Love with the Proper Stranger by Suzanne Brockmann Page B

offering comfort that he couldn’t keep himself from taking.
    She seemed to melt into his arms, her face lifted toward his, and then he was kissing her.
    Her lips were warm and soft and so incredibly sweet. He kissed her harder, drinking of her thirstily, unable to get enough.
    Her body was so soft, her breasts brushing against his chest, and he pulled her closer. She fit against him so perfectly, the room seemed to spin around him. He wanted to touch her everywhere. He wanted to pull off her shirt and feel her smooth skin against his.
    He pulled her back with him onto the couch and their legs intertwined. Not for the first time that night, Miller wished he’d worn shorts instead of jeans.
    He shifted his weight and nestled between the softness of her thighs, nearly delirious with need as he kissed her harder, deeper.
    This was one hell of a bad mistake
.
    She pushed herself tightly against him, and he pushed the thought away, refusing to think at all, losing himself in her kisses, in the softness of her breast cupped in his hand.
    She was opening herself to him, so generously giving him everything he asked for, and more.
    And he was going to use her to satisfy his sexual desires, then walk away from her without looking back the moment she introduced him to Serena Westford—her friend, his chief suspect.
    He couldn’t do this. How could he do this and look himself in the eye in the mirror while he shaved each morning?
    But look where he was. Poised on the edge of total ecstasy. Inches away from paradise.
    He pulled back, and she smiled up at him, hooking her legs around him, her hands slipping down to his buttocks and pressing him securely against her.
    “John, don’t stop,” she whispered. “In case you haven’t noticed, I
am
coming on to you now.”
    “I don’t have any protection,” he lied.
    “I do,” she told him. “In my bedroom.” She reached between them, her fingers unfastening the top button of his jeans. “I can get it….”
    Miller felt himself weaken. She wanted him. She couldn’t be any more obvious about it.
    He let her pull his head down toward hers for another kiss, let her stroke the solid length of his arousal through the denim of his jeans, all the while cursing his inability to keep this from going too far.
    He was a lowlife. He was a snake. And after all was said and done, she would hate him forever.
    Somehow, Miller found the strength to pull back from her, out of her arms, outside the reach of her hands. “I can’t do this,” he said, nearly choking on the words. He sat on the edge of the couch, turned away from her, running his shaking hands through his hair. “Mariah, I can’t take advantage of you this way.”
    She touched his back gently, lightly. “You’re not taking advantage of me,” she said quietly. “I promise.”
    He turned to look at her. Big mistake. She looked incredible with her T-shirt pushed up and twisted around her waist. She was wearing high-cut white cotton panties that were far sexier than any satin or lace he’d ever seen. She wanted to make love to him. He could reach for her and have that T-shirt and those panties off of herin less than a second. He could be inside of her in the time it took to go into her bedroom and find her supply of condoms.
    He had to look away before he could speak.
    “It’s not that I don’t want to, because I do,” he told her. “It’s just…”
    Miller could feel her moving, straightening her T-shirt, sitting up on the other end of the couch. “It’s all right. You don’t have to explain.”
    “I don’t want to rush things,” he said, wishing he could tell her the truth. But what
was
the truth? That he couldn’t make love to her because he was intending to woo and marry a woman she considered one of her closest friends?
    He had to stop thinking like John Miller and start thinking like Jonathan Mills. He had to
become
Jonathan Mills, and his reality—and the truth—would change, too. But he’d never had so