Read Summer Games for Free Online

that he would be with her tonight and his quick question. Wryly she realized that it would be a useful technique for controlling a conversation. Or an interrogation. First you throw in an assumption that might or might not be correct and then you follow it immediately with a totally unrelated question. The person answering the question is caught between protesting the assumption and fielding the question.
    So rather than challenge the assumption, Raine answered the question, and then realized she had just accepted that Cord would be with her that night. Just as she had accepted his statement that he would kiss her, and by accepting it, had all but invited him to do just that.
    “That’s pretty slick,” she said, feeling outmaneuvered but not particularly resentful.
    “Thank you,” he said, smiling. “You’re pretty quick yourself.”
    Her left eyebrow lifted in silent skepticism. “Next to you, I’m real slow. And I’m not through here. There’s at least one more hilltop I have to cover.”
    “That way?” he asked, gesturing toward the empty hills and twisting ravine.
    “Not quite. It’s a case of look but don’t touch, at least until the day before the event. So,” she said, pointing toward a hilltop that was not inside the Olympic course markers, “I’ll have to settle for that one.”
    “Will you finish before dark?”
    “Yes.”
    “Pity,” he said, his eyes watching her instead of the land. “I’ll bet this place is dynamite by moonlight.”
    Her expression changed as she remembered the brutal uses terrorists had for dynamite.
    “Sorry. Bad choice of words,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    As he stood, he took her left hand and pulled her easily upright. They spotted her missing hair clip at the same instant. With startling swiftness, he scooped it up before she could do more than reach toward the barrette.
    “I’ll take care of it,” he said, stepping behind her.
    He caught her hair in his right hand and clipped the chestnut mass in place with his left. When he was finished, he gently, slowly stroked her gold-shot hair.
    Raine froze beneath the caress as every female nerve ending she had came to full alert. She felt the faint humid warmth of Cord’s breath on her neck, and a delicate touch that could have been his lips.
    “Your hair smells like sunlight,” he said, his voice husky. Then, as though he had said nothing at all, he asked, “Where do we go from here?”
    She turned and stared at him, off-balance once more. He had outmaneuvered her again, only this time the assumption was buried in the question. We. Where do we go from here? Talk about an open-ended, fully loaded question . . .
    She was too smart to touch it. The problem was, she wanted to touch Cord. She didn’t know why, but she knew how much.
    Too much.
    Gathering what was left of her concentration, Raine bent over to pick up her rucksack. Cord beat her to it, swinging the sack up easily over one shoulder. He picked her camera and binoculars off the ground and put the straps around her neck. The pad and pencil appeared in his hand again.
    “You handle the camera,” he said. “I’ll take care of the sketches.”
    “That bad, huh?” she asked, amused. She knew that her sketches were awkward and all but unreadable to anyone but herself. Captain Jon told her frequently.
    “Let’s just say that you don’t threaten Da Vinci.”
    “Do you?”
    “You can tell me tonight, when you look at my, um, sketches after dinner.”
    “Mr. Elliot,” she began, determination plain in the lines of her face and her tone of voice.
    “Aren’t you hungry after all your walking around?” he asked, before she could say any more.
    “Of course, but—”
    “Good,” he cut in smoothly. “You drive me to Santa Anita and I’ll buy you dinner. Fair trade, don’t you think?”
    “But—”
    “All right, two dinners,” he said quickly, smiling down at her. “You drive a hard bargain, lady. And my name is Cord, not Mr.