Love with the Proper Stranger (27 page)

“Take it,” Miller said. “
Now
!”

Mariah didn’t want that gun. She knew damn well there was no way she could aim it at Serena and pull the trigger.

But John dropped it into her hand as he used both of his legs and kicked the enormous table onto its side. A shot rang out as he tipped his chair over in front of her, and Mariah realized Serena was shooting at them. She lifted the gun, closed her eyes and squeezed the trigger.

The recoil knocked the gun out of her hands and she screamed.

Miller tried to shield Mariah as the shot she fired went wild. He could feel the dry wood of the old chair he was cuffed to splintering, and he pulled himself free of it.

His wounded arm should have hurt like hell as he contorted to slip his cuffed hands past his legs and around to the front of him, but he didn’t feel even a twinge, thanks to the morphine Serena had given him. Weakness as strength. He was superhuman now. Nothing
could hurt him, nothing could stop him—not even Serena’s bullets.

He felt the force of one plow into his leg as he covered Mariah with his body, as he reached for the gun she had fired and dropped. He felt another bullet strike him as he took aim, and he saw Serena’s eyes as she realized that only a direct hit to his head would take him down.

He fired.

And Serena fell instead, her gun falling from her hand.

In the sudden silence, he could hear the sound of sirens.

It was the sound of fire trucks, rushing to extinguish the blaze that once had been Mariah’s cottage.

But they didn’t stop down the street. They came all the way up the hill, all the way into the driveway. He heard the door burst open, heard the pounding sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs.

He leaned back, resting against the toppled-over table as Mariah tried to stop his bleeding.

Backup had arrived. Somehow Daniel had managed to call for backup, and they had arrived.

“I’m going to close my eyes now,” he told Mariah.

“Don’t,” she said, tears in her own eyes. “Please, John, don’t quit on me. Stay with me—”

He touched her cheek. It was wet with tears. “Don’t cry. I never meant to make you cry. I’m so sorry,” he murmured. “So sorry…” I love you, he wanted to say, but his lips didn’t seem to be able to move.

“We need that stretcher up here stat!” he heard someone shout as the world went black.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
T WAS THIRTY-SIX HOURS
, seventeen minutes and nine seconds before John opened his eyes.

Mariah knew, because she’d been counting every second. The nurses had brought in a cot for her, and she’d slept fitfully, not convinced that she would be roused if John woke up.

But he hadn’t.

He had an IV dripping steadily into his right arm. He was hooked up to machines that monitored his heart rate and his breathing. Doctors came and went, seemingly satisfied with his progress despite the fact that he slept on and on and on.

Daniel came to before John did, and he sat quietly for a while, next to Mariah. He told her about Serena, about all her other husbands, about the years John had spent tracking her down. He told her how, after Mariah had left him in the car, he’d roused himself and crawled out into the rain. He’d forced himself to keep awake, keep moving, and eventually, he’d flagged down a passing car. The driver had taken him to the Garden Isle police station, where a team of local cops had donned their bulletproof vests and driven like bats out of hell to John and Mariah’s rescue.

Except by the time they’d arrived at Serena’s place,
John and Mariah had pretty much managed to rescue themselves.

He told her that Serena was in custody, expected to recover from her gunshot wound. He added that her real name was Janice Reed and that they’d found her keepsake collection of hair, which tied her to nearly a dozen murders.

Daniel managed to answer only some of Mariah’s questions. He said she’d have to wait for John to answer the others. Before John woke up, Daniel had been discharged from the hospital and he’d returned to the resort to finish packing their equipment.

And still Mariah sat next to John’s bed.

Then, finally, he stirred and opened his eyes.

He just looked at her, and she just looked at him, fighting back the tears that immediately sprang to her eyes.

“You’re not dead,” he said when he finally spoke, and she realized that there were tears in his eyes, too. “I’m not really sure what I dreamed and what was real, but I’m glad as hell that you’re not dead.”

His mouth was dry, and she helped him by lifting the cup of water the nurses had left for him. She aimed the bendable straw so he could pull it into his mouth and take a long sip.

