Remember Summer by Elizabeth Lowell

in her lungs, she gently triggered the shutter, hoping she wouldn’t jar the camera while it was taking the picture. Since she hadn’t planned on being out so late, she hadn’t brought a tripod to steady the camera.
    With a sense of futility, she heard the shutter open and close very slowly. Too slowly. She simply couldn’t hold the awkward lens absolutely still.
    “Ruddy hell,” she said under her breath.
    An instant later Cord was kneeling in front of her, but with his back to her. Startled, she looked at the expanse of masculine shoulders and the sleek pelt of black hair that began just above his collar.
    “Use my shoulder as a brace,” he said.
    She hesitated only a moment before she propped the long lens on his shoulder. She bent over, sighed out a breath, adjusted the focus, and shot.
    He didn’t move. At all.
    “A little to the right,” she directed.
    He shifted his body, then became utterly motionless once more.
    “I’ll try to be quick,” she said. “I know how hard it is to hold that still.”
    But instead of concentrating on overlapping the shots to form a seamless panorama, she found herself staring at the clean black line of his hair against his neck. She caught a wisp of fragrance and inhaled deeply, savoring the subtle citrus scent of aftershave blended with his pleasing male smell.
    Clean skin stretched smoothly over the tendons and muscles of his neck. He was completely motionless but for the almost hidden beat of his pulse. She wondered what it would be like to touch his pulse as he had touched hers, to feel it accelerate beneath her fingertip. What would it be like to—
    “Finished?” he asked, his lips barely moving.
    “Um.” Raine gathered her scattering thoughts. “One more. A little more to the right.”
    He moved, then turned into a living statue again. She took another picture, and one more for insurance.
    “That’s it,” she said quickly. “And if you ever want to change careers, I’ll give you a high recommendation as a tripod. Where did you learn to be so still?”
    “Hunting in the jungle.” He rose and turned toward her in one fluid motion.
    His quickness startled her, and his words. She knew without being told that men like him only did one kind of hunting in the jungle. Other men.
    A wisp of her hair lifted on the teasing wind and floated over Cord’s mouth like a caress. His nostrils flared as he drank in her scent, taking it deep into his body.
    “I could give you a map of the endurance event that is accurate to the last centimeter,” he said quietly. “The margins are full of notes on crowd control and sniper scopes, trajectories and hiding places, targets of opportunity and equations for the dispersion of various gases under different conditions of wind and humidity. But you wouldn’t want that, would you? Not even if I erased all the ugly notes. You wouldn’t want anything that would give you an unfair advantage over the other riders.”
    Frozen, unable to speak, Raine nodded.
    Gas. Sniper. Target.
    She had always viewed a career like her father’s, like Cord’s, solely in terms of what it had meant to her as a child: a father who was never there when she wanted him to be.
    But now she was seeing that career in other terms. Now, suddenly, she had a gut understanding of the stark physical danger of such work. Life, even Cord’s immensely vital life, was vulnerable; and death was always there, watching for the unlucky or the unwary or the unprotected.
    At least her father had a wife who waited for him, children, a home, a place of love and warmth to retreat to when the other world began to freeze all that was human in him. Cord had no such haven. He spent his life guarding a gentle world that he had never been lucky enough to live in. He could easily die without ever knowing that warm world.
    Sniper. Bombs. Ambush.
    Death.
    The realization of his vulnerability both chilled and melted Raine, slicing through the defenses she had been building against him.