Seeing Stars Read Free

noise.
    "Claire," he repeated again, and she wished she'd had the sense to stay out of Port Townsend this week. She had no more idea how to make meaningless conversation with people she didn't care about than she'd had fifteen years ago, the night her father insisted she attend her graduation prom.
    It had been emotional torture for a nerdy teenager. Fifteen years later, she felt bored and she wished she hadn't come, but at least she'd ditched the shyness.
    "Would you like to dance?" 
    "I'm not much of a dancer."
    He wasn't wearing a nametag, which probably meant he was local, that he'd never left Port Townsend and simply expected everyone to know him.
    "I'm sorry. I don't remember your name."
    "Barry." His eyes lingered on her bodice again. "Let me get you a drink."
    A few minutes later, when he pressed the drink into her hand, she felt the skin crawl along the back of her neck, as if someone were standing close behind her. Too close.
    She turned her head and fought the urge to gasp audibly. 
    "Hello, Claire." His deep voice was husky with just a hint of gravel.
    "Blake McKenzie," she said breathlessly. She lifted her glass and sipped, reminding herself sternly that she was a mature woman, not a dreamy teenager.
    "Hey, Mac!" said Barry.
    Everyone had called him Mac in school, but she hadn't. She hadn't called him anything, not to his face, but in her mind he'd always been Blake, as if she were the only person in the world—other than the teachers—who called him by his given name.
    Someone tapped him on the shoulder, and he turned his head, giving her a view of waving black hair curling over his collar. She took a careful breath and sipped again. If he turned back, she'd say something casual. After all, she was an adult, perfectly capable of having a cool conversation with a man who'd once turned her adolescent dreams uncomfortably hot.
    He hadn't changed. Black hair, black eyes with that rebellious hint of irreverent laughter. He wore a sports jacket, better fitting than the one his shoulders had strained against the night of the grad dance, but he still had that hell-raising half grin and those big muscular hands that had been surprisingly gentle when they gripped her arms that day in Chem class.
    He hadn't changed, but she had. 
    "Welland," said Barry, standing closer now. "Claire Welland. You're the physics teacher's daughter. I remember now. You've changed."
    "Fifteen years does that," she said, wishing she'd refused to come. Then Blake turned back and her breath caught. How crazy that he could still make her nervous.
    "Dance?" asked Blake.
    She swallowed and told herself to stop this nonsense. He was just a man, a very muscular, physical sort of man. His eyes still had that alert watchfulness, that overlay of mischief, though he'd never turned it on her.
    "What did you say?"
    "Dance with me. I want to talk to you."
    Crazy panic welled up, and she told herself his closeness was because of the noise, must be because of the noise.
    "She doesn't dance," shouted Barry.
    All these voices, sharing memories, but not her memories. Brenda, her one friend in high school, was firmly settled on an experimental farm in Michigan.
    Blake touched her arm and somehow, crazily, she moved toward the dance floor with him.
    "You don't want to dance with me."
    "Yeah, I do." He gave her the half smile she'd seen him romance Lydia with, the same smile he'd turned on Sherry Miller before he and Lydia became a couple. It meant nothing, of course, a trick of facial structure and musculature.
    "It's nice to see you," she said, realizing it was true, that afterward, she'd enjoy describing him to Jenn. 
    He had changed, of course. Fifteen years hadn't left him untouched. His face had always been harshly drawn, dangerous, but now the lines were deeper, the eyes quieter. Changed, but she would have recognized him anywhere.
    Jenn would call him a hunk. She supposed it was something about muscles, strength that didn't come from the gym, and that