Summer Games (7 page)

The supple strength and taut yearning of her body told Cord more than any words could have. He took what she gave to him, what she demanded that he take, drinking her taste and heat and passion until the world dropped away, leaving only Raine, a sweet fire burning in his arms.

Finally Cord forced himself to lift his mouth. If he didn’t stop now, immediately, he doubted he could stop at all. It was that simple.

And that shocking.

The hunger gripping him was new, totally unknown. It wasn’t simple lust. He had learned long ago to control his own sexuality. But now he felt as though a dam had given way deep inside his soul, releasing torrents of need that were as complex and unexpected as they were powerful, sweeping everything before them.

Eyes closed, he fought to control himself, but the afterimage of Raine’s hungry, parted lips burned behind his eyelids.

Do you know what a blazing, beautiful temptation you are, Raine Chandler-Smith? he asked silently, afraid to speak aloud and frighten her again.

When he trusted himself to look at her, he saw himself condensed in wide hazel eyes watching him, admiring him, needing him. Savage hunger turned inside him, emotion as hot and bright and untested as a sword newly brought from the forge.

“You’re coming back with me.” His voice was soft and very certain. The words weren’t a question or even an invitation, but a simple statement of fact.

Raine knew it would be useless to argue. Nor was there any reason to. For one thing, there wasn’t enough light left for photography. For another, it would be foolish to keep wandering alone over the unknown land with darkness coming down.

And, she admitted to herself, there was the simple, overwhelming truth that she wasn’t ready to leave Cord yet.

“Yes,” she said huskily.

He touched her mouth with his fingertips, then forced himself to turn away. He picked up the rucksack, laced his fingers through hers, and began walking back toward the country club, holding her close to his side. Even as he slowed to accommodate her smaller steps, she lengthened her strides to equal his longer ones. They exchanged a look of almost startled recognition, smiled, and continued walking, their steps evenly matched.

Lights from distant houses glowed in the sunset, making the sky overhead a deep, radiant indigo by comparison. Neither Cord nor Raine spoke. Each sensed that it was safer, if not smarter, to let the simple warmth of their interlaced fingers speak for them.

When they reached the clubhouse, there was a helicopter sitting at the far end of the parking lot, well away from the few parked cars. The chopper was small and sleek. It had neither military nor civilian markings. Its rotors turned lazily, waiting.

Before Raine could control her reaction, her footsteps slowed, then stopped completely. She had seen her father climb into similar helicopters and disappear for weeks at a time with neither warning nor parting words. Her fingers tightened for just an instant before she could force herself to release Cord’s hand. She had no right to hang onto him, no claim, no need. She was an adult, not a child.

He felt both the tension of her hand and the sudden release. She didn’t have to be told that the helicopter was waiting for him. After all, she was Blue’s daughter. She knew all about uncertainty and unexpected good-byes.

Knew it, and hated it, her resentment plain in first the tightness and then the quick, final retreat of her fingers.

Silently, deeply, Cord cursed the life he led, running up against its requirements like a mustang coming up against a fence for the first time in its wild life. Other women had found his job romantic, the secrets of his work tantalizing, the danger implicit in the gun he wore erotic.

But not Raine. She knew his work for what it was, a deadly enemy of intimacy.

With a hoarse sound he pulled her into his arms, holding her hard and close, ignoring the clash of binoculars and camera. When he felt the resistance of her closed lips, he simply tightened his arms, demanding what he must have, not really knowing or caring why.

For a long, agonizing moment, she clenched herself against him. In the next heartbeat she softened, unable to deny him what they both wanted. He spoke her name roughly, relief and hunger and apology in a single syllable.

Then he kissed her until she forgot everything but the taste and feel of him. Passion and restraint, strength and yearning, danger and safety, gentleness and ruthlessness, everything that he was and could be poured through the single kiss.

The reality of Cord swept through her like a storm, shaking her safe, predictable world, shattering her defenses and demanding that she make a place next to the civilized, womanly fire that he had guarded for so many years without ever knowing its warmth.

