Love with the Proper Stranger (24 page)

She’d fallen off her bike on her way down the hill and scraped one elbow and both knees. But she hadn’t cried. She
refused
to cry.

She cleaned up her scrapes in the bathroom, then took her suitcases down from the bedroom closet. She packed most of her clothes before she found herself here, breaking plates.

John had broken his promise.

Clearly, when he’d made it, that promise had meant nothing to him.
She
had meant nothing to him. He’d no doubt made love to her—no, not made love, had sex. It had been nothing more than sex, with the intention
of never seeing her again. He’d probably already made his wedding plans with Serena.

Another piece of china hit the wall, shattering into a thousand pieces, just the way her heart had been broken.

And Mariah couldn’t hold back her tears any longer. She crumpled onto the basement floor and cried.

* * *

“C
AN YOU HEAR ME
?” Miller said into the flower vase, making an adjustment to the miniature receiver he wore in his right ear.

“Roger,” Daniel said from his position about a quarter mile to the south of the house. “Let’s check those babies in the dining room once more before we move on into the bedroom.”

Miller went into the elegant dining room where he’d planted a number of nearly invisible microphones underneath the huge table, along the sideboard, on several of the chairs and on the edges of one or two picture frames.

He stood in the center of the room. “Do you have me?”

“Loud and clear,” came Daniel’s reply. “Hang on a sec. Just let me fine tune this puppy… Got it.”

The surveillance device in Daniel’s car had been designed to look like nothing more than an intricate and expensive car stereo system. It was incredibly complicated to program—Miller was glad Daniel was the one doing it. He preferred the straightforward equipment that came inside the tinted glass of a surveillance van.

He wouldn’t be able to wear his in-ear receiver tonight. Not as long as there was a possibility that Serena might find it.

“You know, I’m going to be fine here tonight. You could do this surveillance in comfort from the resort. She’s not going to try anything until my bank transfers that money into her account,” Miller told his partner.

“Yeah, I know,” Daniel said. “I’d just feel better being close—at least for now. There’s something in the air that’s making my hair stand on end.”

“Storm’s coming,” Miller said, moving to look out the window at the ocean.

A bank of dark clouds was gathering on the horizon. The late-afternoon sun was still shining, but the air was heavy with humidity and hard to breathe.

“Yeah, maybe that’s it,” Daniel said. “Whatever the case, I’ll be out here, mainlining coffee and listening to every word you say. So don’t say or do anything you don’t want me to hear.”

That
wasn’t going to be a problem. Miller found himself gazing down at the roof of Mariah’s house. Was she in there right now, tearing all her pictures of him into tiny shreds? Was she in her bedroom, packing up her clothes and her CDs and her funny little speaker that made such realistic-sounding water noises?
Imagine yourself in a special place…

“Any sign of Mrs. Mills?” Daniel asked.

Miller snapped himself back to the present, listening hard for any signs of movement in the house. When Serena had announced that she was taking a walk on the beach, he’d begged off. He claimed fatigue, but in fact wanted to use the opportunity to plant and test the surveillance system. He’d managed to get quite a number of the nearly invisible mikes placed while she was there in the house, but it was much easier doing it
this way. He looked at his watch. Serena had left fifteen minutes ago. It was entirely possible that she was on her way back.

“I, um, haven’t exactly been keeping track,” he admitted.

There was a long silence from Daniel’s end of the line. “John, I need you here one hundred percent,” he finally said. “If you can’t do that—”

Miller cleared his throat. “Look, Daniel,
I
need you to run over to Mariah’s and encourage her to leave the island. Can you do that for me?”

“I’m a step ahead of you,” Daniel told him. “I tapped into the phone lines and I’ve been monitoring her outgoing calls. It occurred to me that she might be in a position to jeopardize your cover if she decided to share with Serena the fact that you and she spent the night together on the eve of your wedding.” He paused. “I may be assuming too much here, but I know that you like this lady an awful lot. That and your lateness to the meeting with Blake clued me in to the fact that you and she—”

“What’s your point?”

