Summer Games (12 page)

Now she would never go back.

“That was . . . incredible,” she murmured, turning toward Cord. “How did you know I needed that? I didn’t even know it myself.”

His fingers tightened over hers. “I knew I needed it. I thought you might. It’s easy to get so tangled in one small reality that you can’t see forest, trees, or even the hand in front of your face.”

“It’s called focus.”

“That kind of concentration is fine. Usually it’s the only way to get a job done. But sometimes too much focus ties you in tiny little knots.”

“Competition madness,” she agreed. “Nothing else seems real but the contest ahead. The world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it’s all you can do to take a deep breath. You have to find something to distract yourself or you suffocate.”

“We’re more alike than you think we are.”

“What do you mean?”

Cord stood and pulled Raine to her feet. “That’s the way it is in my job. Too much focus will kill you.”

“But losing your concentration is a good way to get hurt, too,” she said. “At least it is for me. Especially in the three-day event.”

“No argument there. A careless man—or woman—doesn’t last long in my business, either. So we walk the tightrope between too much and not enough, and the survivors err on the side of too much.” He put his hand on the small of her back as they walked out of the planetarium into the warm darkness. “I guess you could call it a kind of competition madness.”

She saw the thin gleam of Cord’s teeth, but his smile was more grim than amused. She knew that the stakes he played for were lives rather than medals or ribbons. For an instant she almost asked what, precisely, his job was, but growing up with a father like Chandler-Smith had taught her that asking that kind of question was useless. The answer would always be the same.

Silence.

“Can you walk in those sexy little sandals?” Cord asked.

Raine looked down at the thin straps and outrageously high heels on her feet. “Depends on what you mean by walk. Anything less than a civilized stroll on a sidewalk could be a problem.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

“How? Pave Griffith Park?”

“Nothing that extreme. I’ll just carry you.”

“Promises, promises,” she said under her breath. But she was smiling. Tonight she felt light enough to float away.

He guided her to a paved pathway that wound along the edge of the hills. While they walked, a fitful wind sent shivers of sound through the silence, distant voices and nearby trees whispering to themselves.

The path led to a secluded loop overlooking the valley below. Southern pines grew around the viewpoint. Their black trunks and airy branches made lacy patterns against the golden illumination of city below and silver stars above. Each city light was vivid, distinct, an echo of the vastly larger stars flung in diamond brightness across the sky.

For Raine the night and the man were magic. Everything was magnified—the soft scrape of leather soles on pavement, the rub of needles against branches, the fluid ripple of sprinklers on another hill, the whisper of silk caressing her legs. Warm air flowed over her skin, tugged gently at her hair. The air smelled of pine and summer flowers and freshly watered grass. The city lights below were stitched together with the ruby and silver threads of countless freeways.

Cord’s fingers moved caressingly over hers, sending streamers of invisible warmth through both of them. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman who enjoyed silence, who drank the scents of night, who wore silk and jeans with equal ease. He couldn’t remember ever enjoying a woman’s presence as much as he did Raine’s. Being with her was . . . peaceful.

It also aroused him to a point just short of violence.

She drew a deep breath, threaded her fingers more deeply through his, and let herself float on the limitless glittering night. Nothing else was real but this instant. Nothing else mattered but the man whose every touch said how glad he was to be with her.

Because of Cord, she was in a new world tonight, a world where she didn’t have to worry about each word, each gesture. She didn’t have to wonder what he would think or not think, do or not do in response to her. His presence expanded her personal space rather than limiting it.

And the heady freedom of his company brought each of her senses intensely alive. Everything around her was brighter, better, more vivid and complete than anything in her memory.

Silently thanking Cord for the gift, she raised his hand to her mouth and brushed her lips over his fingers. The gesture was so natural that she didn’t realize what she was doing until she had done it.

His thumb moved slowly over her lips, telling her how much he had enjoyed the spontaneous caress.

