Night Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

determine just what was tripping her alarms. He waited patiently, frozen in place. He was highly trained, and there were times he’d been locked into position for hours waiting for a target. He could outwait her if necessary. Whatever she was up to had to be time sensitive. The longer she was inside the estate walls, the more danger she was in. Hit, scatter, and run. Even as a child it would have been drilled into her.
    The moment he sensed she was on the move, he cleared the fence in the exact same spot she had. He hadn’t cased the place so it was the only safe spot to go over when he was landing blind on the other side. He landed in a crouch, just in the shadows of the hedges on the other side, automatically calming the guard dog with his mind. He took a cautious look around.
    The rolling lawns were well manicured, and flowers and plants were grouped in a small area complete with fountains and statues, giving the appearance of a small private park. The house was enormous, two stories with numerous balconies and lots of brick and fancy, scrolled wrought iron. The house even boasted a jutting tower.
    “Flame, what are you up to?” He whispered the words to himself, thinking of her as Flame rather than Iris. It didn’t look like a rendezvous with a wealthy businessman. He ignored the out of character possessive feeling that churned in his gut as his gaze pierced the night to find her.
    He caught a glimpse of her near the thick vines growing up the side of the house. She moved with stealth, knees bent, carefully placing each foot as she skirted the huge windows. She turned her head suddenly and looked right at him.
    Someone was following her and he was damned good at it. Flame hadn’t spotted him, but her heightened awareness told her she wasn’t alone. And that meant he was a professional. She waited, flattened against the wall, her breath slow and even, her body perfectly still. He was there, close, somewhere inside the estate walls. And the dog hadn’t given a warning.
    Her heart lurched. She had cased the area many times and if anyone went near the brick wall, the dog roared a challenge. It was always on the alert, well-trained and eager to ferret out any intruder. She should leave, wait for another night, but she had run out of time. She had to pull off the job tonight in order to meet the deadline. Who else could control a dog that ferocious? She was keeping it from giving away her presence with little effort, but if someone else was also manipulating the dog, that meant they could take control of it.
    She swore under her breath. Whitney had found her. It had to be that. She knew she couldn’t run forever. The story in the newspaper about a sanitarium out in the bayou burning to the ground had drawn her. It was exactly the type of situation she knew better than to pursue. If Peter Whitney or some covert branch of the government he was connected to was looking for her, they would know she wouldn’t be able to resist hunting information. The moment she realized the trail led back to the Whitney estate, she should have gotten out. She’d gotten involved with some of the locals, the way she always did, and she’d stayed much too long.
    Had they sent an assassin? The fire in the sanitarium had been a hit, plain and simple. The Whitney Trust had wanted to cover up the fact that genetic and psychic experiments had been done on babies. Damn Whitney and his government contacts. It wasn’t all that hard to create accidents and make people disappear, especially girls who were considered unbalanced or different.
    Anger smoldered and that was bad. The ground shifted slightly, a minor seismic anomaly. Flame took a deep breath and let it out slowly to calm herself That wouldn’t help matters. The dog whined off to her left, sensing the small shift beneath the ground. She quieted the animal with a touch of her mind as she weighed her chances. They would send someone well trained after her, someone with at least equal the