by Megan Crane
When everyone headed off to the Water’s Edge Café to start wheedling breakfast out of Caradine, Griffin went to the inn.
And it was there, down in the lobby after Madeleine called up to Mariah’s room, that he finally admitted that he’d been in a low-boil fury for hours. Since last night, in fact. He was . . . agitated.
Griffin didn’t normally get agitated. He didn’t get much of anything these days. The closest he got to feelings happened over that endless Christmas week, when no one asked him to come home more often. Not directly. Instead, his sister, Vanessa, tried to guilt him into it by parading his nephews around in front of him. His mother cooked his favorite meals, as if that would accomplish the same thing. And his father, who was so good at hiding behind his amiable physician’s exterior, tried to make idle conversation about sports teams Griffin didn’t follow.
None of them knew the horrors he’d seen out there on his first tour, and he’d never known how to tell them. He’d never known how to tell anyone what it looked like up close, war and human suffering and the kinds of choices a Marine had to make to survive. And worse, to thrive. It had been much easier to close himself off and spend time with the only people who understood without his having to put it all into inadequate words. Other veterans and active-duty military were his people. They got it.
Everyone else was a civilian, a heartbeat away from becoming yet another casualty if Griffin didn’t do his job.
He usually sat in his parents’ living room like the guest he was and chose to remain, his best polite smile on his face, and wondered why they couldn’t all see that he was nothing like them any longer. That he hadn’t been since he was still technically a teenager. That he might as well be drenched in all the blood he’d spilled, for one thing, right there on his mother’s pristine cream and blue sofa. That he was much worse than the monster they likely believed he was—he was an emotionless machine with no regrets, no complications, no human connections.
His father was a hands-on doctor, engaged in his community and always accessible, but while Griffin admired that, it wasn’t him. He’d been raised with the same urge to help people, but he’d gone about it in a different way. And now that he knew precisely what his choices entailed, how could he sit around in his mother’s pretty house playing board games and acting like he was normal?
Griffin knew how to protect people from afar, a calling he took seriously.
He’d never been very good at playing games.
Christmas in his hometown was slightly agitating, he could admit, though there was also a significant part of him that enjoyed the annual test. It gave him the chance to prove all over again that he didn’t belong there. It reminded him exactly who and what he was.
A blond woman who’d made a drunken pass at him shouldn’t have registered. Griffin had long ago decided that casual sex wasn’t for him, but that didn’t keep enterprising women from trying to change his mind. Why was he letting this particular one get to him?
He stood at the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded over his chest, and heard Mariah coming long before he saw her. He heard her door open and slam shut. He heard her footsteps on the second floor hallway, then the way she jogged down the stairs.
Griffin steeled himself for her embarrassment, a bright red face and an inability to look him in the eye, and maybe a few mumbled apologies.
But when she stopped on the step that put her at eye level, all she did was smile.
She didn’t look the worse for wear. If anything, Mariah looked as if she’d had a decent night’s sleep and woken up this morning refreshed. Her blue eyes were bright and clear, and if she was embarrassed or had been up in the night counting out her regrets, there was no visible evidence.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, pointedly.
Her smile widened. “Good, thanks.”
And that was it.
Mariah looked at him, he looked back, and Griffin didn’t know how long that went on before it became noticeably awkward. And he had no choice but to lift his chin like he’d planned to have a stare-down all along, then head for the door.
She had been wasted. She might not remember that, but he sure did. She’d even said—but he refused to dwell on that. He wasn’t going to think about the sultry invitation he had turned down, and not only because he didn’t think she’d meant it.
And so what if it kept him up half the night, wondering what if?
It made no sense that the whole thing scraped at him as they walked down the street in the gray morning toward the café at the water’s edge. Because he knew she never would have propositioned him if she was sober. Never in a million years.
What had she called him? A bad decision?
“What would you do if there was someone stalking you?” Mariah asked as they walked.
He angled a look down at her and didn’t like that she was wearing the same fleece-and-vest combination she’d been wearing last night. Not only because he had a clear memory of how he’d taken both items off her, but because it suggested that she really wasn’t the princess he’d accused her of being. She’d even swapped out those ridiculous leather boots for perfectly reasonable hiking shoes, annoying him even more.
“I would politely ask the stalker to find another target,” he replied, clipped and unamused.
Not that Mariah seemed to notice his tone. “What if he refused?” There was a hint of that laughter that had sucker punched him last night, though she stopped it almost as it began. He hated the loss of it as much as he hated hearing it. And then he hated himself even more. “Stalkers aren’t exactly known for their ability to see reason.”
“I would persuade him,” Griffin bit out. She glanced at him as they moved, her blue eyes not at all as foggy or bloodshot as they ought to have been. “This might surprise you, but I’m actually very persuasive.”