When he finally loosened his arms and stepped back, Raine could hardly stand. She closed her eyes but still she saw him, his thick black hair and icy, burning blue eyes, the lines of his face harsh with need and his mouth shockingly sensual as he looked at her, wanting her.

Needing her.

“Tomorrow night,” he said. “Seven o’clock. Dinner.”

“No,” she answered, her eyes still closed. “You don’t know where you’ll be tomorrow night.”

“I’ll be wherever you are. Seven o’clock. Look at me, Raine.”

Shaking her head helplessly, she opened her eyes. The look he gave her was as shattering as his kiss.

“Seven o’clock,” she agreed.

But her tone said she didn’t believe he would be there.

Before Cord could speak, the helicopter ripped to full life, its rotors spinning rapidly. The body of the aircraft trembled like a beast crouched to spring on its prey. He handed her the rucksack, then turned and walked quickly away, his black hair rippling in the backwash of the great blades slicing through the twilight.

Eyes narrowed against tears and the harsh wind spinning off the black blades, Raine watched him walk away from her.

The chopper leaped into the air, shattering the twilight into a chaos of flashing lights. Hands clenched at her sides, she closed her eyes.

The sound of the helicopter retreated, swallowed by night and distance, leaving only a fading echo in her ears and an afterimage of a blinking red light in her mind.

When she opened her eyes again, she was alone.

Standing in the stall next to Devlin’s Waterloo, Raine was dwarfed by the stallion’s height and muscle. Totally at ease with his bulk, she groomed her horse’s mahogany-red coat with long, sweeping strokes of the brush. In truth, Dev didn’t need the grooming any more than he needed her lingering close to him, speaking in soothing tones. She was talking more for her own peace of mind than for the stallion’s.

Waiting to compete was the worst kind of work for her. Patience never come gracefully or easily. Sometimes patience simply wasn’t possible. She knew her own restless temperament, and allowed for it. Or tried to. The weeks before any three-day event were difficult. She was discovering that the weeks before the Olympic three-day event were impossible.

The syndrome she called “competition madness” had set in around the stables. There wasn’t much left to do in terms of training either horses or riders. The animals were all but exploding with health and vitality. Other than an hour a day of undemanding riding and a few hours of grooming and walking, the horses didn’t require anything.

At this point, hard work or long hours in the ring went against the horses, making them stale and flat rather than eager for the coming test. But not working with the horses left a lot of hours for the riders to fill.

The humans, too, were in peak physical condition, impatient for the competition to begin and the suspense to end. Because they were highly trained athletes, event riders knew better than to deaden the talons of stress with alcohol or drugs. Nor could riders work themselves into a blessed state of numbness, for that would sour them as quickly as it would the horses.

Many riders—and other athletes—relieved the stresses of competition madness with an affair. It was a common and quietly accepted practice that provided a delightful means of killing time without jeopardizing competitive fitness.

More than one man had explained this very logically to Raine. Just as logically, she had explained that she preferred long walks and unnecessary grooming of Devlin’s Waterloo to empty bedroom games.

Only once had Raine given in to competition madness. She had been nineteen, competing in Europe for the first time with world-class equestrians. She had been out of her depth in more ways than one. On the eve of the event, a French rider had seduced her almost effortlessly.

She had mistaken his Gallic appreciation of women in general for a particular appreciation of Raine Smith. He had been dismayed to discover that she was a virgin, and worse, a Chandler-Smith. Despite that, he was kind in his own way, telling her beautiful lies for several weeks while he eased himself out of her life, taking her innocence with him.

Raine knew all about falling and getting back on the horse again. After a few weeks, she realized it was her pride rather than her heart that had been hurt by the suave Frenchman. When she found herself being pursued by a teammate a few months later, she didn’t shy away. She had known the man for several years, and liked him. Marshall was a serious, hard-working rider whose wife had decided she would rather have more fun. End of marriage.

Unfortunately, Raine was too inexperienced to understand the dangers of love on the rebound. Once Marshall had succeeded in talking her into bed, he took her lack of skill and absence of headlong eagerness as a personal insult to his prowess. He returned the insult, with interest.

