Summer Games (10 page)

He fell silent, suddenly remembering the tickling feel of an apple being lipped off his palm by a horse that had finally learned to trust. A sense of longing shot through him, shocking in its intensity. He didn’t know precisely what he missed. He knew only that he missed it.

“Dev could have used a man like you,” Raine said.

“Was your horse a hard case?”

“Yes.”

“With reason?”

“The best. Or the worst. Dev’s owner shouldn’t have been allowed to keep flies, much less horses.”

Cord’s smile was a white slash against the shadowy darkness of his face. “Tell me about your horse.”

“The first time I saw Dev, I was eighteen, walking a one-day-event course with my father. We saw Dev go down, throwing his rider.”

“It happens.”

“All the time,” she agreed easily. “But this was different. When we got to the obstacle, Dev was still down. His front legs were tangled in the bars of a fixed jump.”

Silently Cord shook his head. He didn’t have to be told how dangerous that could be, the near-certainty of permanent injury to the horse and anyone who tried to help.

“Dev’s rider was standing next to him,” she said, her voice echoing with remembered outrage. “He was cursing and kicking and whipping Dev as hard as he could.”

Cord muttered something too low for Raine to hear.

“Dev’s eyes were rolling white and wild,” she said. “Bloody foam was dripping from his body. Any other horse caught between a whip and a trap like that would have panicked and broken both legs trying to fight free. But not Dev.”

He gave her a quick glance. Her eyes were narrow as she stared through the windshield. It was the past she was seeing, a past that still had the power to make rage slide hotly in her veins and thin her full mouth into a flat line.

“What did you do?” he asked, when she didn’t say anything more.

“I grabbed that cruel, brainless bastard and shoved him into my father’s arms. Then I stood and talked to Dev until his eyes stopped rolling. When he finally let me touch him without flinching and offering to bite, I went to work getting his legs free of the bars.”

Softly Cord whistled through his teeth. He pictured a teenage girl working dangerously close to a stallion that was half out of its mind with pain and fear. “That took a lot of nerve.”

“There was no other way to get the job done.” Her voice was matter-of-fact. “When I coaxed Dev to his feet, he was bloody and scraped and lathered all over, trembling in every limb. Yet he stood and watched me with his ears up, his eyes calm, the picture of well-mannered attention. I knew I couldn’t give a horse like that back to a sadist.”

Cord gave her a swift glance, trying to match the elegant woman in the seat next to him with the brutal episode out of her past. If he saw only the silk dress and emerald earrings, what she said was unbelievable. If he remembered the woman who had controlled her panic when she was helpless beneath a stranger’s intrusive hands, her words were quite believable.

Yes, Raine was an elegant, vulnerable woman. She was also a woman who didn’t flinch from doing what had to be done.

“I asked that obscene son of a bitch what he thought his horse was worth,” she continued, unaware of Cord’s brief, intense appraisal. “He said, ‘A bullet. He’s too old to geld and too mean to ride.’ ” She hesitated, remembering what had happened next. It was the only time in her life when her father had been there when it really counted. “So my father pulled his gun, shucked out a bullet, and flipped it to the man.”

“That’s one for our side, Blue,” Cord said beneath his breath.

She turned with a swiftness that showed she had heard. “That’s my father’s nickname. You know him, don’t you?” There was accusation in her voice.

“I doubt your father knows Cord Elliot,” he said with a half-smile, enjoying a joke he couldn’t share with her. He had had so many identities that Blue no longer kept track.

After a moment of hesitation, Raine decided that what Cord said could very easily be true. It was quite reasonable that men who were strangers to Justin Chandler-Smith knew his nickname. Her father had worked in many embassies overseas, as well as in the State Department and in the Pentagon in the United States. His titles had varied with the assignment: under-secretary, assistant to the secretary, or the oldest joke of all—chief assistant to the assistant chief.

The titles were meaningless. In the covert world her father inhabited, men without power held impressive titles. Men with true power moved almost anonymously, gray eminences in the marble corridors of state. It was a system used by all world governments, though few carried it as far as the Soviets, who routinely gave their highest
KGB
men the cover job of chauffeur in Soviet foreign embassies.

