Summer Games (31 page)

Dev never broke loose or refused a signal from his rider, but there were moments when he didn’t display the calm, submissive style that dressage judges favored. At those times, he required “aids” of a strength that were hardly invisible.

On the other hand, the stallion’s impressively powerful hindquarters and muscular, arched neck made him appear to be more collected beneath Raine’s hands than he often was. In addition, her slender, long-legged grace showed to particular advantage against Dev’s huge, coiled body. The obvious contrast in strength between rider and horse added to the impression that Dev was willing rather than mulish.

With a serene expression and a steel grip on the reins, Raine signaled the last lead change as she turned Dev back toward the judges. She halted the stallion and held him immobile beneath her, using the combined pressure of the bit and her legs. Then she saluted to the Olympic judges and ended the longest seven and a half minutes of her life.

Outwardly unruffled, she waited until her scores were flashed on the board. She looked only at the faults recorded by each judge: 33; 40; 23.

With no change of expression, she turned and rode out of the ring. Considering that the average three-day event horse compiled fifty faults per judge, Dev’s and her performance was better than adequate. Considering the French team so far, she could hardly crow about her appearance in the dressage ring.

The audience had no such problem. The spectators had loved Dev’s sheer beauty and muscularity. They cheered the big stallion as though he had put in a flawless round. Dev minced out of the ring, pulling eagerly at the bit. He had pleased the audience, if not the judges, and he knew it. Now Dev wanted nothing more than a good hard run.

“You’ll get it, you red devil,” Raine muttered. She turned Dev toward an open area set aside for exercising horses. “Not as much as you want, though. Just enough to clean out your pipes before we ship you to Rancho Santa Fe for the cross-country. There you’ll get all the run you want and then some.”

Shying, prancing, cakewalking, Dev did everything but crawl out of his skin to free himself from the restrictions of the bit and his rider’s gentle, implacable hands. Nervous lather formed on his shoulders and flanks by the time he danced to the area where he would be allowed to run.

Cord was waiting at the gate. He swung it open, allowing the eager stallion inside. “That was a world-class piece of riding,” he said simply. “Dev’s a hell of a lot of horse to keep the lid on.”

“He’s going to get his reward now,” Raine said rather grimly.

She settled deeper into the flat saddle as Dev leaped sideways, trying to unsettle her enough to get control of the bit. She let out the reins slightly.

Dev went from a standing start to a full gallop, fighting for control of the bit every inch of the way.

Cord watched with an expression on his face that was admiring and harsh at the same time. Raine rode with a joy and skill that almost made him forget how big Dev was, how fiery, and how powerful. But no matter how great her expertise on a horse, Cord couldn’t forgot how completely her life depended on the trust between herself and the volatile blood-bay stallion.

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.

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.”