With a silent inner curse, he forced himself to concentrate on food rather than her tempting, sultry lips.
“Mmmm,” she said, neatly cleaning her chopsticks with her lips. “This shrimp sauce is magic. What’s in it?”
“You don’t want to know.”
She blinked. “I don’t?”
“Nope.”
“What if there’s curry in it?”
“There isn’t. Trust me.”
She smiled. “Pass the shrimp, please.”
By the time dinner was over, Raine was thinking of ways to loosen her silk belt without getting caught at it. For the last ten minutes she had been telling herself that she would take just one more bite of crisp vegetable or one more rainbow bite of shrimp. But each bite had demanded another from a complementary dish, foods and flavors blended with such sophistication that the palate always wanted just one more taste.
Finally she groaned and put her chopsticks on their ivory rest. “No more.”
Cord smiled. A woman could say polite words and push food around her plate, but only someone who truly enjoyed the flavors would have eaten with Raine’s enthusiasm.
“Are you sure?” he asked. “If you’re tired of using chopsticks, I can feed you.”
Absently she flexed her right hand. Tiny little muscles ached with the unaccustomed strain of holding chopsticks. “You could feed me,” she agreed with a crooked smile, “but could you digest it for me?”
Laughing, he shook his head and lifted his right hand slightly. The waiter reappeared and cleared the table with elegance and speed.
“Dessert?” Cord asked, taking Raine’s hand again.
“Impossible.”
“Coffee? Liqueur?”
“Would you believe a walk to the car? If I don’t get moving, I’m going to pop.”
Smiling, he spoke to the waiter. A few moments later the man returned with two pieces of hand-dipped chocolate candy wrapped in gold foil. They were perched like gems on a sterling silver tray.
The waiter also had a Styrofoam cup of coffee laced with Armagnac.
She barely managed not to laugh out loud at the odd marriage of plastic and sterling. Laughter and pleasure fizzed through her. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was the food, most likely it was the man who tucked her into the sleek sports car with hard hands and a gentle touch.
When the parking attendant handed Cord the coffee and candy on the expensive tray, Raine gave in to laughter. She barely managed to balance the cup and the candy when he put them in her hands.
“What’s the punch line?” Cord asked, as he got in the driver’s seat.
“Styrofoam and sterling.”
“The waiter tried to talk me into taking one of their china cups, but I held out for the real thing.”
Snickering, she balanced the coffee in one hand and the chocolates in the other.
With the skill she was coming to take for granted, Cord drove the Pantera through darkened streets and onto the freeway. While streams of cars flowed around them, she fed him one piece of candy, ate the other, and carefully pried off the plastic lid on the cup. The marvelous aromas of Colombian coffee and French Armagnac expanded to fill the interior of the car. She inhaled deeply, greedily, but didn’t take so much as a sip.
He smiled without looking away from traffic. “Go ahead. I got it for both of us.”
“You sure? I already passed up my opportunity back at the restaurant.”
“I’m sure.”
Cautiously she sipped at the hot, heady liquid.
His hand went to the tape deck. There was a soft click, then the haunting strains of Debussy moved through the car like a caress.
After an initial instant of surprise at his taste in music, she sighed and gave herself over to the lyric beauty. When he lifted the coffee cup out of her hand, the sliding warmth of his fingertips over her skin became another kind of music.
The opposite lanes of the freeway slid by in a silver-white dazzle, a racing river of light sixty feet wide and hundreds of miles long. Directly ahead, traffic was a shimmering ruby ribbon with random amber lights winking as invisible cars changed lanes.
When the music finally faded into silence, Raine was all but mesmerized by the beauty of the night and the calm male presence at her side. Saying nothing, she watched the world slide by as Cord turned the car off the freeway. They wound through hills and parked in a lot high on a ridge overlooking the dazzling, light-shot reaches of Los Angeles.
“Where are we?” she asked lazily, not really caring. As she spoke, she stole the cup from Cord and drank the last drops from its fragrant depths.
“Griffith Observatory.”
“Lovely view,” she said, sighing.
It was, but not nearly as beautiful to Raine as Cord was. His profile was clean and black against the lights, and his eyes were deep and calm. He took the empty cup from her fingers and put it on the floor.
“If I could, I’d give you the moon and the stars so that you would forgive me for frightening you yesterday. But the moon and stars are beyond my reach,” he said, unlocking their seatbelts and lifting her across his lap with a fluid motion. “So I’ll give you the next best thing. A guided tour of the universe.”
While his mouth brushed over her lips, her cheeks, her eyelashes, his fingers smoothed the sensitive nape of her neck. When his lips returned to hers, the tip of his tongue moved tantalizingly over the curves of her mouth. Her lips parted, wanting more of his sensual touch. With melting gentleness, his teeth closed over her lower lip. His tongue caressed the soft, captive flesh.
Raine felt herself losing her balance again . . . and she didn’t care. She was surrounded by a warm velvet world, nowhere to fall but Cord’s arms and he was holding her as though she was made of moonlight and stardust. With a shiver of pleasure, she relaxed against him. Her hands slid over the soft wool of his coat to the silk shirt beneath. Slowly her fingers searched over the warm, smooth cloth, enjoying the muscular resilience of his body, instinctively wanting more.
