Remember Summer

by Elizabeth Lowell

  He was losing it. He had to stop.

  Now.

  With quick, hard movements he turned off the faucets. Yet his hands were gentle as he squeezed water from her hair. And he was very gentle when he loosened her arms from around his hips.

  “All done,” he said, his voice neutral.

  He turned away quickly, before she could open her eyes. He knew that his arousal wasn’t at all concealed by the wet jeans plastered against him.

  Dreamily she began to open her eyes.

  “I’ll wait out here while you finish your shower,” he said. “Holler if you need anything.”

  When the shower door closed firmly behind him, she blinked and rubbed her eyes as though waking from a deep sleep. Confused, she looked at the opaque rectangle of glass and the man silhouetted just beyond. She knew that he had enjoyed touching and holding her as much as she had enjoyed it. What she didn’t know was why he had stopped.

  “Cord?”

  Instantly the shower door opened. Eyes that were oddly smoky and brilliantly blue looked out at her from an expressionless face.

  “I feel a little dizzy,” she whispered.

  It wasn’t a lie. When he looked at her like that, she felt weak and dizzy, hot and cold, hungry to taste and feel the male textures of him.

  He moved with startling speed, scooping her off the bench and holding her tightly. “I never should have let you out of bed.”

  Soft, laughing agreement was breathed into his ear as her arms wound around his neck like a lover. He stood very still for an instant, fighting for control. When it came, he set her carefully on her feet and tilted her chin up until she met his eyes.

  “Nearly being killed is the most potent aphrodisiac known to man,” he said, with a casualness that went no deeper than the expressionless mask of his face. “Don’t trust your reactions until tomorrow.”

  When Raine understood what Cord was saying—and what he wasn’t saying—she felt as though she had been dropped into ice water. Flushing red in one instant and then going pale in the next, she jerked her arms away from him. But when she would have turned and walked off, she discovered she couldn’t. His arms were still around her.

  “You don’t need to hold me.” Her voice was as pale as her skin. She didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m fine now. Not the least bit dizzy.”

  “Raine . . .”

  She refused to look at him.

  He turned her chin until she had no choice. The sensible words he had been going to say caught in his throat. He hadn’t meant to hurt her. He hadn’t really even believed he could, not like this, her eyes narrowed, her lips pale.

  “Let go of me,” she said quietly, keeping herself together with the same discipline and nerve that had made her a world-class rider. “I’ve taken enough falls for one day, don’t you think?”

  Abruptly he pulled her close and hard, pressing her against the entire length of his hungry body. He didn’t care anymore if she knew just how savagely aroused he was.

  “If it was tomorrow,” he said roughly, “I’d be in that shower with you right now, pulling off your clothes and licking water off every bit of your skin. Call my name like that again tomorrow and see what happens.”

  He couldn’t help the slow, blazing surge of his hips against her body, but he could let go of her. And he did.

  She closed her eyes, wondering how she had so badly misread herself, him, everything.

  Off-balance. Again.

  She resented the feeling, and the man who caused it. “Maybe, maybe not.” Her voice was a cool echo of his when he had told her about death and aphrodisiacs. “Competition madness is unpredictable. Besides,” she added distinctly, “tomorrow might never come.”

  “I used to believe that.”

  “You should. You’re the one who taught me.”

  “I don’t believe it anymore. Tomorrow will come for us. When it does, I want it to be right. I want to know that I didn’t take you off-balance and more than a little afraid. I’m good at taking people that way. Too good. It’s part of my job. But not you.” His voice shifted, deepened, a river running through moonlight and darkness down to a warm sea. “I want you in a very special way. I can wait one more day for that. I’ve already waited a lifetime.”

  She looked away, unable to meet the hunger and certainty in his eyes. Maybe he was right. Maybe she shouldn’t trust her own instincts now.

  Maybe she shouldn’t trust herself at all when she was around him.

