by Megan Crane
“I can’t believe any of this,” David said, scowling at her as he advanced. “I can’t believe that you would stoop so low as—”
He stopped. Abruptly. Because he ran right into Griffin’s outstretched hand.
“Take one step closer to her and I’ll throw you back out that door. Headfirst.”
David peered up at Griffin.
And had to crane back his neck to do it.
Mariah felt dizzy all over again. She was sitting there in a hospital bed in an obnoxious hospital gown, her hair a disaster she wasn’t prepared to confront, one side of her face swollen and bruised, and the full weight of everything that had happened rolling back over her in deeply unpleasant waves—
But all she could think about was the difference between the two men standing at the end of her hospital bed.
On the one side, there was David. Boyish-faced, preppy David, who kept trim on his treadmill and out on the golf course. He was in his usual uniform of khakis and a collared shirt. In peach today, which seemed to call undue attention to how smooth and soft and manicured he was.
And on the other side, there was Griffin. He looked like some kind of avenging angel, dressed like the weapon he was, all packed muscle. He towered over David. And he was so much more solid and lean, he made David look even softer than he already was.
The longer she stared at them, the calmer and more dangerous Griffin looked.
And the more agitated David became.
“You can call off your attack dog, Mariah,” David snapped. He didn’t wait for her to reply. He swiveled his head back around to Griffin, then nodded toward the door. “You can wait outside, brother.”
Griffin snorted. “You’re not a member of my family. And I’m not going to tell you again. One step closer and you’re out of here.”
It took David a moment to let that settle in. To accept what must have been the challenging reality that Griffin wasn’t playing around. Mariah saw the very moment he understood that.
Just as she saw the next moment, when he decided to ignore Griffin, as if Griffin were nothing but a lowly member of his staff.
“You can’t imagine what they’re saying,” David said, his tone haughty and furious. A tone Mariah knew well. “You’re going to have to clean this up, and fast.”
She shrugged, mostly because he’d once lectured her all the way home from a dinner party clear on the other side of Atlanta because she’d shrugged in public. He’d claimed it broadcast how low class she was. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is obviously some kind of revenge fantasy playing out here.” David forced out an anemic chuckle. “I sympathize, I do. You’re angry at me, and you want to hurt me. But you really shouldn’t have dragged my father into this.”
It was funny—or maybe the word she was looking for was sad—that she’d ever been the kind of silly girl who’d looked at David and seen him as handsome instead of weak. Charming instead of self-involved.
Her mother might have forgiven her for leaving Two Oaks with David. Mariah wasn’t sure she could forgive herself.
And she discovered that the longer she looked at him, really, truly looked at this man she’d been married to for a decade, she wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Somewhere along the way—maybe in the trunk of a car headed down a dirt road toward her own death—he’d lost any power he’d had over her.
She expected that to feel like a victory. Instead, it was more complicated.
Something like sorrow.
But she still didn’t want anything to do with him.
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, trying to keep her voice as kind as she could. After all, he’d found out some nasty things about his father today, and she knew how he idolized Walton. “But I don’t think you should be in here. The police are going to want to talk to me, and I don’t think they’ll like that you came by to . . .” She let her head drop to one side. “Why did you come by again?”
“I don’t know what happened to you. Maybe you paid your goon here to rough you up. For all I know, that’s what you like these days.” Griffin made a sound that Mariah could only describe as a growl, and David inched away from him. Closer to the door, luckily for him. “Mariah. You need to think this through. It’s your word against my father’s, and I don’t know who you think is going to believe you.” He made that chuckling sound again. “You.”
“They don’t have to believe me,” Mariah replied, trying her best to see what she’d found so appealing in him. Trying to remember when she’d believed marrying him was the happily ever after she’d hardly dared believe in before. But all she saw was an angry little man with thinning hair and a sulky mouth. Who clearly wanted nothing more than to bully her. “But I think they’ll probably believe all the men he hired, none of whom are likely to waste a single second risking themselves to keep Walton Lanier out of jail.”
“They’re already flipping,” Griffin confirmed, deadpan. Only his dark eyes glittered. “One after the next. Like ugly dominoes.”
“It will never stick,” David declared with great confidence. “My father is a pillar of Atlanta society. He has friends everywhere. He’s not a scorned woman looking for a payout. I don’t know that I believe anyone did this to you. Maybe you did it to yourself.”
“In a manner of speaking, I surely did.” Mariah surrendered to the full-throated glory of her real drawl. The one that David had always hated so much that she’d trained herself out of it. She sat up straighter, hoping her hair was as big and curly and messy as it felt. She smiled at him, ignoring the tugging pain on the swollen side of her face, because she knew that would irritate him, too. Ugly women shouldn’t smile, he’d told her once. It’s plain offensive. “I had the temerity to marry you. Your daddy told me himself how against our marriage he was. But I didn’t beat myself up, David.”
