by Megan Crane
Dear God, she knew him.
And it wasn’t David.
Seventeen
Griffin gritted out a request for cover and potential cover fire into his comm and barely heard the terse affirmatives in reply. Then he ducked down and swept Rose Ellen up and into his arms, shifting her over one shoulder into a fireman’s carry with the ease of long practice involving much heavier soldiers.
“Hold on,” he told her, when her breath left her in a rush.
He didn’t look back.
Not because he trusted Mariah to execute her role like she was an acting member of Alaska Force today, but because he couldn’t. He’d never felt that thing in his chest before, like a balloon with an ache that kept getting bigger and bigger. . . .
Everything Mariah had said made sense. He couldn’t abandon her mother. A decoy was a solid plan.
And he wanted to tear this barn down with his hands instead of leaving her in it.
Griffin knew that if he looked back at her, he wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t leave her for even one second more.
He moved to the wall instead, then eased his way out between the rotted old planks, taking care not to slam Rose Ellen’s head into the jagged wood. He trusted his brothers to handle any enemy eyes, so he didn’t waste time looking around. He took off for the tree line, running as fast as he could while carrying the weight of another human.
He was aware of his heart and the way it beat, strong and true. He was aware of his breath, in and out of his lungs as he moved. He was aware of every inch of the body he’d made into a machine, and how every part worked exactly as it should.
There was nothing but his breath. The weight of Rose Ellen.
And the trees ahead of him, beckoning him to safety.
It felt like it took him an hour to sprint some two hundred yards, but it was likely a handful of seconds.
When he penetrated the forest, he kept going until he was sure there was enough cover. Only then did he stop, shifting to let Rose Ellen down. He helped her stand on that bad leg. And then he checked in.
“Mariah’s mother is safe,” he said into his comm.
“What’s the status on Mariah?” came Isaac’s cool voice, after much too long a pause.
“She stayed behind. As bait.”
There was another long pause.
“Mariah’s mother can’t walk much or fast,” Griffin said tersely. Rose Ellen watched him as he talked, no particular reaction on her face. Because she was tough like her daughter, Griffin thought. Or maybe Mariah was tough like her. Either way, she wasn’t breaking down as he gave his precise coordinates. “I need her picked up.”
“Are you thinking another diversion?” Blue asked.
“I’m thinking it’s high time I did what I do best,” Griffin replied.
He didn’t wait for his brothers to agree, because he knew they would.
He bent down and pulled one of his backup pieces from his ankle. Then offered it to Rose Ellen. “Do you know how to operate a nine-millimeter?”
“Oh, sugar,” Rose Ellen drawled, a fierce glint in her eyes. “With a merry ol’ song in my heart.”
“Okay. Shoot anyone who doesn’t identify himself as a friend.”
“Whose friend?” Rose Ellen asked coolly. She took the gun he offered her, checked the chamber, then held it in a casually firm grip as she pointed the muzzle at the ground. “I don’t know as I have any friends running around these woods today, and if I did, I’d have half a mind to put a couple bullets in them for leaving me in there.”
“My friends,” he clarified, and hated himself for finding this woman charming when Mariah was still stuck in that barn. And he’d put her there. “But I suspect you’ll know them when you see them. For one thing, they’ll call you ma’am.”
Rose Ellen almost smiled. “Then I might shoot them first.”
He left her with her back to a tree, the Glock in her hand like she’d been born with it.
And he ran.
Under normal circumstances, Griffin liked to pore over maps. He liked to study geological factors, the wind, any and all weather conditions. Under normal circumstances, he planned long before he ever maneuvered himself into position.
But there was nothing normal about this.
He ran through the woods, grateful for every nasty vertical mile he’d ever pounded out in Alaska. Because these flat Georgia woods were nothing in comparison. He ran in a wide circle so no one could see him through the trees, and made as little noise as possible as he moved. When he was roughly one hundred and eighty degrees from where he’d started, he headed back toward the field.
And found the tree he’d spied on the way in, with its sturdy trunk and broad, wide limbs. He scaled it easily, flowing from branch to branch until he found the perfect vantage point. He balanced himself, then reached back around for his rifle.
He could assemble it with his eyes closed. In the dark. Behind his back.
It was even easier here, high up in a big old tree. He felt the smoothness of the metal, the lethal barrel, the scope.
In a few economical movements, he assembled one of the most lethal weapons that had ever been crafted.
He settled down with the scope, focusing it on the barn door.
“I’m in position,” he said into his comm.
“Wait for some fireworks,” Isaac ordered him.
Griffin muttered an affirmative.
I love you, Mariah had said.
More than once.
He told himself to breathe. To settle. To blank out his mind and focus in on the target.
I love you, she had said, and it had never been like this before. He had never had all this weight and ache sitting on him while he did what he’d been born to do. It was a lot worse than a distraction, because he wasn’t distracted. He was focused. He just . . . felt.
