by Megan Crane
But she was here, she was the softest thing he’d ever touched, and Griffin understood in a sudden flash of unwelcome insight exactly why she got beneath his skin.
Because around this woman, he kept remembering he’d once been a man and could be again—if only for a night.
If he played his cards right, which he couldn’t. And wouldn’t.
But there was no escaping the fact that whatever else happened, Griffin was already in trouble.
Seven
After Griffin left her in the café, disappearing like a puff of smoke, Mariah had shifted around to the other side of the table so that she could take a turn with her back to the wall and a nice view of all the comings and goings.
She ordered another mug of coffee from the surly waitress, who she was surprised to discover was also the cook. And, as she replayed what Griffin had told her, she realized she was clearly the owner, too, which made all that attitude and grumpiness feel like even more delightful local color.
Mariah sat there, nursing her coffee and watching as the group of fishermen left in a friendly knot. And as the tourist couple continued to fight with each other, punctuating their strained conversation with pointed silences as they ate their soup and sandwiches.
After they stormed out, hiking boots hitting the old floorboards with obvious aggression, only Mariah and Caradine were left in the bright, cheerful space that made as much of the iffy sunshine as it could. Unlike Caradine herself, who sat on a stool behind the counter and scowled out at the village as if it offended her. Just by . . . being there.
“Are they always like that?” Mariah had dared to ask.
“Which they?” Caradine had replied after a long pause and a baleful glare.
“Griffin and his friends. I mean, I’m assuming he has friends. That there’s really a thing called Alaska Force and not just . . . him. Running around brooding at people and pretending he’s a whole battalion.”
Caradine’s mouth had curved the slightest bit in one corner. “I’m sorry to tell you that Alaska Force is all too real.”
Mariah had sighed. “I don’t know if that makes me happy or sad. I was warming to the idea of Griffin being a one-man show.”
“What I can tell you about all the men in Alaska Force is that each and every one of them is their own epic show. What you need to ask yourself is whether or not you want to be in the audience.”
“I’m not the audience. I’m a client.”
Caradine hadn’t rolled her eyes, exactly. “That’s how they get you.”
“Not me,” Mariah had said with tremendous confidence, as if she hadn’t been easily distracted by Griffin’s arm. “I already followed one worthless man around for a decade. I don’t plan to repeat the experience.”
“A woman after my own black heart.”
Mariah had waited for Caradine to ask questions. Why she was here, for example. What had made her seek out Alaska Force. But if Caradine had the slightest bit of curiosity about Mariah’s story—the way Mariah would have if their positions had been reversed—she didn’t show it. She’d made Mariah another outstanding coffee and then, when the door opened, she’d waved away the people who tried to come in.
“I’m closed,” she’d said, without a shred of apology in her voice.
“Come on, Caradine,” the man argued in a low, gruff voice. “Maria and Luz need to eat before we head out into the bush. It’s all mud and puddles and overflow for miles.”
“Maria and Luz and springtime are not my problem.”
“Please?” It was a female voice that time. Mariah saw that there were two women standing there with the man on the doorstep. The speaker was tall and blond. The other was short and brunette. And both were noticeably pregnant. “You know how long the trip is.”
“Get provisions from the general store,” Caradine suggested, in a tone that didn’t invite any further argument.
Sure enough, the man—another fisherman by the looks of him—backed out of the doorway. Caradine followed, flipping the sign in the window to CLOSED and locking the door behind him.
“Are they both . . . ?” Mariah had asked, watching the trio make their way down the street outside.
“What they both are is a mess.” Caradine had actually rolled her eyes then. “The short one, Maria, moved here with her boyfriend. But then she took up with Jared, who grew up here with the tall one, his wife, Luz. Who then got together with Maria’s boyfriend instead. Now everybody’s pregnant, no one knows who the fathers are, and they’re all living together off the grid out there. It’s a Grizzly Harbor soap opera. With bears and stupidity.”
“You don’t like them?”
“I don’t like anyone.”
“Well, that’s handy,” Mariah had said with a smile. “Neither do I.”
She hadn’t thought about it in such stark terms before, but she realized as she said it that it was true. She’d had all kinds of friends in Atlanta. Friends from the Junior League. Friends from every charity event she’d ever been involved with. Friends from the country club, the golf club, and David’s other clubs. Friends to go to lunch with, or to Pilates with, or to art exhibitions at the High Museum with when the men were busy, and anywhere else she might want to go, too.
And not one of them had known a single real thing about her. Not one of them had been at all trustworthy. She hadn’t even questioned the fact that none of them were likely to support her when she divorced David. She’d accepted it as fact, endured any number of thinly veiled insults from these friends, and when it came time to leave town and run for her life, she hadn’t contacted any of them.
But it hadn’t occurred to her until right that second, sitting there in Caradine’s café, that she’d never really liked any of them all that much in the first place.
