Suzanne Brockmann - Unstoppable

“Hey.” Somehow he managed to make his voice sound friendly—and as if he wasn’t thinking about how incredible it would be to reenact that famous beach scene in From Here to Eternity with this woman right here and now. “Where’ve you been all day?”

“Were you looking for me?” She couldn’t hide the pleasure in her voice or the spark of attraction in her eyes.

Miller felt that same twinge of something disquieting and he forced it away. So she liked him. Big deal. “I came by this morning,” he told her.

The waves tugged again at her shorts, and she came all the way out of the water to stand self-consciously, dripping on the sand. She had no towel to cover herself this time, and she was obviously uncomfortable about that. But she leaned over to greet Princess, enthusiastically rubbing the dog’s ears.

“I went over to the mainland,” she told Miller, rinsing her hands in the ocean. “I volunteer for Foundations for Families, and I was working at a building site. We got the vinyl siding up today.”

“Foundations for Families?”

She nodded, squeezing the water out of her ponytail with one hand. “It’s an organization that builds quality homes for people with low incomes. The houses are affordable because of the low-interest mortgages Triple F arranges, and because volunteers actually build the houses alongside the future home owners.”

Miller had heard of the group. “I thought you had to be a carpenter or an electrician or a professional roofer to volunteer.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “And how do you know I’m not one?”

Miller covered his sudden flare of alarm with a laugh. She wasn’t challenging him or questioning him. She hadn’t suddenly realized he knew all about her background through his FBI files. She was teasing. So he teased her back. “Obviously because I’m a sexist bastard who archaically thinks that only men can be carpenters or electricians or roofers. I apologize, Miz Robinson. I stand guilty as charged.”

Mariah smiled. “Well, now that you’ve confessed, I can tell you that I’m not a carpenter. Although I am well on my way to being a professional roofer. I’ve helped do ten roofs since I got here a couple of months ago. I’m not afraid of heights, so I somehow always end up working there.”

“How many days a week do you do this?”

“Three or four,” she told him. “Sometimes more if there’s a building blitz scheduled.”

“A building blitz?”

“That’s when we push really hard to get one phase of the project finished. Today we blitzed the siding. We’ve had weeklong blitzes when we start and finish an entire house inside and out.” She glanced at him. “If you’re interested, you could come along with me next time I go. I’ve got tomorrow off, but I’m working again the day after that.”

“I’d like that,” he said quietly. The uneasiness was back—this time not because he was deceiving her, but because his words rang with too much truth. He would like it. A lot.

Means to an end, he reminded himself. Mariah Robinson was merely the means to meeting—and catching—Serena Westford.

But Mariah smiled almost shyly into his eyes and he found himself comparing them to whiskey—smoky and light brown and intoxicatingly warming.

“Well, good. I leave early in the morning—the van picks me up at six. You could either meet me here or downtown in front of the library.” She looked away from him and glanced up at the sky. The high, dappled clouds were streaked with the pink of the setting sun. “Look at how pretty that is,” she breathed.

She was mostly turned away from him, and he was struck by the soft curve of her cheek. Her skin would feel so smooth beneath his fingers, beneath his lips. Her own lips were slightly parted as she gazed raptly out at the water, at the red-orange fingers of clouds extending nearly to the horizon, lit by the sun setting to the west, to their backs.

And then Miller followed her gaze and looked at the sky. The clouds were colored in every hue of pink and orange imaginable. It was beautiful. When was the last time he’d stopped to look at a sunset?

“My mother loved sunsets,” he said, before he even realized he was speaking. God, what was he telling her? About his mother…?

But she’d turned to look at him, her eyes still so warm. “Past tense,” she said. “Is she…?”

“She died when I was a kid,” he told her, pretending that he had only said that because he was looking for that flare of compassion he knew was going to appear in her eyes. Serena Westford, he reminded himself. Mariah was a means to an end.

Jackpot. Her eyes softened as he knew they would. She was an easy target. He was used to manipulating hardened, suspicious criminals. Compared to them, Mariah Robinson was laughably easy to control. One mention of his poor dead mother—never mind that it was true—and her eyes damn near became filled with tears.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured. She actually reached for his hand and gently squeezed his fingers before she let him go.

“She always wanted to go to Key West,” Miller said, watching her eyes. “She thought it was really great that the people on Key West celebrate every single sunset—that they stop and watch and just sit quietly for a few minutes every evening. God, I haven’t thought about that in years.”

Mariah gave him another gentle smile, and he knew he was lying to himself. He was doing it again. This was his background, his history, not Jonathan Mills’s cover story. He was telling her about his mother because he wanted to tell her. He’d known Tony for nearly two decades, and the topic had never come up in their conversations. Not even once. He knew this girl, what? Two days? And he was telling her about his mother’s craziest dream.

They’d planned to rent a car and drive all the way from New Haven down to Key West. But then she’d gone and died.

Mariah was silent, just watching the sky as the last of the light slipped away. Who was controlling whom? Miller had to wonder.

“Do you have plans for this evening?” he asked.

She turned to scoop her T-shirt up off the sand. “A friend wanted me to go barhopping, but I turned her down. That’s not exactly my idea of fun. Besides, I’m beat. I’m going to have a shower, a quick dinner, and then sit down with a good book with my feet up.”

“I should go,” Miller murmured. He definitely had to go. Serena Westford was probably that friend, and if she was out, she probably wasn’t going to be dropping by tonight. He’d come back in the morning when the sun was up, when the soft dusk of early evening wasn’t throwing seductive shadows across everything.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Mariah said. “I picked something up for you on the mainland this morning.”

She hurried back up the beach toward the backpack she’d left at the bottom of the stairs. Miller followed more slowly. She’d picked something up for him?

“Wait a sec,” she said, bounding up the stairs, carrying the heavy-looking backpack effortlessly. “I want to turn on the deck light.”

Princess followed her up the stairs.

“Hey, what are you doing?” he heard Mariah say to Princess. “You can’t go in there. My rental agreement distinctly says no dogs or cats. And I hate to break it to you, babe, but you’re definitely a dog. I know you don’t believe me....”

The light came on as Miller started up the stairs. It was one of those yellow bug lights, easy on the eyes. It cast a golden, almost fairy-tale-like glow on the deck.

Mariah had her backpack on the table as she unzipped one of the compartments. He stopped halfway up the stairs, afraid to get too close, fighting the pull that drew him toward her. Means to an end, he reminded himself.