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separated her from the man who could make her pulse stutter with a word, a touch, a glance.
    “What kind of thing are you looking for?” he asked. “Maybe I can help.”
    She hesitated, then shrugged. “I’d know what to expect if twenty horses went over the Virginia hills in front of me, but a dry land is different.” She frowned. “I’ll probably have to tape Dev’s legs more heavily than usual. In some places here the going will be harder than he’s used to.”
    “Watch the water jumps. There’s a lot of clay around. Slippery as sin.”
    She looked at Cord. “Are you sure you aren’t a rider?”
    “Not professionally, not since I was eighteen.”
    “You’re too big to be a jockey,” she said, assessing his six-foot-plus height. “Strong shoulders and legs, steady hands, and great coordination. Did you hunt?”
    His lips curved in silent laughter. “Yes, but not the way you mean. I ate what I shot, and when I rode, it was for pay as well as pleasure. Rodeo.”
    Intrigued, she waited for him to say more about his past. When he didn’t, she asked, “Why did you give it up?”
    “Vietnam,” he said briefly, opening and closing the subject with a single word.
    “And then?” she asked, unable to curb her curiosity about the man walking beside her, holding her hand as though they were on a date.
    “More of the same.”
    She waited, then persisted. “And then?”
    “There wasn’t any ‘and then’ for me.”
    Raine knew she should let it go. It was becoming clear to her that Cord’s life might very well be stamped TOP SECRET, DROP DEAD BEFORE SHARING.
    Like her father’s life.
    “So you’re still in the Army or Marines or whatever?” she asked, unable to stop herself, hungry for details about Cord’s past.
    He stopped and swung toward her, his eyes narrow. Silently he looked her over from her hair to her dusty hiking shoes.
    She looked back at him with the same mixture of intelligence and challenge, defiance and yearning that had made her childhood difficult for her and for anyone else who got in the way of something she really wanted.
    “Funny,” he said sardonically, “you don’t look like a cat. No furry ears or long tail or whiskers. But you’re as curious as any cat I’ve ever known.”
    “And you’re a man used to asking rather than answering questions.” Her voice was neutral and her eyes were as narrow as his.
    “Curiosity, and claws, too.” For a long moment he looked down at her oval face, at her hazel eyes with their surprising glints of gold and green, at the feminine mouth that was quick to smile but wasn’t smiling now. “What do you really want to know, Raine Smith?”



Chapter 3
    “I  . . .” Raine’s voice faded into silence.
    She couldn’t answer Cord’s question for the simple reason that she didn’t know what she wanted to ask him.
    She had seen men who moved like him before. Men walking discreetly through embassy halls. Men watching the crowd while the crowd watched a statesman speak. Men whose job it was to guard diplomats and foreign dignitaries and people whose names and titles and true functions were shrouded in files only a few officials were cleared to read. Men whose very lives were state secrets.
    Men like her father.
    She hadn’t thought about such men in years. She had never really been a part of her father’s life. He no longer was a part of hers. She loved him, but she didn’t know him at all. She rarely saw her parents for more than a few hours at a time. Despite mutual love, their lives just didn’t overlap.
    “I don’t know what question I was trying to ask,” she said finally. She shrugged. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been around a man like you.”
    “A man like me?” Cord smiled, but there was little humor in the hard line of his mouth or the narrow slash of white teeth. “One head, two arms, two hands, two feet, two legs—”
    “And one gun in the small of your back,” she cut in coolly. “Or do you carry it