He could fight it, Griffin realized after a moment of trying, or he could give in.
He had his scope at his eye. He had his gun against his shoulder.
And he’d learned a long time ago that there was no fighting the inevitable. There was only leaning into it, settling into whatever parameters were available, and taking it to that still, focused place where he could exist forever.
I love you, Mariah had said, bright and easy.
He breathed out, then in. And slowly, slowly felt his heartbeat begin to chill.
I love you, she’d said, and it was like those words wrapped around the barrel of his gun, flowing from the elegance of the rifle deep into him, changing everything.
I love you.
He held it like he held his rifle, his aim true.
She loved him. And he would save her.
Those were facts, the same as the weight of the rifle, the angle vectors and wind resistance, all of which he calculated by rote. All of which helped make him who he was.
He leaned into them, they became part of him, and Griffin went still.
Finally, he went still.
And waited.
* * *
• • •
It wasn’t the first time in this long ordeal of a day that Mariah thought she was dreaming. Possibly dead.
But no amount of blinking could change the fact that she knew the man standing there in front of her.
It was her father-in-law, Walton Chandler Lanier.
And he looked the way he always did. Dapper. Put together in a Southern man’s outfit of linen and pastels, like he’d gotten lost on the way to one of those garden parties with refreshing mint juleps that seemed to be the entire point of slow, hot Southern summers.
He even cracked the same toothy grin she’d last seen at the Thanksgiving dinner table.
“Walton?” she asked, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
Because she couldn’t.
“I get it,
” Walton said, grinning even wider. “I do.”
David took after his mother, and Mariah had always secretly regretted that he’d missed out on Walton’s truly luxuriant mane of hair. It had been golden blond in his youth and was now a pure, flowing white. Mariah had never understood how all that hair never responded to the humidity the way hers always did. Even now, when her father-in-law was standing in front of her in this barn where she was tied to a chair—or supposedly tied to a chair, and clearly by his orders—she was marveling at that hair.
“I truly do get it,” Walton was saying in his thick, affable drawl. “You’re a pretty girl, and men lose their minds over pretty things. I can’t say I’m not guilty of the same. But you never should have married him, Mariah.” He shook his head as if he were sad. “You should have known your place.”
Mariah was glad that she was pretending to still be tied up, because no one was likely to notice it when she clenched her hands into fists.
She was buffeted by competing emotions. First, she still didn’t feel anything like brave ought to. She was afraid she might throw up at any moment. And second, she was swamped with an overpowering sense of relief that didn’t make the slightest bit of sense under the circumstances, when she didn’t have a lot to be relieved about.
It took her a moment to understand that she’d really expected it to be David.
She’d steeled herself for it, in fact.
And Mariah wasn’t sure what it said about her that even though she knew what kind of man David was, she hadn’t wanted to believe that he could really want to kill her.
Much less do it.
Hate her, sure. Shout terrible things in her face, why not. Their marriage had been ugly, so there was no reason to imagine their divorce would be anything but more of the same.
But deep down, she’d wanted to hold on to the memory of that misty fall evening in Two Oaks, when he’d shown up in that cherry red car, smiled at her as if she mattered, and told her he could change her life.
Maybe that was a strange souvenir from a terrible marriage, but she wanted to hold on to it all the same.
“Walton,” she said, and her voice was scratchy. “I can’t believe you’re the one responsible for all this.”
“I’ll tell you what, Miss Mariah,” he said with that broad smile that, she saw now, went nowhere near his hooded eyes. Had that always been true? Was she only now noticing it? “I never did care for the way you took to calling me by my Christian name. I know I offered, but any good girl of decent breeding never would have taken me up on it. It seems to me that’s part and parcel of the problem right there.” Another sad, sad shake of that lion’s head. “I don’t know that I blame you. It’s in your nature, after all. It’s what gold diggers do. You take advantage.”
Mariah revised that feeling of relief and focused on who was in the room instead of who wasn’t.
“Walton,” she said, lingering on his name because this time she could see that telltale coldness in his gaze. His smile was usually too wide and bright for it to show. “Did you put me in the hospital? Twice?”
“I didn’t want to hurt you.” Walton looked like he was out making Sunday social calls, shaking hands around white linen-draped tables at his clubs. Not standing in an old country barn, talking about . . . this. “But I don’t want my only son divorced from some backwoods trash. Bad enough he married you in the first place.”
“You were always so much more friendly to me than Mrs. Lanier,” Mariah said, astonished to discover that somewhere inside, that smarted. She was actually the faintest bit hurt. “You were always perfectly polite. You always smiled, asked after me.”
“A man either has manners or he doesn’t,” Walton said, as if she’d suggested he do something truly horrendous, like wear white after Labor Day. “I know I failed with David. I know he’s not the man I intended him to be. I know all about his dalliances, and if I could apologize for him, I would. I didn’t raise him to flaunt bad behavior.”
“But . . .” She swallowed, not sure how to ask the question. “If you’re apologizing for him, why am I here?”
