Her parents had loved each other with the same focused obsession that they'd loved the treasures they'd sought their entire married life. From her earliest memories, the stories of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba were part of their daily conversations. Her bedtime stories had been filled with tales of adventure and temples of treasure. And of the love of two people who spent their earthly lives knowing they could never be together.
It had broken her heart as a child to think of what it must have felt like to know a part of their soul had been missing. Her father had always told her that's how he'd feel if he had to go through life without her mother, and Miller had decided as a young child to never subject herself to that kind of heartbreak.
Her parents had spent their marriage traveling the world, searching for the lost temple and piecing together a history that the greatest books in the world hadn't achieved. And it was her older brother who'd been burdened with the responsibility of taking care of her. He was four years older, and probably the last thing he wanted to do was babysit his younger sister, but that's exactly what he'd done. He'd been her only stability as a child, an adult long before he should've been, and they'd always been close. He'd never resented the fact he'd been stuck home with her when he'd wanted to be hunting treasure alongside their parents.
After a few weeks, her parents would come back full of excitement and stories of their adventures. And more often than not they'd have some trinket that had supposedly been housed in the temple where King Solomon kept his treasures. She had a box full of them in her office. It was sad to think her best memories of her parents all rested in that box.
Her brother had eventually left home and joined the military, much like her father had at his age, but the obsession with a three-thousand-year-old king and the queen who would never be his must've been hereditary, because Justin had taken up the search, and it had only intensified after their parents were killed when their small plane went down.
Their obsession with each other and the love of two people in history had led to their death. And she hadn't seen her brother in close to ten years, though he sent letters like clockwork. All she knew was that kind of love and obsession had left her without her parents and a cynicism she worked hard to keep out of her books.
Miller had a good life, and normalcy was very important to her-at least as normal as one could be when making stuff up was how she made her living. To say she was a control freak was probably an understatement, but she liked knowing she was responsible for her own happiness and achievements. Her work fulfilled her. And the occasional relationship satisfied her.
It wasn't often she found a man she was intrigued enough by to invite to her bed. She was damned picky actually. She wrote romance novels for crying out loud. So what if she wanted great conversation, a smoking hot body, and great sex? She'd never seen the point in settling. And since she didn't believe in the happily-ever-afters she wrote about, she figured her chances with a man like Elias Cole were a done deal. He hadn't seemed like the kind of man who was interested in happily-ever-afters either. He'd all but ravished her on her front porch and then calmly walked away, leaving her more sexually frustrated than she'd ever been in her life. But the past was the past. It was time to let it go.
She shivered as she walked into her bedroom and she turned up the thermostat on her way to the bathroom. Her bedroom was tidy-the king-size bed neatly made and all her clothes folded and put away. She hadn't felt the mattress beneath her in days. She'd been taking catnaps, crashing on the couch in her office when she needed to recharge.
Miller loved color, and the bedroom reflected that. The bed was like a white cloud, but pillows in cobalt, teal, and turquoise added vibrancy, along with a crocheted throw using all the colors at the foot of the bed. The large canvas on the wall was an abstract ocean scene using thick layers of paint, her bedside lamps were blown glass in the same bright blue, and the cozy chair in the corner was yellow with thick blue stripes.
It was her favorite room in the house, and that was saying something because she loved all of her house. But this was her room, and she'd never invited another man to share it with her. Except that night when Elias had taken her home and made her lose her mind with his kisses. He would've been the first to see her private sanctum. And she didn't want to analyze too closely why she'd chosen him, when she'd never had any desire for another man to step foot there.
Most people in the small town of Last Stop, Texas, considered her eccentric, and many of them had much more creative names for her. She hated to not live up to people's expectations, so when the Gothic home on the corner of Elm Street and Devil's Hill went on the market, she snapped it up in a heartbeat. And she got it for a steal too because no one wanted to touch it.