With a hoarse sound he pulled her into his arms, holding her hard and close, ignoring the clash of binoculars and camera. When he felt the resistance of her closed lips, he simply tightened his arms, demanding what he must have, not really knowing or caring why.
For a long, agonizing moment, she clenched herself against him. In the next heartbeat she softened, unable to deny him what they both wanted. He spoke her name roughly, relief and hunger and apology in a single syllable.
Then he kissed her until she forgot everything but the taste and feel of him. Passion and restraint, strength and yearning, danger and safety, gentleness and ruthlessness, everything that he was and could be poured through the single kiss.
The reality of Cord swept through her like a storm, shaking her safe, predictable world, shattering her defenses and demanding that she make a place next to the civilized, womanly fire that he had guarded for so many years without ever knowing its warmth.
When he finally loosened his arms and stepped back, Raine could hardly stand. She closed her eyes but still she saw him, his thick black hair and icy, burning blue eyes, the lines of his face harsh with need and his mouth shockingly sensual as he looked at her, wanting her.
Needing her.
“Tomorrow night,” he said. “Seven o’clock. Dinner.”
“No,” she answered, her eyes still closed. “You don’t know where you’ll be tomorrow night.”
“I’ll be wherever you are. Seven o’clock. Look at me, Raine.”
Shaking her head helplessly, she opened her eyes. The look he gave her was as shattering as his kiss.
“Seven o’clock,” she agreed.
But her tone said she didn’t believe he would be there.
Before Cord could speak, the helicopter ripped to full life, its rotors spinning rapidly. The body of the aircraft trembled like a beast crouched to spring on its prey. He handed her the rucksack, then turned and walked quickly away, his black hair rippling in the backwash of the great blades slicing through the twilight.
Eyes narrowed against tears and the harsh wind spinning off the black blades, Raine watched him walk away from her.
The chopper leaped into the air, shattering the twilight into a chaos of flashing lights. Hands clenched at her sides, she closed her eyes.
The sound of the helicopter retreated, swallowed by night and distance, leaving only a fading echo in her ears and an afterimage of a blinking red light in her mind.
When she opened her eyes again, she was alone.
Chapter 4
Standing in the stall next to Devlin’s Waterloo, Raine was dwarfed by the stallion’s height and muscle. Totally at ease with his bulk, she groomed her horse’s mahogany-red coat with long, sweeping strokes of the brush. In truth, Dev didn’t need the grooming any more than he needed her lingering close to him, speaking in soothing tones. She was talking more for her own peace of mind than for the stallion’s.
Waiting to compete was the worst kind of work for her. Patience never come gracefully or easily. Sometimes patience simply wasn’t possible. She knew her own restless temperament, and allowed for it. Or tried to. The weeks before any three-day event were difficult. She was discovering that the weeks before the Olympic three-day event were impossible.
The syndrome she called “competition madness” had set in around the stables. There wasn’t much left to do in terms of training either horses or riders. The animals were all but exploding with health and vitality. Other than an hour a day of undemanding riding and a few hours of grooming and walking, the horses didn’t require anything.
At this point, hard work or long hours in the ring went against the horses, making them stale and flat rather than eager for the coming test. But not working with the horses left a lot of hours for the riders to fill.
The humans, too, were in peak physical condition, impatient for the competition to begin and the suspense to end. Because they were highly trained athletes, event riders knew better than to deaden the talons of stress with alcohol or drugs. Nor could riders work themselves into a blessed state of numbness, for that would sour them as quickly as it would the horses.
Many riders—and other athletes—relieved the stresses of competition madness with an affair. It was a common and quietly accepted practice that provided a delightful means of killing time without jeopardizing competitive fitness.
More than one man had explained this very logically to Raine. Just as logically, she had explained that she preferred long walks and unnecessary grooming of Devlin’s Waterloo to empty bedroom games.
Only once had Raine given in to competition madness. She had been nineteen, competing in Europe for the first time with world-class equestrians. She had been out of her depth in more ways than one. On the eve of the event, a French rider had seduced her almost effortlessly.
She had mistaken his Gallic appreciation of women in general for a particular appreciation of Raine Smith. He had been dismayed to discover that she was a virgin, and worse, a Chandler-Smith. Despite that, he was kind in his own way, telling her beautiful lies for several weeks while he eased himself out of her life, taking her innocence with him.
Raine knew all about falling and getting back on the horse again. After a few weeks, she realized it was her pride rather than her heart that had been hurt by the suave Frenchman. When she found herself being pursued by a teammate a few months later, she didn’t shy away. She had known the man for several years, and liked him. Marshall was a serious, hard-working rider whose wife had decided she would rather have more fun. End of marriage.
Unfortunately, Raine was too inexperienced to understand the dangers of love on the rebound. Once Marshall had succeeded in talking her into bed, he took her lack of skill and absence of headlong eagerness as a personal insult to his prowess. He returned the insult, with interest.
For several months after the very brief affair had blown up in her face, things were very tense around the stables. After that, she was careful not to date anyone who was associated with her work. Which meant, in effect, no one at all. She enjoyed the men she was constantly around. She joked with them and traded equestrian advice, planned surprise birthday parties, and was a babysitter of last resort for the married riders.
