Love with the Proper Stranger Read Online Free

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.”
    * * *
    S HE 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.
    * * *
    “G ARDEN I SLE , G EORGIA ,” 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 photosacross 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 was blurred.
    Miller looked up. “What’s your name again?”
    The young man held his gaze only briefly. “Taylor. Steven Taylor.”
    “Couldn’t you get a better picture than this, Taylor?”
    “No, sir,” he said. “We’re lucky we even got this one. It was taken with a telephoto lens from the window of the resort. It’s the best of about twenty that I managed to get at that time. Any other time I tried to take her picture, she somehow seemed to know there was a camera around and she covered herself almost completely. I have about five hundred perfect pictures where her face is nearly entirely obscured by enormous sunglasses or her hat. I have five hundred other perfect shots of the back of her head.”
    “Yet you’re certain this woman is our Black Widow.” Miller didn’t hide his skepticism.
    Daniel shifted in his seat. “I believe it’s her, John. Hear him out.”
    Miller was usually unerringly accurate when it came to reading people. He knew for a fact that Patrick Blake disliked him despite his record of arrests. And he knew quite clearly that Steven Taylor was afraid of him. Oh, he was polite and respectful, but something about his stance told Miller clear as day that Taylor was going to request a transfer off this case now that he knew Miller was aboard.
    Daniel Tonaka, on the other hand, had never been easy to read. He was unflappable, with a quirky sense of humor that surfaced at the most unexpected moments. As far as Miller could tell, Daniel treated every person with whom he came into contact with the same amount of courtesy and kindness. He treated everyone from a bag lady to the governor’s wife with respect, always giving them his full attention.
    Daniel had spoken up to say he had a hunch or a feeling about a suspect or a case only a handful of times, and all of those times he’d been