Her friendships during her marriage hadn’t had anything to do with whom she liked or whom she didn’t. One of her jobs had been to ingratiate herself with as many of the right people as possible, and she’d launched herself into it, because keeping David happy had been the closest thing to a career she had.
“My whole life has been about other people’s expectations,” she’d told Caradine, because she could tell by the look on the other woman’s face that she didn’t care. She had no expectations about Mariah at all. And that made her the perfect person to open up to. “And now that I find myself this far away in the middle of nowhere, it turns out I have a powerful hankering to defy every one of those expectations.”
“If this involves pumping our fists and singing power ballads together, I’m going to have to decline.”
“I’m tone-deaf,” Mariah assured her, climbing to her feet. “I was raised by a long line of people who handled every disappointment the same way. With enough alcohol to take down a horse, a whole lot of bad behavior to go with it, and a vicious hangover the next morning, sure, but precious few regrets.”
“I don’t do friends,” Caradine had said, studying her. “If that’s what you’re after.”
“I’m after getting blind drunk and a little bit rowdy, like God intended when he made tequila.”
Caradine’s smile had been the kind of pure evil that made bad reputations. “That I can get behind.”
And that was how Mariah had found herself embracing her long-neglected inner McKenna, smack in the middle of Grizzly Harbor’s disreputable dive bar. Which happened to also be its only bar.
The first shot had tasted like cough medicine, only much worse. Mariah had wheezed and hacked her way through it, her eyes tearing up.
“The only way out is through,” Caradine had murmured, sliding the second toward her.
That one had been about the same, with less hacking.
The third, happily, went down smooth.
It was around then that Mariah stopped counting. Or caring that she’d recently suffered an anaphylactic reaction and maybe shouldn’t have been dri
nking at all. She started laughing instead.
She didn’t even know what was funny. She laughed and she laughed, because everything was sunshine, inside and out. She felt silly and free, as if she were a toddler who’d finally learned how to get up on her feet and refused to sit back down again. Her thoughts spun around and around in her head, but none of them really gripped her. She leaned back against the bar so she wouldn’t fall off the side of the planet, and she let herself laugh.
Then Griffin walked in. And she couldn’t find the edge of the world any longer, so she just spun on out into the Milky Way and focused the best she could on him.
Because he was far more potent than any of the alcohol churning around in her system.
He was cut, sculpted, and beautiful. And he made her nothing short of giddy as he walked up to stand in front of her, looking dark and disapproving and unquestionably delicious. The friend he brought with him was more of the same, a man built powerful and dangerous, sporting a beard like the locals and a similar, glittering intensity in his gaze.
But he could have walked in with a parade. Griffin was the only thing that Mariah could seem to look at.
Especially when he poked at her again.
That made her laugh, too, and she moved forward so she could get in his face the way every female relative she’d ever had always did to the men in their lives, but she stopped short when he wrapped one of his huge hands around her upper arm.
His hand was much too strong. Too tough and capable, indicating he used it for more than the odd golf game.
The heat of his palm felt like fire.
She could feel it everywhere. It rolled through her, charging through her blood and her bones and all the soft, needy areas in between, kicking out the cobwebs and reminding her of all the parts of herself she’d locked away.
So many parts of herself. So many feelings and dreams she’d quickly learned to hide. Need and longing and desire. And that gnarled, battered, sharp-sweet thing she was still inclined to believe was hope.
Marriage is about compromise, her mother-in-law had told her, with standard high-class distaste for her only son’s regrettable wife. But Mariah had known better. It wasn’t David who had compromised in their marriage; it was her. It was always, always her.
David’s single compromise had been marrying Mariah in the first place. All subsequent compromises had been hers to make. And she’d made them. Oh, how she’d twisted and turned, contorting herself until she sometimes wondered if she’d even recognize who she’d been when she started.
Tonight, she knew she wouldn’t.
Because she’d been married for ten years and she’d never felt anything in all that time like the roar of heat and greed that nearly knocked her off her feet when Griffin Cisneros grabbed her by the upper arm to keep her from tripping.
And then held on.
“You don’t approve of me,” she said, tipping back her head to look up at him and take in all that severe masculine beauty. “Every time you look at me your jaw goes like this.”
She did an impression of him, jaw clenched tight, though it was possible she looked more like a horse. She wasn’t much of an actress.
“I don’t approve or disapprove of you,” Griffin said, the obvious disapproval in his tone contradicting the statement. “You’re a client. Nothing more, nothing less.”
But everything was sunshine, and she was, too, so she didn’t think twice. Mariah reached out and thunked him in the center of his chest with two fingers. And then, when he gazed down at her in exaggerated astonishment, she did it again.
Because he was shaped like one of the marble statues of Greek gods she’d seen at an exhibit at the High, but he was harder and hotter than marble. And far more impressive than any old Adonis.
“You specifically don’t approve of me,” Mariah countered. “You think I’m a gold digger.”
“I don’t think you’re a gold digger. Because I don’t think about you at all, not like that. What interests me about you is your safety.”
