Summer Games (4 page)

“Then get it.”

“No. You get it. And take your time. We’ll both feel safer if you’re one hundred percent sure.”

“Nothing is one hundred percent sure but death.”

His long arm reached past her. He started with her shoes, flexing the soles as he gave them to her. Finally he lifted the rucksack onto his lap and opened it.

While Raine put on her shoes, he rummaged through the contents of the blue bag, looking for her comb. He didn’t come across anything suspicious. Certainly nothing dangerous. What she carried was as innocent as she was. Or seemed to be.

That damned three percent.

Lean fingers brushed against the sketch pad he had seen her using. His training demanded that he examine what she had written or drawn on the sheets, but still he hesitated. He didn’t want to invade her privacy any more than he already had.

His own reaction surprised him. More accurately, it stunned him. In the past he had never been particularly fastidious when it came to searching, and that included body cavity searches. He did whatever it took to get the job done.

When Cord turned back to Raine, he had her comb in his right hand. In his left he had the small pad of paper. He held out the comb to her. He noted—as he noted all details, however small—that the comb was worn, had no missing teeth, and was clean but for some lint from the rucksack.

“May I?” he asked, holding up the sketch pad.

“Of course.”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. But thank you for allowing me to snoop.”

“Like I said,” she retorted, “we’ll both feel better.”

She took the comb from his hand and began to unsnarl her shoulder-length hair. She combed carefully, favoring her right arm, which had taken the full force of her fall. She ignored the aching of her upper arm. When necessary, she had ridden over jumps with cracked ribs, a mild concussion, and a stress fracture in her foot. A few bruises were nothing.

With fast, efficient movements Cord finished searching the knapsack. Then he gave his attention to the sketch pad. He flipped through it quickly, seeing everything with brief, encompassing looks. What he saw impressed him. Blue’s daughter couldn’t draw worth a damn, but she had a fine appreciation of the impact of geography on man and animals.

Thoughtfully Cord closed the pad and looked at her. Her hair had just enough natural curl to give it thickness, body, and a mind of its own. The curl showed as a stubborn tendency to turn up at the ends no matter how hard she tried to make everything lie straight. The slanting light brought out gold and red highlights, giving her hair a sun-shot appearance that made the underlying brown shimmer with life and warmth.

Raine wasn’t nearly as fascinated by her hair as Cord was. She simply combed it, wincing occasionally over knots or when her bruised arm protested being used. There was more impatience than pain in her grimaces. The slippery flyaway mass of her hair crackled with the static electricity of dry, windy air.

“Ruddy hell,” she muttered, making another futile pass with the comb.

Her irritation peaked when she finally managed to get one hand around all of her hair at once, then couldn’t find the clip to hold everything in place. It must have gone flying when she was knocked to the ground with such stunning force. She glanced around, but couldn’t see the clip anywhere.

Maybe Cord had it.

When she turned to him, he was watching her, the rucksack in his lap and the sketch pad forgotten in his hands. He had a bemused, fully male smile on his face. She had never seen a man look at her quite like that. The realization that he enjoyed watching her comb her hair made her skin hot.

It wasn’t embarrassment. Like his smile, the heat was something new to her.

“Well?” Raine asked, arching her left eyebrow. “Did you find the secrets of World War Three in my rucksack?”

“Water bottle, pencils, rawhide thongs, sketch pad, tape recorder, film, an apple, a chocolate bar, an elastic bandage, and a buckle.”

“A buckle? Show me.”

Cord reached into the knapsack and brought out a buckle no bigger than his thumbnail. Raine let go of her hair and leaned forward to see better. Wind sent strands of her hair over his fingers. It took an effort of will not to wind the silky stuff around his hand and pull her into his lap, into his arms. He wanted her with a force that shook him.

Yet nothing of his raw hunger showed. He made certain of it. If she had seen it, she would have scrambled up and run like hell.

“So that’s where it went,” she muttered. “I was polishing Dev’s tack when Captain Jon called me. I didn’t have time to put the buckle where it belonged and I didn’t want to lose it, so I put it in a safe place.”

“How long ago was that?” Cord asked. Laughter stirred just beneath the surface of his deep voice.