Here in Georgia, against her will. Here in this barn, with these men all around. Here in this chair, waiting for a verdict they all knew had been passed already.
This was her sentence, not her trial.
“You shouldn’t have left him,” Walton said, tsking as if he were admonishing her. Correcting her. “The only thing you had going for you was your loyalty. All those years standing by his side, taking all that abuse when you couldn’t give him the baby he thinks he wants. I’ve always rewarded loyalty, Mariah. But then you left.”
“Rewarded . . . ?”
Mariah hardly understood what he was saying. And not only because she was too aware of the other men behind him. The staring one muttered to the tweaker, and the tweaker slipped out through the barn door. Taking his giant gun with him.
She jerked her attention back to Walton.
“You were obedient. You were loyal. You stayed with him for ten years, almost to the point where folks were getting used to you and thinking on forgetting where he found you. You should have stayed. I’d just about decided that I could tolerate a piece of trash like you being the mother of my grandbabies, because Lord knew, you have more tenacity than my own flesh and blood.”
She couldn’t help the way her chin rose then. She’d been letting too much of her McKenna out lately, and there was no putting it back inside. Not now. Not ever again.
“No need to worry on that score.” And she let her drawl go deep country, just to remind them both who she was. Where she’d come from. “It turns out I can’t have children. A surprise, I know. Your son’s been pretty worked up about it for years.”
“I’ve had you on birth control since the day my son brought you home,” Walton said, that same merry smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes, as if what he was saying wasn’t impossible. And heinous. “You were a tramp straight out of a roadside diner, like a bad country song. I knew that left to your own devices, you’d have a litter of sticky brats to spend my family’s money, and I couldn’t have that. If you think on it a minute, you’ll see clear.”
Her heart was doing things that should have hurt more. Though it hurt enough as it was. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .”
“One thing I appreciate about you, Mariah, is how consistent you are. You wake up at the same time every morning. You eat the same thing for breakfast right after you get off the treadmill. Easiest thing in the world to slip a crushed-up pill into your morning oats. There’s not a maid in that house who doesn’t do my bidding.”
Mariah couldn’t take that in. All those years. All the terrible things David had said to her, and the way she’d privately agreed, hating her own body for betraying her. All the doctor’s appointments . . .
Her stomach lurched. Why had it never occurred to her that she was only ever sent to doctors David approved of—doctors who played golf with him and his father? Why had it never crossed her mind that, really, she ought to find her own?
“You let me think I was infertile for a decade,” she whispered.
Walton laughed that same booming, uproarious laugh she’d heard him use a thousand times over the years. She’d found it infectious. She still did, only now it struck her as more of an airborne toxic event.
“You should thank me,” he told her now. “Just think how losing a mother can break a child’s heart. If you’d had David’s babies, they’d have to mourn you, too. Are you really that selfish?”
Pull yourself together, baby girl, she told herself, that voice in her head sounding exactly like her own mother’s.
Behind Walton, the staring man said something to her original abductor, then left through the barn door, too.
Griffin had told her to run, she reminded herself. That she would know when she should.
She tensed in her seat, told h
erself she could and would do this, and then focused her attention back on her father-in-law. Who looked the same as he always did.
It made this worse.
“I’m not following,” she said, trying to sound submissive and docile. The way he liked women to address him. “David and I were engaged for months. Why didn’t you stop the wedding if you were opposed to it?”
Another chuckle. “It never occurred to me he’d go through with it. He sure showed me.”
“I was his . . . rebellion?”
“Let’s be real clear, now that it’s just you and me.” Walton moved closer, and then, sickeningly, reached out to fit his palm against her cheek. He leaned in so close, she had no choice but to look at the red of his nose. Capillaries that spoke of the drinks he liked too much and the dissipation he took as his rightful due. “You’ve always been a mighty fine piece of ass, Miss Mariah. At first I was going to kill you off. Make it look like an accident, nice and simple, no muss and no fuss. But then you had to go and run. It would have been one thing if you planned to stay away for good, but who stays in Alaska? I knew you’d be back.”
Mariah was frozen straight through, but the worst part was that she could still feel her heart kicking hard and panicked. Her pulse was an impossible racket inside her. She wasn’t sure if her head ached more than her stomach lurched, but despite that, she stayed still. Entirely too focused on his meaty, damp hand against the side of her face.
“You caused me a lot of trouble, is the thing,” Walton said, and his hand moved down to stroke its way over the nape of her neck, making her shudder in revulsion. “I think I deserve a taste of that fine ass. It’d be a shame to waste it, don’t you think?”
It took three seconds. One of disbelief. One of sheer horror.
Then one more second of hell no.
“Well, Walton,” she said, and she smiled as she said it, “since you asked, I would really rather die.”
And it was worth it for the blank look on his face. The shock that followed. It was worth watching his temper take hold, his mouth tightening, color flooding his face until he was even redder than he was before.
