“What do you mean?”
He shrugged as though it didn’t matter, yet it mattered very much. He was going to shake her beautiful world until there was a place in it for him. But not today. Not even tomorrow. Someday.
First he had to take care of Barracuda. Permanently. Cord was damned if he would go through the rest of his life looking over his shoulder for the assassin who had vowed to kill him.
Saying nothing, Cord handed over Dev’s reins and turned to go.
“Wait,” Raine said urgently, putting her hand on his arm.
She didn’t see the sudden tension in his expression or the hungry way he watched her fingers resting on his sleeve. Then he looked at her hazel eyes, more brown than green now, almost as beautiful as the tempting curves of her mouth.
“I’m waiting,” he said, keeping his voice neutral with an effort.
“What if I called Dad and asked him not to come?”
Cord hesitated, wanting to take her hand, to run his thumb over her fingertips and touch the center of her palm with his tongue. But he couldn’t do that, either.
And he couldn’t stop wanting to.
“If it would make you feel better,” he said evenly, “go ahead. But it won’t change anything. Sometime in the last few months, Blue discovered that he missed getting to know quite a woman. The fact that she’s his daughter just makes it worse. He’s coming, Raine. Hell or high water, he’s coming.”
She remembered her father’s words, the absolute certainty in his voice, and knew that Cord was right. Justin Chandler-Smith was coming to see his daughter’s Olympic ride.
Her fingers closed with surprising strength over Cord’s wrist. “I don’t want to make it easier for someone to kill him!” Her voice broke. “Cord, please, what can I do to make Dad believe that?”
“He already knows how you feel.”
“But—”
“Why do you think he worked so hard to protect you from knowing that he’s a target? Only Lorraine knows how dangerous his work is, and even she doesn’t know precisely what his work involves. Not because he doesn’t trust her, but because it’s another way of protecting her. What she doesn’t know, no one can force her to talk about.”
Raine’s face went white. The thought that her mother could be a target had never occurred to her. “What can I do to protect him—them?”
Cord would have laughed, but the intensity of her emotion wasn’t anything to smile about. “There are a lot of well-trained, very competent people protecting your father and his family.”
She looked at Cord with hazel eyes that were dark, shadowed by emotion. “Are you one of them?”
“I have several spots picked out for Blue on the endurance course,” he said, neither admitting nor denying her conclusion. “Great views of the action, and only exposed on one side.”
“Is that what you were doing when you jumped me, looking for a safe place for Dad to watch me ride?”
This time a corner of Cord’s mouth turned up in a wry smile. “Still pissed about that, aren’t you?”
She waved away a bee that had mistaken her bright red riding helmet for an oversized flower. “No. Not anymore. If you’re supposed to be protecting my father, you didn’t really have much choice but to assume the worst when you saw me out there. You had no way of knowing who I was. And in your world everyone, everyone, is a potential assassin.”
“It’s your world, too.”
She bit her lip and said, “Yes, I know. Now. If Dad dies because of me . . .” She couldn’t finish.
“I’m good at my work,” Cord said calmly.
Wanly, she smiled. “If you’re one of Dad’s men, you’re a lot better than good. You’re the best.”
“Raine!” Captain Jon called. “You’re up!”
“Coming.”
Cord laced his fingers together to make a flesh-and-bone stirrup for her. Automatically she accepted the aid in mounting her tall stallion. She was in the saddle before she had a chance to feel more than an instant of his smooth strength boosting her into place.
“Take care of her, boy,” he murmured in a voice that went no further than Dev’s black-tipped ears, “or I’ll have your red hide for a wall hanging.”
She settled firmly into the saddle, collected Dev, and headed toward the practice area at a smart trot. She wished she could collect her mind as easily. She felt as though someone had taken her carefully mapped-out world, turned it upside down, and shaken it until she was forced to look at old realities in entirely new ways. Her picture of her father had shifted subtly, irrevocably.
