Read Online Remember Summer by Elizabeth Lowell - Free Book Online Page B

the suave Frenchman. When she found herself being pursued by a teammate a few months later, she didn’t shy away. She had known the man for several years, and liked him. Marshall was a serious, hard-working rider whose wife had decided she would rather have more fun. End of marriage.
    Unfortunately, Raine was too inexperienced to understand the dangers of love on the rebound. Once Marshall had succeeded in talking her into bed, he took her lack of skill and absence of headlong eagerness as a personal insult to his prowess. He returned the insult, with interest.
    For several months after the very brief affair had blown up in her face, things were very tense around the stables. After that, she was careful not to date anyone who was associated with her work. Which meant, in effect, no one at all. She enjoyed the men she was constantly around. She joked with them and traded equestrian advice, planned surprise birthday parties, and was a babysitter of last resort for the married riders.
    Humorous, unflappable, generous, a hell of a rider, a younger sister in residence, a mind like a whip . . . untouchable. All those words had been used to describe her. All were correct, so far as they went. None of those words described the emotions beneath Raine’s disciplined surface, the loneliness and yearning she was always careful to conceal.
    Until yesterday, when a stranger had knocked her flat and then gently held her, looked at her as though he saw through the surface to the womanly warmth beneath; and then he had kissed her and bathed both of them in sensual fire.
    With a whispered curse, Raine threw Dev’s brush into the tack box hanging on the wide stall door. She had been thinking a lot about what happened yesterday. Too much. The darkness beneath her eyes showed her lack of sleep. Yet after hours of turning, tossing, muttering, and turning some more, she still didn’t understand what had happened to transform her from a cool rider into an eager, even demanding, lover.
    The only rational explanation she had come up with was that her response to the man and the indigo twilight was the result of her own precompetition nerves and Cord’s high-stress work. She had been literally knocked off-balance, all her normal certainties shattered. He had been on a hair-trigger adrenaline ride, not knowing if she was a terrorist carrying death in a rucksack.
    Under those circumstances, normal reserve or ordinary social responses just weren’t likely. She shouldn’t be surprised that he had kissed her. She shouldn’t be astonished at her own unexpected, overwhelmingly sensual response. They were simply human, a man and a woman with more adrenaline than common sense coursing through their blood.
    When she looked at it that way, there was nothing mysterious or even unexpected about what had happened yesterday. It was simply adrenaline, nerves, and the unexpected all coming together at once.
    But I deal with those things every day, she thought stubbornly. Why was yesterday different?
    There was no answer except the old inadequate one. Nerves. That’s all. Just nerves. It had to be. It couldn’t have been anything else.
    It certainly couldn’t have been a silent recognition of her other half, a filling of inner hollows that had waited empty and unknown for a lifetime, a joining more complex and . . . dangerous . . . than she could accept.
    Nerves, nothing more. Competition madness.
    Period.
    “Raine?”
    Startled, she spun around. “Oh. Hi, Captain Jon. I didn’t hear you come up.”
    Tall, graying, with a competition rider’s innate balance and lean strength, Captain Jon waited just outside Dev’s stall door. He didn’t offer to come inside. He had a very healthy respect for the stallion’s heels. Teeth, too.
    “Phone call for you,” he said.
    Automatically Raine glanced at the sturdy watch on her wrist. Five-thirty. A little late for any of her family to be calling her. Or a little early, depending on whether it was her