Read Online The Perfect Stranger by Jenna Mills - Free Book Online Page B

men had been in her father’s study. That one of them put the gun to her father’s temple—then turned it on her. She’d been found in a wooded area three miles from their house late the next day, wet and cold and suffering from exposure. The authorities had written off her near-incoherent ramblings to grief and imagination.
    At first it had puzzled Saura why her family publicly accepted the official ruling of suicide, but privately maintained foul play was involved. Only with time did Saura realize her uncles accepted the lie because something bigger was at play—something she believed was still at play, all these years later. A web, a vendetta, that touched them all.
    When she closed her eyes, she could still see Edouard and Etienne chopping wood at the back of the Robichaud property. And she could still hear the name upon which they’d vowed vengeance.
    Nathan Lambert.
    But the slippery man was still alive, still free, and now Alec was dead. Alec, her friend. Alec, who’d stood beside her when the world turned cold. Alec, who’d figured out her secret, when even her brother had not. Alec, who’d contacted her during the final days of his life, asking what she knew about Nathan Lambert. What she could find out.
    Alec, whom she would not let down.
    Frowning, she set down her mug and picked up her cordless phone, listened to her messages for the third time in the hour since Cain had finally left her alone.
    “It wasn’t the same after you left last night,” Lambert said in a sleep-heavy voice. At the time he’d left the message, she’d been en route to the old hotel. “Please let me know you’re okay. I worry about you.”
    “It’s after lunch, Dawn.” That was the name she’d given him, the identity she’d created. A woman from a small Mississippi town, in New Orleans to satisfy a taste for adventure. “Call me a foolish old man, but I need to know that you’re okay.” A fishing expedition, she wondered? A way of determining if she’d perished in the fire? “Please. Call me back.”
    The final message was brilliant for its simplicity: “Call me back, sweetheart. I’m worried.”
    She hadn’t called him back. At least not yet. Not until she retrieved the tapes from the surveillance equipment she’d stashed in his neighbor’s yard and determined if she was the one who’d been targeted to perish in the fire.
    She’d never been caught before. Never really come close. She wasn’t a woman to make mistakes. That was her M.O., why demand for her services had once far surpassed supply. She operated with care and precision. She could extract what she wanted and no one would be the wiser. She never left tracks.
    She never got caught.
    But that was before, she realized, fingering the card that had come with the roses. True beauty, it read, knows no rival.
    A ridiculously romantic gesture? Or a moderately clever cover-up? What man, after all, sent roses to a woman on the day he meant to execute her?
    Nathan Lambert, she recalled, had played poker with her uncle Troy less than twenty-four hours before his so-called suicide. He’d gone to the funeral. And…he’d sent flowers.
    True determination, she thought with one last sip of now lukewarm chocolate, knew no limits.
    Standing, Saura turned out the light and headed for her bedroom. No matter how much she wanted to crawl into bed, she had tapes to retrieve.
    She had two buttons unfastened when the sound of a fist on wood jolted through the old house. She stood so very still, listening. Waiting. Cain had a key—and as far as she knew, no one else knew where she lived. And no one else had reason to visit during the dead of night.
    Another knock. Louder. More forceful.
    Instinct and training swirled through her in a rush, and without even thinking about what she was doing, she moved away from the window and pressed her back to the wall, eased toward the dresser that had once belonged to her grandmother. From inside her pajama drawer—the lingerie drawer