Unstoppable: Love With The Proper Stranger / Letters To Kelly

Mariah shook her head. “I’m having fun right now,” she told her friend.

“You,” Serena said, “are one seriously twisted woman.” She called back over her shoulder as she headed toward her car, “Don’t forget about my party Friday night.”

“You know, Serena, I’m not really the party type…”

But Serena had already climbed behind the wheel, starting her car with a roar.

Mariah didn’t want to go to any party. She’d been to several of Serena’s affairs before and stood uncomfortably while Serena’s chic resort friends talked about nothing of any substance. The weather. The stock market. The best place to rent jet skis.

Last time, she’d left early and vowed to make up an excuse if Serena ever invited her again. She’d have to think up something convincing…

But she wasn’t going to think about it right now. She had a house to build. No worries. No problems.

Mariah got back to work.

MILLER WAS RUNNING on empty.

He’d awakened before dawn, after only a few hours of rest, jarred out of sleep by an ominous dream. It wasn’t his usual nightmare, but it was a dream filled with shadows and darkness, and he knew if he fell back to sleep, he’d soon find himself outside that damned warehouse.

So he’d made himself a cup of coffee, roused Princess and headed down the beach, toward Mariah’s cottage.

The first glimmer of daybreak had been lighting the sky when he’d reached the part of the strand where he’d met Mariah two mornings ago. And as he’d watched, the light in her beach house went off, and she came outside, shouldering a backpack.

She climbed on her bicycle and rode away, down the road toward town, before he was even close enough to call out to her.

He stayed for a while, hoping she would return, but she hadn’t. Later, he’d found her bike, locked to a rack by the public library.

Having to wait for her to come back was frustrating, but Miller had been on stakeouts that had literally lasted for months, and he knew how to curb his impatience. He’d set up camp under the shade of a brightly colored beach umbrella, lathered himself with sunblock and waited.

He’d spent the first part of the morning reading that book Mariah had lent him. It was one of those touchy-feely books that urged the reader to become one with his or her emotions, and to vent—to talk or cry. Emotional release was necessary—according to the author, a Dr. Gerrard Hollis from California, of course—before the anxiety causing stress could be relieved.

Miller flipped through the chapters on breathing exercises and self-hypnosis techniques, focusing instead on the section about reducing stress through sex. There was nothing like regularly scheduled orgasmic release—according to the esteemed Dr. Hollis, whoever the hell he was—to counter the bad effects of stress on the human nervous system.

Each of the exercises outlined in the book—and this section went on for an entire detailed chapter—were designed to be both physically and emotionally relaxing. They were also designed to be done either by a couple, or by an individual. Women could make use of certain “assistive” devices if they so desired, Dr. Hollis pointed out.

Miller had gotten a hell of a lot of mileage out of thinking about Mariah performing those exercises, with or without assistive devices.

But she still hadn’t returned by lunchtime, and Miller had gone back to the resort. He’d spent the afternoon helping Daniel fine-tune the surveillance equipment the younger man had planted in Serena Westford’s rented house. Yesterday, around noon, their suspect had gone off island. Instead of following her, assuming that if she was going over the causeway to the mainland she was planning to stay for a while, Daniel had used the opportunity to hide miniature microphones in key spots in Serena’s home.

Their surveillance system was up and running.

And now Miller was back outside Mariah’s house, watching the sun set, wondering where she had gone, feeling slightly sick to his stomach from fatigue.

He heard the squeak of her bicycle before he saw her. As he watched, she turned up her driveway, getting off her bike and pushing it the last few feet up the hill. She put down the kickstand, but the sandy ground was too soft to hold it up, and she leaned it against the side of the house instead.

She slipped her arms out of her backpack and tossed it down near the foot of the stairs leading up to her deck. And then, kicking her feet free from a pair of almost ridiculously clunky work boots, she pulled her T-shirt over her head and headed directly toward the ocean.

As Miller watched, she dropped her shirt on the sand and crash-dived into the water. She didn’t notice him until she was on her way back out. And then she saw Princess first.

Mariah’s running shorts clung to her thighs, their waistband sagging down across her smooth stomach, the pull of the water turning them into hip huggers. The effect was incredibly sexy, but she quickly hiked her shorts up, pulling at the thin fabric in an attempt to keep it from sticking to her legs.

“John,” she said, smiling at him. “Hi.”

She was wearing some kind of athletic bra-type thing, the word “Champion,” emblazoned across her full breasts. There was nothing she could do to keep that wet fabric from clinging, but she seemed more concerned with keeping her belly button properly concealed.

And Miller couldn’t think of anything besides the exercise that Dr. Hollis called “Releasing Control.” And the one the good doctor called “Pressure Cooker Release.” And something particularly intriguing that was cutely labeled “Seabirds in Flight.” It was a damned good thing his shorts weren’t wet and clinging to his body.

“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?