He started to speak, but she wasn’t done.
“All I had to do was be nice to him, and when he raped me, he’d go easy. That was what he promised me.” She kept her gaze trained on David, though she was aware of the way Griffin went from stone to something harder. More terrifying. “But I wasn’t that nice to him. That’s why he did this to my face. And he had every intention of making it a full-body experience, then inviting all those other men to join in. That’s who your father is.”
Mariah had spent a lot of time coming up with scenes in her head over the years, imagining what it would be like to see David speechless.
But the reality was far better than anything she could have cooked up.
She took advantage of it and kept on. “But I’ll tell you what. He was much too comfortable with his threats and his fist. That tells me that I’m not the first girl who’s seen that side of your father. So I don’t think it really matters if anyone believes me. There’s going to be a line out the door behind me. You can count on it.”
And it took her a moment to realize that the harsh panting wasn’t hers. It was David’s.
“He begged me to leave you in the gutter where I found you,” David sneered. “But I thought I could make something out of you. I thought I could take a piece of crap that belonged in a toilet—”
This wasn’t a new line of complaint. But this time, Griffin was here.
And he’d obviously had enough.
Mariah didn’t see him move. One minute he was staring down at David like a stone carving. The next, David’s arm was extended at a painful-looking angle, and Griffin was forcing him out the door, wrenching David’s shoulder to bend him forward.
Mariah heard cursing from the hallway, then David’s blustery shout, but he was cut off. Fast.
And when Griffin returned to the doorway, he stayed there, gazing at her from a distance.
Where he was probably more comfortable, she knew. No matter how it made her ache more.
“Thank you,” she said qui
etly.
“The least I can do is take out the trash.”
Something bright and heady swelled there between them. But Griffin turned his head, looking at a distraction out in the hall.
“Griffin . . .” Mariah began, desperate and shaky and determined to hold on to him, no matter what it took.
“The police are here,” he told her, his voice too calm. Too deliberate. Too much like the way he’d talked to her so long ago, when she’d stepped off that ferry and seen him, and her world had changed forever. “It’s going to be a long interview. If I were you, I’d get dressed.”
He stepped into the hall, closing the door behind him. Mariah sat where she was, her hands in fists and her eyes blurry with some mixture of emotion and fury. She didn’t want to move. But she was entirely too Southern not to think that a coat of armor might not be amiss if she was about to be grilled by the authorities on such a host of unpleasant subjects.
And when she came out of the bathroom some time later, she was dressed in clothes she didn’t have to ask to know Griffin had found for her. She’d done what she could with her hair, washed her face, and tried her best to look less like a zombie and more like a human being. Out in her room, she found two detectives waiting for her and Isaac standing by the window, the same way Griffin had earlier.
But Griffin himself was nowhere to be found.
Twenty
Mariah talked until she was hoarse, Isaac interrupting from time to time to corroborate her story or add detail. And then she did it all over again with the FBI.
When all law enforcement officials were gone and her throat was worn out, she was poked and prodded some more by the doctors, then released.
But when the nurse rolled her out in the mandatory wheelchair, it wasn’t Alaska Force she found waiting for her at the hospital entrance.
It was her family.
“Y’all sure know how to throw a homecoming party,” her sister Britney drawled through the open window of her pickup truck. “I was fixing to stay mad at you for the next ten or twenty years at least. But look at you. You’re much too pathetic.”
“Somebody has to teach you how to make sure the other guy looks worse,” her brother Justin chimed in, shaking his head as if Mariah had let down the whole family.
A position he’d taken every time any one of their relatives had gotten into a scrap, now that she considered it.
None of them hugged, because McKennas weren’t huggers, save for the most dire and horrendous of circumstances—like a mother-daughter meeting up for the first time in years after having been kidnapped and hauled off to some ratty barn deep in the countryside.
But when her brother and sister packed her up into the pickup, settling her in the backseat next to Rose Ellen, Mariah had to admit it felt as good as a hug might have. Tucked up in a pickup with her family, headed down a Georgia highway toward home.
At last.
And as the days passed, Mariah expected to find it difficult to ease back into life in Two Oaks, especially when she’d been running from it all these years.
But the reality was, home was simple. It was familiar. She sank back into life in the old farmhouse like she was sinking into butter.
She met all her nieces and nephews. She caught up with Britney, Justin, and her sister Whitney. They told stories and laughed into the night around the same old bonfire out back, and when they were good and caught up on all the nuclear family scandals and disappointments— like the “misunderstanding” that had landed her brother Michael in jail—they brought in the cousins.
And as the swelling in her face went down and she got less stiff and sore with each day, Mariah found herself . . . closer to content than she remembered ever being before. She slept in that same room off the kitchen that had been hers as a girl, and some days she almost forgot that she’d been away for so long. That those years in Atlanta had even happened. She could wake up in the warm mornings, walk outside in her bare feet, and feel the Georgia dirt between her toes the way she always had.
