The thought of the cross-country made ice condense in Cord’s veins.
But there was nothing he could do about that. Nothing he would do. Raine had made her choice long ago. He respected that, as he respected her. In a few hours he would drive her down to Rancho Santa Fe, where he had first seen her walking alone amid tawny hills and towering eucalyptus trees. There—away from the heat and smog that Prince Philip had rightly decreed weren’t suitable for the cross-country part of the Olympic three-day event—were the obstacles designed to test the courage of horse and rider.
And there Barracuda waited.
Chapter 18
Rancho Santa Fe’s dry winds combed restlessly through the tawny grass and silver-green eucalyptus leaves. The cloudless sky was blue-white, radiant with heat and light. Despite the beautiful day, Raine barely noticed her surroundings as she sat on a hilltop, writing quickly in a steno notebook. Its pages contained the condensed wisdom of Captain Jon, herself, and her teammates on the subject of the endurance course of the three day event.
The course was divided into four segments: (A) roads and trails; (B) steeplechase; (C) roads and trails; (D) cross-country. Together, A and C equaled about fifteen miles. Those fifteen miles must be covered at the average speed of a canter. The rider could choose a combination of walk, canter, and gallop. Or the rider might simply try to canter the whole fifteen miles.
The judges didn’t care. What mattered was that the horse took the course and obstacles in the assigned order without using up more than the allotted time for any segment. Pacing was crucial in order to get good marks. No points were given for going faster than the required times on the roads-and-trails segments, but points were deducted for taking too long.
A steady canter would be the ideal pace, easy on both horse and rider. The course was cleverly laid out so that it rarely allowed an easy canter.
The rider’s job was to balance the terrain’s demands, the time requirements, and the horse’s own reserves of strength. If the rider was too careful of his horse, the pace would be too slow and time faults would be deducted from the score. Too fast a run would take too much out of the horse, making the final cross-country segment of the course impossible rather than merely very difficult.
Any errors at all on roads and trails segments would reduce the team’s chance for an Olympic medal. There simply was no excuse for not pacing the horse properly or taking any of the course out of its assigned order.
As Raine flipped through her pages of notes, she glanced occasionally at the map each contestant had been given when the game officials walked the riders over the course. She figured that part B, the steeplechase, would require the horse to move at a fast gallop for about two and a half miles, with jumps placed on the average of every thousand feet.
These were solidly fixed jumps, not show-ring jumps that fell over if the horse misjudged. In the steeplechase, if you hit a fence, you went down, not the fence. Unlike the roads and trails segments, if you went faster than required over the steeplechase course, you could make up points. If you went too slow, you lost points. If you took twice the required time to complete the steeplechase, you were disqualified. Period.
There was no way to spare your horse on the steeplechase and still stay in the event. Refusals or falls at the jumps counted heavily against a competitor. In order to have a chance at the gold, horse and rider had to put in a perfect round. The steeplechase was a test of nerve and speed and judgment.
But it was part D, the cross-country, that was designed to separate the merely fit and skilled horse-and-rider teams from the superbly fit and consummately skilled. A fall within the penalty area around each obstacle—and falls were common—cost sixty points. A team might survive one such fall by one rider and still place in the medals. A fall by two different riders would likely end a team’s hope of finishing in the medals.
There were many opportunities to fall. The cross-country was five miles of trails that went up and down hills and over obstacles designed to force a horse to trust its rider’s judgment. No trust, no jump. The first refusal of an obstacle cost twenty penalty points. The second refusal of the same obstacle cost forty. The third disqualified you.
The obstacles averaged one every eight hundred feet. Thirty obstacles. Five miles.
Although none of the obstacles required more than a six-and-a-half-foot drop from the takeoff point, some of the obstacles were diabolically placed in the middle of ponds or just beneath the crest of a hill, on the downhill side. On those jumps, the horse must literally jump blind on a signal from its rider, who knew the course. Other obstacles came at the end of a long uphill run, testing the will of the horse to continue.
The cross-country course was exactly what it had been designed to be—five brutal miles of run, scramble, and jump. It came on the heels of nearly eighteen miles of hard work for both horse and rider, including the breakneck steeplechase. Except for a fifteen-minute break just before the cross-country segment—when a veterinarian examined the horse to see that it was fit enough to finish the course—horse and rider were tested relentlessly.
As Captain Jon had put it, the endurance event was a “right bastard.”
“You aren’t supposed to be out here alone.”
Cord’s voice came from behind Raine, startling her. She looked up from her notes and realized that everyone else had scattered over various parts of the course, measuring yet again what would be required of horse and rider.
She glanced back at Cord. He was sitting on his heels and looking over her shoulder at her notebook. His eyes were shards of silver and blue, so beautiful that her breath caught.
“I’m not alone,” she said huskily. “You’re here.”
Smiling, she brushed her lips over his. His hand rested against her cheek, savoring the smoothness and heat of her skin. She was so warm, so soft, so alive.
And Barracuda’s world was so damned cold.