She couldn’t remake the past, but she could look at its pieces arranged in a new way, a different pattern, different truths. Her father did love her. At some level she had always known that, but she hadn’t always admitted it. It was easier to be angry with him than to try to understand the choices he had made.
Yet even that understanding wasn’t enough. She couldn’t accept a life lived as her father had lived his. Not for herself. Not for the children she someday hoped to have.
Loving a man like Cord Elliot would destroy her.
Yet she wanted him as she had never wanted anything in her life. The depth of her need was frightening.
“. . . listening?” Captain Jon snapped.
Quickly she searched her mind for the words she must have heard while she was thinking about Cord instead of Captain Jon’s instructions.
“I take the triple jump once clockwise, once counterclockwise,” she said, repeating the captain’s instructions. “Then I go through again, changing leads twice, getting Dev to take the jumps unexpectedly, on the wrong lead.”
“Right. He must understand that when you say jump, he bloody well jumps whether or not he’s on the right lead. Now, on the second round, that last jump is set at a right angle into the ring fence. Watch that Dev doesn’t run out along the unfenced side just because he’s on the wrong lead.”
Banishing Cord from her mind, Raine rode into the ring. Dev went through the first series of jumps like a perfect gentleman. While he slowly cantered around to approach from the opposite side, a group of equestrians walked by just outside the ring. The riders talked among themselves as they watched the muscular stallion’s progress over the low, tricky jumps.
Suddenly one of the horses screamed, shied violently, and bolted straight into one of the American riders who was sitting on his patient mount, waiting for a turn in the ring. The American horse went down. His rider slammed into the fence with a sickening crack. The horse that was out of control burst through the fence and hurtled blindly toward Dev.
Toward Raine.
Cord was already racing toward the ring, knowing it was too late, refusing to accept it. In a rage of adrenaline, the world slowed, then stopped, letting him see everything with terrible clarity. The American rider was down, tangled in the fence. His horse was scrambling up, favoring its foreleg. Another horse had bolted through the fence and across the ring, the rider barely hanging on, scrambling desperately to control his mount. Heading toward Raine like a runaway truck.
Too late.
The berserk horse slammed into Dev with a force that staggered the big stallion and sent Raine flying out of the saddle.
No! Cord screamed, but it was all in silence, in his mind, because he had breath only for the terrible needs of this instant, when Raine was hurtling beneath the plunging horse, dusty ground rushing to meet her, no time to duck, no time to roll out of the way of steel-shod hooves, no time even to throw up her hands to protect her head.
She hit the ground and lay without moving.
He put his hands on the top rail of the fence and vaulted into the ring.
With a stallion’s chilling scream, Dev attacked the strange horse, biting cruelly into living flesh. The horse squealed frantically, then twisted away in a lunge that finally unseated its rider. He hit the dirt, pulled himself to his feet, and staggered in Raine’s direction, not even knowing she was there.
Ears flattened to his skull, b
ared teeth gleaming, eyes rolling white, Dev reared and screamed in primitive rage. He came down straddling Raine. His neck moved with a deadly, snakelike motion, warning the rider to stay away.
The man was too dazed to realize what was happening. He kept weaving toward Raine.
Cord hit him with a flying tackle that carried them away from the raging stallion. He rolled to his feet with the grace of a highly trained fighter. “Get out of here,” he snarled to the rider in low voice.
When the man didn’t react quickly enough, Cord picked him up and physically threw him over the fence. Then he spun and looked at Raine.
She hadn’t moved.
He wanted to run over and throw himself down by her, to find her pulse, feel it, know that she was still alive. But he couldn’t. Right now the blood-bay stallion was a wholly primitive creature, as savage as any mustang ever born beyond the reach of man. He stood over his fallen mistress like a huge guard dog, responding to her unnatural stillness with a stallion’s protective instinct.
Dev would kill anyone who tried to touch her.
Slowly, slowly, Cord eased across the ring toward Raine. Every breath he took was a soothing murmur of sound, a shaman’s voice curling caressingly around the quivering stallion.
