Free Summer Games by Elizabeth Lowell Page A

half-shell. That’s all I need, to be yoked to another rider every time I leave the stable.”
    Despite the sharpness of her voice, her hand was gentle when a dark, eager muzzle reached out to be petted.
    Captain Jon wasn’t surprised by the endless patience Raine had for horses, but he was startled by the tension in her expression and voice. When everyone else was coming apart with nerves, she was—or at least, had seemed to be—a center of calm.
    “The buddy system isn’t an unreasonable request,” he said mildly. “Ever since Munich, Olympic athletes have been a target.”
    Raine made a throttled sound that wasn’t quite a word. It was just as well. It wasn’t the kind of word she used in public.
    “I’ve seen the countryside around the endurance course,” he continued. “There’s bugger-all out there but hills, obstacles, and what’s left of the original golf course.”
    “I know. I was there yesterday.”
    “Alone?” Captain Jon asked sharply.
    “Most of the time.”
    Before he could ask any other questions, Raine took two fast steps and picked up the receiver that was dangling over a bale of straw.
    “Hello,” she said crisply.
    “Seven o’clock.”
    Hearing Cord’s voice shocked her. She had already stuffed him into a mental pigeonhole labeled “competition madness.” She hadn’t really expected to hear from him again. She certainly hadn’t expected her heart to lurch and then race while adrenaline poured into her blood as though she had just taken a hard fall.
    His midnight-and-black-velvet voice brought yesterday back all too vividly—first the fear, then the safety.
    And then the fire.
    In the background at Cord’s end of the line, other voices floated like colored leaves, oddly pitched voices riding broken waves of sound punctuated by bursts of static.
    Automatically he shifted in his seat and adjusted the volume on one of the many radios and scanners that were within his reach. Now he could hear Raine better. The sound of her soft, quickening breaths licked over him like remembered flames.
    Yet she said nothing, did nothing, as though she didn’t want to remember him at all. She was in full retreat from yesterday.
    From him.
    “I know you’re there,” he said, his voice both gritty and intimate. “I can hear you breathing. I just wish I was close enough to feel your breath, too, and kiss the pulse beating in your warm throat.”
    Raine’s breath came in sharply. She felt like she could taste Cord on her tongue, feel him, know the dizzying thrill of his sensuality pouring over her. It both frightened and fascinated her. He was as much in control now as he had been when he had surprised her in the hills.
    And she was as much off-balance.
    “Don’t you ever play fair?” she asked bluntly.
    “I’m a hunter. I don’t play at all.”
    “Well, I’m no dumb bunny, Cord Elliot,” she said, her voice clipped.
    His laugh was rough yet soft, a purr from an animal that was definitely not a domestic cat.
    “I know,” he said. “I feel rather like Actaeon must have felt when he hunted Diana beneath her own moon. Not a sport for the faint of heart.”
    A shiver went through Raine.
    It wasn’t fear.
    “Seven o’clock,” he said. “Wear whatever you like. Or, like Diana, wear nothing at all.”
    He hung up before she could say anything.
    It was just as well. She couldn’t think of anything to say. The masculine promise and anticipation in his voice should have been illegal.
    “Everything okay?” Captain Jon looked closely at her face. “First you went pale and now you’re flushed.”
    “Everything’s fine,” she said, hanging up the receiver. “The person I was talking to is just a bit . . . unnerving.”
    “Anyone I know?”
    “Doubt it.”
    Frowning, she fingered the plastic-coated ID badge she wore around her neck on a thin steel chain. The photograph was surrounded by color and number codes that identified her as an Olympic competitor with access to all