Reluctantly Cord released Raine and stood up, pulling her with him. She wondered what had put the grim lines back around his mouth, but she didn’t ask. She glanced at her watch. Barely an hour had passed since the beeper had called him away.
“That didn’t take long,” she said.
One of his hands slid into her hair. He pulled her close and kissed her hungrily, deeply, as though it had been months rather an hour since he left her side.
“Promise you won’t go anywhere alone. Anywhere.” His voice was rough, almost harsh.
She glanced up at his ice-blue eyes and felt the tension in his muscular shoulders. “Is it Dad?” she asked tautly.
Cord looked at her. He could have told her that the guard around her father had been tripled. So had her own guard. The rest of her family had flown back to the East Coast; they would watch her ride on television.
Barracuda had eluded Bonner and his men.
But telling Raine wouldn’t make her any safer, and it could distract her at a time when she needed every bit of her focus to get Dev over the man-eating obstacles on the endurance course.
“Promise me,” he said, his voice gritty and intense.
“I have to walk parts of the course again.”
He laced his right hand though hers. “Let’s go.”
“Cord . . .” She hesitated, knowing that he wasn’t going to like what she had to say. “If your beeper goes off again and you have to leave, I still have to walk the course. I can’t take Dev over obstacles that I haven’t had a chance to study.”
His face settled into harsh lines. “We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it.”
She wanted to ask what had happened in the past hour to make him so wary, so hard, so savagely angry. But she didn’t say anything. There was no point. He wouldn’t tell her any more than he already had.
He most definitely did not want her to be alone.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Steeplechase. I want to look at the water jump again, as well as the bigger fences.”
They walked quickly, saying little as
she studied the steeplechase part of the course. From time to time she wrote in the notebook, tested the quality of the dirt, noted the angle of the sun at the obstacles, and mentally paced Dev through the course.
Though Cord knew that his men were all over the course like a rash, watching through binoculars, he didn’t let down his guard. Silently he concentrated on everything but the jumps. It was easier not to look at them. He was a rider raised in rough country on rougher horses, but the steeplechase was enough to make him sweat.
He wished to hell that Raine had taken up ballet or needlepoint or pure dressage—anything but the three-day event.
The water jump involved a stout fence followed by a small artificial pond. The whole jump was thirteen feet wide. It would take a powerful, well-balanced leap to clear everything. The other obstacles were no easier. There were mounds of logs nailed together, solid as a house. There were brush and water jumps. Jumps into shadow and then into sunlight and leap up again half-blind. Twist and turn and jump repeatedly, two and a half miles at a hard gallop.
Just as dressage had its roots in war, as a way to instill the obedience and agility required by an officer of his horse in battle, the endurance and steeplechase part of the three-day event were meant to reproduce the kind of obstacles a mounted messenger might face while racing overland carrying battle orders.
All they left out was the gunfire, Cord thought grimly.
His job was to see that it stayed that way.
Stretching fingers cramped from writing, Raine closed the notebook. “On to the cross-country.”
“All five miles of it?”
“I’ll walk fast.”
“I’ll starve.”
She reached back and patted her rucksack.“Food.”
“Mind if I rummage?”
“Didn’t we meet this way, with you so eager to rummage in my rucksack that you knocked me off my feet?”
His lips relaxed into a smile. Slowly, caressingly, the pad of his thumb moved over her high, slanting cheekbone.
“If I knew then what I know now,” he said huskily, “I’d have taken off your clothes and made love to you right there. Maybe I should do that now, undress you and pull you down into the grass, love you until you shiver and burn and cry out my name.”
Her breath caught at the desire in his eyes. She swayed toward him and he kissed her until she shivered and burned against him. The sound of voices floated up the riverbed, reminding him that they weren’t alone. Not really.
He groaned and tore his mouth away from hers. “Too damn many people.”
She laughed shakily. “A while ago you were complaining about it being too lonely out here.”
“Then I was thinking like a bodyguard. Now . . .” Pale, burning blue eyes looked at her lips, reddened from the force of his kiss. “Now I’m thinking like a lover. I want you.”
“Don’t tempt me.” Sensual hunger raced through her. “I happen to know of a perfect little hideaway. It’s too heavily wired for my taste, and the background music leaves a lot to be desired, but the locks are the best that money and ingenuity can provide.”
“Background music?”
“The scanner.”
Laughing, he folded her against his body, cradling her, rocking her, comforting himself. “After this morning, I didn’t think anything could make me laugh. You’re so good for me, sweet rider.”
He brushed his open mouth over her neck, tasted her heat, touched the beat of her life with the tip of his tongue. She arched her neck to give him more freedom. He gave her a slow, tender bite and forced himself to release her.
“I like you in one piece,” he said, “so let’s see the rest of what this ‘right bastard’ course has in store.”
“You’ve been talking to Captain Jon.”
Cord shrugged. He had walked the course before the riders were ever allowed on it, but he hadn’t been looking at the obstacles themselves. Barracuda’s style was hit, run, and brag. If he had hidden inside the course itself, he could have hit whatever he wanted, but he wouldn’t have been able to run afterward.