Humorous, unflappable, generous, a hell of a rider, a younger sister in residence, a mind like a whip . . . untouchable. All those words had been used to describe her. All were correct, so far as they went. None of those words described the emotions beneath Raine’s disciplined surface, the loneliness and yearning she was always careful to conceal.
Until yesterday, when a stranger had knocked her flat and then gently held her, looked at her as though he saw through the surface to the womanly warmth beneath; and then he had kissed her and bathed both of them in sensual fire.
With a whispered curse, Raine threw Dev’s brush into the tack box hanging on the wide stall door. She had been thinking a lot about what happened yesterday. Too much. The darkness beneath her eyes showed her lack of sleep. Yet after hours of turning, tossing, muttering, and turning some more, she still didn’t understand what had happened to transform her from a cool rider into an eager, even demanding, lover.
The only rational explanation she had come up with was that her response to the man and the indigo twilight was the result of her own precompetition nerves and Cord’s high-stress work. She had been literally knocked off-balance, all her normal certainties shattered. He had been on a hair-trigger adrenaline ride, not knowing if she was a terrorist carrying death in a rucksack.
Under those circumstances, normal reserve or ordinary social responses just weren’t likely. She shouldn’t be surprised that he had kissed her. She shouldn’t be astonished at her own unexpected, overwhelmingly sensual response. They were simply human, a man and a woman with more adrenaline than common sense coursing through their blood.
When she looked at it that way, there was nothing mysterious or even unexpected about what had happened yesterday. It was simply adrenaline, nerves, and the unexpected al
l coming together at once.
But I deal with those things every day, she thought stubbornly. Why was yesterday different?
There was no answer except the old inadequate one. Nerves. That’s all. Just nerves. It had to be. It couldn’t have been anything else.
It certainly couldn’t have been a silent recognition of her other half, a filling of inner hollows that had waited empty and unknown for a lifetime, a joining more complex and . . . dangerous . . . than she could accept.
Nerves, nothing more. Competition madness.
Period.
“Raine?”
Startled, she spun around. “Oh. Hi, Captain Jon. I didn’t hear you come up.”
Tall, graying, with a competition rider’s innate balance and lean strength, Captain Jon waited just outside Dev’s stall door. He didn’t offer to come inside. He had a very healthy respect for the stallion’s heels. Teeth, too.
“Phone call for you,” he said.
Automatically Raine glanced at the sturdy watch on her wrist. Five-thirty. A little late for any of her family to be calling her. Or a little early, depending on whether it was her brother in Japan or her mother in Berlin.
Perhaps it was her sister, calling before the latest round of political fund-raisers. Or, even more likely, it was one of the increasing number of reporters who had discovered that Raine Smith, Olympic equestrian, was also Lorraine Todhunter Chandler-Smith, daughter of old wealth and older power.
“It better not be a reporter,” she said. “I’m flat out of polite ways to tell them to get stuffed.”
Amused, Captain Jon stepped away from the stall door and opened it. “I could remind you that event riding needs all the publicity it can get.”
“You could.”
“And then you’d tell me to get stuffed.”
She gave him a genuine smile. “Nope. You’re the only man who has guts enough to help me with Dev.”
“Doesn’t speak highly of my intelligence, does it?”
Still smiling, Raine patted Dev’s muscular rump and walked out of the stall, shutting the door behind her. The broad aisle between rows of stalls was clean, sunny, and dusty, despite constant spraying from the hoses coiled in front of every stall. Hot-blooded horses stood quietly in their stalls, coats gleaming with health, heads turning while they watched everything that happened with alert, liquid brown eyes.
As she and the captain walked down the aisle, horses poked their heads over stall doors. Some of the horses whickered softly when they scented her, asking for a word or a touch. She responded almost absently, stroking velvet noses, teasing the lips that nibbled playfully at her fingertips, and through it all she kept walking toward the phone at the end of the long, dusty aisle, wondering who was on the other end of the line.
“I called your name three times before you noticed me,” Captain Jon said. “Perhaps I should get you a beeper.”
“Like bloody hell.”
His white eyebrows lifted. “I didn’t think it was that bad an idea.”
“I don’t like electronic leashes.”
“No kidding,” he answered, in a too-innocent tone. The American slang sounded odd coming from the Eton-educated Swiss aristocrat.
After giving Captain Jon a narrow glance, Raine relented with a smile. “Sorry. It comes of being raised with the damn things. Birthdays, Christmas, Thanksgiving, the Pan-American Games—it didn’t matter. Somewhere in the world, hell is always breaking loose. Beep-beep and good-bye.”
Captain Jon didn’t argue. He knew better than anyone that Raine’s father had managed to attend only three of the dozens of competitions she had been in over the years. Nor had those three been the crucial ones, the competitions where a smile or a touch or a thumbs-up from your family really mattered.
“Worry about your own piece of the world,” the captain advised, rubbing his hand through his thinning gray hair. “Leave the rest of it to the pros.”
Men like Cord, she thought, but she said nothing aloud. She simply stroked another velvet muzzle and kept walking.