“Now I know how Dev feels after I wash and groom and polish him and then ride him dancing to the starting gate,” she said dreamily. “Everything is ahead, anything is possible.”

Cord’s thumb traced her cheekbone and the hollow beneath it before settling on the corner of her mouth. When he tilted her face, her lips parted and her arms moved to circle his waist, silently welcoming the coming embrace.

Even though his breathing thickened with the sudden, urgent demands of his body, he didn’t stop thinking. Swiftly, gently, he captured her hands and kissed each palm. Then he put her arms around his neck. He didn’t want her to bump into the gun holstered in the small of his back.

At the beginning of the evening, she had been deeply wary of him. He didn’t know why, but he knew fear was there. Sensing fear was his business. He had thought about it during the drive to the planetarium. By the time he pulled into the parking lot, he had decided that her fear had as much to do with her past as with his present job.

But he didn’t want to remind her of either just now. He wanted Raine the way she was at this instant, warm and supple, hungry and very female in his arms. When her fingers rubbed over his neck and scalp, he made a low sound of pleasure and arched beneath her touch like a great black-haired cat.

His uninhibited response swept through her like fire, taking her breath. She stood on tiptoe, but still she couldn’t reach his mouth to kiss him. Her fingers clenched in the rough silk of his hair. Her nails raked not quite gently over his scalp. She wanted him to lower his head and kiss her, and she wanted it now.

He laughed and caught her bottom lip between his teeth. His hard tongue teased her while he slowly devoured her soft flesh. A small sound of pleasure and desire rippled out of her. It made him forget that he was going to stop with a single, teasing kiss. His hands went from her face to her shoulders and down her spine to her hips. Then his arms tightened and he molded her to the hungry length of his body.

When he felt her shudder of response, he groaned softly and cupped the resilient warmth of her hips in his hands. She made a startled sound and tried to step back, only to find herself held by the teeth gently gripping her bottom lip. The instant she discovered that she was the prisoner of his sensual vise, he released her.

Off-balance, she clung to the hard support of his upper arms, staring into his ice-blue eyes. Only they weren’t icy now, but smoldering with passion, a silver blue hot enough to burn.

And the proof of his hunger was hard against her belly. When she would have withdrawn, he held her for an instant. Then he released her. Slowly.

“You tempt me,” he said in a low voice. “Unbearably.”

“I don’t mean—”

“I know,” he cut in. “God, I know.”

Slowly, almost helplessly, he bent his head and licked her lips with tiny catlike strokes.

The primitive caress made liquid fire run and gather deep inside her. Lost in a swirl of sensation, she said his name, a name he stole from her tongue as he claimed the warm territory of her mouth for his own.

In a heartbeat the kiss went from tender to ravenous. They fought to get closer to each other. His hands kneaded down her spine to her hips, touching each feminine curve, holding her against the blunt heat and hard ridge of his erection. His fingers caressed the deep crease between her buttocks, then slid lower, seeking the smooth curve of her inner thighs, rocking her against his rigid flesh.

This time she didn’t withdraw at the intimacy of feeling his erection pressed against her, stroking her, making her dizzy with unfamiliar needs. Her arms locked around his neck and she arched into him, rubbing against him in turn, wanting only to be closer and then closer still.

Hungry for more, he sank his fingers into her before he forced himself to slowly release the taut flesh of her hips. Restlessly his hands swept back up to her shoulders and then down her arms to her waist, devouring the feminine curves of her body. Fingers spread wide, heartbeat speeding, he traced the line of her ribs beneath the thin silk.

Though she expected it, the brush of his thumbs over her nipples made her gasp at the stark hunger that leaped inside her. He murmured against her lips, words without meaning except as another kind of caress, the dark velvet of his voice both soothing and inciting her.

Delicately, his teeth closed over her ear. He traced its shape with the hardened tip of his tongue, then thrust into her with slow, deep, thorough strokes that told her exactly what to expect if she opened herself to him, welcoming him into the sultry velvet center of her body.

