, faceless bodies he’d bedded during those first dark months, Nick stopped and raked an aggravated hand through his thick black hair. “I suppose they saw themselves as sexual therapists or something, and I—”

  “If you think I’m interested in hearing you brag about how many notches you’ve carved in Braille on your bedpost, you’re sadly mistaken!” she snapped over her shoulder.

  “You jump to conclusions faster than a frog!” Veering toward the sound of her voice, he grabbed her arms in a steel vise of a grip and jerked her around to face him. “Now, you’re not making another move until I’ve had my say! Understand?”

  Dovie stood frozen in his grasp, stunned by the anger that had erupted in him. Dimly she realized that he wasn’t angry at her as much as he was angry at the terrible fate that had robbed him of his eyesight. Nevertheless, Nick in a temper was a man to fear.

  “I don’t blame you for thinking I was bragging a moment ago, but believe me, I wasn’t.” He relaxed his grip but didn’t release her, because he was sure she’d bolt if given the chance. “And I know you were mad when I stopped kissing you—”

  “I wasn’t mad; I was hurt.”

  Nick could feel her trembling through the nubby cotton fabric of her sweater. The way his knuckles were still digging into the sides of her breasts, he knew her courage must have cost her dearly. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  Dovie heard the change in his voice, but it did nothing to calm the riotous vibrations where his hands held her captive. Her fear of him was gone, replaced by a fear of a different kind. A fear of herself. “Then let me go.”

  Silently, he did as she had demanded.

  It was almost full daylight now. Around them snow fell softly from laden evergreen boughs and icicles on the nearby dogwood limbs began to melt under the fleeting magic of a December sun. Between them their breaths joined in warm white clouds on the freezing air. And together they braved a whole new world of emotion.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said huskily, “but I’m a hell of a lot friendlier on a full stomach.”

  “Me too.” Giving in to an impulse she’d had since she first met him, she raised one hand and let her fingers sift through his windblown hair. Ah, it felt as clean and springy as it looked.

  “The offer’s still open, then?” He caught her hand and brought it to his mouth, pressing his lips into the center of her palm with a light, experienced touch that made her ache with excitement deep inside.

  Dovie nodded, illogically thinking he could see the motion.

  Nick sensed it and, giving in to some devilish impulse of his own, murmured against her sensitized skin. “Then let’s go home. I’m starved.”

  “Oh … you …” She let out a huff of laughter and snatched her hand away. “Just for that, you have to make the coffee as well as pour it.”

  He laughed too. “Sounds good to me.”

  They gathered up their fishing gear in companionable silence and started back. As they climbed the hill, their footsteps crunching through the snow, she was suddenly acutely aware of winter’s beauty.

  “Be my eyes,” Nick said, placing a proprietary hand at the small of her back. “Describe everything you see, starting with the sky.”

  Dovie searched the sky as desperately as she scrambled for adjectives. They had to be absolutely perfect. “Polished pewter.”

  “Polished pewter?” A twist of a smile touched his lips, and she felt foolish for having gotten so carried away by a gray sky. Then her tension receded and relief flowed in when he laughed triumphantly. “Beautiful! Clear as a bell!”

  After that, it was a snap.

  “What’s the snow look like?”

  “Diamond dust.”

  “The trees?”

  “Straight out of a Currier and Ives Christmas scene.”

  A pair of cardinals whistling in the pines … chirring chipmunks playing tag under the drooping canopy of a willow … a white-tailed doe and her spotted fawn poised for flight halfway up the hill …

  The snowscape was so beautiful that Dovie wept because Nick couldn’t see it. At the top of the hill she stood next to him, his arm around her shoulders. He touched his hand to her face, where he found her tears.

  “It’s that lovely, is it?”

  She nodded, knowing he felt her response, and laid her cheek against his warm, wide chest.

  The sharp air lashed at his face, and his lungs filled with it, clean and crisp. Winter held the world in its icy fingers, but Nick held Dovie, and something hard and cold within him began to thaw.

  “No one’s ever cried for me before.” He bent his head and kissed away her tears, his mouth so tender, she thought she might swoon. “Thank you for being my eyes.”

  “I should be thanking you.” Listening to the strong, steady beat of his heart, she sighed contentedly, a kind of peace stealing over her. “I’ve been so preoccupied lately, I’d almost forgotten how pretty it is around here.”

  They stood in silent communion with each other and with their own emotions for a while longer.

  For Dovie, who’d given up her youthful dreams to take care of her seven brothers and sisters, it was a chance to dream again. And for Nick, who had taken a little over a year to come to terms with the loss of his sight, it finally was time to look to the future.

  What neither of them realized in the dawn of a new day was that this was simply the calm before the storm.

  After ten rings, Dovie hung up the telephone receiver, sighed, and turned back to the stove.