“Speaking of the rest of the world,” Captain Jon said, “we have an amendment to the security regulations. Riders who want to look over the country around Rancho Santa Fe have to use the buddy system.”
“Shit,” she hissed under her breath.
The captain’s eyebrows rose. The word wasn’t a normal part of Raine’s conversation. Or even an abnormal part. She must be really on edge. Being a wise man, he didn’t mention that fact.
Belatedly Raine realized that she hadn’t kept her response soft enough so that it wouldn’t be heard. That wasn’t like her. She must be a lot closer to competition madness than she thought. “Sorry. Again.”
“I hear much worse,” he said dryly. “It’s a way of letting off steam.”
“So I’m told.”
“Is it working?” he asked.
“Too soon to know.”
“If you run out of American and British slang, try the Aussies. They’re very inventive.”
“I’ll keep it in mind.” Impatiently she swiped some hair off her face and stuffed it behind her ear. “Buddy system. Hell on the half-shell. That’s all I need, to be yoked to another rider every time I leave the stable.”
Despite the sharpness of her voice, her hand was gentle when a dark, eager muzzle reached out to be petted.
Captain Jon wasn’t surprised by the endless patience Raine had for horses, but he was startled by the tension in her expression and voice. When everyone else was coming apart with nerves, she was—or at least, had seemed to be—a center of calm.
“The buddy system isn’t an unreasonable request,” he said mildly. “Ever since Munich, Olympic athletes have been a target.”
Raine made a throttled sound that wasn’t quite a word. It was just as well. It wasn’t the kind of word she used in public.
“I’ve seen the countryside around the endurance course,” he continued. “There’s bugger-all out there but hills, obstacles, and what’s left of the original golf course.”
“I know. I was there yesterday.”
“Alone?” Captain Jon asked sharply.
“Most of the time.”
Before he could ask any other questions, Raine took two fast steps and picked up the receiver that was dangling over a bale of straw.
“Hello,” she said crisply.
“Seven o’clock.”
Hearing Cord’s voice shocked her. She had already stuffed him into a mental pigeonhole labeled “competition madness.” She hadn’t really expected to hear from him again. She certainly hadn’t expected her heart to lurch and then race while adrenaline poured into her blood as though she had just taken a hard fall.
His midnight-and-black-velvet voice brought yesterday back all too vividly—first the fear, then the safety.
And then the fire.
In the background at Cord’s end of the line, other voices floated like colored leaves, oddly pitched voices riding broken waves of sound punctuated by bursts of static.
Automatically he shifted in his seat and adjusted the volume on one of the many radios and scanners that were within his reach. Now he could hear Raine better. The sound of her soft, quickening breaths licked over him like remembered flames.
Yet she said nothing, did nothing, as though she didn’t want to remember him at all. She was in full retreat from yesterday.
From him.
“I know you’re there,” he said, his voice both gritty and intimate. “I can hear you breathing. I just wish I was close enough to feel your breath, too, and kiss the pulse beating in your warm throat.”
Raine’s breath came in sharply. She felt like she could taste Cord on her tongue, feel him, know the dizzying thrill of his sensuality pouring over her. It both frightened and fascinated her. He was as much in control now as he had been when he had surprised her in the hills.
And she was as much off-balance.
“Don’t you ever play fair?” she asked bluntly.
“I’m a hunter.
I don’t play at all.”
“Well, I’m no dumb bunny, Cord Elliot,” she said, her voice clipped.
His laugh was rough yet soft, a purr from an animal that was definitely not a domestic cat.
“I know,” he said. “I feel rather like Actaeon must have felt when he hunted Diana beneath her own moon. Not a sport for the faint of heart.”
A shiver went through Raine.
It wasn’t fear.
“Seven o’clock,” he said. “Wear whatever you like. Or, like Diana, wear nothing at all.”
He hung up before she could say anything.
It was just as well. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The masculine promise and anticipation in his voice should have been illegal.
“Everything okay?” Captain Jon looked closely at her face. “First you went pale and now you’re flushed.”
“Everything’s fine,” she said, hanging up the receiver. “The person I was talking to is just a bit . . . unnerving.”
“Anyone I know?”
“Doubt it.”
Frowning, she fingered the plastic-coated ID badge she wore around her neck on a thin steel chain. The photograph was surrounded by color and number codes that identified her as an Olympic competitor with access to all equestrian areas.
“I know a lot of people,” Captain Jon said.
“I just met the man yesterday.”
“Oh?”
Raine looked down at her hands and arms, dusty from hours of cleaning Dev’s stall and brushing his healthy red hide.
Wear anything you like.
The thought made her smile. It was a slashing, competitor’s smile. Mr. Always-in-Charge Elliot was going to have his wind knocked out for a change.
But first she needed a long, slow perfumed bath.
“I won’t be in the mess hall tonight,” she said.
Captain Jon shrugged. His athletes were older than most Olympic competitors. He didn’t cluck over his riders, unless they had it coming. Then he could mother-hen with a vengeance. But Raine had never given him a bit of trouble, not even when she had fallen for that smooth-talking Frenchman.
Remember Summer Page 6