“The fact is, she
is
leaving. I heard her call for a taxi for this evening. For seven o’clock. She asked for a cab with plenty of trunk room. She told the dispatcher she had quite a bit of luggage.”

“Thank God.” Miller closed his eyes in relief. Mariah was leaving the island. He could stop worrying about her safety. He knew it was highly unlikely that Serena would hurt anyone other than her targeted victim. Still, he would breathe easier with Mariah off the island.

He would stop worrying about her, but he wouldn’t stop thinking about her—and wondering if the truth would be enough to make up for the heartbreak.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

L
IGHTNING FORKED ACROSS
the sky, thunder boomed and the power flickered and went out.

Mariah swore like a sailor, bumping her shins on her suitcases as she felt her way into the kitchen where she knew there was a candle over near the toaster.

The matches were a little bit harder to locate, and with the candle held tightly in one hand, she felt along the counter with the other. She found the book of matches on the windowsill and lit the candle.

It had been burned down pretty far. Mariah estimated she had only about an hour or two of wax left at most. After that, it was going to be very, very dark in here.

But the kitchen clock was stopped at 5:37. With luck, her cab would arrive before the candle burned completely down.

She took the softly glowing light back downstairs into her darkroom. That was the last of the rooms she had left to pack. Her clothes were all ready to go, and she was going to leave what was left of her food behind for the cleaning lady.

She gazed around the darkroom at all of her photographic supplies—at the pictures of John, long since dried.

Tears filled her eyes, and she shook her head in disgust.
She’d thought she’d already cried herself dry. She had, she tried to convince herself. These tears were just leftovers—kind of like an earthquake’s aftershocks.

She’d cried, she’d gotten it out of her system and she was okay now. So she’d made a bad call. She’d guessed wrong, misjudged someone. Life was going to go on.

She could hear the rain pelting against the roof. Mariah thought about the Washburtons’ house. She thought about the way she’d worked on that roof all yesterday afternoon, along with nearly two dozen other volunteers. They’d all worked in perfect cooperation, their common goal to get the job done and done well.

If she left Garden Isle, she wouldn’t be able to see the completion of that house. She wouldn’t go to the housewarming, wouldn’t watch Frank and Loretta Washburton’s eyes fill with joy and pride as they welcomed friends and Triple F workers into their home.

If she left, she would be leaving behind the friends she made, the work team she’d come to know so well. Laronda. There couldn’t possibly be another site coordinator as cool as Laronda.

If she left Garden Isle, if she let herself be pushed out, chased away from her great-great-grandmother’s childhood home, she’d never forgive herself.

Why should
she
be the one who was forced to leave? If Jonathan Mills was uncomfortable living two doors away from her, let
him
be the one to move.

Hell, she had the rent on this cottage paid through to the end of the month.

Thunder boomed, and she knew she was only kidding herself. What was she going to do? March up to John and Serena’s house, interrupt their honeymoon and demand that they leave?

No, she couldn’t do that, but she could just stay here, quietly keeping to herself-and feeling like crap every time John or Serena’s car drove past, praying that she wouldn’t run into them in the supermarket, dreading seeing them together on the beach, knowing that she still wanted him.

She still wanted him.

Jonathan Mills was a son of a bitch. The fact that he was confused, that he was tormented by painful nightmares, that he was stressed out from the strain of dealing with a potentially terminal illness—none of that gave him the right to make love to her one night and then marry Serena the next.

Yet she still ached for his touch.

She was a fool.

With a sigh, Mariah began packing up her darkroom equipment by candlelight, deciding what she had to take and what could be left behind.

Yes, she could refuse to leave the island. But as much as she hated the thought of slinking away, beaten down and defeated, she wasn’t into self-torture.

She tossed the photos of Jonathan Mills into the trash can. Those could definitely be left behind.

* * *

“W
OW, THIS IS FANCY
.” M
ILLER
stepped into the candlelit dining room.

Serena had cooked a gourmet meal and set one end of the heavy wooden table with elegant china place settings, a myriad of wineglasses and what looked to be the entire silverware drawer. There were salad forks, shrimp cocktail forks, dinner forks, dessert forks.