She laughed. And it was laughter, for God’s sake. Everybody laughed. He didn’t understand why he was acting like he’d never heard a woman laugh before. Why it felt like a bolt of lightning shot straight through him.
“I believe you,” Mariah said when her laughter faded.
Griffin couldn’t believe he had to remind himself that this was a job. He was working, not hanging around a pretty woman for his own entertainment. Something he really shouldn’t have had to keep telling himself.
“The good news is that whoever is following you is now following me,” he told her, stepping back into his usual role. Calm, cool, collected. He had always been an exemplary sniper. He knew how to calm himself down. How to steady himself into perfect stillness. Mariah was no more than a new situation he needed to conquer. But he had no doubt he would, because that was what he did. “It’s also extremely unlikely that anyone followed you here, and we’re tracking your cell phone now, so we’ll know if anyone uses it to hunt you down.”
He saw a flash of color move over her face then, but he couldn’t tell what had made her flush. Especially not when she trained her eyes on the uneven boardwalk before her. The fact that she no longer had what passed for cell phone privacy? Emotion? A stray memory of last night?
Why did he want to know so badly?
“This is certainly the most remote place I’ve ever been,” she said after a brief pause he chose not to analyze.
“It’s remote. It’s also a small town. There aren’t that many people here, and we all know each other. Too well, you might say.”
The way she smiled clawed at him, but by then they were walking up to the café’s front door. He stopped her before she could go inside, not knowing how to ask the question. But he wanted to know what she was hiding from him.
He needed to know it, because he liked to have all the information before he did any job. That was all.
Of course that was all.
“Mariah—”
“Please don’t tell me we have to have a conversation,” she said quickly.
“Or maybe you want me to apologize? I do. It’s all a blessed blur, I’m afraid, but please accept a blanket apology for anything I might have said or done last night.”
“You don’t remember?”
“It’s just so blurry.” He didn’t believe that bland smile she aimed at him. Not at all. “Bits and pieces. That’s all.”
“You don’t remember telling me that I’m beautiful.”
It was a statement, not a question, and he wouldn’t have thrown it at her if he hadn’t been so aware that she was lying to him. He’d had no intention of discussing what had happened last night. He’d spent the entire boat ride over patting himself on the back for the high road he planned to take.
But here he was. No high road in sight.
“I sure don’t.” Her smile was impenetrable, which was how he knew she’d practiced it. It was likely how Princess Mariah kept people at arm’s length. “But I’m sure you’re aware that you’re a very attractive man, Griffin. I assume they give you access to mirrors out there in the woods, or wherever y’all live. I can only apologize for stating the obvious.”
“You also told me that you figured a death threat was as good as a divorce decree, and wondered if I’d like to be your rebound.”
Though she hadn’t used those words. Not exactly.
“Now you’re making me blush,” she told him, despite clear evidence to the contrary. She wasn’t blushing at all at that point. She wore that cool smile, she was holding his gaze, and there wasn’t the faintest hint of embarrassment—or anything else—anywhere on that pretty face of hers. “I sure wish I could remember any of the scandalous things I said to you, but I can’t. I hope it wasn’t too much for you to handle.”
And he knew, without a shred of doubt, that despite the sweet honey of that drawl and the wide-eyed innocence of her gaze, she knew perfectly well she was issuing him a challenge.
“I didn’t try to handle you, Mariah,” he told her, low and dark and perilously close to out of control. Not that he’d allowed himself to get truly out of control since he was approximately eighteen, and boot camp had taken care of that short-lived impulse. “If I did, you can trust that you wouldn’t have any trouble remembering it the next day.”
Then he reached past her, opening the door and making a show of ushering her in like the fine, proper gentleman his mother had tried to raise before the Marines had made him into . . . something else entirely.
And she went, gliding ahead of him like it had been her idea in the first place, but he figured she was showing her hand. If Mariah had been half as innocent as she was acting, she should have been more bothered by him. That she wasn’t suggested she was taking pains to cover up her actual reactions. He liked that.
Not that he should let this woman—a client—get to him in the first place.
When he got to the table where Jonas and Blue waited, he was all business.
It took them two solid hours. They dug into every aspect of Mariah’s life. Her childhood. Her marriage. The kind of political aspirations David Lanier had; the family connections he had no qualm about using; and the names of every friend, connection, or story someone else had ever told in her presence about people who had known David before she met him. All to build a full picture.
“People don’t usually start with murder,” Blue told Mariah, kicked back in his chair with his tablet in his hands as he put in requests to Oz for different streams of information on David, his family, and all other aspects of Mariah’s story. “They usually warm up with something else first.”
Jonas sat next to Blue, giving Mariah his usual dark, grave stare. He didn’t say much. He stroked his beard—his favorite fake-out because he was not a man who succumbed to nervous energy unless he was trying to draw attention to his own movements, so that someone failed to notice how little he moved otherwise—and kept his gaze trained on Mariah.
