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  Yet he was already turning away from her, his face impassive. Had it not been for his fingers laced so deeply with her own, she would have felt . . . lonely.

  Without thinking about it, she pressed her palm along his, her fingers holding tightly to him as they walked. After a few minutes she felt as though they had always walked this way, side by side, intimate. And they always would.

  She would have smiled at the thought, but it hurt too much. She knew all the way to her soul that they had no future together. Sooner or later there would be a brushfire in some savage little country, the alarm would go out, and Cord would leave her to walk through the gathering darkness alone.

  “I started riding when I was five.” Raine didn’t look at him while she spoke. She was afraid he could read her as clearly as she read him. She didn’t want to shatter the fragile peace of the moment by focusing on the bleak certainty of the future. “I was an afterthought. An accident. Eight years younger than my closest sibling.”

  His grip on her hand tightened gently, encouraging and reassuring her, telling her that he was listening and understanding . . . even though his eyes constantly searched the surrounding land for possible danger.

  “I was always smallest and last and worst at everything the family did,” she said, her voice a mixture of humor, resentment, and acceptance. “So I found something no one in the family did, and then I did that better than anyone in or out of the family.”

  “Riding?”

  “Yes. Mom and Dad didn’t really care about horses, beyond a certain relief that I had found something to do besides turn things upside down at home.”

  Cord smiled faintly and looked at the deceptively delicate fingers twined with his. “You mean you weren’t a perfect little angel?”

  “I was a perfect little witch. But I didn’t know it at the time, any more than I knew why I was so determined to succeed at riding. I simply went through life hell-bent on being best.”

  “Just like your father.”

  “Do you know him?” she asked, startled.

  “A lot of people in the trade know of Chandler-Smith,” Cord said easily, neither evading nor really answering her question.

  This time Raine didn’t push the issue. She liked the feel of his palm against hers and the hint of a smile softening his mouth. She liked being close enough to smell the sun and dust and eucalyptus clinging to his skin. It would end soon enough. There was no need to rush toward the future by asking questions that only silence would answer.

  After they paused at the top of a small rise, he looked out at the dry riverbed in the distance. “There’s not much light left for a lens as big as you’re using. Better get shooting.”

  She reached for her camera, then realized that her hand was still securely held in his. When she looked up, she found herself reflected in his pale, burning blue eyes. He slid his fingers from between hers so slowly that every pressure of his skin moving over hers became a lingering, sensual caress. When he was no longer touching her, she felt strangely lost, as empty as a cloudless sky.

  With fingers that trembled just enough for Cord to see, she adjusted the focus ring on the telephoto lens and began taking pictures. He forced himself to look away. He knew if he kept on watching her, he would have a hell of a time keeping his hands off her. So he took her sketch pad and pencil out of the knapsack. Using quick, efficient strokes, he reduced the surrounding landscape to dark slashes across white paper.

  He finished more quickly than she did. She was having trouble holding the heavy lens and camera still for the one-second exposures the dying light required.

  As Raine had each time before, she took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. When there was no more air in her lungs, she gently triggered the shutter, hoping she wouldn’t jar the camera while it was taking the picture. Since she hadn’t planned on being out so late, she hadn’t brought a tripod to steady the camera.

  With a sense of futility, she heard the shutter open and close very slowly. Too slowly. She simply couldn’t hold the awkward lens absolutely still.

  “Ruddy hell,” she said under her breath.

  An instant later Cord was kneeling in front of her, but with his back to her. Startled, she looked at the expanse of masculine shoulders and the sleek pelt of black hair that began just above his collar.

  “Use my shoulder as a brace,” he said.

  She hesitated only a moment before she propped the long lens on his shoulder. She bent over, sighed out a breath, adjusted the focus, and shot.

  He didn’t move. At all.

  “A little to the right,” she directed.

  He shifted his body, then became utterly motionless once more.

  “I’ll try to be quick,” she said. “I know how hard it is to hold that still.”