“Five weeks,” she admitted. “I’m forever putting things in safe places and then forgetting where I put them. Captain Jon swears I need a keeper.”

“Don’t you have one?” Though Cord’s voice was casual, his eyes were burning, intent. Blue hadn’t mentioned a lover, but fathers weren’t usually the first to know about such things, even fathers like Chandler-Smith.

“No. And if I did,” Raine added in a crisp voice, “I’d lose him, too.”

“That would depend on the man,” Cord pointed out smoothly, smiling. But there was no laughter in his voice. Instead, there was a mixture of emotions that were too complex to separate or name.

Her eyes widened as she looked at the man who was so close to her, watching her with unnerving intensity. Self-consciously she lifted her right arm to push back the hair that kept wanting to fall across her shoulder—and his hand. The movement made her wince almost invisibly.

But he saw it. His pale eyes saw everything. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s nothing,” she said, meaning exactly that.

“Let me see.”

“It’s probably only a friction bruise.”

He waited, his hand out. He radiated the kind of command that owed nothing to superior strength.

Grumbling, she pushed the faded blue sleeve of her shirt as far above her elbow as she could. “See?”

He saw that a red welt marked her fine-grained skin. The welt began a few inches above her elbow and disappeared beneath the bunched blue cloth. The shoulder seam was torn. It sagged downward, revealing the top of the welt. Tiny beads of blood glistened like red mist.

He hooked a finger in the torn seam and yanked quickly, giving her no time to protest. The cloth gave way as though made of smoke. When he saw the strip of scraped flesh, his lips flattened. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket, wet the white square with water from the bottle in the rucksack, and held the cloth gently against her abraded skin.

“Hurt?” he asked, watching her eyes.

She started to speak, swallowed, and shook her head, caught by the guilt she sensed in him.

“It’s all right.” Lightly she touched his sleeve. The tension and hard muscle beneath the sand-colored cloth was almost shocking. “Cord? I do much worse to myself twice a week.”

“But you didn’t do this to yourself. I did.”

There was nothing she could say to that, so she watched silently while he worked on her arm. The contrast between the masculine power of his shoulders and the exquisite tenderness of his fingers as he cleaned the abrasion sent unfamiliar sensations shivering through her. She looked at his black hair and icy blue eyes, his angular face, and the sensual curve of his mouth, and she wondered how this man could so thoroughly frighten and then so completely reassure her in the space of a few minutes.

Cord glanced up and saw Raine watching him. He let his fingers slide slowly from her inner elbow to the pulse beating beneath the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.

“Forgive me?” he asked.

“Of course,” she whispered, knowing it was true, but not knowing why.

“I don’t have any antiseptic.” He looked at the red abrasion. “I suppose I could use the oldest remedy.”

“What’s that?”

“Kiss it and make it well.” His voice was as deep as the shadows pooling beneath the fragrant trees.

Her lips parted slightly with surprise and an invitation that she wasn’t even aware of.

“But,” he continued, his voice dark and smooth, flowing over her, sinking into her, “when I kiss you, it won’t be like a parent kissing a child. It will be very healing, though. For both of us.”

Raine felt her pulse leap beneath Cord’s fingertips and knew that he felt it, too. She glanced away quickly, confused by her response to him. She wasn’t the type to lose control of herself merely because a good-looking man had touched her wrist and talked about kissing her.

Then she realized that it wasn’t his looks that made her pulse leap. It was his unexpected gentleness that unnerved her, the danger and the strength and the yearning in him, a hunger that called to depths in her that she hadn’t known existed.

Until now.

He lifted the wet cloth, examined her arm again, and said matter-of-factly, “We’ll clean it better tonight. Are you through here?”

She was off-balance, unable to answer, caught between his assumption that he would be with her tonight and his quick question. Wryly she realized that it would be a useful technique for controlling a conversation. Or an interrogation. First you throw in an assumption that might or might not be correct and then you follow it immediately with a totally unrelated question. The person answering the question is caught between protesting the assumption and fielding the question.

So rather than challenge the assumption, Raine answered the question, and then realized she had just accepted that Cord would be with her that night. Just as she had accepted his statement that he would kiss her, and by accepting it, had all but invited him to do just that.

