Summer Games (18 page)

When she gave the command for walking again, Dev fought it. She locked her wrists and knees and bore down. When the stallion accepted the walk, she asked for him to stop and stand. Motionless. He did, finally, chewing on the bit in frustration.

From the corner of her eye Raine saw Cord walk up to the fence. Adrenaline surged through her, a helpless response to her own emotions.

Sensing the sudden change in his rider, Dev danced in place.

Cursing silently, she brought the stallion back under full control with pressure from her hands and legs.

Cord’s deep voice carried easily above the muffled hoofbeats of horses working in the ring.

“There’s a call for you.”

“Later,” she said curtly.

“It’s your father.”

“Dad?” Raine asked Cord in disbelief. “He called me?”

“He’s waiting on the phone right now.”

She stared, still not quite believing. Her father hadn’t called her in . . . she couldn’t remember the last time.

Dev sensed his rider’s divided attention. He went sideways in a single catlike leap. Swearing as much at herself as at him, she fought a brief, sharp skirmish over control of the bit. She won.

“He’s full of vinegar,” Cord said, half smiling, admiration clear in his eyes as he watched the blood-bay stallion dance. Then his voice shifted, velvet and moonlight and a silver river flowing. “Aren’t much for dressage, are you? I don’t blame you, boy. Don’t blame you one bit. Dressage is for people who like fences and rules.”

Firmly Raine held Dev where he was—ten feet away from the fence. He resisted, dancing in place, wanting to get closer to the fascinating voice. Smoothly, relentlessly, she guided him toward the exit to the ring.

Cord followed along the outside of the fence, talking to the stallion every step of the way. Ears pricked forward until they almost touched at the tips, Dev minced closer to the shaman’s voice.

“Bet you’re one hell of a ride,” Cord murmured. “Go the distance without whimpering, take a mouthful of water, and turn around and do it all again. Will your mistress ever let you sire blood-bay colts, or is she going to keep you on a tight rein all your life?”

As soon as Dev came through the gate, Cord grasped the reins just below the bit. The stallion stood motionless, his velvet nostrils flaring as he drank the man’s scent and watched him with liquid brown eyes.

“Ask for Operator eleven,” Cord murmured. “I’ll take care of the Prince of Darkness for you.”

If it had been any other man, she would have refused. But if it had been any other man, Dev wouldn’t have been standing around with a bemused look on his handsome face.

“You’re as bad as I am,” she muttered to Dev. “Idiot.”

“What?” Cord asked.

“Nothing.”

She slid off the huge horse and landed lightly on the ground beside Cord.

“If you’ve bitten off more horse than you can chew,” she said irritably, “you have only yourself to blame.”

He ignored her. Talking soothingly the whole way, he led Dev toward the stables.

For a few seconds she stared at her well-behaved stallion. Then she shook off the spell of Cord’s voice and sprinted for the nearest phone, wondering what had gone wrong with her family. She grabbed the phone and asked for Operator eleven. By the time she was connected with her father, she had imagined every possible calamity that could have happened to her family.

“Daddy,” she said urgently as soon as she heard his voice, thinned by distance and static but still unmistakably Justin Chandler-Smith. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to be the one to tell you that I’ll be out with your mother and your sibs for the Olympics.”

“You will?” Raine asked doubtfully, years of hope and disappointment mingling in her voice. “You’ll try to be here?”

“I will be there, Baby Raine.”

She laughed almost sadly and shook her head. “I’m not a baby anymore.”

“You never were,” he said ruefully. “Not really. Comes of being the fifth child, I suppose. You were going to be as old as your brothers and sisters or know the reason why.”

“Speaking of siblings, are you sure everything is all right?”

“Positive. All six of us will be there.”

“Impossible,” she said dryly. “The six of you haven’t been in the same place at once since William was old enough to drive.”

“The six of us never had a seventh competing in the Olympics. I’m not going to miss this one, Raine. I mean it.”

She swallowed, trying to keep emotion from closing her throat. Before now, her father always had hedged his promises with the phrase if I can.

“You don’t have to,” she said quietly, meaning it. “If not this time, there’s always another.”

“Not for you, baby. I’ve got a cast-iron hunch that you’re through with wanderlust and adrenaline. If I don’t see you ride in a world-class competition this time, there won’t be another chance.”

Her hand tightened on the phone as her father’s calm words swept through her, telling her what she was still discovering about herself. She was tired of living on the road, tired of the relentless demands of training and competition and pressure, the excitement that was a little bit less each time, diminishing so slowly that its loss could only be measured over the years.

She still looked forward to the Olympics, still wanted very badly to compete and win. But her father was right. This would be the last time she hungered for world-class competition.

“How did you know?” she whispered. “I just found out myself.”

“You’re a lot like me. Except you’re smarter. A whole lot smarter. It took me a long time to figure out what I was missing. Well, I’m not going to miss it anymore. Look for me, Baby Raine. I love you.”

She was too surprised to answer. By the time she whispered, “I love you, too,” her father had already hung up.

She replaced the receiver and stood staring across the yard, seeing nothing at all.

“Bad news?” Cord asked.

She blinked and turned slowly toward the man who was holding Dev’s reins as easily as she would have. And Dev was just as calm. It was more than the shaman’s voice. It was the man himself.

“Raine?” he asked, his voice very gentle. “Is everything all right?”

“Daddy says he’s coming to the games.” Her voice was clear and almost childlike. “Always before he said he would try. This time he promised. He’s never promised before.”

Cord’s mouth flattened into a grim line. “Don’t tell anyone else. If anyone asks you about it, lie. And then tell me who was asking you questions about your father.”

The change in Cord from gentle to harsh was like a slap. She flinched and stepped back, off-balance again.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why?” His voice rose in disbelief. Then it went as cold as the ice color of his eyes. “Grow up, Baby Raine. There are people in this world who would murder your father if they could find him. But they can’t. That’s the reason his schedule is always unpredictable. It’s called survival. If you were an assassin and you knew your target had a daughter competing in the Summer Games, what would you do?”

She closed her eyes on a wave of sickening fear. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head quickly, not wanting to believe.

“Yes,” he snarled. “Why in hell do you suppose Blue has missed all your important competitions? Why in hell do you suppose he never came to his children’s graduations? Why in hell do you think he missed every Broadway opening night your sister ever had? Why in hell—”

“I didn’t know,” Raine broke in, her voice tight as she tried to stop the relentless words.

“You didn’t want to know.”

Her hands clenched. “Daddy never told me.”

“He didn’t want you to know. If he knew I was telling you now, he’d have my butt for punting practice.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Maybe I don’t believe a father should have to be a sitting duck for an assassin just to convince his daughter that he loves her.”

“I never asked for that!” Her voice shook. “I just wanted to feel like part of the family instead of a fifth wheel. I wanted to feel like I belonged! Is that so much to ask?”

The anger went out of Cord as he saw the trembling of her pale lips, the tears that she refused to shed, the corded lines of her throat as she fought to control her voice. He wanted to gather her into his arms, to stroke and soothe her until her eyes weren’t haunted and her face wasn’t pale.

He might as well wish for the moon while he was at it.

“No,” he said, “it’s not so much to ask. Just everything. Just the whole world in your palm, spinning like a bright blue ball.”

“But—”

“Some of us aren’t meant to belong,” he said simply, relentlessly. “Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.”

“Is that what you did?”

“Yes. Once.” He watched her with eyes that were suddenly measuring. “And that’s just what I’m going to do again.”

“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.