Remember Summer

by Elizabeth Lowell Narrated by Laural Merlington

Overview

The most grueling challenge of Raine Smith's equestrian career looms before her-the Olympic Games. Little does she realize that she's about to face greater perils in the arms of a stranger than she's ever found on the back of her horse.

Cord Elliott is a man trained to deflect disaster, and his mission is to ensure that Raine Smith remains untouched by sudden gunfire at the Summer Games. Yet from the moment Raine meets Cord's ice-blue glance, she knows he's more hazardous to her heart than a sniper's bullet. Falling for a man who answers to the call of intrigue and holds secrets that can never be shared is to endure the broken promises, unexplained absences, and constant danger that comes with his profession.

But in the fiery passion of irresistible love, a summer to remember seems worth every risk.

Editorial Reviews

St. Louis Post Dispatch

What we're really celebrating in the romance of Night Ride Home is how to find yourself, not lose yourself.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

What we're really celebrating in the romance of Night Ride Home is how to find yourself, not lose yourself.

Kirkus Reviews

Youthful passions still burn strong as Esstman, in a second novel that tries hard to tug the heartstrings but only occasionally succeeds, profiles a woman who finds the courage to reclaim her life after losing her son. Set on a farm on the banks of the Missouri River shortly after WW II, the story limns in self-consciously lyrical prose a woman's belated discovery, in the aftermath of a tragedy, of unsuspected strengths and middle-aged passion. Events before and after the tragedy are recalled and analyzed by family members, as well as by Ozzie Kline, the wrangler who has loved horses—and Nora—since he and she were both teenagers. Nora, who was especially close to her son Simon, breaks down completely; husband Neal has her hospitalized and subjected to electric shock treatment. He tries to sell the farm, though it's been in Nora's family for 70 years. Ozzie, who'd been working on the farm, disappears after the accident but soon returns to help Nora, who refuses to give up the farm. While Nora slowly recovers, Neal, using daughter Clea as a pawn, continues his verbal abuse of Nora: But Nora, with her mother's and Ozzie's help, finds the strength to stand up to him. In this moving and lyrical story of overcoming loss, a man and a woman wage the fight of their lives for a second chance at love.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940172697043
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	10/25/2006
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Rancho Santa Fe

Rancho Santa Fe's tawny hills rolled gently up from the broad sand beaches of the Pacific Ocean. Many hills wore crowns of expensive houses windows and walls of glass were molten gold in the late--aftemoon light. The cool salt smell of the sea mingled with the scent of wild grass cured by hot southern California days.

A riverbed that rarely held water twisted through dry hills and ravines, eucalyptus trees and granite outcroppings. Patches of the Fairbanks Ranch Country Club's emerald golf course remained along the riverbed, making a startling contrast with the brown hillsides. Manmade obstacles of wood, rock, and water crisscrossed the riverbed and climbed the hills.

It was the obstacles, not the quiet beauty of the land, that held Raine Chandler-Smith's attention.

Yesterday she had marched at the Los Angeles Coliseum, joining the colorful, uniformed ranks of athletes from around the world who had traveled thousands of miles to compete in the Summer

Olvmpics. Yesterday she had been one among thousands surrounded by rippling multicolored flags and dazzling Hollywood-style ceremonies. Yesterday she had been enthralled, humbled, and excited to be part of a tradition that was as old as Western civilization.

Today Raine was alone.

Today she was measuring obstacles that had been created for the sole purpose of testing the skill, stamina, and trust that existed between herself and her horse. The three-day event was to riders what the pentathlon was to traditional athletes-the ultimate test.

Even while her eyes and mind traced the dangerous course, shebreathed in deeply, savoring the strange scents of the land around her. Raised in Virginia and Europe, she found the dryness of a southern California summer both alien and compelling. The combination of odors was clean, haunting, older than civilization or man, as old as hills and sea and sunlight combined.

She looked over the countryside again, then stretched and shifted the weight of her knapsack. The water bottle inside gurgled companionably. When she walked forward, her camera's long lens and binoculars knocked lightly against each other below her breasts. She took a few more steps, winced, and decided it was finally time to remove the pebble from her hiking shoe.

With a supple, easy movement she balanced on one foot while she removed one shoe and probed for the pebble that had been abusing her arch. She made a graceful line as she stood there like a beige flamingo at rest, but she would have been the last person to describe herself as graceful.

When she had been eleven years old and just becoming aware of herself as a woman, she was five feet, seven and three--quarters inches of angular female who despaired of ever being as at ease on the ground as she was on a horse's back. Because the picture in her mirror never seemed to change, no matter what efforts she made to be more like her gorgeous older sisters, Raine had stopped looking in the mirror. Instead, she concentrated on the one thing she was good at, the thing she had been born to do.

She rode horses over jumps that were taller and much harder than she was.

At twenty-seven, Raine was lithe and gently curved. She had a woman's smooth strength and the poise of a rider who regularly entered and won world-class competitions. Yet she still thought of herself as a little awkward and relentlessly average in looks. Medium brownish hair, medium brownish eyes, and medium brownish figure was the way she summed up herself when she thought about it.

Raine rarely thought about it anymore. She had spent too much of her youth trying to be as beautiful and as accomplished as her much older siblings. She had failed.

A gawky brown hen simply couldn't compete with the pair of tawny swans who were her sisters. One of them was a partner in a powerful law firm and a senator's wife. The other sister was a leading lady on Broadway. Her two older brothers were also successful. One was a diplomat and the other a neurosurgeon.

When Raine was five, she pleaded and demanded and persisted until her parents gave her riding lessons. After that, life became easier for the whole family. Riding was an elegant solution to the problem of what to do with Baby Lorraine. Or Raine, as she insisted on being called, as soon as she realized that her given name was "secondhand."

Horses gave her a way to be first.

There was an elemental rapport between her and the big animals. Horses were her life's work and love. When she was riding, she forgot to feel awkward and inadequate. She merged herself with the rhythms of her horse and the demands of the jumps. There was a fantastic exhilaration in flying over fences and obstacles on the back of her huge blood-bay stallion. Only then was she wholly free, wholly alive, wholly herself.

"But if I don't get to work instead of daydreaming," she told herself as she retied her shoe, "I'll end up flat on my back in the dirt, instead of flying over jumps. The cross-country part of this endurance event looks rougher than anything I've ever taken Dev over."

Picking up the binoculars again, she focused on the dry riverbed twisting along the base of the hill. After a few minutes she pulled a pad out of her rucksack, sketched in the line of river and hills, and scuffed at the ground beneath her feet. Nothing gave beneath her prodding toe.

She bent and yanked at a handful of grass until some of it pulled free. Beneath the thatch of tight, incredibly tough roots, the ground was rough and dry. It was made up of tight clods of clay and small stones. She sifted out some of the pebbles and kept them in her left hand, fiddling with them as she tried to absorb the reality of the ground through touch as well as sight and smell.

Remember Summer. Copyright © by Elizabeth Lowell. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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