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Elliot.”
    Raine’s teeth clicked together in frustration. She hadn’t felt so overmatched since the time years before when she took on both her older sisters at once. It had been a learning experience.
    “Lead me to your hilltop,” Cord said. Subdued laughter made his voice even deeper than it usually was. Then the laughter slid away, leaving only hunger, an intensity burning in him as he watched her. “If you want me to leave, I will. But I’d much rather stay. I’ll be good. I promise you.”
    Slanting light fell across his eyes, making the countless splinters of blue within the ice-pale irises glitter like a fine diamond. Against the angular male planes of his face, his eyes seemed impossibly vivid, fringed in lashes as dense and dark as midnight.
    With an effort Raine forced herself to look away from him. She had come out here to learn about the land, not a man. Even one as compelling as Cord Elliot.
    Gradually she saw the countryside rather than the man. The hills were empty, the houses few and distant. Twilight was slowly welling up from nameless ravines, shadow pools spreading and joining, forerunners of the darkness to come.
    Suddenly she was glad Cord was with her. Intentionally or not, he had yanked her out of her cozy, civilized world of equestrian competition. It had been a harsh reminder that there was another, much larger and colder world out there, a barbarian world where violence rather than safety was the rule.
    “What about your work, whatever it may be?” she asked finally. “Don’t you have something you have to do?”
    “My work is the same as yours.”
    She spun back toward him, unable to hide her astonishment. “You’re a rider?”
    “Not in the way you mean, not anymore.” The corner of his mouth lifted in a half-smile. He had been a rider once, broncs and mustangs and tough little cowponies, the sort of horses Raine had never ridden and probably never even seen. “But we’re both here for the same kind of work today—a quick recon of the cross-country course.”
    “If you’re not a rider, what are you looking for?”
    “Places to hide and seek, fields of fire and radio dead spaces, sniper angles and ambush sites.”
    Cord’s casual acceptance of such violence shocked Raine. She watched uneasily while he took a very small walkie-talkie unit out of his hip pocket, extended the telescoping antenna, and spoke quietly.
    “Thorne?” he said clearly. “Another hour. Same place.” Pause. “Right.”
    Raine didn’t understand the crackling that came from the flat black rectangle, but Cord did. He collapsed the antenna and replaced the unit in his pocket. Then he took her hand and set off toward a nearby hill. Its top overlooked the dry riverbed that wound through the Olympic endurance course.
    “What sort of things does a rider look for?” he asked.
    She was walking right next to him, but she didn’t really hear his question. She was still caught in the moment of stunned understanding when she realized the kind of world he lived in, a place where violence and treachery were expected rather than shocking.
    It was the world of her father.
    It was a world she hated.
    It was a world she had vowed never to enter again.
    “Raine?” Cord asked, wondering at the look on her face.
    She took a deep breath and began talking, telling him about riding the three-day event. And wondering why she bothered. The routine of her life could hardly have been more alien to him if he had stepped off a flying saucer.
    “Today, I’m just trying to get a feel for the country. It’s not at all like Virginia,” she added wryly, looking at the sunburned hills.
    Cord’s glance was quick, penetrating, but all he said was, “You don’t have a southern accent.”
    “My father is with the government. I’ve lived in too many places to have any kind of accent at all.”
    Exclusive boarding schools also didn’t encourage accents, but Raine didn’t go into that. Wealth was the least of the things that