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

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СКАЧАТЬ buried in books. Others socialized, talking and flirting in large and small groups. Men and women in athletic gear ran up and down the miles of flat, hard sand at the edge of the water. Others walked or strolled. Still others paraded—clearly advertising their trim, tanned bodies, scantily clad in designer bathing suits.

       Mariah took out her camera, focusing on a golden retriever running next to a muscular man in neon green running shorts. She loved dogs. In fact, now that she wasn’t shut up in an office each day from dawn till dusk, she was thinking about getting one and—

       “Fancy meeting you here this early.”

       Mariah looked up but the glare from the bright sun threw the face of the woman standing next to her into shadows. It didn’t matter. The crisp English-accented voice was unmistakable.

       “Hey,” Mariah said, smiling as Serena sat down next to her on her blanket.

       “I thought you’d sworn off the resort beach,” Serena continued, looking at Mariah over the tops of her expensive sunglasses.

       Serena Westford was older than Mariah had originally thought when they’d first met a few weeks ago—she was closer to forty than thirty, anyway. Her smile was young though. It was mercurial and charming, displaying perfect white teeth. Her hair was blond with wisps escaping from underneath the big straw hat she always wore, and her trim body was that of a twenty-four-year-old.

       She was as cool and confident as she was beautiful. She was everything Mariah wished she could be. Everything Marie Carver wished she could be, Mariah corrected herself. But Marie Carver had purposely been left behind in Phoenix, Arizona. Mariah Robinson was here in Georgia, and Mariah was happy with her life. She went with the flow, calm and relaxed. No worries. No problems. No stress. No jealousy.

       Serena was wearing a black thong bathing suit, covered only by a diaphanous short wrap that fluttered about her buttocks and thighs in the ocean breeze, leaving only slightly more than nothing to the imagination. Despite the fact that Serena Westford was no longer a schoolgirl, she was one of the minuscule percentage of the population who actually looked good in a thong bikini.

       Mariah let herself hate her friend—but only for a fraction of a second. So what if Mariah was destined never to wear a similarly styled bathing suit? So what if Mariah was the exact physical opposite of petite, slender, golden Serena? So what if Mariah was just over six feet tall, broad shouldered, large breasted and athletically built? So what if her hair was an unremarkable shade of brown curls, always messy and impossible to control? So what if her eyes were brown? Light brown, not that dark-as-midnight intriguing shade of brown, or cat green like Serena’s.

       Mariah was willing to bet that behind Serena Westford’s cool, confident facade, there lurked a woman with a thousand screaming anxieties. She probably worked out two hours each day to maintain her youthful figure. She probably spent an equal amount of time on her hair and makeup. She was probably consumed with worries and stress, poor thing.

       “I just came down here to violate the photographic rights of these unsuspecting beachgoers,” Mariah told her friend, unable to hide a smile.

       The two women had first met when Mariah took Serena’s picture here on the resort beach. Serena had been less than happy about that and had demanded Mariah hand over the undeveloped film then and there. What could have been an antagonistic and adversarial relationship quickly changed to one of mutual respect as Serena explained that while in the peace corps, she’d spent a great deal of time with certain tribes in Africa who believed that being photographed was tantamount to having one’s soul kidnapped.

       Mariah had surrendered the film, and spent an entire afternoon listening to Serena’s fascinating stories of her travels around the world as a volunteer humanitarian.

       They’d talked about Mariah’s work for Foundations for Families, too. Serena had mentioned she’d seen Mariah getting dropped off by the Triple F van in the evenings. And they’d talked about the grassroots organization that used volunteers to help build affordable homes for hardworking, low-income families. Mariah spent three or four days each week with a hammer in her hand, and she loved both the work and the sense of purpose it gave her.

       “Hey, I got a package notice from the post office,” Mariah told her friend. “I think it’s my darkroom supplies. Any chance I can talk you into picking it up for me?”

       “If you had a car, you could pick it up yourself.”

       “If I had a car, I would use it once a month, when a heavy package needed to be picked up at the post office.”

       “If you had a car, you wouldn’t have to wait for that awful van to take you over to the mainland four times a week,” Serena pointed out.

       Mariah smiled. “I like taking the van.”

       Serena looked at her closely. “The driver is a real hunk.”

       “The driver is happily married to one of the Triple F site supervisors.”

       “Too bad.”

       Serena’s sigh of regret was so heartfelt, Mariah had to laugh. “You know, Serena, not everyone in the world is husband hunting. I’m actually very happy all by myself.”

       Serena smiled. “Husband hunting,” she repeated. “The biggest of the big game.” She laughed. “I like that image. I wonder what gauge bullet I’d need to bring one down…”

       Mariah gathered up her things. “Let’s go have lunch.”

       SHE WOULD KNOW HIM WHEN she saw him, but she simply hadn’t seen him yet. He would have money. Lots of money. Enough so that when she asked for the funds for the down payment on a house, he wouldn’t hesitate to give it directly to her. Enough so that he would open a checking account in her name—an account she would immediately start draining. She would transfer the money to dummy accounts out of state.

       She had the system set up so that anyone following the paper trail would be stopped cold, left high and dry.

       She’d sit on the cash for a week or two, then make the deposits into her Swiss bank accounts.

       Three million dollars. She had three million dollars American already in her Swiss accounts.

       Three million dollars, and nine locks of hair.

       Yes, she’d know him when she saw him.

       “GARDEN ISLE, GEORGIA,” the agent named Taylor said as he looked around the table from Daniel Tonaka to Pat Blake, the head of the FBI unit, and finally to John Miller. “It’s her. The Black Widow killer. It’s got to be.”

       He slid several enlarged black-and-white photos across the conference table, one toward Blake and the other toward Miller and Daniel. Miller sat forward slightly in his chair, picking it up and angling it away from the reflections of the overhead lights. He couldn’t seem to hold it steady—his hands were shaking—and he quickly put it down on the table.

       “She’s going by the name Serena Westford,” the young agent was saying. “She came out of nowhere. Her story is that she spent the past seven years in Europe—in Paris—but no one seems to know her over there. If she was living there, she wasn’t paying taxes, that’s for sure.”

       The photograph showed a woman moving rapidly, purposefully across a parking lot. She was wearing a hat and sunglasses, and her face СКАЧАТЬ