Strong arms tightened around her, his answer to the restless seeking of her hands over his chest. He heard her tiny sigh when her fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of his neck. With a final caress, he released her lower lip. He fitted his mouth over hers, searching her darkness and warmth as though she was wholly undiscovered territory. Not one hidden surface, not one warm texture escaped his slow, intimate exploration. Finally he captured her tongue with his own and drank deeply of her sweetness.
A hunger that was both dark and incandescent shot through his veins. His arousal grew with aching swiftness. The slight shift of her hips against his thighs made him groan deep in his chest. He knew that her move wasn’t calculated. She wasn’t trying to cut the steel ropes of his discipline. She wasn’t urging him to strip off her silk panties and take her right here, right now, hot and deep and hard.
But he was very close to doing just that.
The knowledge of how near he was to the brink brought Cord back under control. Reluctantly, feeling as though he was tearing off his own skin, he separated his mouth from Raine’s. When he saw her dilated pupils, her flushed cheeks, her quick, shallow breaths, he knew that she was as aroused as he was. It was a bittersweet comfort.
Gently he pressed her head against his chest and held her close, rocking her very slowly. The depth and recklessness of his hunger for her shocked him. So did her headlong response. Her subtle shifts and hesitations at the beginning of the kiss had told him that she was a sensual rather than an experienced woman.
Yet she had opened to him like an undefended valley, inviting and warm, welcoming the soldier coming down from the frigid heights of a mountain pass.
And he needed that welcome the way fire needed to burn.
Sighing, Raine slid her arms around Cord and snuggled in close. She enjoyed the solid feel of his flesh, his heat, the deep rhythm of his heart against her cheek, the strength and vitality that hummed just beneath his surface. She had never felt quite so safe as sh
e did right now, and so cherished. All the relentless pressures weighing her down had evaporated in his presence.
“You were right,” she said softly. “Kissing you is a healing thing.”
She felt his breath stop, then resume. Slowly his hand stroked the length of her dress from shoulder to waist to knee. Silk whispered seductively, asking to be stroked again. His finger tilted up her chin. Gentle kisses touched every contour of her face, lingered over the softness of her lips.
“You’re very beautiful,” he whispered.
When she opened her mouth to protest, his tongue slid between her teeth, silencing her with a slow, penetrating sweetness that made her shiver. It was a long time before he lifted his head and looked down at her with eyes more silver than blue, their centers dark and wide with passion.
“If I don’t put you back on the other side of the car,” he said huskily, “we’ll miss that guided tour of the universe.”
Her breath broke at the hunger burning in his eyes, the stark need that vibrated through him. Yet his hands were gentle as they moved over her.
“I thought this was the tour,” she admitted, unable to conceal the catch in her voice or the quiver of her response to his long caresses.
He looked at her eyes as though he could see the future reflected in their hazel depths. “Is this a new world for you?”
“Yes,” she said simply.
“It’s new for me, too.”
He bent down to kiss her with a gentleness that made her want to melt and flow over him, into him, until they filled each other and there was nothing in the world but them.
Headlights flashed through the windshield. Another car pulled into the parking lot. Laughter and conversation drifted through the Pantera’s open window as people walked toward the observatory’s entrance.
With a whispered word that could have been a curse or a prayer, Cord eased Raine back into her seat. Silently he got out and walked around to her side of the car.
She watched his lithe stride, the male grace of his body, and remembered the feel of him, the taste of him, the sheer heat and strength. Unfamiliar sensations raced over nerve endings she hadn’t known she had, making her shiver as though with cold. Yet there was a melting heat at her core.
When he reached in to help her out of the car, the simple touch of his hand on hers made muscles tighten deep inside her body. It was the elemental reaction of a woman needing her mate. She stared up at him with an almost dazed look. Being seduced by other men hadn’t been nearly as exciting as simply being kissed by Cord Elliot.
The realization dismayed her, making her distrust her own responses. Yet when he smiled and took her hand, she couldn’t bring herself to withdraw.
Slowly they walked toward the domed planetarium, barely noticing the glittering, jeweled carpet of Los Angeles spread from horizon to horizon at their feet. The interior of the building was cool, the ceiling shaped like a hemisphere, the seats oddly slanted so that people looked up rather than forward. Silently, hand in hand, Raine and Cord sat and waited in darkness for the universe to condense across the arched ceiling.
Stars materialized, countless silver shimmers scattered across the featureless black ceiling-sky. The stars moved in graceful swirls, sliding down the sides of artificial night until a single spiral galaxy filled the viewing area.
A polished voice began to speak, pointing out the relationship of the planet Earth to the languidly turning galaxy known as the Milky Way. The tiny sparkle of Earth’s sun along one arm of the galaxy increased and the rest of the galaxy expanded until stars blurred and ran in silver streamers down the ceiling to vanish in the black walls. The Solar System grew until individual planets could be seen gliding at the end of invisible leashes around the burning center of the Sun.