She would have believed him without question if he’d said that a few hours ago. If he’d sat at that table in the café, stared her down, and laid it out that way. She would have been deeply embarrassed that she’d made it personal when he was only trying to do his job.
But it was dark inside this dive-bar-to-end-all-dive-bars. There was country music wailing on the jukebox, and Mariah was at least four shots in to a blurry, giddy night. And that gave her insight she wouldn’t otherwise have had.
Griffin didn’t look at her like she was a client. There was a difference in the way his trained gaze tracked the noise and chaos around them. The way he seemed to keep tabs on everything that was happening, from the pool tables to the bartender to whatever tense, whispered conversation Caradine and Isaac were having a few feet away.
The way he looked at all of those things was more clinical. More distant.
But when he looked back at her, every time he looked at her, something in him burned.
She didn’t ask herself how she knew this. She just accepted it.
And her fingers were pressed into that mouthwatering hollow between his pectoral muscles, so she went with it. She spread out her hand, touching as much of his chest as she could.
It still wasn’t enough.
She wasn’t all that shocked when he snatched her hand and held it in the space between them.
“You’re drunk,” he told her. Flatly.
In the exact same tone she remembered wielding on any number of her own relatives in the past when they’d taken their own McKenna cures.
She couldn’t help but grin. “Am I? Already? I thought for sure that came with crying in the corner. Trying to curl up and take a nap under a bar stool. Or dancing on the pool tables in some or other state of undress.”
“That’s wasted. That comes after drunk.”
“I wouldn’t know,” she said airily. “I’ve never been drunk in my life.”
“But you figured you’d start tonight. In a bar where you don’t know a soul. Anyone in here could do you harm, for all you know. You might as well paint a target on your back.”
“I’ve drunk some wine here and there, but it was always controlled. Never more than two glasses, under pain of death. David got to get drunk if he wanted, of course. But drunk on a woman is no good, don’t you know? It’s sloppy. Trashy. And we can’t have that.”
His lips moved like he was biting back his words.
But all he said was, “I’m taking you back to your room.”
She laughed at that, too. But she didn’t protest. He kept that hard hand of his wrapped tight around her upper arm as he steered her away from the long, scarred wooden bar. Mariah waved to Caradine, who didn’t wave back. She dutifully accepted the bundle of fabric that Griffin handed her, but it took her a few confused moments to realize that it was her own fleece and vest.
“This is all much more forward than I’m used to,” she told him as he swung open the door and propelled her outside into the shock of the cold night air. “I don’t go to bars. Much less leave them with strange men.”
“It’s cold,” Griffin said shortly. “You should dress yourself appropriately before you freeze.”
“I like it,” Mariah assured him.
She could feel the cold, of course. It was like a sharp, gleaming scythe, cutting straight into her and cleaving her in two, but it was exhilarating all the same.
She tipped her head back, letting herself topple off into the real Milky Way spread out above her. She had never seen so many stars in her life. Not even when she’d been a child, lying in the back of a pickup truck on those long summer nights out in the country.
And it wasn’t until she felt his hand tighten around her arm that she realized Griffin was the only reason she wasn’t spinning off into the ether. Or tumbling to the uneven ground.
She smiled at him when she found him there, scowling beneath the surly neon sign from the bar that cast him in a kind of pink shadow. But it did nothing to take away from his breathtaking beauty, which caught at her with the same sharpness as the temperature.
“You’re beautiful,” she told him.
His scowl deepened. He let go of her, but only so he could take her fleece from her hand and put it over her head like she was a child. She stood there, bemused, as he fed one arm through one sleeve, then the other. He tugged the fleece into place, zipped up the neck, and even tugged her hair free. Not done, he wrapped her down vest over her shoulders, made sure her arms were in the proper armholes, and zipped that up, too.
“Replace this vest,” he muttered at her as he did it. “Down gets wet and soggy. You’ll freeze in the first rain.”
A new sensation swelled in her then. Raw. Fragile. And far more dangerous than too much tequila or that fire in his dark gold eyes. All that sunshine had shifted into something sacred, and it didn’t matter that he was scowling at her.
His hands were brisk, efficient, even impatient—but kind.
Mariah couldn’t remember the last time anyone had treated her with kindness.
“Why are you crying?”
He sounded harsh, but his thumb grazed over one cheekbone, and there was nothing harsh in the touch. It was more of that same shocking kindness and the faint scrape of his skin against hers. Then a gleaming bit of moisture he held out between them as evidence.
“I’m not crying,” she assured him with as much dignity as she could muster.
“Let’s get you to your room,” he said, and they were walking again.
His hand was wrapped around her upper arm, and once more, she relaxed into his grip. She let him guide her, laughing every time her legs couldn’t seem to follow directions. And laughing even more when he didn’t join in.
She watched in fascination as he punched a code into a keypad at the inn’s front door when they arrived, then had to concentrate ferociously to navigate the stairs that led up to her room.