He knew just how good it would be.

Eyes closed, letting the world fall away, his fingers probed beneath the chestnut coils of her hair until he felt the heat of her scalp. Then he held her close and hard while his tongue claimed her mouth, telling her all over again how thoroughly he would love her. He smoothed one hand over her throat, finding and savoring the wild race of her pulse. It made him want to shout with triumph. Never had a woman responded like this to him, as swift and hot as his own hunger.

And never had his hunger been this great. With hands as hot as his own breath, his own blood, he slid into the deep neckline of her dress, searching beneath silk until her naked breasts pushed against his palms.

Part of Raine knew it was too much, too fast; she should protest, but the only sound she made was a ragged moan of pleasure as Cord’s thumbs circled her nipples. Taut, full, aching with a hunger she had never known before, she surrendered herself to the endless sensuality of his touch.

He brushed aside the fold of silk covering one breast and bent down. Even before the coolness of the night air registered against her flushed skin, a searing pleasure shot through her. His teeth and tongue shaped her hungrily, licking and nipping until she was as hard as he was, as hot, as wild. Then he took her into his mouth and suckled her with a fierce restraint that made her cry out, defenseless against the reckless sexuality he could summon from her depths.

She had never suspected herself capable of such headlong passion. She had no way to fight it. She didn’t even want to. Eyes closed, trembling, she clung to him for balance and let her own unexpected hunger take over.

He shuddered when her hips moved against him with open invitation. He told himself he had to stop now, while he still could. He was at flash point with a woman he should never have touched, but here he was teetering on the brink of burying himself in her.

He had no right to seduce her into giving him a place at the center of her fire. He knew it, even if she didn’t. She was the queen and he was the soldier destined to guard the castle rather than warm himself at the fire.

That was what his common sense said, but it was a small voice crying in a storm of passion and hunger and something more, emotions more gentle and complex and vastly more consuming than lust. He wanted to protect and ravish her at the same time, to keep her from harm and burn her to her soul the way he was being burned, to die and be reborn in her arms and she in his.

Yet he had no right.

It wasn’t her wealth or her family that defeated him. It was her vulnerability. As a child she had been a casualty in the undeclared war that was her father’s life.

It would be no different with Cord.

He would wound her, and in wounding her, destroy himself. Loving her would tear him apart. Two irreconcilable needs, duty and love locked in a death spiral until love was dead and duty was ashes. He had seen it happen to too many of his friends, their wives burned out, haunted, cynical. He couldn’t do that to Raine, who trusted him more than she knew. She was too precious to risk breaking.

She was fire in a world of ice.

It took all of Cord’s fierce discipline to gently disengage himself from Raine’s clinging warmth. He held her against his chest as he had in the car, rocking slowly, soothing both of them in the only way he would allow. When he would have ended even that undemanding embrace, she made a sound of protest and edged closer to him again.

“It’s late,” he said.

But his arms tightened around her even as he spoke. He closed his eyes, savoring her warmth and fragrance. She stirred against him, her palms moving slowly over the silk of his shirt, caressing him.

“You have a curfew,” he said, when all he wanted to do was take her down to the ground and discover how much he had been missing before he found her.

“Captain Jon told me not to worry. He thinks I work too hard anyway.”

“Do you?”

Her shoulders lifted beneath his hands in a shrug. “I love my work. But . . .”

“But?” His fingers kneaded lightly, smoothing away the tension he felt returning to her neck and back.

“But right now,” she said, turning her face up to him, “I don’t want to go back to that world. Not yet. I’ve never felt quite like this.”

He looked down into her wide hazel eyes and asked the question he had no right to ask, the very question he couldn’t keep himself from asking. “How do you feel?”

“New. No past but tonight. No future farther away than the next instant when you’ll touch me, teaching me something about myself I never knew.”

Her honesty was more devastating and more arousing than an experienced lover’s knowing caress. She was an invitation he couldn’t refuse and couldn’t accept and couldn’t ignore.