“That’s pretty slick,” she said, feeling outmaneuvered but not particularly resentful.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling. “You’re pretty quick yourself.”

Her left eyebrow lifted in silent skepticism. “Next to you, I’m real slow. And I’m not through here. There’s at least one more hilltop I have to cover.”

“That way?” he asked, gesturing toward the empty hills and twisting ravine.

“Not quite. It’s a case of look but don’t touch, at least until the day before the event. So,” she said, pointing toward a hilltop that was not inside the Olympic course markers, “I’ll have to settle for that one.”

“Will you finish before dark?”

“Yes.”

“Pity,” he said, his eyes watching her instead of the land. “I’ll bet this place is dynamite by moonlight.”

Her expression changed as she remembered the brutal uses terrorists had for dynamite.

“Sorry. Bad choice of words,” he said. “Let’s go.”

As he stood, he took her left hand and pulled her easily upright. They spotted her missing hair clip at the same instant. With startling swiftness, he scooped it up before she could do more than reach toward the barrette.

“I’ll take care of it,” he said, stepping behind her.

He caught her hair in his right hand and clipped the chestnut mass in place with his left. When he was finished, he gently, slowly stroked her gold-shot hair.

Raine froze beneath the caress as every female nerve ending she had came to full alert. She felt the faint humid warmth of Cord’s breath on her neck, and a delicate touch that could have been his lips.

“Your hair smells like sunlight,” he said, his voice husky. Then, as though he had said nothing at all, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”

She turned and stared at him, off-balance once more. He had outmaneuvered her again, only this time the assumption was buried in the question. We. Where do we go from here? Talk about an open-ended, fully loaded question . . .

She was too smart to touch it. The problem was, she wanted to touch Cord. She didn’t know why, but she knew how much.

Too much.

Gathering what was left of her concentration, Raine bent over to pick up her rucksack. Cord beat her to it, swinging the sack up easily over one shoulder. He picked her camera and binoculars off the ground and put the straps around her neck. The pad and pencil appeared in his hand again.

“You handle the camera,” he said. “I’ll take care of the sketches.”

“That bad, huh?” she asked, amused. She knew that her sketches were awkward and all but unreadable to anyone but herself. Captain Jon told her frequently.

“Let’s just say that you don’t threaten Da Vinci.”

“Do you?”

“You can tell me tonight, when you look at my, um, sketches after dinner.”

“Mr. Elliot,” she began, determination plain in the lines of her face and her tone of voice.

“Aren’t you hungry after all your walking around?” he asked, before she could say any more.

“Of course, but—”

“Good,” he cut in smoothly. “You drive me to Santa Anita and I’ll buy you dinner. Fair trade, don’t you think?”

“But—”

“All right, two dinners,” he said quickly, smiling down at her. “You drive a hard bargain, lady. And my name is Cord, not Mr. Elliot.”

Raine’s teeth clicked together in frustration. She hadn’t felt so overmatched since the time years before when she took on both her older sisters at once. It had been a learning experience.

“Lead me to your hilltop,” Cord said. Subdued laughter made his voice even deeper than it usually was. Then the laughter slid away, leaving only hunger, an intensity burning in him as he watched her. “If you want me to leave, I will. But I’d much rather stay. I’ll be good. I promise you.”

Slanting light fell across his eyes, making the countless splinters of blue within the ice-pale irises glitter like a fine diamond. Against the angular male planes of his face, his eyes seemed impossibly vivid, fringed in lashes as dense and dark as midnight.

With an effort Raine forced herself to look away from him. She had come out here to learn about the land, not a man. Even one as compelling as Cord Elliot.

Gradually she saw the countryside rather than the man. The hills were empty, the houses few and distant. Twilight was slowly welling up from nameless ravines, shadow pools spreading and joining, forerunners of the darkness to come.

Suddenly she was glad Cord was with her. Intentionally or not, he had yanked her out of her cozy, civilized world of equestrian competition. It had been a harsh reminder that there was another, much larger and colder world out there, a barbarian world where violence rather than safety was the rule.