  But instead of concentrating on overlapping the shots to form a seamless panorama, she found herself staring at the clean black line of his hair against his neck. She caught a wisp of fragrance and inhaled deeply, savoring the subtle citrus scent of aftershave blended with his pleasing male smell.

  Clean skin stretched smoothly over the tendons and muscles of his neck. He was completely motionless but for the almost hidden beat of his pulse. She wondered what it would be like to touch his pulse as he had touched hers, to feel it accelerate beneath her fingertip. What would it be like to—

  “Finished?” he asked, his lips barely moving.

  “Um.” Raine gathered her scattering thoughts. “One more. A little more to the right.”

  He moved, then turned into a living statue again. She took another picture, and one more for insurance.

  “That’s it,” she said quickly. “And if you ever want to change careers, I’ll give you a high recommendation as a tripod. Where did you learn to be so still?”

  “Hunting in the jungle.” He rose and turned toward her in one fluid motion.

  His quickness startled her, and his words. She knew without being told that men like him only did one kind of hunting in the jungle. Other men.

  A wisp of her hair lifted on the teasing wind and floated over Cord’s mouth like a caress. His nostrils flared as he drank in her scent, taking it deep into his body.

  “I could give you a map of the endurance event that is accurate to the last centimeter,” he said quietly. “The margins are full of notes on crowd control and sniper scopes, trajectories and hiding places, targets of opportunity and equations for the dispersion of various gases under different conditions of wind and humidity. But you wouldn’t want that, would you? Not even if I erased all the ugly notes. You wouldn’t want anything that would give you an unfair advantage over the other riders.”

  Frozen, unable to speak, Raine nodded.

  Gas. Sniper. Target.

  She had always viewed a career like her father’s, like Cord’s, solely in terms of what it had meant to her as a child: a father who was never there when she wanted him to be.

  But now she was seeing that career in other terms. Now, suddenly, she had a gut understanding of the stark physical danger of such work. Life, even Cord’s immensely vital life, was vulnerable; and death was always there, watching for the unlucky or the unwary or the unprotected.

  At least her father had a wife who waited for him, children, a home, a place of love and warmth to retreat to when the other world began to freeze all that was human in him. Cord had no such haven. He spent his life guarding a gentle world that he had never been lucky enough to live in. He could easily die without ever knowing that warm world.

  Sniper. Bombs. Ambush.

  Death.

  The realization of his vulnerability both chilled and melted Raine, slicing through the defenses she had been building against him. There was something in him that she could neither refuse nor ignore, something that called to her in a wordless, compelling language.

  She wondered if he was hearing that same language, feeling the same deep pull. It would explain why he stood as she did, silently, almost stunned, feeling as though the world had been turned
upside down and shaken until she fell out and there was nothing real, only him.

  “Cord,” she whispered, reaching out.

  An electronic beeper shrilled before she touched him. She recognized the sound instantly. Her hands jerked and dropped to her sides. Her fingers started to curl into fists. At that moment she admitted just how much she had been looking forward to driving back to Santa Anita and having dinner with Cord Elliot.

  It was a struggle to make her hands relax, but she managed it.

  Without glancing away from her, he reached for his belt. Using his thumb, he punched out a code that acknowledged receipt of the summons.

  Anger at herself swept through Raine. She was a fool to be fascinated by a man who was like her father, a man so involved in his work that he lived his life at the end of an electronic leash. She had deliberately left that world behind. She would never enter it again, no matter what the lure.

  After anger came the quick coiling of resentment. It lasted only a moment. She had had a lifetime to get used to being second, third, and last.

  “You better hurry,” she said coolly. She took the sketch pad and pencil from him and put them away in the rucksack she slid off his shoulder. “The nearest phone is back at the clubhouse.”

  “Raine.”

  He spoke her name so softly that she almost didn’t hear. Then his hands came up to her shoulders, holding her in a gentle vise. He looked at her as though he was afraid she would vanish the instant she was no longer reflected in his eyes.