“Did you have any trouble with Dev?” Cord asked, driving into a small parking lot and changing the subject in the same neat maneuver.

She thought about it and quickly decided there was no more point in pushing Cord for information than there was in pushing her father. A waste of time all around.

“I had to retrain Dev completely. I turned him out to pasture for three months before I even tried to put a bridle on him. It took more than a year to bring him up to the most basic level of schooled responses.”

“You were unusually patient for an eighteen-year-old.”

“Dev was worth every minute of it. He was born for eventing. He has more sheer guts than any horse I’ve ever ridden. Brawn and brains, too.” Then she added wryly, “He’s saved my butt more than once on a downhill jump.”

Cord thought of the course he had gone over yet again today: hellish jumps, dangerous obstacles, blind turns. Next to them Raine seemed frail, overmatched, like a candle burning against overpowering midnight.

“Dev’s only drawback is that he won’t tolerate strange men handling him,” she said.

“Or riding him?”

“Every man who tries ends up on the floor.”

A parking attendant trotted over, eager to get his hands on the Pantera. He opened doors, handed over a claim check, and eased into the car.

“What about you?” Cord asked, as his car started off with an unnecessary growl. “Does he try to unload you?”

“Dev has never dumped me intentionally. But I’ve hit the floor more than once out of my own stupidity.”

“Somehow I can’t picture you being stupid.” He ran his fingertip from the softness of her earlobe to the pulse accelerating in her throat. “Taken by surprise, yes. Next to treachery, surprise is the best way to take a highly fortified position.”

Surprised, she stared up at him and felt like a castle whose keys had just been handed over to a strange knight.

Off-balance. Again.

As Raine should have expected, the restaurant Cord chose was a surprise. She had assumed an Oriental restaurant would have the usual mock-Asian decor—red tassels and wall hangings from Taiwan. But the Year of the Rainbow was decorated with Continental restraint and richness: heavy linen and crystal, bone china and sterling silver napkin holders. It took her a moment to realize why the place settings still managed to look odd.

There was no silverware on the table.

The menu was also a surprise. It was printed in ideographs with French translations. At least, she assumed the French was a translation. She couldn’t read ideographs. The only price appeared at the very bottom of the menu. The figure assured her that the food was either marvelous or served on solid gold plates.

Perhaps both.

She wondered how Cord managed to afford elegant clothes, transportation, and restaurants. What she had heard of his background didn’t suggest inherited wealth. And while people who worked for the government at the highest levels were paid well, they weren’t paid that well. Most diplomats had to supplement their salaries with personal wealth just to be able to entertain on the scale their jobs required. The United States might be one of the richest countries on earth, but its diplomatic budgets were bare bones.

When Raine looked up from the menu, Cord was watching her openly. His ice-blue eyes were unusually vivid in the candlelight. His thick black hair gleamed with vitality. He was very close to her, because he had chosen to sit at a right angle to her rather than across the table.

“If you like haute cuisine after the French manner,” he said, “order from the right side of the menu. If you’re feeling adventurous—or would trust me to order for you—go to the left side. And don’t worry about the lack of silverware. They’ll bring the proper tools to eat whatever you choose.”

He watched while she read the French side of the menu with a speed and attention that suggested utter familiarity with the language and cuisine. He would have expected no less from a Chandler-Smith.

Yet in so many ways she continued to surprise him. Open one moment, wary the next, and aware of him every single instant.

Just as he was aware of her. He watched her with a barely leashed intensity, fascinated by the candlelight that shimmered and slid over the chestnut coils of her hair. When a wisp of hair floated forward, tickling the corner of her mouth, he tucked the silky tendril back in place. As he removed his hand, his fingertip traced the rim of her ear.

She gave him a startled look, followed by an almost shy smile that made him wish they were alone in a fortress, the doors locked and bolted against the world outside.

As though she knew what he was thinking, she cleared her throat and turned to the left side of the menu. “I’m feeling adventurous.”

“Not trusting?” he asked with a wounded expression on his face and a wicked glint in his eyes.

“Adventurous,” she said firmly, refusing him the satisfaction of being trusted.