Dead men don’t brag, either.
If Barracuda got past the redoubled security, he would be heading for one of the many positions Cord had already noted—hilltops where a sniper would have a good view of the crowd. And the contestants.
“Even after seeing the specs for myself,” he said, “I couldn’t believe the cross-country segment was as bad as Captain Jon made it sound. He’s done professional events all his life, and he says this is the toughest course he’s ever seen.”
Raine’s chin came up. The tone of Cord’s voice told her that he wanted her out of the competition. “The course is what it’s supposed to be. A test.”
He said nothing, but his mouth was a thin, hard line as he rummaged in the rucksack she was wearing. After a few moments he asked, “Ham-and-Swiss or Italian?”
“Italian.”
Eating as they walked, Raine and Cord cut across the course to the last segment, the cross-country. Between bites of Italian sandwich, she answered his questions. All of his queries had one thing in common: a blunt concern for her safety.
The more obstacles he saw up close, the more he worried. Taken by themselves, many of the obstacles were hair-raising, even for a man brought up racing mustangs through broken country. But these obstacles weren’t taken alone by a fresh horse. They were taken at the end of nearly eighteen miles of running and jumping.
Taken that way, the obstacles were appalling. They were conceived in hell and dedicated to the principle that any horse-and-rider unit could be broken into its component parts.
And left that way.
There was one obstacle called the Coffin. It had a sharp downhill approach, a pair of rails planted on each side of an eight-foot-wide stream, and an uphill landing. If horse or rider misjudged at any point, a vicious fall was inevitable.
Then there were the Steps, a gigantic staircase with each step just wide enough for a horse to land on and not one bit more. There was no space for a stride before the next step loomed up ahead. Without perfect timing, willingness and coordination, the horse could break a leg and the rider a neck.
The water jumps weren’t any easier. Water was softer than logs, but mud made for nasty footing. One of the jumps was styled after the type of obstacle any nineteenth-century military rider might have encountered—a stream sunk between banks that were almost four feet high. The stream was too wide to jump across from bank to bank. The horse was forced to jump down into water and then back up and out, jumping onto the far bank without knowing what kind of footing was there.
Another obstacle involved jumping blindly into water. There was a wall of logs that dropped into water on the far side. The horse had to take two strides in knee-high water and then leap over a chest-high fence in the middle of the pond. Jumping the fence required a wet, uncertain takeoff and a worse landing.
The more Cord saw of the course, the less he liked it. He measured another nasty test, which was a rough uphill run separating two obstacles. There was a jump at the base of the hill, a jump onto the crest, and another rugged jump hidden just below the crest on the far side.
“What if you fall between obstacles?” he asked.
Raine swallowed a final bite of her sandwich, savoring the crunchy mild pepper. “No penalty points. There are officials at each obstacle to make sure you take the obstacle in the right direction and land right side up. If you fall within the penalty area, you loose sixty points.”
“Not to mention teeth, among other things,” he muttered. The wood rails were solid and as thick as his arm.
She smiled, showing two unbroken rows of white teeth. “So far, so good. I still have the ones I was born with.”
“Broken bones?”
She shrugged. “Sure. It comes with—”
“—the territory,” he cut in, his voice hard.
“Yes. Like the scar across your left hip that you won’t tell me about. And the other one on your right side. And
the third one buried beneath your hair at the back of your head.”
His right hand clenched in his pocket around the solid-gold coin. She was right. He of all people should know just how much abuse the human body could take and still survive. Yet a sense of disaster had been riding him since he had talked to Bonner that morning.
Cord had felt like this five times before in his life; three times people had died. Silently he cursed the Scots grandmother who had passed on her fey premonitions to him but had not passed on the means to prevent the disasters. He could only sense them through veils of coldness and unease.
He would give anything he had, everything he had ever hoped for, if only Raine wouldn’t ride tomorrow.
“Even if it wasn’t my job,” he said quietly, “I’d still want to protect you. You’re so beautiful, so alive, like a fire burning in a winter world.”
Tears magnified her eyes. She didn’t know what to say. She put her hand on his arm, and was shocked by the tension vibrating beneath his control.
Cord closed his eyes for an instant. Then he chose his words as though his life depended on them. He had never wanted anything so much—or been so helpless to get it.
“I know what it is to live out on the edge,” he said finally, “to test yourself and find out just what you’re made of, to test and test again until you can live freely, sure of your own abilities.”
She stared at him, seeing herself reflected in his eyes, his words.
“But there comes a time,” he said slowly, “when the old tests don’t teach you anything new. Do you understand what I’m saying?” His eyes changed, focusing on her, silently asking what he wouldn’t say aloud.
She touched his cheek. “I have to ride tomorrow.”
He didn’t move, yet it was as though he had. He held himself like a man expecting a blow.
“If it was only me, I might hesitate,” she said. “For you, Cord. Only for you. But it isn’t just you or just me.”
He closed his eyes, accepting what he couldn’t change. Very gently he kissed the center of her palm. “I know. God help us both, I know.”
Remember Summer Page 25