For several months after the very brief affair had blown up in her face, things were very tense around the stables. After that, she was careful not to date anyone who was associated with her work. Which meant, in effect, no one at all. She enjoyed the men she was constantly around. She joked with them and traded equestrian advice, planned surprise birthday parties, and was a babysitter of last resort for the married riders.

Humorous, unflappable, generous, a hell of a rider, a younger sister in residence, a mind like a whip . . . untouchable. All those words had been used to describe her. All were correct, so far as they went. None of those words described the emotions beneath Raine’s disciplined surface, the loneliness and yearning she was always careful to conceal.

Until yesterday, when a stranger had knocked her flat and then gently held her, looked at her as though he saw through the surface to the womanly warmth beneath; and then he had kissed her and bathed both of them in sensual fire.

With a whispered curse, Raine threw Dev’s brush into the tack box hanging on the wide stall door. She had been thinking a lot about what happened yesterday. Too much. The darkness beneath her eyes showed her lack of sleep. Yet after hours of turning, tossing, muttering, and turning some more, she still didn’t understand what had happened to transform her from a cool rider into an eager, even demanding, lover.

The only rational explanation she had come up with was that her response to the man and the indigo twilight was the result of her own precompetition nerves and Cord’s high-stress work. She had been literally knocked off-balance, all her normal certainties shattered. He had been on a hair-trigger adrenaline ride, not knowing if she was a terrorist carrying death in a rucksack.

Under those circumstances, normal reserve or ordinary social responses just weren’t likely. She shouldn’t be surprised that he had kissed her. She shouldn’t be astonished at her own unexpected, overwhelmingly sensual response. They were simply human, a man and a woman with more adrenaline than common sense coursing through their blood.

When she looked at it that way, there was nothing mysterious or even unexpected about what had happened yesterday. It was simply adrenaline, nerves, and the unexpected all coming together at once.

But I deal with those things every day, she thought stubbornly. Why was yesterday different?

There was no answer except the old inadequate one. Nerves. That’s all. Just nerves. It had to be. It couldn’t have been anything else.

It certainly couldn’t have been a silent recognition of her other half, a filling of inner hollows that had waited empty and unknown for a lifetime, a joining more complex and . . . dangerous . . . than she could accept.

Nerves, nothing more. Competition madness.

Period.

“Raine?”

Startled, she spun around. “Oh. Hi, Captain Jon. I didn’t hear you come up.”

Tall, graying, with a competition rider’s innate balance and lean strength, Captain Jon waited just outside Dev’s stall door. He didn’t offer to come inside. He had a very healthy respect for the stallion’s heels. Teeth, too.

“Phone call for you,” he said.

Automatically Raine glanced at the sturdy watch on her wrist. Five-thirty. A little late for any of her family to be calling her. Or a little early, depending on whether it was her brother in Japan or her mother in Berlin.

Perhaps it was her sister, calling before the latest round of political fund-raisers. Or, even more likely, it was one of the increasing number of reporters who had discovered that Raine Smith, Olympic equestrian, was also Lorraine Todhunter Chandler-Smith, daughter of old wealth and older power.

“It better not be a reporter,” she said. “I’m flat out of polite ways to tell them to get stuffed.”

Amused, Captain Jon stepped away from the stall door and opened it. “I could remind you that event riding needs all the publicity it can get.”

“You could.”

“And then you’d tell me to get stuffed.”

She gave him a genuine smile. “Nope. You’re the only man who has guts enough to help me with Dev.”

“Doesn’t speak highly of my intelligence, does it?”

Still smiling, Raine patted Dev’s muscular rump and walked out of the stall, shutting the door behind her. The broad aisle between rows of stalls was clean, sunny, and dusty, despite constant spraying from the hoses coiled in front of every stall. Hot-blooded horses stood quietly in their stalls, coats gleaming with health, heads turning while they watched everything that happened with alert, liquid brown eyes.