Free The Waiting Game by Unknown

entirely new to her.

    But an hour later as she lay in bed in the room next to Adrian’s Sara realized that, anticipation or not, sleep was not going to come easily that night. Adrian had succeeded in distracting her for a while, she decided ruefully, but now that she was alone again, too many jumbled thoughts were swirling in her head. Her mind skipped around from worries about her uncle and his "unfinished business" to memories of Adrian’s urgent kiss. She needed something to relax her.
    "Like a good book," she decided aloud, pushing back the covers. And she knew just where to get one.
    Padding barefoot across the carpet, her long cotton nightgown trailing behind her, Sara went to the suitcase in the corner. Opening it, she reached inside and removed the manuscript of Phantom that she had picked up off her uncle’s desk. For a moment her gaze rested thoughtfully on the sketch of the wolf in the upper corner, and then she told herself to ignore it. She was after relaxation, not added worry.
    A deep curiosity filled her as she climbed back into bed and started Phantom. Silently she admitted to herself that it was the desire to learn something more about the man she had spent the day with rather than a wish to see how the story ended that prompted the feeling. How much could you tell about a man by his writing, she wondered.
    On the surface, Phantom was high adventure. It involved the perilous race to retrieve a cache of gold that had been smuggled out of South Vietnam during the last, chaotic days of the war. The treasure had been hidden near the Cambodian border and had been inaccessible for years because it was simply too dangerous to go after it. Only a handful of men knew the location.
    As the story opened, it was learned that more than a treasure had been hidden. Secret documents that could destroy the career of a powerful government official had been buried along with the gold.
    Suddenly any risk was worth taking to retrieve the cache.
    The action was well plotted and moved with the swiftness of an avalanche, but what held Sara’s attention until nearly two in the morning was the inner conflict of the protagonist, the man called Phantom.
    He was portrayed as a man who had clearly reached the limits of his emotional and physical endurance.
    Too many years of tension and violence had taken a savage toll. Now he had been assigned one last job by the government agency for which he worked. He was told to retrieve the gold and the documents hidden with it. At any price.
    In the end the man called Phantom did the job he had been assigned to do, but it had nearly destroyed him. Then he had accidentally discovered that the incriminating documents buried with the gold constituted a shattering indictment of the man who ran the very agency for which he himself worked.
    The secret papers pointed at treason at the highest levels. Phantom had learned far too much. He had not been expected to survive his mission, but now that he had, his life was in jeopardy.
    By the time Sara finished the harrowing and emotionally gripping tale, she felt exhausted but not at all relaxed. The writing had been lean and stark, which didn’t surprise her. Adrian Saville struck her as the kind of man who wouldn’t use one more word than necessary to tell his story. But she was left with the same question she’d had when she’d begun reading. How much insight could you gain into a man by reading his fiction?
    Restlessly she restacked the manuscript pages and climbed back out of bed. She put Phantom back in the suitcase and turned to eye the rumpled sheets. She really didn’t feel like climbing back into bed just yet. The book had left her far too keyed up and strangely tense.
    On impulse she walked over to the sliding-glass door that opened onto the balcony and unlocked it.
    Taking a deep breath of the chilled mountain air, she stepped outside.
    "You should have been asleep hours ago."
    Sara jumped at the sound of Adrian’s voice. Whirling, she