Love with the Proper Stranger (18 page)

“John, you’ve got to forgive yourself for not dying with your friend.”

That was why he’d come here, wasn’t it? For absolution. For the relief of his soul. But he wanted relief for his body, too. He wanted it so badly he was afraid he’d give in to the temptation. God, it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.

He tried to pull free from her hands, well aware that her touch was giving him far more than comfort. Her touch was lighting him on fire, reminding him of the sweet oblivion that awaited him if only he gave in. He had to get out of here.

But she wouldn’t let him go. “It’s all right,” she murmured, her hands in his hair, on his face, soothing his shoulders and back. “Let it out, John. Let it go. It’s okay to feel angry and hurt. It’s okay to grieve. If you don’t, it’ll poison you. Just let it all go.”

Miller couldn’t stop himself. Mariah held him even more tightly as he clung to her desperately. Please, God, don’t let her kiss him. If she did, he’d be lost.

He closed his eyes as she began talking to him soothingly, softly, walking him through that same relaxation exercise she’d helped him with last week. And
once again, like last week, his exhaustion crashed down upon him.

He was barely conscious as she pulled him back onto the couch with her, her arms tightly around him, his back pressed against her front.

“Forgive yourself,” she murmured. “I’m sure Tony does.”

* * *

M
ARIAH COULDN’T SLEEP.

The couch wasn’t meant to hold two people lying down—especially not two people her and John’s size. But she wasn’t uncomfortable. In fact, she liked the sensation of John’s body pressed against hers, their legs intimately intertwined.

She liked it too much.

She listened to the steady, quiet rhythm of his breathing and cursed herself for being a fool.

At least she hadn’t had sex with him. Although, that was really only because he hadn’t asked. If he’d wanted to, she probably wouldn’t have been able to turn him down.

God, what had happened to her since that first morning she’d set eyes on this man? Where on earth had Jonathan Mills gotten the power to transform her so totally into some kind of doormat?

He stirred slightly, and she took the opportunity to pull her arm out from underneath him.

It was the cancer thing. The idea that this man had faced—and was still facing—the very real possibility of his imminent death did her in. His plight reduced her to a quivering mass of emotions and reactions.

It had to be that. Because she’d fallen in love before without losing her sense of self, her strength and…

Fallen in love.

She looked down at John’s face. He looked impossibly young, improbably innocent, his lips slightly parted in sleep.

She was in love with him.

Mariah knew in that instant that her doormat days were done. She was in love, and yet she was more unhappy than she’d ever been in her entire life. She hadn’t felt this bad even while she was going through her divorce from Trevor.

She couldn’t do this to herself anymore.

She wasn’t crazy. And yet here she was, holding John while he slept when she knew for a fact that he’d been sharing more than meals with Serena. From now on, he was going to have to go to Serena for the comfort he needed to get him through the blackest hours of the night.

Mariah peeled herself away from him, climbing off the couch. He stirred again, but he didn’t wake up as she stood there, looking down at him.

She should have felt better. Pushing him away from her like that should have been empowering.

But without his body next to hers, warming her, all Mariah felt was cold.

* * *

S
HE CAME BACK TO THE HOTEL
quite late. She’d closed the bar down, drinking and dancing.

Her dress smelled of smoke and sweat, and she peeled it off, letting it fall in a heap on the soft, expensive carpeting. She wouldn’t take it with her when she left in the morning.

She was going to have to go back. She needed that
negative. Except the stupid cow hadn’t sounded as if she was going to go out of her way to get it back from…

Where was it she kept her negatives? B&W Photo Lab. Just over on the mainland from Garden Isle. It would be easy enough to find, easy enough to walk in there and get hold of her entire collection of negatives.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror and stopped for a moment to admire her body, her face.

She’d had plastic surgery to remove all but one of her scars. One she kept—a little one, just along the line of her left eyebrow.

The first one had done that to her. The first one had given her all her scars—at least all the scars that her father before him hadn’t given her.