“Easy . . . easy, boy. I’m not going to hurt your mistress. Remember me? I’m the one who smells like her.”
He extended his right forearm, the arm that Raine had held only moments before, when Cord had believed that there was time to wait before he took down her castle gate and began to live with warmth instead of ice.
But now there was no more time, only Raine lying facedown in the ring.
“Easy, Dev. Easy. Put those ears up, boy. Smell me . . . remember me . . .”
His voice poured over the stallion like a warm, darkly gleaming river, ceaseless, peaceful, bewitching with hints of moonlight sliding among deep currents.
Dev’s ears lifted just a fraction from his skull. He watched Cord, but not with feral rage.
“That’s it, boy. I’m not a wolf or a lion after a foal. I won’t hurt you or Raine. That’s it . . . that’s it . . . easy, boy.”
Quietly he praised each subtle shift in the stallion’s attention, each tiny quiver of the horse’s ears lifting from his skull.
“Smell me, boy. I smell like her . . .”
Behind Cord, shouts and startled cries sank into a spreading pool of silence. Everyone’s attention was riveted on the ring and the fallen rider, the soft-talking man and the huge horse quivering on the break-point of rage and fear, a stallion’s savage instincts battling with a shaman’s voice for control of Dev’s deadly body.
Voices called out offering advice and warnings. With each new male voice, Dev shuddered as though a whip had fallen on his sweat-blackened hide.
Cord wanted to shout at the men to shut up, but if he raised his voice, Dev would explode.
Fucking idiots, he thought viciously. Can’t they see they’re making things worse?
Suddenly, clearly, Captain Jon’s calm tones cut across the rumble of male advice. “I will personally horsewhip the next person who speaks. If anyone can get close to that stallion now, it’s the man in the ring.”
“But—” began one rider.
“Shut it.”
Though Captain Jon didn’t raise his voice, there was an immediate and total silence.
Cord’s mesmerizing words continued without pause, the sounds of peace, of safety, of grassy fields and sweet water forever flowing.
Dev’s ears shifted nervously as he stretched his head down toward Raine. Velvet nostrils expanded and quivered as the stallion’s muzzle moved over his rider’s motionless body. Her stillness was puzzling, unnerving.
With almost invisible movements, Cord glided closer. Words and nonsense mixed into a gentle murmur of sound that calmed Dev’s uncertainty and fear.
“Let me look at her,” he said. “I won’t hurt her, boy. I just want to touch her, help her. That’s what you want, too. You want your beautiful rider back on her feet and grooming you and cussing you out for being such a spring-loaded knothead. She can cuss me out, too. I was as big a knothead as you. I thought we had all the time in the world . . .”
Ears not quite flattened, Dev stretched his powerful neck toward Cord. Black nostrils expanded, quivered, scenting again the mixture of Cord and Raine on the man’s sleeve. With a long breath that was almost a groan, Dev’s ears came up. He nosed Cord, then Raine, as though asking if the man knew why she was so still.
He praised the stallion even as his strong fingers closed around the reins. Dev shuddered, tried to toss his head, then accepted Cord’s mastery.
Despite the urgency shrieking inside him, Cord was careful to move very slowly as he knelt next to Raine. She was facedown, arms flung out as though to deflect a blow. Delicately his fingertips found the soft skin of her neck. He held his breath and sought for the least sign of her life.
He felt nothing.
Jaw clenched, he let his breath out, slowing his own heartbeats so that he could feel hers no matter how faint or far apart they were.
After a wrenching moment, he felt the beat of Raine’s life flowing just beneath his fingertips. Relief swept through him with a force that left him weak.
“Alive,” he said, in a voice that was still dark magic.
“Do you want me to take Dev?” Captain Jon asked.
At the sound of the captain’s voice, skin rippled nervously along the stallion’s sweaty body.
“Not yet,” Cord said soothingly. “Dev won’t tolerate it.”