  “Come back with me,” he said urgently. “Don’t stay out here alone. The world is full of men hungry for warmth, men who would kill for a smile from lips like yours. And some of those men would simply take what they wanted, destroying everything.”

  As she looked up at Cord, she sensed both his power and his yearning, his body trained for death and his eyes hungry for life. Her resentment crumbled, shattered by the same man who had broken apart a safe world she hadn’t questioned since she was a child.

  Tears gathered in her eyes, blurring his outline, leaving only the crystal intensity of his gaze. Abruptly his hands lifted. He stepped back, releasing her.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” he said angrily, sadly. “I’m not one of the barbarians. I won’t take anything you don’t want to give me.”

  She shook her head, swallowed, and tried to explain past the lump in her throat. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “I don’t believe you. Why else would you cry?”

  “You’ve risked so much,” she whispered. “You’ve given so much. Yet you’ve never known the warm world you make possible for others. You could die without knowing that world, like a sentry barred from the very hearth he protects.”

  He said her name as he lifted his hands to catch the tears at the corner of her eyes.

  “And I could die, too,” she said huskily. “You made me realize that this afternoon. Life doesn’t last forever—it just seems that way.”

  The rucksack slipped from her fingers as he drew her close. Hands framing her face, he bent down to her, moving slowly, never using his superior strength to hold her captive. If she wanted to avoid the kiss, all she had to do was step away.

  She didn’t. She tilted her face toward his mouth, as hungry to be close to him as he was to touch her.

  In a hushed silence broken only by a whisper of wind, his lips moved over the chestnut arch of her eyebrows, the smooth skin at her temples, the soft hollow beneath her cheekbone, kisses as delicate as a breath.

  Trembling, she leaned closer to him, totally off guard. She hadn’t expected such tenderness, his male hunger restrained until it showed only in the tension of his arms. Her fingertips traced the life pulsing in his veins from wrist to elbow and back again. The gentle, searching caresses said more about her own female hunger than she knew.

  But Cord knew. His fingers tightened, drawing Raine still closer to him. He felt her breath flow warmly over his neck. Slowly, slowly, his mouth traced the line of her jaw with touches that lingered and haunted.

  He knew he should stop with those undemanding kisses. He had no right to ask for more, to plead with his lips and eyes and body for everything she had to give. He was taking unfair advantage of her. First he had frightened her, then he had comforted her . . . and now he was making love to her. From first to last he had always been a step ahead of her, a master of unarmed combat keeping a novice offbalance until there was nowhere to fall but straight into his arms.

  He should stop. He had no right to hold a woman like her, a woman made for one man’s love, not for casual affairs with men whose lives belonged to war. He would stop.

  But not yet.

  Not until he came just a bit closer to her fire, warmed himself just a bit longer, drove out just a bit more of the chill that had crept like an enemy into his soul, ambushing him when he least expected it.

  Willingly Raine shared the deepening kiss, opening her lips and inviting Cord into her warmth, inviting him to dream about a place by her fire. When his tongue moved over hers, she made an involuntary sound of pleasure and surprise. Her fingers slid beneath his short sleeves and clung to the bunched muscles of his upper arms as though she had just lost her balance and must hold onto him or fall.

  Her response went through him like a shock wave. He fought an almost overpowering surge of hunger. He wanted to take her down to the golden grass and make love to her until nothing else was real, no past or future, no rights or wrongs, nothing but sunset sliding into night, a man and woman alone, two lovers turning and twining and joining, two flames burning as one in a world of crimson silence.

  She sensed the hunger in him even before she heard the almost silent groan that came from deep in his chest. His tongue slowly caressed hers, tasting her, wanting her, wanting everything except to end the kiss.

  Without meaning to, she clung to him fiercely. She didn’t care about anything but the feel of his biceps flexed beneath her hands, the salt-sweet intimacy of him inside her mouth, their hunger bridging all differences, all difficulties. She didn’t want the kiss to end, to stand apart from him once more, to send him alone into the descending night.

  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 tur
n 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.