Addicted to Nick Read Online Free PDF

she saw Nick. She planned to stiffen her backbone, look him in the eye and say, “Nick, I need to know your intentions.”
    She was pleased with that forthright opener, composed the next morning while she and Jason, her stable hand, exercised the first half of their team. And when it was time for a coffee break, she took her mug to an upturned bucket in the breezeway, tilted her face toward the midmorning sun and fine-tuned her intonation.
    â€œNick, I need to know…Nick, I need to know… ”
    Then Nick sauntered into the barn, and her plans, her intonation and her backbone, turned to mush. He wore a polo shirt in the same azure-blue as his eyes, and faded jeans that hugged him in all the right places. The warmth that flooded her body had nothing to do with the sun. Her heart stalled, then bounded into overdrive. She felt all the same jittery reactions as when she stepped a horse ontothe track before a big race, but she didn’t look away. She couldn’t not watch his lazy loose-limbed approach. Talk about poetry in slow motion. If he’d been a horse, she would have labeled him a fabulous mover.
    â€œIs this the new boss?” Jason asked.
    T.C. nodded, swallowed, inhaled once, exhaled once. By then Nick was close enough for her to notice his shower-damp hair and the rested look about his eyes. It was obvious his sleep hadn’t been disturbed by spicy aftertones clinging to his pillow!
    Somehow she managed to mumble the necessary introductions, and Nick shook Jason’s hand. “You must own the one-two-five out front.”
    Very smooth opening, T.C. thought with a cynical twist of her mouth, seeing as Jason was mad-keen on his newly acquired dirt bike. They swapped notes in that rev-head shorthand T.C. had never understood, and when Ug snuffled noisily out of her morning nap, Nick hunkered down to tickle her behind the ears. With a fatuous look of bliss clouding her mismatched eyes, the dog promptly rolled onto her back.
    T.C. snorted. She bet females did that trick for Nick Corelli all the time.
    â€œWhat do you call her?” His gaze lifted from the prone dog and met T.C.’s over the rim of her coffee mug.
    â€œUg.” Jason supplied the answer, which was just as well, because the smiling warmth in Nick’s eyes had struck T.C. dumb. Behind the subterfuge of sipping coffee, she attempted to unravel the knot in her tongue.
    â€œStrange name.” He smiled right into her eyes, and that uncooperative tongue looped itself in a second half-hitch. Luckily Jason came to her rescue again.
    â€œWhen Joe first brought her home—he found her down the road a bit—T.C. said she wanted to call her Lucky, because she was lucky Joe found her. But Joe says ‘There’s nothin’ lucky about a dog that looks like that.’”
    â€œSo how did she get to be Ug?” Nick asked.
    â€œJoe said ‘I’d call her plain old ugly,’ and it just sort of stuck. Except T.C. shortened it to Ug.”
    T.C. smiled at the familiar anecdote. She felt like she might finally be capable of speech. “You look like you slept well,” she said, by way of a start.
    â€œLike a baby.” His smile deepened the creases on either side of his mouth, and it struck her that he must smile a lot. “Any more of that coffee around?”
    â€œI’ll get it,” Jason offered. “Um, you want milk or anythin’?”
    â€œThe works.” Somehow T.C. wasn’t surprised. She figured Nick would demand the works in all kinds of ways. “Plenty of milk, at least two sugars. Thanks, Jason.”
    As the kid bustled off, Nick hoped the coffee wasn’t already bubbling away in a percolator. He wanted some time alone with Tamara. He pulled up the bucket vacated by Jason and sat. “You know, I’d still be sleeping like a baby except the phone rang.”
    She stopped fidgeting with her mug and went very still. “I didn’t hear