With a low groan, fighting for the breath that had been knocked out of her, Raine tried to get up.
“Lie still. You had a bad fall.” The quiet order was enforced with a hand between her shoulder blades. “Dev’s all right,” Cord added swiftly, knowing that Raine’s first concern would be for her horse. “Do you hurt anywhere?”
The world whirled around her when she tried to lift her head. She let it sink back into the loose dirt of the ring. When everything settled down again, she opened her eyes. “Just dizzy. Breath knocked out.”
“Tell me if I hurt you.”
Holding Dev’s reins in one hand, Cord ran the other over her, beginning at her neck and working down, probing for broken bones with surprising skill and gentleness. When he was finished, he looked a silent question at her.
“I’m okay,” she repeated. Her voice was already stronger.
“You didn’t look okay,” he said bleakly. “You were facedown in the dirt, out cold.”
Warily she moved her head. Muscles complained. She winced, knowing she would be stiff later.
“Can you sit up?” he asked.
“Sure.”
But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Her head hurt and her stomach thought she was on a merry-go-round. When he put his arm around her, bracing her, she leaned into him.
“You sure you’re ready for this?” he asked.
“I’ve been sitting up for years. What happened?”
“One of the horses went crazy. Bee sting, probably. He shied into another horse, broke through the fence, and then hit Dev like a runaway train. You were knocked off right into the middle of it. Dev drove away the other horse and then stood over you like a one-ton attack dog.”
She smiled weakly. “Sounds like Dev. He gets a little protective of me when I fall.”
Cord’s black eyebrows lifted at her understatement.
Abruptly she remembered seeing one of her teammates thrown into the fence. She turned toward the fence so quickly that she startled Dev.
“Jameson,” she said urgently. “Is Jameson all right?”
Captain Jon was standing next to the American rider. Jameson turned toward the ring. His face was pale and sweaty. The way he held himself suggested that his shoulder was either fractured or dislocated, or both.
“Shoulder,” the captain said, watching Dev warily.
“What about Show Me?” Raine asked.
“Right foreleg prob
ably is strained. Nothing serious,” the captain added. “But Jameson won’t be riding for a while.”
She exchanged a long look with Captain Jon. The United States had to field a minimum number of three contestants in the three-day event. Four was the maximum permitted for a team. Four was also the preferred number, because it gave some margin for accident after the beginning of the event.
With Jameson out, one of the alternate riders would move up to take his place. There would still be four riders competing, but they wouldn’t be the four who Captain Jon thought had the best chance of winning.
Grimly she started to get to her feet.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Cord demanded, holding her down.
“I’m getting up,” she said in a clipped voice. “Either help me or get the hell out of my way.”
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he pulled her to her feet with startling ease. She hesitated a moment, letting dizziness pass, before she reached for Dev’s reins.
Cord didn’t release them.
Raine turned on him, furious because a man and a horse had been hurt, undercutting the hopes and dreams and years of hard work by the whole U.S. Equestrian Team. “Give me the damned reins,” she snarled.
“I can lead Dev back to the stable,” he said reasonably.
“Not yet. First he has to go over the jump.”
“What happened wasn’t Dev’s fault.”
“I know. But if he doesn’t go over that jump now, there could be merry hell to pay later.”
“She’s right, you know,” Captain Jon said, looking shrewdly from Cord to Raine. “It’s a matter of the horse’s confidence.”
“What about the rider’s neck.” Cord’s voice was uninflected, professional, and very cold.
“Event riders rather routinely finish the course with concussions, broken teeth, and bashed ribs,” the captain said. “Comes with the territory.”
“Shit.”
Without warning Cord bent, turned, straightened, and all but threw Raine up into the saddle. Then he let go of the reins and stepped out of the way. His pale eyes never left her face as she guided Dev back around the ring. He saw her fight dizziness, conquer it, and line up Dev for the jump.
Remember Summer Page 15
