Unstoppable: Love With The Proper Stranger / Letters To Kelly. Suzanne Brockmann

kissed. And once he kissed her, there’d be no turning back. The attraction between them was too hot, too volatile.

       And then she would really be hurt—after he slept with her, then married her best friend.

       So he’d make damn sure that he wouldn’t sleep with her.

       He’d show up in front of the library tomorrow at 6:00 a.m. He’d see her again—God, he wanted to see her again—but in public, where there’d be no danger of intimacies getting out of hand. Somehow he’d make her understand that their relationship was to be nothing more than a friendship, all the while making Serena believe otherwise. Then Serena could “steal” him from Mariah without Mariah getting hurt.

       Miller stood up. “I’m going to do it. Figure I’ll be out of the picture all day tomorrow.”

       Daniel rose to his feet, too. “I’ll stay near Serena.” Miller turned to leave, but Daniel’s quiet voice stopped him. “You know, John, we could do this another way.”

       His cover was all set up. He was here, he was in place. And all of his reasons for not going ahead would be purely personal. He’d never pulled out of a case for personal reasons before and he sure as hell wasn’t about to start now.

       “I haven’t come up with a better way—or a quicker way—to catch this killer,” he flatly told his partner. “Let’s do this right and lock her up before she hurts anyone else.”

      Chapter Six

      MARIAH SAW HIM AS soon as she rounded the corner.

       Jonathan Mills was sitting on the steps to the library, shoulders hunched over, nursing a cup of coffee.

       He couldn’t have been waiting for her—not after last night. Not after he’d been visibly dazzled by Serena.

       And yet she knew there was no one else he could have been waiting for. She was the only one on all of Garden Isle who regularly volunteered for Foundations for Families. Occasionally there would be a group of college students on vacation, but the Triple F van would pick them up over by the campground.

       Mariah briefly considered just riding past. Not stopping. Flagging the van down near the drugstore or the post office. Leaving her bike…where? This bike rack in front of the library was the only one in town.

       Maybe if she ignored him, he’d go away.

       But Mariah knew that that, too, wasn’t any kind of solution, so she nodded to him briefly as she braked to a stop.

       He stood up as if every bone in his body ached, as if he, too, hadn’t had an awful lot of sleep last night.

       “I realized as I was getting ready to meet you here that I don’t have a tool belt,” he told her.

       Her own belt was in her backpack, weighing it down, and she slid it off her shoulders and onto the sidewalk as she positioned her bike in the rack. She didn’t know what to say. Was he actually serious? Did he really intend to spend the day with her?

       Her cheeks still flushed with embarrassment when she thought about last night. And the night before. She’d actually thought he was as attracted to her as she was to him. She’d gone and thrown herself at him and…

       She could think of nothing worse than spending the entire day with this man, yet she couldn’t simply tell him to go home. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Yes, she’d resolved last night that she’d have nothing more to do with him. Yes, she’d come to the conclusion that he was far more shallow and self-absorbed than she’d previously thought. Still, she couldn’t tell him to go away.