“My real name is Marie Carver,” she told him without hesitation, “although my nickname has always been Mariah. I’ve spent the past few months on Garden Isle using the name Mariah Robinson because I read in a book that going on vacation and leaving your name behind was a good way to reduce stress.”

He smiled very slightly as she put the cup back on
the table next to the bed. “It’s also a good way to make the local law enforcement officials very suspicious.”

“I never even thought of that.” She paused. “You didn’t really think I was… a killer?”

“We pretty much knew it was Serena right from the start.”

“I can’t believe you married someone you suspected of being a serial killer! Is that part of your job description as an FBI agent?”

He laughed, then winced, holding tightly to his side where one of Serena’s bullets had cracked a rib. “No. No, that was above and beyond the call of duty.”

Mariah was quiet for a moment. She almost didn’t ask, but she had to know. “How could you… sleep with her, knowing that she’d killed all her other husbands?”

He took her hand, interlacing their fingers. “I didn’t sleep with her—I didn’t want to sleep with her. Besides, I promised you that I wouldn’t, remember? I told her I was impotent—that my condition was a side effect of my chemotherapy.”

Mariah gazed into his eyes. Chemotherapy. Cancer. “You never really had cancer,” she realized aloud. “That was all just part of your cover.”

He nodded. “That’s right. I’m sorry—”

“Sorry?” She laughed, leaning forward to kiss him hard on the mouth. “Are you kidding? That’s
such
good news! It makes all this hell we’ve just been through worth it. You’re not going to die!”

Her reaction was pure Mariah. She was focusing on the good, not the bad. Miller felt his heart flip-flop in his chest. God, he loved her.

He caught her chin, pulling her mouth down to his for another kiss. This kiss was more lingering, and
when she pulled away, her eyes looked so serious, so solemn.

“I don’t even know your real name,” she told him.

“It’s John Miller.”

“I don’t know anything about you—who you are, where you’re from—”

“Yes, you do,” he told her. “You know more about me than anyone in the world. I told you more than I’ve ever told Daniel. More than Tony ever knew.”

“Tony was real?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She looked down at their hands, their fingers still intertwined. “Serena said you were only using me to get close to her.”

“If you really believe that, what are you doing here, sitting next to my bed?”

She looked up at him then. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “I honestly don’t know. I just… I had to know you were all right before I… left.”

Before she left. God, he didn’t want her to leave. But if she
was
going to leave, he wanted her to know the truth.

Miller took a deep breath. “I did meet you to get close to Serena,” he told her. “Yes, that’s true. But I kept coming back—I couldn’t stay away—because I fell in love with you.”

Her eyes were so wide, so beautiful.

“I love you, Mariah,” he told her quietly. “I have almost from the very first day we met. I made a lot of mistakes in this case—even though I tried my damnedest to keep away from you, I couldn’t. And when Serena left the island, I was so sure she had gone for good. And then after we made love, and she came back…” He exhaled
noisily. “I made some very wrong choices. I knew that marrying her would hurt you, but I couldn’t stand the thought of letting her get away, and I nearly got you killed because of that.”

He took a deep breath, afraid that what he was about to say was going to drive her away for good. “You see, that’s who I am,” he continued. “I’m a man who can’t stand to fail. I have a record of arrests that’s unrivaled in the bureau. I have a reputation for always catching the bad guys, for never letting them get away. I’m supposed to be some kind of superhero—the toughest and meanest in the field. I have a nickname—the other agents call me ‘The Robot,’ because nothing matters to me outside of my job. They think I have no heart and no soul, and maybe they’re right, because the truth is I have no life outside of the work I do. I have no family and no friends—”

“Daniel is your friend.”

Miller nodded. “Yeah. I don’t get it, but yeah. He’s my friend.”

“I’m your friend, too.”

Miller had to swallow. He had to take another deep breath before he could say, “That’s all I can really ask. That you be my friend.”

She was very quiet, just watching him.