  “Still no answer?” Nick had paused in the midst of setting the table, his head tilted at a listening angle. The instinct born of years of medical experience, of being aware that what patients didn’t say was often more important than what they did say, had alerted him to Dovie’s distress.

  “No.” The word was softly spoken, emotionless, but he knew anxiety too well to miss it in someone else. She was worried sick because she couldn’t locate Curtis and Linda.

  “Try the hospital again,” he suggested.

  “I’ve already left messages with the admitting office and the maternity ward,” she said.

  Dovie felt a cloak of guilt closing a
round her. Even though her brothers and sisters were on their own, they still depended on her in case of an emergency. And rightfully so. Remembering the way she’d snapped at Curtis when he’d called her yesterday morning, she blinked back tears of remorse and set about finishing the cooking of their breakfast.

  The pungent aroma of sage and coriander trailed her to the table when she carried in a platter of hot homemade sausage patties. Napkins and silverware were unnecessarily rearranged right under Nick’s nose. A friendly, crackling fire received several unfriendly thrusts from the tip of an iron poker, provoking a snapping shower of sparks in return.

  Killing time … Nick knew damn good and well what Dovie was doing. Massacring the moments until she could go back to the telephone and try her brother’s number again. And all the while she was keeping that tightly controlled silence that people who’ve never had anyone to share their burdens with are prone to keep.

  For all intents and purposes she’d forgotten he even existed. So he waited patiently while she plumped sofa pillows and straightened family photographs with a mother hen’s practiced hand. And he wondered, as she busyworked her way back to the table, how many times she’d walked these floors alone, the worries she’d inherited weighing heavy on her mind.

  Compassion and the need to help her welled up strongly in Nick. He was deluged by the desire to hold her and calm her. To protect her and to provide the missing years of love and laughter that could never be made up for.

  “I’ll get the mush,” she finally said.

  “Forget the mush.”

  “But I’ve got to call—”

  “Don’t shut me out, Dovie.” He reached out and grabbed her wrist, gathering her into the comforting circle of his arms.

  “No!” She resisted him fiercely at first, twisting and turning, drumming his chest with her frantic little fists. “Let … me … go!”

  But he needed her as much as she needed him, so he clasped her to him all the more closely until, like a broken spring, she unwound suddenly and burrowed into his arms.

  “Hold me, Nick, hold me, hold me, hold me.”

  “I’m here.” He bent his head and buried his face in the soft clean silk of her hair.

  Her breath was warm and labored on his neck. “I’m afraid.”

  “A fear shared is a fear conquered.”

  That seemed to do the trick. Her body sagged with relief and her breathing returned to normal. The fingers that had clutched handfuls of his shirtfront with such desperation began to relax.

  For a long time neither spoke. Dovie slid her arms around his lean waist and let herself rest against the hard bulk of his body. Nick registered the crush of her soft breasts against his chest, the shape of himself against her stomach, but kept his thoughts to the straight and narrow. The embrace was one of sustenance rather than desire, a drawing of strength, and perhaps a prelude to tragedy.

  “Something’s happened to Curtis and Linda,” she said at last. “I can’t explain it, but I can feel it in my bones.”

  Dovie had never given birth; her brothers and sisters had grown in her heart, not under it. In raising them, though, she had developed that age-old intuition that is part and parcel of motherhood. And it was her maternal sense of urgency to which Nick responded.

  “I’ll put the food away while you back the car out.”

  “There’s a shortcut through the woods,” she said, “but we’ll have to walk.”

  “Fine.” He turned her toward the table. “We’d better hurry.”

  They had the food put away and were out the door in a matter of minutes. Snow fell needle-straight now from churlish clouds that seemed to make dusk of day. In the distance a lone dog howled its misery, while the wind moaned about something that hurt. The morning had lost its luster, which only added to Dovie’s dread. But even if worse came to worst, she would never forget how safe and protected she’d felt in Nick’s arms.

  It was beginning to look at lot like Christmas at Curtis and Linda’s. A boxwood wreath adorned with chinaberries and lemons hung on the front door. On either side, brass-and-glass carriage lanterns wore ribbons of red. A willow basket full of apples—symbolizing generosity and goodwill—had been left out on the wooden step.

  Outside, their small saltbox home extended a warm holiday welcome to one and all; inside, it was as cold and silent as a tomb.

  Five

  * * *

  “Where’s their bedroom?” Nick demanded after a quick but thorough search of the basement and first floor proved futile.

  “Upstairs.” Dovie’s stomach went weightless with alarm when she looked past the fragrant pine swags that looped their way up the banister. Why, oh, why, hadn’t she called them before she left to go fishing this morning?

