Remember Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

did,” Raine added in a crisp voice, “I’d lose him, too.”
    “That would depend on the man,” Cord pointed out smoothly, smiling. But there was no laughter in his voice. Instead, there was a mixture of emotions that were too complex to separate or name.
    Her eyes widened as she looked at the man who was so close to her, watching her with unnerving intensity. Self-consciously she lifted her right arm to push back the hair that kept wanting to fall across her shoulder—and his hand. The movement made her wince almost invisibly.
    But he saw it. His pale eyes saw everything. “You’re hurt.”
    “It’s nothing,” she said, meaning exactly that.
    “Let me see.”
    “It’s probably only a friction bruise.”
    He waited, his hand out. He radiated the kind of command that owed nothing to superior strength.
    Grumbling, she pushed the faded blue sleeve of her shirt as far above her elbow as she could. “See?”
    He saw that a red welt marked her fine-grained skin. The welt began a few inches above her elbow and disappeared beneath the bunched blue cloth. The shoulder seam was torn. It sagged downward, revealing the top of the welt. Tiny beads of blood glistened like red mist.
    He hooked a finger in the torn seam and yanked quickly, giving her no time to protest. The cloth gave way as though made of smoke. When he saw the strip of scraped flesh, his lips flattened. He pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket, wet the white square with water from the bottle in the rucksack, and held the cloth gently against her abraded skin.
    “Hurt?” he asked, watching her eyes.
    She started to speak, swallowed, and shook her head, caught by the guilt she sensed in him.
    “It’s all right.” Lightly she touched his sleeve. The tension and hard muscle beneath the sand-colored cloth was almost shocking. “Cord? I do much worse to myself twice a week.”
    “But you didn’t do this to yourself. I did.”
    There was nothing she could say to that, so she watched silently while he worked on her arm. The contrast between the masculine power of his shoulders and the exquisite tenderness of his fingers as he cleaned the abrasion sent unfamiliar sensations shivering through her. She looked at his black hair and icy blue eyes, his angular face, and the sensual curve of his mouth, and she wondered how this man could so thoroughly frighten and then so completely reassure her in the space of a few minutes.
    Cord glanced up and saw Raine watching him. He let his fingers slide slowly from her inner elbow to the pulse beating beneath the soft skin on the inside of her wrist.
    “Forgive me?” he asked.
    “Of course,” she whispered, knowing it was true, but not knowing why.
    “I don’t have any antiseptic.” He looked at the red abrasion. “I suppose I could use the oldest remedy.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Kiss it and make it well.” His voice was as deep as the shadows pooling beneath the fragrant trees.
    Her lips parted slightly with surprise and an invitation that she wasn’t even aware of.
    “But,” he continued, his voice dark and smooth, flowing over her, sinking into her, “when I kiss you, it won’t be like a parent kissing a child. It will be very healing, though. For both of us.”
    Raine felt her pulse leap beneath Cord’s fingertips and knew that he felt it, too. She glanced away quickly, confused by her response to him. She wasn’t the type to lose control of herself merely because a good-looking man had touched her wrist and talked about kissing her.
    Then she realized that it wasn’t his looks that made her pulse leap. It was his unexpected gentleness that unnerved her, the danger and the strength and the yearning in him, a hunger that called to depths in her that she hadn’t known existed.
    Until now.
    He lifted the wet cloth, examined her arm again, and said matter-of-factly, “We’ll clean it better tonight. Are you through here?”
    She was off-balance, unable to answer, caught between his assumption