“I had this crazy dream,” he told her, “that morning we made love. I was thinking, this could be my life. I thought, maybe I could feel this good every single day. This woman could love me, and I could become this peaceful, relaxed, happy man. I could be so much more than I’ve ever been before—than I’d ever thought I’d be. And I could picture us, forty years from now, still
making love, still holding hands, still laughing together. I really liked that picture.”

Mariah’s heart was in her throat as he looked away from her, as he was silent for several long moments. As she watched, he swallowed hard, and when he looked back up at her, his eyes were luminous with unshed tears.

“But I’m not that man. I’m ‘The Robot.’ And I don’t blame you if you can’t love me—if you don’t want to love me. I’m hard, and I’m driven, and my job matters too damn much to me. I wouldn’t wish myself on anyone—maybe especially not on you.” He took another deep breath and forced a smile as he squeezed her hand. “So, go on. Get out of here. You’ve seen for yourself that I’m okay. You can leave.”

Mariah couldn’t move, couldn’t speak.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m okay. I’m just… I’m glad I had the chance to love you. To, you know, know that I could actually feel this way and…”

One of his tears escaped, rolling down his cheek and splashing onto Mariah’s hand. He swore, turning away and tightly closing his eyes. But that only served to make more of his tears fall.

“John,” Mariah said quietly, gently touching his face. “Robots don’t cry.” She leaned forward and kissed him and when she pulled back, she whispered, “What would Jonathan Mills think if I told him that I made a mistake, too? What would he say if I told him that really, all this time, I’ve been in love with a man named John Miller?”

He could feel all his emotions cross his face. Disbelief. Amazement. Confusion. Jubilation. She loved him. She
loved
him!

He made a sound that was something like a laugh as he fought to keep his eyes from filling with tears again. And then he didn’t fight anymore. Hell, with Mariah, he didn’t need to fight it. He wanted her to know, wanted her to see the way she made him feel.

“He would wish you the best of luck,” he told her, “and he would warn you that with me, you’re probably going to need it.”

Mariah touched his cheek, touched the tear he knew was shimmering there. “And what do
you
think about that?”

“I think that if you still have the urge to change your name, you should consider changing it to Miller.”

He’d caught her off guard. “Are you asking me to
marry
you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am.”

This time, the tears that fell were Mariah’s. “Yes,” she whispered, “I’d love to change my name.” She leaned forward and kissed him.

It was the sweetest kiss Miller had ever known.

* * * * *

Excerpt

K
ATIE STEPPED INTO
the darkness of the master bedroom and screamed a little as strong arms came out of nowhere to sweep her up against a hard body. “Gotcha. I win,” Alex announced. “You are the worst spy ever.”

“Mmm, but I’m the softest and sexiest and love you the best.”

“True,” he agreed as his mouth closed over hers.

The explosive attraction that had simmered between them before erupted, crackling like chain lightning across her skin, striking farther and farther inside her as their kiss deepened. Craving twisted her innards into tight knots of desire. She could never seem to get enough of him.

Her clothes went every which way as the passion overtook them, and frantic urgency spurred them onward. Naked and devouring each other, they fell onto his bed. She’d have laughed, except he speared his hand into her hair and pulled her head back so he could plunder her neck and shoulder with teeth and tongue, and the laugh became a gasp of pleasure instead.

He took control tonight, demanding ever more response from her as he kissed and stroked and nipped his way across her flesh. Where she was cold, he was hot. Where she was soft, he was hard. And where she was hungry, he starved her for more.

With hands and mouth, he played her body, using his knowledge of her pleasures and desires to drive her into a frenzy of blind lust. She needed to have him crushing her into the mattress, to fill her body with his, to feel his power and desire as he pounded into her…oh, yes. She needed all of that in the worst way.

But frustratingly, he withheld it from her tonight. Instead, he kissed his way down her body until she gasped with need. His tongue circled her most sensitive bud, wet and hot and maddening until a climax started to claw its way out of her belly. And then his mouth withdrew.

“Tell me something, Katie. How bad do you want this?”

Oh, no
. “Um, bad enough to beg?”

“Is that all?” he murmured in disappointment.

“Bad enough to do anything you want?” she tried.