Summer Games Read Free

the three-day event. Heat sapped a horse’s strength even more than a rider’s. No matter how hot it became, the horse was stuck wearing a fur coat.
    “At least it isn’t humid,” she muttered. “That would be a killer. But this . . . I like this.”
    That surprised her. The arid land that should have been so alien to her felt instead like a home she had forgotten or never known.
    Smiling at the odd thought, she brushed off her fingers, raised her camera, and went to work. Delicately she adjusted the very long telephoto lens and took a series of overlapping photos. Once developed, the slides would make a panorama of the part of the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club that had been torn up and given over to the Summer Games.
    Frowning, far from satisfied, she lowered the camera. Photos were better than nothing, but not good enough. What she really needed was to walk the course itself. But she couldn’t. All the endurance-event competitors would walk the course for the first time, together, the day before their ride.
    Ten days from today. Just ten days until the event that would be both climax and close of a lifetime of work.
    Raine didn’t know what she would do after the Olympics. She only knew that it would be something different. She was ready to step off the glittering, grueling carousel of international competition. In the past three years, the idea of raising and training event horses had come to her more and more frequently. Devlin’s Waterloo was a stallion to build a future on. Earning a medal in the Olympics would go a long way toward making her silent dreams come true.
    Wind combed through the grass around her, whispering of rain that didn’t come for months on end. She closed her eyes, trying to absorb the essence of the strange, beautiful land. Never in her life had she ridden over such dry ground. It worried her that she wouldn’t have the same instinctive understanding of the terrain that she had on the East Coast or in Britain or France.
    But there was no help for it. Until the day before the endurance event, she would have to be satisfied with learning what she could at a distance.
    Her lips curved in an ironic smile. Somehow it was fitting that the most important contest of her life should find her on the outside looking in. She had spent her years like that, watching the world at a distance. Most of the time she preferred it that way. Sometimes, though, when she heard lovers laugh softly, saw them touch each other as though they were more precious than gold, a man bending down to his woman, smiling . . .
    Abruptly Raine picked up the binoculars again. She had no illusions about her chance of finding a mate. As many men had told her with varying degrees of anger, she was too damned particular about her sex partners. The few times she finally had succumbed to loneliness had left her feeling worse about herself as a woman than before.
    Get over it, she told herself coolly. The only kind of riding you’re good at is on a horse.
    For long minutes she scanned the land below the crest of the hill. She hardly saw the rich honey sheen of sunlight on grass or the blue-black dance of shadows beneath the wind. She concentrated on a grove of eucalyptus, deciding that the smooth-trunked trees were rather like horses, huge yet graceful, powerful yet elegant.
    She wondered if the drifts of dried leaves and peeling bark she saw at the base of the trees would be slippery or if the ground itself would be damp. She couldn’t tell from where she was and she couldn’t get any closer without crossing the Olympic boundary markers.
    Damn.
    Raine looked through the glasses at the dense shadows and the gray-green leaves shimmering in the late-afternoon light. So near and yet so far . . .
    Story of my life.
    She lowered the glasses and turned away.
    Deep in the eucalyptus grove, concealed by shadows and by the absolute stillness of his body, Cord Elliot waited for the woman’s attention to pass over the grove.
    Over