  Fear dampened her palms and dried her throat as she hurried toward the stairs. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  “No!” Nick’s fingers curled around her arm, stopping her short of the first riser. He knew she was already torturing herself needlessly, and wanted to spare her as much as he could. “I’ll go.”

  She rounded on him. “But—”

  “But nothing!” The doctor within him, for a time imprisoned in some dark part of his mind, was back in control. “You call Harley and tell him to bring my medical bag. He knows where I keep it. And tell him to alert Joe Rodgers … just in case we have to take them to Richmond.”

  For a moment Dovie felt as if she might be sick. Then she swallowed, willing herself to take strength from Nick, to trust his decision, and finally she nodded. “What’s your telephone number?”

  He gave it to her and then bounded up the stairs, using the greenery-decorated banister as his guide.

  “Five steps down the hall, first door to your right!” she called up just as he reached the second-floor landing. Then she ran to the telephone and dialed his number with shaking fingers.

  “Curtis?” Nick paused outside their closed door and laid his ear against the wood, listening. “Linda?”

  When no one answered—had he really expected otherwise?—he found the doorknob and turned it. Flinching slightly because of the cold, he entered the eerily silent room.

  Luckily the bed was only a few steps from the door. He leaned down to explore it and felt them curled spoon-fashion beneath the covers, as though trying to share their body heat.

  Working rapidly now, Nick rolled Curtis onto his back, pressed two fingers just below his jaw, and made out a thready pulse. Then he moved to the opposite side of their big four-poster bed and repeated the procedure on Linda, with the same results.

  “They’re alive.” He answered Dovie’s unspoken question when he heard her hesitate in the doorway.

  “Thank God,” she murmured. Her anxious gaze lit on the taut swell of Linda’s stomach. “What about the baby?”

  Nick threw back the quilted bedspread along with a host of blankets, lifted the hem of Linda’s flannel nightgown, and pressed his fingers against the lower left quadrant of her protruding abdomen, feeling for the fetal heartbeat.

  Watching … waiting … Dovie bit her bottom lip so hard, she drew blood.

  Suddenly Linda’s stomach began arching and changing shape, as if her baby were waking from a long winter’s nap.

  The instant she saw the infant move and realized what it meant, Dovie almost wept with relief. But this was neither the time nor the place for tears, so she stepped to the bed and asked with brisk intensity, “What do you want me to do?”

  Nick palpated Linda’s distended abdomen with both hands, the shadow of a smile tingeing his lips when he located the baby’s head in the birth canal. If everything went as it should … Abruptly he pulled the hem of her nightgown down, snapped erect, and ordered, “Close the door and open the windows.”

  “Right.” But the room seemed to spin as Dovie rushed to do his bidding.

  The window closest to the bed slid up smoothly, but the latch on the storm was stuck.

  She tried working it loose, becoming all thumbs and butterfingers in th
e process. Then she rested for a moment, her thoughts suddenly muddled, while thousands of tiny pinpoint lights exploded in front of her eyes and the world reeled around her.

  Finally, sensing that time was of the essence, she mustered every ounce of strength left in her and tried the latch again.

  It gave.

  Dovie pushed up the thermal pane, then dropped to her knees. Cold air swirled in, clearing her head. The snow that had piled up against the storm window collapsed and fell onto the bedroom floor.

  Not until Nick knelt beside her and drew in several drafts of the fresh, freezing air did she understand what an incredibly close call they’d just had.

  “How do they heat this house?”

  “Curtis converted from oil to gas a couple of years ago.” She looked at him quizzically. “Why?”

  “Unless I’ve missed my guess, their furnace has a carbon-monoxide leak.”

  “But the pilot light was on when we checked the basement.”

  Nick stood, and Dovie followed suit. “A lit gas burner only means the furnace is operating; it has no bearing on the CO.”

  She opened the rest of the windows without a hitch, and the room immediately felt like the inside of a meat locker. “CO?”

  “The odorless, colorless, silent killer.” He scooped Linda up off the bed and carried her to an open window for some fresh air.

  “I never even suspected it.” Dovie shivered, not entirely from the cold, when she sat down on the window seat and helped Nick lower Linda to her lap. Later she would remember with amazement how they had worked as a team. But the danger was still too recent. Still too real. “Law, we could have died—all of us!”

  “That’s my fault.” He briefly relived another reaction, the one that had cost him his eyesight. Surprisingly enough, the memory wasn’t nearly as bitter now as it had been a couple of days ago. Before he’d met Dovie. Dear Lord, if anything had happened to her because of him … He crossed back to the bed, appalled at his own recklessness. “I didn’t stop to think that carbon monoxide can put the rescuers at risk too.”

  Watching Nick heft her two-hundred-pound-plus brother with no more difficulty than he’d have picking up an infant, Dovie felt a surge of emotion that ultimately clouded her eyes. “When will they start coming around?”