Remember Summer by Elizabeth Lowell Read Free Book Online Page A

associated with her father that she refused even to use Chandler-Smith’s full name.
    “My work is satisfying in many ways,” Cord said finally. “Exciting, at times. Alarms and excursions,” he continued, his voice lightly mocking, but the mockery was aimed at himself rather than at her. “Saving civilization from barbarians, winning and losing and fighting again, life and death as close together as bullets in a clip.”
    His voice faded as he remembered how it had been fifteen years ago, when he was twenty and everything had seemed so clear. Lately it seemed there was much more death than life, far more doubt than certainty, and nothing was black-and-white; and everything was a thousand shades of gray.
    In the past fifteen years, he had lost patience with people who believed in simple slogans, easy solutions, and the inevitable victory of civilization over barbarism. He had learned in the hardest possible way that happiness was a rare gift rather than a God-given right, that people had died and would continue to die so that others could live . . . and sometimes in the hours before dawn it seemed that the barbarians were winning because civilization just didn’t give a damn.
    Cord pulled his mind away from the dark downward spiral of his thoughts. He knew the danger of what he was thinking. He assessed his own emotions as unflinchingly as he assessed a dark street when he was outnumbered five to one. He was getting cold inside. He was feeling darkness without dawn, winter without spring.
    Burnout.
    Maybe it was time to let someone else take his place in the thin bloody line standing against the barbarians. Someone who found more excitement than disillusionment in the battle. Someone who didn’t feel cold all the way to his soul.
    Someone who hadn’t frightened a woman called Raine.
    “Cord?” Her voice was soft, unhappy.
    It was an effort for him to banish his bleak thoughts. Lately they came more often, and they took more energy to turn back. The day would come when he didn’t have the energy. When he didn’t care. Then he would go under and darkness would be all he knew.
    Raine sensed the bleak chill beneath his exterior calm. Without thinking about the past or the future, she reached out to him, unable to bear the thought that she had added to the sum of darkness in him, to the cold condensing like winter in his soul.
    “I’m sorry,” she said huskily. “I don’t have any right to attack you or your work. It’s not your fault that my father never had enough time for his family.”
    Her hand moved in a gesture of appeal that was also an apology. Her fingertips touched the silky black hair on his forearm, then settled against his warm skin with a feeling like coming home.
    “Despite how I just sounded,” she said, smiling unevenly, “I’m not naive or stupid. I know your work is necessary. It’s just that I don’t like thinking about it. I can’t live that way. It would destroy me.”
    Very gently he lifted her hand from his arm. He looked at the slender fingers with their clean, short nails. Slowly he ran his thumb over the calluses on her palm, legacy of a lifetime of holding reins and lead ropes.
    I can’t live that way. It would destroy me.
    He needed her. The certainty of that need shook him all the way to his soul.
    But if he took her, he would destroy her.
    Slowly he bent his head and kissed the center of her hand. The caress was as natural and warm as the late-afternoon light. And like the fading light, the touch told of endings rather than beginnings.
    “There are times I don’t like thinking about my work, either,” he said quietly. “So tell me about your work, Raine Smith-only, no Chandler. How did you come to be an Olympic equestrian?”
    The weariness and defeat she heard in Cord’s voice made her throat tighten with something very like grief. There was a deep current of longing in him that reached out to her, a need more compelling than simple sexual desire. She couldn’t