The balanced dance of force and counterforce, attraction and retreat, was as seductive as Debussy or the haunting fragrance of Armagnac and coffee. Each planet was featured separately: the ochres and tawny browns of Mercury; the fierce heat beneath Venus’s brilliant, seething cloud cover; the fragile silver and blue beauty of Earth; Mars’s ruined, red-brown surface; the great Red Spot of Jupiter, set immovably in fluid, multicolored bands of cloud; and Saturn’s incredible rings, curves of silence and beauty turning endlessly around their own frozen center.
Raine watched without moving, enthralled by a perspective that was as new to her as the alien landscapes condensing and vanishing in silent counterpoint to the narrator’s serene voice. Some of the views were composite photographs taken by space-faring machines. Other views were drawn by artists with rigorous scientific backgrounds.
No matter the source, the pictures reminded her that the Solar System was huge and mysterious, the universe unimaginably vast, the possibilities literally infinite. For all its variety of people and geography, when viewed against the larger universe, Earth was only a wisp of a dream circling an unknown star. And human life was simply a dream within that dream.
Slowly, light seeped back into the auditorium. Raine blinked, still lost within the vastness and beauty of what she had seen. The sense of infinity suspended within eternity was oddly comforting to her. Life was both fragile and fierce, brief and able to embrace eternity.
She sighed with a pleasure that was unlike anything she had felt before. The new sense of being rooted in a vastly larger reality was like being taken out of a cage and set free to soar on endless currents of possibility. She hadn’t known that the cage was there until the door was opened.
Now she would never go back.
“That was . . . incredible,” she murmured, turning toward Cord. “How did you know I needed that? I didn’t even know it myself.”
His fingers tightened over hers. “I knew I needed it. I thought you might. It’s easy to get so tangled in one small reality that you can’t see forest, trees, or even the hand in front of your face.”
“It’s called focus.”
“That kind of concentration is fine. Usually it’s the only way to get a job done. But sometimes too much focus ties you in tiny little knots.”
“Competition madness,” she agreed. “Nothing else seems real but the contest ahead. The world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks until it’s all you can do to take a deep breath. You have to find something to distract yourself or you suffocate.”
“We’re more alike than you think we are.”
“What do you mean?”
Cord stood and pulled Raine to her feet. “That’s the way it is in my job. Too much focus will kill you.”
“But losing your concentration is a good way to get hurt, too,” she said. “At least it is for me. Especially in the three-day event.”
“No argument there. A careless man—or woman—doesn’t last long in my business, either. So we walk the tightrope between too much and not enough, and the survivors err on the side of too much.” He put his hand on the small of her back as they walked out of the planetarium into the warm darkness. “I guess you could call it a kind of competition madness.”
She saw the thin gleam of Cord’s teeth, but his smile was more grim than amused. She knew that the stakes he played for were lives rather than medals or ribbons. For an instant she almost asked what, precisely, his job was, but growing up with a father like Chandler-Smith had taught her that asking that kind of question was useless. The answer would always be the same.
Silence.
Chapter 7
“Can you walk in those sexy little sandals?” Cord asked.
Raine looked down at the thin straps and outrageously high heels on her feet. “Depends on what you mean by walk. Anything less than a civilized stroll on a sidewalk could be a problem.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
“How? Pave Griffith Park?”
“Nothing that extreme. I’ll just carry you.”
“Promises, promises,” she said under her breath. But she was smiling. Tonight she felt light enough to float away.
He guided her to a paved pathway that wound along the
edge of the hills. While they walked, a fitful wind sent shivers of sound through the silence, distant voices and nearby trees whispering to themselves.
The path led to a secluded loop overlooking the valley below. Southern pines grew around the viewpoint. Their black trunks and airy branches made lacy patterns against the golden illumination of city below and silver stars above. Each city light was vivid, distinct, an echo of the vastly larger stars flung in diamond brightness across the sky.
For Raine the night and the man were magic. Everything was magnified—the soft scrape of leather soles on pavement, the rub of needles against branches, the fluid ripple of sprinklers on another hill, the whisper of silk caressing her legs. Warm air flowed over her skin, tugged gently at her hair. The air smelled of pine and summer flowers and freshly watered grass. The city lights below were stitched together with the ruby and silver threads of countless freeways.
Cord’s fingers moved caressingly over hers, sending streamers of invisible warmth through both of them. It had been a long time since he had been with a woman who enjoyed silence, who drank the scents of night, who wore silk and jeans with equal ease. He couldn’t remember ever enjoying a woman’s presence as much as he did Raine’s. Being with her was . . . peaceful.
It also aroused him to a point just short of violence.
She drew a deep breath, threaded her fingers more deeply through his, and let herself float on the limitless glittering night. Nothing else was real but this instant. Nothing else mattered but the man whose every touch said how glad he was to be with her.
Because of Cord, she was in a new world tonight, a world where she didn’t have to worry about each word, each gesture. She didn’t have to wonder what he would think or not think, do or not do in response to her. His presence expanded her personal space rather than limiting it.
And the heady freedom of his company brought each of her senses intensely alive. Everything around her was brighter, better, more vivid and complete than anything in her memory.
Remember Summer Page 9