She closed her eyes, remembering the thrill she had felt when the policeman had come to her door, waking her in the middle of the night to tell her that the first one was dead. A car accident. He’d drunk himself into a stupor, and instead of coming home and beating her to a pulp, he’d driven his car into a tree.

The undertaker’s wife, mistaking her round-the-clock vigilance at his coffin for grief, cut her a lock of his hair to remember him by.

But it hadn’t been grief keeping her there—it had been fear. Fear that unless she watched him, unless she made damn sure he stayed right there in that wooden box until they nailed it shut, he might somehow escape. He might jump up and run away and come back to haunt her.

She’d nearly thrown the hair into the toilet, but on second thought, she’d kept it, wrapped in cellophane, at the bottom of her jewelry box.

The insurance money, along with a stash she’d found
in a suitcase in the garage, had been enough to get her to St. Thomas. She’d picked herself a new name, afraid that whoever owned the money that had been in that suitcase would come looking for her.

That was when she’d met the second one.

He was rich and old and nearly as mean as the first one. Except the abuse
he
dished out wasn’t physical. And when a piece of chicken caught in his throat during dinner, she had stood by and watched him choke.

She didn’t call for help. She just watched—watched the look in his eyes as he knew she would do nothing to save him, watched as he realized he was, indeed, going to die. She’d liked it—liked the power, liked the feeling of control.

The third one she’d married with the intention of killing.

It had been laughably easy. She was so much smarter than all of them.

Smarter than Jonathan Mills, who wasn’t really named Jonathan Mills.

She knew that sooner or later the police would try to trap her. She’d been watching for them. She’d been ready. And when she’d found their clumsily hidden microphones all over her house, she knew that Jonathan Mills had been sent to stop her.

Instead, she’d escaped.

She climbed between the crisp hotel sheets, feeling a flare of regret.

She would have liked pushing her knife blade into Jonathan Mills’s heart.

CHAPTER NINE

M
ILLER OPENED HIS EYES
to the sound of the telephone ringing.

It was daylight. Bright, gleaming morning. The sun had been up for at least an hour and he simply lay for a moment on the couch, staring up at the light playing across the ceiling, hazily wondering why that should seem such an amazing thing.

“Yes.” He heard a soft voice from the other room. “Yes, he’s here. I’ll see if he’s awake.”

Then he heard the sound of footsteps coming into the living room, and he sat up, automatically raking his hair back with one hand, pushing it from his forehead. Except the hair his fingers connected with was shockingly short, and he remembered instantly both where he was and who he was supposed to be.

Dear God, he’d slept all night again. This time, without even a trace of his nightmare.

“Phone’s for you,” Mariah said quietly, handing him a cordless telephone.

She didn’t meet his gaze. She hardly looked at him at all.

Miller quickly played back the previous evening in his mind. God knows he had plenty to be embarrassed about, what with breaking down and crying the way
he’d done. But he couldn’t recall a single thing Mariah had done that should make her so uncomfortable.

She hadn’t even kissed him.

God help him—he’d somehow managed to spend all that time here last night without ever kissing Mariah. Although he had a very definite memory of falling asleep cradled in the softness of her arms.

He brought the telephone to his ear, still watching Mariah as she opened the sliders to let in the fresh morning air. Last night’s coolness remained, but it wouldn’t for long, not in the heat from the sun. She stayed for a moment, just looking out at the ocean, her fatigue evident in the way she stood, in the set of her shoulders.

He might have slept well last night, but she clearly hadn’t.

“Yeah?” Miller said into the phone.

“John, it’s Daniel. I’m sorry to have to call you there, but Serena appears to have gone for good.”

Miller didn’t move a muscle. He just sat and watched Mariah watch the ocean. “Based on…?”

“Based on the fact that yesterday she notified her rental agent that she was terminating her lease agreement. Her place is empty, John. All her things are cleared out. I went over there early this morning. All the surveillance microphones are still in place—it doesn’t look as if she touched any of them, but that doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got to believe she found ’em, got spooked and ran.”

