Predatory Game (GhostWalkers, #6)(38)
He followed her, keeping up easily with a single thrust of his powerful arms. “You mean like: Hey! I’m sitting down and I still have a couple of inches on you.”
She stopped so abruptly he ran right into her, catching her waist, laughing at her squeal of outrage as he pulled her down onto his lap. “What’s wrong, Saber, does it hit too close to home for comfort?”
Saber circled his neck with her arm. “Oh, shut up,” she snapped, but he could hear the answering laughter in her voice.
She couldn’t help but admire the easy way he maneuvered the chair over rough terrain with her added weight and the awkward load of blankets and picnic basket. They were both laughing when they reached the van. But by the time they were home, Jess was quiet, thoughtful, almost remote.
Saber tried desperately to push away the feel of his mouth, his hands, as she dressed for work. It was a good thing she wasn’t trying to go to bed. There would be no such thing as sleep.
Elation, euphoria poured through his system along with sheer adrenaline. He was so much cleverer than Whitney’s precious enhanced soldiers. He could have walked right up to them and sliced their throats. He’d stalked them, together, and neither had been aware of his presence. He was so good. The best. So skilled and yet had none of the training the two of them had. All that time he had circled them, fantasizing about how he would end them both, laughing to himself, feeling so high. He almost couldn’t come down from it. All that money spent, all that training, and here he was, a mere foot soldier without a single enhancement, just brains and skill, eluding both of them.
It didn’t surprise him in the least. He’d always been superior to others, but this should prove it even to Whitney. Whitney, who put his intelligence above everyone else, who believed himself a god. How many mistakes had the man made? His pheromone receptor research had made fools of the soldiers and whores of the women. Look at Wynter kissing the cripple when she should have killed him. Calhoun was inferior now. Useless. He should have had a bullet in his head a year ago, but no, they wanted his DNA. He was going to have to take over her training, because Whitney certainly hadn’t gotten it right. It was becoming harder and harder to wait, to play the game and play the role of a puppet. He wanted to up the stakes and shove it right under their noses now that he knew he could. Oh yes, this was going to be fun.
CHAPTER 7
Someone was stalking them. Saber slipped into the garage and looked carefully around. Nothing was out of place, yet someone had been there, and they were good, very good, because she had an eye for detail—a photographic memory that alerted her the moment something was even a hair off. It was time to step out of her dream world and confront reality head on.
Jess was a GhostWalker. She was a GhostWalker. He had been recruited and trained as an adult already in Special Forces. She had been taken from an orphanage and raised in a laboratory and then later a training compound. How in the world had they both ended up in Sheridan, Wyoming?
Saber carefully went over Jess’s car and then her own, searching for an incendiary device. She needed her electronic equipment to be absolutely certain the cars were free of bugs, so that would have to wait. But as far as she could tell by listening and feeling, both vehicles were clean, and she had always been right. She slipped into her car and sat for a moment, contemplating what to do.
She tapped her fingernail against the dash of her car and stared at herself in the rearview mirror. There wasn’t a single line in her baby soft skin. Her too-big eyes were fringed with long feathery lashes and held a look of absolute innocence. She could barely look at herself sometimes. Her innocence had been lost when she was sent out on her first mission at nine years old. She glanced down at her hands expecting to see blood—something—some evidence of the evil that lurked inside of her, but even her hands looked young and innocent.
She looked back into the mirror. She’d made a promise to herself that she would never go back to that life, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—abandon Jess. She didn’t believe in coincidence, but there was no way Jess could have planned for her to show up at his home. She had wandered down his road, hoping to find a place to camp before winter set in and she had to move on. She had gotten his name off an Internet site for radio station jobs when she’d looked for an opening in Sheridan.
Her voice was one of her best assets. Radio stations were the easiest places to find work, and if there was no opening, she could often use her voice to persuade them to hire her anyway. She knew Jess had suspected she was a battered woman on the run. He had hired her for work at the station and offered to let her rent the upstairs in return for light housekeeping. How could someone have manipulated their meeting? And if they had, what was the purpose?
She bit at her lower lip while she sat there turning it over in her mind. She couldn’t leave, not when someone was hunting Jess. She was just going to have to be very alert and know that either of them, or both, could be in danger every step of the way.
Jess watched on the monitor as Saber drove her car through the gates and disappeared from sight. He touched a fingertip to the screen, right over the spot where the Volkswagen’s taillights had been. He should have insisted on a guard for her. Someone was watching them. Someone who knew how to bypass the kind of security he had, knew exactly where the camera’s blind spots were and had utilized them to invade Jess’s territory. He had known the moment he’d gone outside. He doubted if the intruder had breached the house, but he’d followed them to the park. Jess knew they were being hunted.