Lover At Last(137)

Don’t look again, she told herself. He knows you’re here—

The keening cry of a woman orgasming vibrated out of the cottage, laying waste to the wholesome appearance of the place.

Sola leaned back into the window, peering through the glass again…even though she knew she shouldn’t.

He was inside the woman, his lower body pumping, his face buried in her neck, his arms bowed out to support his heavy upper torso.

He wasn’t looking up anymore. And he was going to be busy for a while longer.

Now was the time to retreat.

Besides, like she really needed to watch?

With a curse, Sola ghosted away from the site, beating feet through the scratchy underbrush, dodging the thin, leafless trees. When she got to her rental car, she jumped in, locked the doors, and started the engine.

Shutting her eyes once more, she replayed the entire scene: her closing in on the cottage, coming up to the window, staying in the shadows thrown by the chimney.

Him standing across the open room, the woman in front of him, her graceful body covered with black satin, her long, dark hair reaching down to the small of her back. He had put his hands to her face and kissed her hard, his shoulders curling as he’d bent down to make the contact with an utterly erotic expression…

And then he’d eased the woman over to the couch.

Even though it killed her to admit it, Sola had felt a stab of irrational jealousy. But that hadn’t been the worst of it: her own body had responded, her sex blooming between her legs sure as if it had been her mouth he was working, her waist his hands were on, her breasts that were up against his chest. And that reaction had only intensified as he’d positioned the woman on that couch, his face marked with dark hunger, his eyes glittering as if what was beneath him was a meal to be eaten.

Watching was wrong. Watching was bad.

But even the threat to her personal safety—and, arguably, her mental heath—hadn’t been enough to get her away from the glass. Especially as he’d reared up and dragged that heavy black overcoat off his shoulders. It had been impossible for her not to picture him naked, seeing his broad chest exposed to the firelight, imaging what his abs would look like curling up tight beneath his skin….And then it had appeared that he’d bitten—bitten, for godsakes—through the spaghetti straps of the negligee’s bodice.

Just as the woman’s goddamn frickin’ perfect breasts were exposed…he had looked at her.

With no warning whatsoever, those glittering, predatory eyes had risen and drilled right into her own, a sly smile lifting the corner of his mouth.

Like the show was just for her.

“Shit. Shit.”

One thing was clear: If he’d wanted to teach her a lesson about spying? Hard to think of a better way—short of making her eat the barrel of a forty.

Sola eased off the shoulder and got onto the road. As the Ford Taurus took ten miles to accelerate to the speed limit of forty-five, she wished she were in her Audi: With her blood still pumping through her veins, she needed some outward expression of the roar trapped in her body.

Some kind of outlet.

Like…sex, for example.

And not with herself.





FORTY-NINE


As Adirondack Great Camps went, Rehv’s had everything: huge rustic main house sided in cedar shingles and covered with porches. A number of outer buildings, including guest cottages. Lake view. Lotta bedrooms.

After Trez and iAm took form in the side yard, they walked around through the snow to the back entrance into the kitchen. Even in winter, the place gave off a cozy vibe, with all that buttery glow coming through the diamond-paned glass. But not everything was Sugar Plum Fairy time: The wealthy Victorians who had built these compounds as a way to escape the heat and industrialization of the cities during the summers had most certainly not equipped them with laser-sighted motion detectors, state-of-the-art contacts on all windows and doors, and not one, but several, different motherboards controlling a fully integrated, multi-interface alarm system.

Boo-yah.

Trez’s thumbprint on the discreetly mounted pad to the left of the door opened the way into the house’s hub—an industrial-size kitchen that was kitted out with stainless-steel appliances on a level with Sal’s.

Something was baking in the Viking oven. Bread, it smelled like.

“I’m hungry,” Trez remarked as he shut the door. The locking mechanism bolted itself, but he checked anyway out of habit.

Off in the distance, someone was vacuuming—probably a Chosen. Ever since Phury had taken over as Primale, and essentially freed that cloistered group of females from the Far Side, Rehv had been letting them stay at the camp. Made sense. Lot of privacy, especially off-season, plus the remoteness from the city provided a soft transition from, if Trez understood things correctly, the placid sameness of the Sanctuary to the frenetic, sometimes traumatic nature of life on Earth.