  “I’ll make your omelet while you shower,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact again as he turned away.

  This time when the door shut behind Cord, she didn’t call his name. After a silent dinner, Cord took Raine back to the radio room. He saw her looking around with the kind of curiosity that said her mind was alert and in full working order again.

  “This is a hallucination,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “This room. It doesn’t exist. The equipment doesn’t exist. The motor home itself is only an unfounded rumor. Therefore, the fact that you don’t have the security clearance to be here doesn’t matter.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “I thought you would, being Blue’s daughter and all.”

  “You’re sure you don’t know my father?”

  “I can guarantee he doesn’t know my name. Lie down on the bed. If you feel like reading, Thorne brought the books from your motel room. They’re on the bedside table.”

  She stretched out on the bed, surprised that it felt so good to be off her feet. One way or another, she had done little for the past eight hours except lie down. A neat stack of mysteries beckoned. She had bought them at Dulles Airport before she got on the plane to California. She picked up the first book and opened it.

  Sixty-two pages later she closed the book and picked up a second mystery, hoping that it would hold her wandering attention. After five chapters she chucked the second mystery on the floor and reached for a third.

  Only a few feet away, Cord worked quietly. The computer keyboard made tiny hollow sounds beneath his fingertips. The scanner cast fragments of scratchy dialogue into the room. Sometimes poignant, sometimes urgent, most often simply bored, the voices had an eerie unreality that nagged at Raine’s attention as much as the big man who sat and watched the computer with an intensity that hummed with intelligence.

  “Delta/Blue Light, do you copy?”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw his hand flash out to the scanner and hit the hold button. She realized that each time she had heard those words, Cord had reacted in the same way. Other words, other codes overheard by the scanner seemed to have no interest for him.

  She tried to make out the meaning of the transmission, but couldn’t. Both men and women spoke in a staccato shorthand that might as well have been another language.

  Curiosity gnawed at Raine. Her assumption that Cord was some sort of glorified bodyguard for her father had shattered against the high-tech, high-tension reality of the motorhome. Whatever Cord did, it was more far-reaching and less obvious than guarding VIPs.

  Doggedly she dragged her thoughts back to the second chapter of the third mystery for the fourth time, but its clues and red herrings were less tantalizing than the fragments of conversation pulled out of the night by the scanner. When the words “Delta/Blue Light” came again, and Cord stopped the scanner to listen, she put down her book with an impatient gesture. As soon as the transmission ended, she looked at him directly for the first time since her shower.

  “What is ‘Delta/Blue Light’?”

  He swiveled his chair to face her and said nothing.

  “If the equipment doesn’t exist, and the room doesn’t exist, then I don’t exist,” she said reasonably. “You can’t break any security rules by telling me about Delta/Blue Light, because I’m not really here at all, am I?”

  His lips turned up in the shadow of a smile. “You should have been a lawyer.” For a moment longer he hesitated, then he shrugged. “Delta/Blue Light is a big secret, ba
dly kept. The newspapers have been hinting about it for eighteen months.”

  She waited, knowing that he would tell her what he thought he should, and no more. She also knew that it was his way of protecting her, as her father had protected her mother. But even knowing that, she chafed at ignorance in a way she never had before.

  She wanted to know more about Cord Elliot, about what he was, about what he did, about his thoughts and memories and dreams. Yet his life was a closed file kept in a locked cabinet in a guarded room, with access only on a strict need-to-know basis.

  Well, I need to know. I’ll keep asking until I do know, damn it. It isn’t smart and I shouldn’t care, but I do.

  “The Pentagon,” Cord continued, watching Raine with eyes that were almost colorless, like his voice, “has set aside fifty million dollars for backup in case of another terrorist attack like Munich. Our hole card is Delta/Blue Light, a group of hand-picked commandos waiting around outside Las Vegas, Nevada. If they have to, they’ll come down on L.A. like a hard rain, using all the nasty tricks we’ve learned from some of the world’s nastiest people. Terrorists.”

