THAT GENTLE TOUCH

Animal lovers can skip this gormless romance about a female vet: though there's that ever-popular opener--the vet plunged up to the shoulder in cow--animals get short shrift here, and so does intelligible English. (An old church ""assailed her sensibilities with gargantuan distinction."") Nicole Winter, assistant to kind Dr. Carey in Essex Junction, Vermont, after midwiving a cow, is confronted by a great black stallion--so she falls, cracks her head, and dunks in a pond. But Nicole is rescued by mysterious computer-scientist Jason McBride, who has eyes like coal-chunks (""her eyes locked with the black embers of Jason"") and ""heavy, well-formed thighs."" So our heroine is transfixed all through her (chaperoned) stay at Jason's house after her accident; she's Jason-charged even through surgery and the attentions of young Dr. Stephen Baker. And though Baker offers dinners at nice restaurants (""'That hit the spot,' exclaimed Nicole, as she drained her wineglass""), the sight of Jason here and there still ""knocked the wind from her lungs."" They ride horseback and fly to Montreal and upstate New York; in an embrace by a glade ""the trees seemed to rustle from the voltage that dispersed into the air."" But just when everything's coming off with gargantuan distinction. . . a wicked woman, who beats horses, shows up to claim she's Jason's wife. Jason will try to explain; Nicole, no longer an innocent ""naive pristine juvenile,"" is huffy; but then Jason wins a happy ending by telling Nicole about that incident in the first year of his marriage when ""the sky opened and the heavens came crashing down."" Just awful.