Miller swore sharply. Mariah glanced back at him, but quickly looked away. “Call Pat Blake,” he told Daniel. “Advise him of the situation and then get back to me.”

He should’ve proposed marriage to Serena yesterday at lunch, when he’d had the chance. But he’d hesitated, and now she was gone. And in his experience, when a suspect fled, that suspect was gone for good.

The case was over—at least this stage of it was—with the suspect still at large. But other than that first sharp flash of annoyance, all Miller felt was relief. Because, for the first time in his life, he had found something that he wanted even more than he wanted to solve this case.

He’d found Mariah.

He pushed the button to disconnect the phone, then set it on the end table. He stood up stiffly, stretching out his legs and back. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

Mariah turned to face him. “No, of course I don’t,” she said stiffly, politely. “But afterward, I think you should leave.”

He froze mid-stretch. Leave?

He’d found Mariah—who wanted him to leave.

She turned swiftly, disappearing into the kitchen.

It was too damned ironic. For the first time since he’d met her, Miller finally felt free. True, the case wasn’t officially over. He couldn’t tell her who he was or what he’d been up to—not yet anyway. But he could pull her into his arms and kiss her without knowing for damn sure that she was going to end up hurt.

Miller didn’t believe in happily ever after. He had no misconceptions regarding his ability to make Mariah happy in the long run. He knew damn well that kind of future wasn’t in his cards. But he was sure that he could make her smile in the short term. He was
very
sure of that.

He went into the bathroom, relieved himself, then
washed up. As he splashed cold water on his face, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Despite the sleep he’d gotten, he still looked tired. For the first time in years, he found himself longing to crawl back into bed. For the first time in years, sleep beckoned invitingly instead of looming over him dangerously, like some snarling, vicious beast.

With Serena out of the picture, he had nothing to do, nowhere to go—at least not until Daniel contacted Pat Blake. Knowing Blake, he’d call a meeting, maybe even come down here himself to inspect the scene of the disaster firsthand. But that wouldn’t be for hours, maybe even days.

Mariah wanted him to leave, but Miller wanted to stay. And for the first time, he
could
stay.

He took a deep breath before he opened the bathroom door. Mariah was in the kitchen. He could hear the sound of water running.

“I gave Princess some water,” she told him without even looking up as he paused in the doorway.

“Thanks,” he said. He hesitated, suddenly oddly embarrassed, a picture of the way he’d wept last night flashing into his head. “And thanks… for last night, too. I feel…” He smiled crookedly. “I feel
okay
.”

Mariah turned to face him then. “You slept for a long time.”

He nodded. “First time in over two years I’ve slept through the sunrise.”

“You never let yourself grieve for him before, did you?” she asked quietly, talking about Tony.

Miller squinted slightly as he looked out the window at the brightness of the day. “No.”

“It wasn’t your fault that he died.”

He shook his head very slightly. “No. No, it wasn’t.” He laughed very softly. “I know it wasn’t. Logically. Rationally. I guess I just don’t quite
believe
it wasn’t.” He paused, gazing at her, feeling that familiar ache of longing. He wanted to pull her into his arms, but she was sending out all kinds of signals warning him to keep his distance. “Maybe you could help me work on that.”

“Gee, I’m sorry, but I can’t.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be your therapist anymore, John,” she said bluntly. “What you’re dealing with isn’t going to be solved by breaking plates or silly little relaxation exercises. You need to find someone professional who can really help you. And I…” Her voice broke. “I need you to stay away from me. I can’t pretend to be your friend anymore. Maybe that’s petty of me, because I know you really need me as a friend, but I can’t do this anymore. I respect myself too much to play this crazy game with you. Do you want me or don’t you? Every time I think that you do, you back away. And just when I’m convinced that you don’t, you look at me like… like…
that
. Don’t look at me like that, dammit, because I’m not going to play anymore. I want you to leave.”

He stepped toward her. “Mariah—”

Mariah lifted her chin, folding her arms across her chest, holding her ground despite the tears that filled her eyes. “The door’s in the other direction.”