She could breathe deeply the way she never had in Atlanta, and the way she imagined she might again someday in Alaska.
She ate her great aunt’s sweet potato pie, had too many beers with her cousins, and let her drawl get thick and lazy and full-on redneck again.
The bruises on her face had gone down to little more than a few shadows by the time she’d been home for a week and a half.
Mariah walked outside after sunset on that Wednesday night, looking for lightning bugs as the sky deepened from dark blue into soft black and the stars came out. She walked away from the blazing lights of the farmhouse and the laugh track on Rose Ellen’s favorite show. She picked her way across the yard, toward the woods, until she found herself at the tree line.
She stood there a moment, breathing in the rich scent of home. Jasmine and honeysuckle perfuming the night air, the rich earth, the woods and the green and, when the wind changed, the neighbor’s cows.
And when she smiled, it ached a bit, but not from her injuries.
“I know you’re there,” she said softly. She heard an owl hoot. “I expect that means you want me to.”
For a moment there was nothing but quiet. Or what passed for quiet in the country night, on a pretty spring evening in these noisy woods.
And then, where there had been only shadow a moment before, there was Griffin.
“Are you going to follow me around forever? Just hide out in the shadows for the rest of your life?”
His dark eyes glittered. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay. That your ex doesn’t come back to finish that conversation.”
“He’s got his hands full telling lies to half of Atlanta,” Mariah said with a shrug. “And besides, he’s not going to come back to Two Oaks. The last time he was here, look what happened.”
“I dropped off your things.”
The longer they stood there, the more her eyes adjusted and the more she wanted to touch him. She wanted to reach over and get her hands on him, to remind herself that no matter what he looked like out here in the dark, with only the stars to light him, he wasn’t a machine. He wasn’t really made of stone.
He was a man, flesh and blood. And so much heart, though she knew he would deny that most of all.
“Thank you.” She had come home from breakfast with a selection of her aunts that morning to find her single suitcase waiting for her at the farmhouse door. Everything she’d taken on her run from Atlanta and left in Alaska was packed up inside it.
She’d carried her suitcase into her room, shut the door behind her, and cried into her pillow until she’d given herself a headache.
But she wasn’t crying now.
“I’m headed back tomorrow,” he told her, gruff and low. “For good.”
And then they just stood there, staring at each other.
And Mariah’s bruises had all but faded by now. Or the physical pain had, anyway. That ache inside her had spilled over into tears, sure—but that was this morning.
She’d walked around the past few days with the nape of her neck prickling, fully aware that even though she couldn’t see him, he was there again.
Watching over her. Keeping her safe.
Hiding, a voice in her had whispered this morning, after she’d draped a cold washcloth over her red, cried-out eyes.
She wasn’t the same person who had found herself in a hospital bed after that charity event. She wasn’t the girl who’d made a thousand excuses, over and over, to deny truths that had always been right there in front of her eyes.
She wasn’t even the same as she’d been when she’d arrived in Grizzly Harbor.
Mariah had been forged in a different fire altogether in that barn.
“If you ever try to sacrifice yourself for me again, baby girl,” Rose Ellen had told her the other night, her leg up on her coffee table and a cigarette in her ha
nd, “you better believe that I will kick your butt. Do you hear me?”
And no matter how many years she’d spent trying to pretend otherwise, the truth was that Mariah was every inch her mother’s daughter. Bad decisions, stubbornness, and deeply unimpressed with pointless sacrifices.
“So this is your version of a good-bye?” she demanded now, not surprised to find that her hands had shifted to her hips. “You’re . . . what? Off to Alaska? Never to be seen again?”
“The job is complete.” He gritted out the words, and she could actually hear how tight his jaw was. “I tried to tell you this was never going to be anything more than the job.”
She laughed at him. She couldn’t help herself. And she took his scowl as encouragement.
“You go ahead and lie to yourself all you want, Griffin. You’re good at that. But don’t you think for one minute that you can lie to my face. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.”
She could feel the air crackle between them. And when he leaned closer, he looked less like stone and more like iron heated in an unforgiving fire.
“Do not compare me to your ex, princess. Ever.”
“I’ve been beating myself up for my cowardice for longer than I care to admit.” She shook her head. “But it looks like it’s going around.”
Then his hands were curling around her shoulders. And though she could feel his fingers and the tightness of his grip, he didn’t hurt her. She knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that he never would. That he would hurt himself first.
At least if they were talking about his hands.
“You know exactly what I do. You’ve watched me do it. I can’t be the man you want me to be, Mariah. I don’t want to be the man you want me to be.”
“You mean you don’t know how,” she threw back at him.