Miller had to wonder—was she actually planning to
serve dessert tonight, or did she have something a little more macabre up her sleeve?

Actually, she wasn’t wearing any sleeves. The dress she wore was black and sleeveless, timelessly chic, complete with an innocent-looking string of pearls around her neck.

“Fortunately, we have a gas stove,” she told him as she opened a decanter of wine and poured them each a glass. “Or we’d be sending out to McDonald’s for double cheeseburgers.” She smiled at him. “And
that
wouldn’t have done at all. I wanted this meal to be… special.”

Special. The Black Widow’s M.O.—
her
M.O.—was to serve her husband an elegant gourmet meal, drug him so that he couldn’t fight back, then stab him in the heart shortly after the main course.

His nerves were strung much too tightly. Miller was as certain as he could possibly be that, just as he’d reassured Daniel that afternoon, Serena wasn’t going to try to kill him tonight. It was too soon. She would wait until she had his money in hand—to do otherwise would be outside of her pattern, outside of her rules. And serial killers of this type rarely strayed from their set of rules.

“You should have told me we were going to have a formal meal,” Miller said for Daniel’s benefit. “I would have dressed for dinner.”

Serena handed him one of the two wineglasses. “Let’s have a toast, shall we?”

Right then and there, Miller knew he’d been dead wrong. She’d poured him a glass of red wine, but it smelled much too sweet and the liquid in the glass was much too thick. Opium. She was trying to drug him by
putting opium in the wine. Right now. Tonight. Without having received a penny from him, she was preparing to kill him.

“I don’t feel very much like red wine tonight,” he said, setting the glass down on the dinner table.

Serena smiled at him. “Let’s not be cute,” she said. When she put her own glass down, he realized she was holding a gun. The rules were all changing, and changing fast.

“Is that a gun?” he said.

She laughed. “Yes, it’s a gun,” she told him. She raised her voice slightly. “Did you hear that, Daniel? Or, oh my. Maybe you’re not listening. Maybe you’re not
able
to listen. Maybe someone smarter than you
and
your partner waited until the call of nature pulled you out of that car you’ve been sitting in. Maybe someone much smarter sweetened that coffee you’ve been drinking to stay alert all night long—sweetened it with more than sugar. Maybe you’re leaning against the steering wheel right now, drooling, about to slide into a narcotic coma. Eventually you’ll just stop breathing, poor thing. What a shame to die so young….”

Miller took a step toward her and she lifted the gun, aiming directly for his head. “Sit down at the table,” she ordered. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”

He slowly sat down. Sitting down was good. It put his hands that much closer to the gun he had hidden in his boot.

“Hands on the table,” she warned.

If she would only get close enough, if she would stop aiming directly at his head, he might have a chance to go for his gun. But she was carefully keeping her distance. Her aim seemed sure, her hands steady. Outside
the windows, lightning flashed and thunder roared, but she seem oblivious, almost inhuman in her concentration.

But she may have finally met her match because there was no way in hell he was going to let Daniel die. No
way
.

“Drink the wine,” she ordered him.

“No.”

“Funny, I don’t believe I phrased that as a yes or no question.”

“I’m not drinking it.”

She closed one eye as she aimed her gun and fired.

The slap of the bullet going into his arm nearly knocked Miller out of the chair. She
shot
him. He didn’t let his disbelief get in his way as he went with the force of the bullet, pushing back his chair and landing on the floor, hoping to get a chance to grab that gun from his boot. But the chance never came as Serena moved around the table, aiming her gun at his head. He swore sharply as pain from his wounded arm rocketed through him.

“Get up.” From somewhere, she’d procured a pair of regulation handcuffs. “Sit down. Put your hands behind you.”

Miller sat back in another chair, aware of blood streaming down his left arm, aware of the teeth-clenching pain, aware of Serena’s gun aimed, once again, directly at his head. He no longer had any doubts that she would use it. And once one of those bullets smashed into his brain, he’d be of absolutely no help to Daniel or anyone else.