Summer Games by Elizabeth Lowell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
2.5 stars
This month's TBRChallenge theme was Celebrations!, fighting a cold, I reached into my garage sale book boxes and pulled out Summer Games. The 1984 LA Olympics count for celebrations I say! This book had a couple of reoccurring themes that just about drove me batty because of how hammered on they were. Our main male character Cord grew-up around horses and was a rodeo bronco buster before Vietnam called and he constantly is given a “shaman's” voice as he works to get our female main character's horse, Devlin's Waterloo, to trust him. If I had read this on an electronic device, I'd have done a count on how many times it was used, since I only had a paperback, you'll have to take my conservative estimate of one million times. There was also the discussion of coming in from the cold, the whole underlining women warm the hearth and home for the men coming in from cold of protecting and providing, the “queen” and “solider” analogy became a lot in it's repetitiveness.
She was a fool to be interested in a man who was like her father, so involved in his work that he lived his life at the end of an electronic leash. She had left that world behind once. She would never enter it again, no matter the lure.
At it's essence, Summer Games was a romantic suspense where retirement landing you in the soft thighs of a younger woman who also comes with a hot stallion sounds like a good idea and we're all destined to marry our fathers. Raine grew-up with a father that did super secret American government work and she hated how his family always came a distant second, he's never even seen her ride in her equestrian competitions. This has soured her on men of a certain cut of cloth, so when she's, literally, knocked out of her shoes by Cord, he has his work cut out for him. Cord came off a bit...intense. But I've never ran point on security for the Olympics, so who am I too judge? When Raine's looking over the course she'll run during the competition, he thinks she's a “Cuban or Lebanese commando” terrorist setting bombs. Their “meet-cute” has sparks flying and Cord instantly knowing he wants her while Raine only sees her father and tries to put up her walls. I say try because, lol, she be rubbing all up and down this man.
But she was so warm in his arms, and he was so cold inside.
The first half really focused on their romance and the pushing and pulling of their attraction with not wanting to get emotionally involved, Raine not wanting to get involved with a man she'll come second to and Cord knowing he lives too secretive and dangerous of a life. I went back and forth if I thought this was overwritten with remnants of purple prose or if we're losing the recipes. Example: He wanted to take Raine down to the golden grass and make love to her until nothing else was real, no past or future, no rights or wrongs, nothing but sunset sliding into night, a man and woman alone, two lovers turning and twining and blending intimately, two flames burning as one in a world of crimson silence.
Purple prose-y, can see the cringe but “nothing but sunset sliding into night” and “burning as one in a world of crimson silence.”. We're using our words!! But maybe we already had made rent and needed to settle down.
He wanted to seduce her in more than a merely physical way. He wanted her to trust him.
The later second half finally gives us a focus on Raine's equestrian trials and you'll learn about dressage, cross country racing, and jumping, which was interesting and I didn't think textbook-ed it to eye-glazing. The suspense part about the notorious “Barracuda” assassin that was hovering on the edges also comes to the forefront, sort of, when Cord's constantly called away to “monitor” and do super secret DIA anti-terrorism stuff. I wish we had gotten more with Raine and her family, we get a few scenes with her father (guy plays the lips zipped spy well, give her more info!) so that more resolution could have been had there.
“And you're an expert on love?” she said, her voice hard and dry.
“No,” he said softly. “I'm an expert on dying. On not loving. On being lonely. On looking at castles from the outside. On finding a woman worth having and then watching her bar the gate against me because I'm just a soldier, not a king.”
After all are protected (any violence of this kind is completely off page) and Raine wins her Olympic medal but Cord disappears, she ends up on a ranch in Arizona until her HEA choppers in. The repeated term use of shaman, queen, and soldier was super tiring but the backstory of how Cord grew-up around horses (family of Mesteñeros
) was brilliant because of how it then linked and gave a thread to him helping and connecting with her through her stallion, which was her family for all intents and purposes. The women providing warmth and succor for warrior men theme was meh, Cord wasn't the cardboard cut-out alpha man, he had layers and it didn't feel like a treatise on the ideal, but meh.
“I don't believe it anymore. Tomorrow will come for us. When it does, I want it to be right. I want to know that I didn't take you off-balance and more than a little afraid. I'm good at taking people that way. Too good. It's part of my job. But not you,” said Cord, his voice deep, a river running through moonlight and darkness down to a warm sea. “I want you in a very special way, Raine. I can wait one more day for that. I've already waited a lifetime.”
What stood out the most for me, was the touching and caressing between these two (let me Bat signal – washes her hair scene), they weren't just slot A slot B fucking, which, please, bring back caressing. There were more than one purple prose remnant scenes like this: Shirtless, barefoot, Cord rode the screaming blood-bay whirlwind. The man's muscles bunched and gleamed in the bright moonlight even as the stallion's did, two powerful, supremely conditioned males fighting for dominance.
Obviously can read a little goofball out of context but in this story and the contextual moment, it's also put a capital on that W-riting. So while I had fun with some of the scenery chewing going on here, I'm not sure I'd recommend for this to be one to go back and visit, but I'll give it up to the “I can wait one more day, I've already waited a lifetime” to it all.
One Burning Heart by Elizabeth Kingston