He was looking for tells. Calculating lies and diversions. Running potential scenarios in his head, looking for weaknesses, tallying up probabilities.
“Why does he want to go into politics?” he asked at one point. It was the only question he’d asked in the last forty-five minutes.
“No reasonable man would,” Blue replied with a laugh.
“Power,” Mariah replied quietly.
Griffin had been proud of the way she’d held up under the intensity of this first, exploratory session with men who had been trained in interrogation techniques suitable for use in some of the nastiest places imaginable. And then he’d been pissed at himself for having pride in this woman when she had nothing to do with him.
Just. A. Client, he reminded himself. You idiot.
Still, she sat like a queen in the chair beside him, her blond hair wavier than it had been the day before and all of it loose and inviting around her face. It made her look younger. More approachable. He didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing—he only knew that he had more trouble than he should have had looking away.
Especially when she didn’t wilt beneath the full force of all their considerable attention.
“I’m not surprised you don’t understand,” she continued, a thread of steel beneath all that honey. “Y’all are obviously powerful in other ways. David can’t perform daring physical feats. He would never put his body on the line for his country or anyone else. The power he has comes from his pedigree. His bank account. For someone like that, a political career makes all kinds of sense. It’s a path to celebrity for people who recoil at the very idea of actual Hollywood celebrities.”
“Is he running for a particular office now?” Griffin asked.
“He plans to start in city government and work his way up. He has a very high opinion of himself. White House high, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Do you think he can win?”
Mariah considered that for a moment, and Griffin was suddenly aware of how she held herself motionless, like everyone else at the table. She learned how to conceal herself from the enemy, too, a voice in him insisted, and something in him lurched at the notion. Her hands were folded neatly in her lap, and her legs were crossed at the ankles beneath her chair. And she sat very, very still, as if the slightest hint of a gesture would give her away.
Which told him things about her life as a rich man’s trophy wife that he really didn’t want to know.
“What I think,” she said slowly, weighing each word carefully, “is that he chose me deliberately. Because it makes a good story, doesn’t it? A man like him, respectable bloodlines and old money, taking up with a dirt-poor nobody from way out yonder in the back of beyond? A waitress with no prospects he basically found by the side of the road? I think it was all part of the plan.”
“He married you ten years ago,” Blue pointed out. “Why did he wait so long to start his political career if that’s what he wanted all along?”
“I didn’t cooperate as expected.” Mariah smiled again as they all stared at her, and this time Griffin could see how controlled it was. “I believe the plan was to produce a few towheaded, photogenic babies first. Some adorable tykes for the Christmas card, who he could trot out behind him on stage while he made his acceptance speeches.”
“You said it was your job to keep him happy,” Blue said. And Griffin couldn’t possibly have explained why he wanted to punch his friend at that moment. Only that it was a challenge to repress that urge. “If that’s what it took to make him happy, why are you here without the Christmas-card kids in tow?”
Mariah’s smile widened, but Griffin felt her get more distant.
“David would tell you that I tricked him. A good old-fashioned bait and switch, he called it once.” She laughed, but it was a hollow sound that bore no resemblance to those deep, problematic belly laughs from the night before. “He expected that one of the benefits of marrying a white trash girl who was more or less straight from the trailer park is that I would shoot out babies
like a gumball machine. Instead, I never got pregnant. I never even had a late period, if you’re wondering.”
His brothers maintained stone faces, but Griffin was pretty sure neither one of them had wondered anything of the kind. He certainly hadn’t.
And he suspected Mariah knew that, since her tone got lighter as she kept going.
“He never liked me much, now that I look back on it. I was a project. I was good optics. He and that nasty best friend of his—who I’m sure has aspirations of becoming his campaign manager and chief of staff down the line—plotted it all out. Everybody loves a Cinderella story, after all. And I’m sure he’ll even use our infertility to keep climbing on up that ladder. It’s amazing how many voters find him sympathetic, especially when he pretends he’s in pain.” Her nose wrinkled slightly, as if she were holding back more of that laughter. Or something else. “I’ve always heard tell that the camera adds ten pounds, but in David’s case, it adds a soul.”
There were a few more probing background questions, all to give them as much insight as possible into Mariah’s take on her current dilemma. Then, as things were winding down, Jonas took a call from Templeton.
“Things are ramping up with the preacher,” he said curtly when he hung up, his gaze shifting between Blue and Griffin. “I’m on it.”
He nodded at Mariah, then took his leave, disappearing out the back door of the café. Blue and Griffin checked their phones and clearly both sent Templeton the same text, offering immediate assistance if necessary, because the same response came back to both of them.
Not there yet.
“Spiritual concerns?” Mariah asked lightly.
“Something like that,” Griffin replied.
“Piety can be so thorny,” she murmured, and despite everything, he almost laughed.
