Lover At Last

by J. R. Ward

Chapter Nine

  The sound of cross-country skis traveling over snow was a rhythmic rush, repeated at a quick clip.

  The storm that had drifted down from the north had cleared after dawn, and the rising sun that shone beneath the lip of the departing cloud cover sliced through the forest to the sparkling ground.

  To Sola Morte, the shafts of gold looked like blades.

  Up ahead, her target presented itself like a Faberge egg sitting on a stand: The house on the Hudson River was an architectural showpiece, a cage of seemingly fragile girders holding stack upon stack of countless panels of glass. On all sides, reflections of the water and the nascent sun were like photographs captured by a true artist, the images frozen in the very construction of the home itself.

  You couldn't pay me to live like that, Sola thought.

  Unless it was all bulletproof? But who had the money for that.

  According to the Caldwell public records department, the land had been purchased by a Vincent DiPietro two years before, and developed by the man's real estate company. No expense had been spared on the construction - at least, given the valuation on the tax rolls, which was north of eight million dollars. Just after building was completed, the property changed hands, but not to a person: to a real estate trust - with only a lawyer in London listed as trustee.

  She knew who lived here, however.

  He was the reason she'd come.

  He was also the reason she had armed herself so thoroughly. Sola had lots of weapons in easy-to-reach places: a knife in a holster at the small of her back, a gun on her right hip, a switch hidden in the collar of her white-on-white camo parka.

  Men like her target did not appreciate being spied on - even though she came only in search of information, and not to kill him, she had no doubt that if she were found on the property, things would get tense. Quick.

  As she took her binocs out of an inside pocket, she kept still and listened hard. No sounds of anything approaching from the back or the sides, and in front, she had a clear visual shot at the rear of the house.

  Ordinarily, when she was hired for one of these kinds of assignments, she operated at night. Not with this target.

  Masters of the drug trade conducted their business from nine to five, but that would be p. m. to a. m. , not the other way around. Daytime was when they slept and fucked, so that was when you wanted to case their houses, learn their habits, get a read on their staff and how they protected themselves during their downtime.

  Bringing the house into close focus, she made her assessment. Garage doors. Back door. Half windows that she guessed looked out of the kitchen. And then the full floor-to-ceiling glass sliders started up, running down the rear flank and around the corner that turned to the river's shoreline.

  Three stories up.

  Nothing moving inside that she could see.

  Man, that was a lot of glass. And depending on the angle of the light, she could actually see into some of the rooms, especially the big open space that appeared to take up at least half of the first floor. Furniture was sparse and modern, as if the owner didn't welcome people loitering.

  Bet the view was unbelievable. Especially now, with the partial cloud cover and the sun.

  Training the binocs on the eaves under the roofline, she looked for security cameras, expecting one every twenty feet.

  Yup.

  Okay, that made sense. From what she'd been told, the homeowner was cagey as hell - and that kind of relentless mistrust tended to be accessorized with a good dose of security-conscious behavior, including but not limited to personal guards, bulletproof cars, and most certainly, constant monitoring of any environment the individual spent any amount of time in.

  The man who'd hired her had all those and more, for example.

  "What the. . . " she whispered, refocusing the binoculars.

  She stopped breathing to make sure nothing shifted.

  This was. . . all wrong. There was a wave pattern to what was inside the house: What furniture she could see was subtly undulating.

  Dropping the high-powered lenses, she looked around, wondering if maybe her eyes were the problem.

  Nope. All the pine trees in the forest were behaving appropriately, standing still, their branches unmoving in the cold air. And when she put the magnifiers up again, she traced the rooftop of the house and the contours of the stone chimneys.

  All were utterly inanimate.

  Back to the glass.

  Inhaling deep, she held the oxygen in her lungs and balanced against the nearest birch trunk to give her body extra stability.

  Something continued to be off. The frames of those sliding glass doors and the lines of the porches and everything about the house? Static and solid. The interiors, however, seemed. . . pixilated somehow, like a composite image had been created to make things appear as if there were furniture. . . and that image had been superimposed on something like a curtain. . . that happened to be subjected to a soft current of air.

  This was going to be a more interesting project than she'd assumed. Reporting on the activities of this business associate of a "friend" of hers had not exactly lit a fire under her ass. She much preferred greater challenges.

  But maybe there was more to this than first appeared.

  After all, camouflage meant you were hiding something - and she'd made a career out of taking things from people that they wanted to keep: Secrets. Items of value. Information. Documents.

  The vocabulary used to define the nouns was irrelevant to her. The act of penetrating a locked house or car or safe or briefcase and extracting what she was after was what mattered.

  She was a hunter.

  And the man in that house, whoever he was, was her prey.