  She was utterly still for a second, caught as much by the violence implicit in his words as by the words themselves. Not a bodyguard, not a simple soldier, not like any man she had ever met before. Not even like her father.

  “Who are you?” she whispered.

  She saw the subtle, devastating change that swept over Cord at her words. Suddenly he was poised, deadly, waiting for a signal only he would recognize. Fear roughened the skin on her arms.

  He was looking at her the way he had the first time, when he hadn’t known who she was. He was looking at her as though his pale, uncanny eyes could peel away her soft skin and see whatever might be hidden beneath.

  And if he didn’t like what he found . . .

  Chapter 13

  The hard-edged smile Cord gave Raine was no more comforting than his eyes. “I’m Cord Elliot, remember?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said quickly, words tumbling out of her as she tried to explain, to banish the deadly stranger who was looking at her through Cord Elliot’s eyes. “Are you local police or federal or military or . . . something else?”

  His eyes closed for an instant. When they opened, the stranger was gone. “I’m on your side, Raine. Isn’t that enough?”

  He turned away before she could answer.

  There was a finality to his movement that told her more clearly than words that the subject of Cord Elliot was closed. With hands that wanted to tremble, she picked up the mystery and began the second chapter for the fifth time.

  This time she was more successful, if success could be measured by the number of pages turning beneath her determined fingers as the darkness outside deepened toward midnight. But the words she read were meaningless, the silence and the static cries of the scanner oddly hypnotic.

  Cord was right. This equipment, this room, she herself didn’t exist. Nothing did but darkness and ghostly voices and the man with pale eyes who sat at the center of everything, listening, waiting.

  “—Ontario. Two-eleven in progress. All cars in vicinity respond code three. Repeat. Two-eleven in progress on corner of—”

  Static and silence and the hollow clicking of a computer keyboard. She held her breath unconsciously while the scanner searched unknown frequencies.

  “—Subject turning right on Sunset. Are you on him, Jake? Can you—”

  Silence and clicking, scanner searching.

  “—And they’re at it again. Flip you for it, Martinez. Last time I got between her and her pimp she damn near cut off my—”

  Static and silence, the faint hiss of voices coming over frequencies layered like cards in a deck, waiting for a dealer to pick them out and give them meaning.

  “—repeat. Anyone monitoring this frequency speak Chinese? At least, I think it’s Chinese, but I—”

  Cord snapped on the hold and waited, listening.

  “—can’t be sure because I’m no linguist. She looks about six years old, and scared to death in the bargain. This is Kate on Nine. Over.”

  He waited, but no one answered. He picked up the radio, adjusted the frequency, and spoke.

  “Kate on Nine,” he said, leaving out his own identification. “Is the girl able to hear me? Over.”

  “Yes. Over.”

  Raine listened in fascination as sliding, singsong syllables poured out of Cord. When he ended with, “Does she understand? Over,” the English words were almost jarring.

  “Thank God. Yes, she understands you. Over.” The woman’s relief was evident even through the static.

  He talked for a while longer, his voice soothing even in the odd tones and minor-key phrasing of the language he used. A girl’s voice came back to him, high and thin and strangely musical. The exchange continued for a few minutes before Cord addressed the woman called Kate.

  “The girl’s name is Mei. She’s Vietnamese, ten years old, and has been here only a few weeks. Do you live near Anaheim Stadium? Over.”

  “A few blocks north. Over.”

  “Call stadium security. She was at an Angels game and she got separated from her parents in the closing crush. Her folks are probably frantic by now, though they won’t show it until they have her back. Over.”

  “What about the police? Shouldn’t I call them? Over.”

  “Only as a last resort. The sight of a uniform might panic Mei. Where she came from, uniforms were worn by enemies. Over.”

  “Okay. Thanks. What’s your name and call number? Over.”

  “I’ll monitor this band for a while. If you need me, just ask for Mei’s friend. Over and out.”

