LITMIR.BIZ

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Mariah’s friend. It was John Miller who wanted to take this woman as his lover and lose himself in her quiet serenity for the entire rest of the year.

       It was John Miller who’d found himself unable to tear his eyes away from the soft cotton of Mariah’s T-shirt as it clung revealingly to her body out on the beach that morning. He’d caught himself staring more than once, and he could only hope that she hadn’t noticed.

       But he knew damn well that she had. He’d seen the slight pink of her blush on her cheeks.

       Miller got out of the car and, carrying the flowers with him, went to Mariah’s front door and rang the bell.

       There was no answer.

       He knew she was home—Daniel had been out on surveillance all day and had just called saying that Mariah was back home after an afternoon of running errands in town. Sure enough, her bike was leaning against the side of the house.

       Miller went around toward the back, toward the beach, and nearly ran smack into Mariah.

       She’d come directly from the ocean. Her hair was wet, her dark curls like a cap against her head. Her skin glistened from the water, and her tank-style bathing suit was plastered to her incredible body. The sun sparkled on a bead of water caught in her eyelashes as her eyes widened in surprise.

       “John! Hi! What are you doing here?”

       God, she was gorgeous. Every last inch of her was fantastic. But she wrapped her towel around her waist as if self-conscious of the way she looked in a bathing suit.

       He held out the yellow flowers. “I wanted to thank you for helping me this morning.”

       She took the flowers, but barely looked at them. Her attention was fully on him, her gaze searching his face. “Are you all right? You didn’t walk all the way out here, did you?”

       “No, I drove.”

       “By yourself?” She looked over his shoulder at the car, parked in her drive.

       “I’m feeling much better,” he said. “It was just…I don’t know, low blood sugar, I guess. I didn’t have much dinner last night, and I didn’t have anything to eat before I left the resort this morning. But I had some breakfast and even managed to catch a few hours of sleep after Daniel gave me a ride back to my room.”

       “Low blood sugar,” she repeated her gaze never leaving his face.

       She clearly didn’t believe him. It was the perfect opening for him to begin to tell her Jonathan Mills’s cover story. But the words—the lies—stuck in his throat, and for the first time in his life, he almost couldn’t do it.

       What was wrong with him? This was the part of being under cover that he always enjoyed—getting close to the major players in the game. He’d never thought of his cover story as lies before. It was, instead, the new truth. His cover became his new reality. He was Jonathan Mills.

       But as he looked into Mariah’s eyes, he couldn’t push John Miller away. No doubt the fatigue and the stress of the past few years were taking their toll.

       “Actually,” he said, clearing his throat, “it was probably a combination of low blood sugar-and the fact that I’ve just finished a course of chemotherapy.” He ran his fingers through his barely there hair as he watched realization and horror dawn in Mariah’s eyes. He should have felt a burst of satisfaction, but all he felt was this damned twinge of guilt. He hardened himself. He was the robot, after all.

       “Oh,” she said.

       “Cancer,” he told her. “Hodgkin’s. The doctors caught it early. I’m…I’m lucky, you know?”

       She was looking down at the flowers now, but her gaze was unfocused. When she glanced back up at him, he could see that she had tears in her eyes. Tears of compassion, of sympathy. He knew he’d moved another step closer to his goal, but robot or not, he felt like a bastard.

       “Would you be interested in that glass of iced tea I offered you this morning?” she asked, blinking back the tears and forcing a friendly smile.

       Miller nodded. “Thanks.”

       Mariah led the way up the stairs to her deck, her hips swaying beneath her beach towel. Miller let himself look. Looking was all he was going to be able to do, God help him.

       “These flowers are beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like them before.” She gestured toward a round, umbrella shaded table, surrounded by cushioned chairs. “Why don’t you sit down?”

       “Thanks.”

       Mariah carried the flowers into the kitchen and set them down on the counter. Cancer. Jonathan Mills had cancer. He’d just finished a course of chemotherapy.

       She gripped the edge of the counter, trying hard to keep her balance.

       Talk about stress. Talk about pain. Talk about problems. Her own petty problems were laughable compared to having an illness that, left unchecked, was sure to kill him. And even with the treatment, there was still a pretty big chance that he wouldn’t survive.

       Cancer. God. And he was the one bringing her flowers.

       Mariah took a moment to put them in water, gathering the strength she needed to go back out onto the deck and make small talk with a man who was probably going to die.

       Taking a deep breath, she took two glasses from the cabinets and filled them with ice, then poured the tea. Cancer.

       Somehow, she was able to smile by the time she carried the glasses back out to the deck.

       But he wasn’t fooled. “I freaked you out, didn’t I?” John asked as she set the glass down in front of him. “I’m sorry.”

       Mariah sat down across from him, arranging her towel so that it covered most of her legs, grateful that he wasn’t going to ignore the fact that he’d just told her he was so desperately ill. “Are you able to talk about it?” she asked.

       He took a sip of his iced tea. “Sometimes it seems as if it’s all I’ve talked about for the past year.”

       “If you don’t want to, it’s—”

       “No, that’s all right. I guess I…wanted you to know. I haven’t always made a habit of doing nosedives into the sand at the drop of a hat.” He took a deep breath and forced a smile. “So. I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease, which is a form of cancer of the lymph nodes. Like I said, my doctors caught it early—I was stage one, which means the cancer hasn’t metastasized. It hasn’t spread. The survival rate is higher for patients with stage one Hodgkin’s. So I took the treatments, did the chemo—which made me far sicker than the Hodgkin’s ever did—and here I am, waiting for my hair to grow back in.” He paused. “And to find out if I’m finally out of danger.”

       Mariah remembered the tension she’d felt in his shoulders. Was it any wonder this man was a walking bundle of nerves? He was waiting to find out if he was going to live or die. He looked exhausted, sitting there across from her, the lines in his face pronounced.

       “No wonder you’re not eating well. You’re probably not sleeping very well, either,” she said. “Are you?”

       Something shifted in his eyes, and he looked out at the ocean, shimmering at the edge of the sand. He didn’t answer right away, but she just waited, and he finally turned back to her. “No,” he said. “I’m not.”

       “Is it that you can’t fall asleep?” she asked. “Or after you fall asleep, do you wake up a few hours later and just lie there, thinking about everything, worrying…?”

       “Both,” he admitted.

       “I used to do that,” she told him. “Two hours after I fell asleep, I’d be wide-awake, lying in bed, suffocating underneath all these screaming anxieties....” She shook her head. “That’s not a fun way to live.”

      

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