“There’s a lot to be said for adventure.” His smile matched the gleam in his eyes.

“Then let’s just say I’m hungry enough to eat anything.” When she heard her words, she winced and wished she had bitten her tongue.

“An adventurous woman,” he agreed blandly. “You came to the right man.”

Cord took Raine’s menu and set it on top of his own, which he hadn’t bothered to open.

The waiter materialized as though summoned by a king.

Cord spoke to him in a sliding, sing-song language. After a discreetly startled reappraisal of his client, the waiter began scribbling ideographs on his pad. When Cord finished, the waiter made a few recommendations. Cord took two and discarded the others.

The wine steward came over. They conferred over the list in two languages, neither of which was English.

Watching, listening, Raine smiled with a mixture of amusement and appreciation. Cord reminded her of her father, a man at home in several tongues and utterly fluent in the oldest language known to man—power.

When Cord was finished with the wine list, Raine saluted him silently.

He gathered her hand into his and watched her expression closely. “No inherited wealth, just the best education Uncle Sam and experience could provide.” He smiled slightly and added, “The steward was polite enough not to wince at my French accent.”

“Inherited wealth only means money, not the brains to use it. And there’s nothing wrong with your accent,” she said, defending him instantly.

“Tell that to a Parisian.”

“You can’t tell anything to a Parisian.”

Cord’s dark pupils dilated. “The queen is very kind to her soldier,” he said softly.

He lifted Raine’s hand to his lips. For an instant he savored her sweet-smelling skin with the hidden tip of his tongue. The caress was so casual, yet at the same time so intimate, that she could barely control the shiver that went through her.

“I’m not a queen,” she whispered through suddenly dry lips, “and you’re hardly a common soldier.”

He simply looked at her, making no effort to conceal the hunger in his eyes, a hunger reflected in the slow movement of his thumb over her fingertips. When the wine arrived, he went through the ritual of tasting it almost indifferently, not even releasing her hand.

Yet she was certain that if the wine had been inferior, he would have noticed and sent it back instantly. Cord Elliot wasn’t a man to accept second best in anything.

The wine was both delicious and unfamiliar, a Fumй blanc that exactly balanced the exotic meal. There was shrimp paste broiled on narrow strips of sugarcane, tiny crepe-like wrappers containing a miniature leaf and crisp julienne of marinated vegetables, very small meatballs simmered in a piquant sauce, and shrimp that tasted like rainbows and melted in her mouth.

There were other dishes, too, temperatures hot and cold and tepid, tastes sweet and vinegar and salt, flavors and textures and colors combined in endless array, a feast for the eyes as well as the mouth.

The meal arrived with sterling silver chopsticks and a lemon-scented fingerbowl. Raine watched Cord, ate the appropriate foods with her fingers, and used the fingerbowl as she would after any meal. The chopsticks, however, baffled her. The cuisines she was familiar with would have used a tool shaped like a chopstick to skewer and broil chunks of meat, not to eat anything as tiny and elusive as rice.

“Like this.” He took her hand and positioned her chopsticks correctly. “Keep them almost parallel to the plate, instead of vertical, as you would a fork. Now, hold the bottom one steady and move the top one. Or vice versa. I’m not a purist. Whatever gets it done.”

As the meal progressed, she became more skilled with the slippery sticks, but still lost about one out of three tidbits. It could have been because she kept being distracted by Cord. He used the chopsticks with a dexterity that fascinated her. Divided between admiration and exasperation, she watched him eat. When yet another succulent shrimp escaped her, exasperation won out.

“Ruddy slippery beast,” she muttered.

Deftly he picked up the shrimp in his chopsticks and held it near her lips. Without hesitation she opened her mouth and took the morsel. He looked hungrily at the white gleam of her teeth, the pink tip of her tongue, the sensual fullness of her lips as they closed for an instant around his chopsticks.

The memory of a twilight hill and the taste of Raine on his tongue stabbed through Cord and settled deep inside, the potent heaviness and ache of male hunger. With an effort he looked away from her mouth. Tonight he wanted to prove to her that he was a gentleman as well as a man trained in violence. He wanted to seduce her in more than a merely physical way.