Read Online Love with the Proper Stranger by Suzanne Brockmann - Free Book Online Page A

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 tobe 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