  He set the radio aside, released the scanner, and went back to sifting through electronic reports.

  Raine picked up her mystery again. For a long time she lay there, staring at pages she didn’t see, wondering about the man called Cord Elliot. A man who could badly frighten her with a single look and the next instant speak gently to a lost child in her own language, an alien language thousands of miles removed from the reality of the Summer Games. Fear and gentleness flowed from him so easily, so naturally. As did hunger and passion and an elemental male sensuality that was like nothing she had ever known.

  After a long time, the mystery novel slipped from her fingers. She drifted in and out of sleep, listening to fragments caught by the restless scanner, voices crying in the cosmopolitan wilderness telling of drunk drivers and armed robbers, lost children and freeway accidents, drug deals and domestic disputes, murder and rape, loneliness and violence, and a chill seeping into her soul.

  Woven through it all like a glittering black thread came the clipped, almost brutal humor of the men who spent their lives patrolling civilization’s long nights. Men just beyond the castle, walking cold perimeters while fire danced behind the locked gates they guarded, warmth always alluring, always beyond reach.

  Half-asleep, half-awake, suspended between dream and reality, she turned restlessly, seeking peace. But the voices were still there, scratchy static whispers describing life beyond the castle walls, life besieged by violence and unhappiness, life that knew the pain of lonely men and of children crying for lost mothers.

  And one man calling to Raine in a dark shaman’s voice, telling her to unlock the gate, to come to him and make a new world where fire would drive away the chill . . .

  Holding to his voice, she let herself slide slowly into sleep.

  * * *

  From the corner of his eyes, Cord had watched Raine’s restless twisting and turning, her fussing with pages, reading and rereading them, then simply staring at the print without seeing it. When the book finally slid from her fingers and her breathing changed, signaling sleep, he punched a code into his computer.

  BLUE MOON CALLING BLUE HERRING

  Within minutes, the special radio phone buzzed. He activated it quickly so that it wouldn’t wake her and spoke quietly into the microphone. “Blue Moon.”

  “B
lue Herring, buddy.” The words floated up from a desktop speaker like smoke, softly filling the room. “You took your time getting back to me. Hot date?”

  Cord’s lips turned in a sardonic curve as he thought of Chandler-Smith’s daughter sleeping on his bed only an arm’s length away. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. What’s doing, compadre?”

  Silently Raine awakened. Motionless, she tried to orient herself. Memories came—the fall, the motor home, the shower, the bed. Cord’s bed. As understanding came, so did the soft, smoky-rough words that had pulled her from sleep.

  “The usual,” Bonner said. “Blue is using field boots on everyone in sight. He’s worried about Baby.”

  “Tell Blue that Baby is literally within my reach when her one-ton guard dog isn’t on the job,” Cord said.

  “Her what?”

  Cord laughed softly. “Just tell him. He’ll know.”

  “He’s worried about whether she’ll cooperate with you. Says she’s damn near as stubborn as he is.”

  “She is,” Cord said succinctly. “But she’ll cooperate, one way or another.”

  “Well, at least you won’t have to chase Baby through a lot of bedrooms. The book on her is that she likes horses a helluva lot better than men.”

  Raine winced and then went utterly still, listening with increasing anger. She knew who Blue was. She suspected that “Baby” referred to her.

  “Can’t say as I blame her,” Cord said.

  “Cynic.”

  “Realist. Did your worm say anything else about Barracuda and friends?”

  “No. He couldn’t even positively ID the picture Mitchell managed to take at LAX.”

  “You don’t suppose your worm’s turning again?” Cord asked.

  “Doubt it. He barely got out alive. His ex-friends don’t have any sense of humor. Barracuda personally executed the last three who tried to leave without permission.”

  Chill crept through Raine. Cord’s back was to her. It was just as well. She didn’t want to see what his eyes were like now—ice around the kind of darkness that sane men and women avoided.