by Megan Crane
He knew exactly who he was. He knew precisely what he needed. He wasn’t built for softness. Of any kind. If Mariah had taught him anything, it was that he needed to make more of an effort to tend to his body’s needs over time, so he wasn’t tempted to confuse sex for something else ever again.
And sure, as he hiked back to his cabin in the brightness that evenings offered at this time of year—at the end of the long week since Everly had told him Mariah had returned to Grizzly Harbor and he’d restricted himself to Fool’s Cove for work reasons—he might have been slightly stressed out about all the ways he had betrayed himself with a client. He needed to find a way to repair what Mariah had broken. What he’d let her break. He needed to patch up all those walls and compartments, and reorder himself so that he made sense again.
And maybe he continued to be surprised that it was a whole lot harder to do than it had seemed when he’d created those spaces inside him in the first place.
He got to his cabin, and it was cold and gloomy and empty, exactly as he’d left it. Exactly as it always was.
Griffin pushed his way inside but didn’t switch on the generator and start his lights. He stayed where he was. Frozen in the gloom, the quiet.
The emptiness.
And there, when no one could see him and he could barely see himself, he faced the uncomfortable truth that he’d been avoiding for days.
The fact that she was here, a simple boat ride away, was killing him.
Killing him.
And it was more than that.
He knew when she’d arrived on the ferry. He knew when she’d checked into Blue Bear Inn again. He knew that she’d spent her week here the way she’d spent her days before, only without an Alaska Force escort this time. And he’d kept himself on alert, waiting for the inevitable attempt she’d make to reach out to him—
But she didn’t.
Mariah had made no effort whatsoever to see him, and Griffin didn’t know what the hell to do with that.
Especially now that her whole week here had passed.
And she was leaving on the morning ferry.
She was killing him.
She’d told him back in Georgia that she wasn’t going to chase him. She wasn’t going to beg him for anything. She deserved better.
Griffin would have sworn up and down that he didn’t want any of this. That it was all for the best that he hadn’t seen her, and better still that she was leaving without any kind of confrontation between them. But here in the precarious summer evening light, nothing around him but the silent forest and the ruthless mountains, he could admit, at last, that it was eating him alive that she hadn’t tried.
“You hypocrite,” he muttered at himself. Then swore at himself in his family’s Spanish, the French he’d learned in high school, and the Arabic he’d learned in the service to really nail the point home.
It was as if, once he admitted any kind of feeling to himself—any hint of an emotion at all—the floodgates opened.
But that was a lie, too. They were already wide open.
Mariah had taken a sledgehammer to every barrier and every wall that made him who he was, and Griffin had no idea how to put them back together.
How to put him back together.
And he could fool himself, with all his lectures about how fine he was and how he was getting along with renovating himself from the inside out—
But she was here.
She was right here in Grizzly Harbor, happily living a life that didn’t include him, and he wasn’t sure he could bear it.
He braced his hands against the counter in his kitchen, like that might keep the wild storm locked away inside him.
He knew how to control his heartbeat, but he had never felt it like this before, storming at him and taking him over.
He knew the power of stillness, of waiting, of fierce and total focus, but he had never allowed himself to free-fall the way he was now, with nothing to hold on to and no idea where he was going.
Griffin remembered his tours with the Marines, and the necessary steps he’d taken to make sure he could live with the man the Corps had made him. Some walls protected not just him, after all, but anyone unlucky enough to be around him.
He didn’t need to bring a war zone home to his family. He didn’t need to bludgeon the people he loved with the reality of what he’d seen. He had been called to serve, and part of that service was holding weight that civilians couldn’t. And shouldn’t. That service didn’t end when he left the Marines. If anything, it was more crucial as a veteran.
But as he stood there in the gloom of his cabin, what Isaac had said about putting down weight and what Mariah had said about the masks both he and she wore felt tangled up inside him.
Do you carry the weight of that life? she’d asked him while he’d held her. And she’d put her hand on his heart, not his shoulders.
Because it was one thing to hold fast to his honor and carry what he could. That was the vow he had taken when he’d chosen to become a soldier. But it was something else entirely to fashion the mask he’d worn from the moment he’d come back from the Marines and spend all these years hiding behind it.
Griffin had thought it was because he was too different. Too alien. Incapable of interacting with humans and unfit for relationships beyond that one week a year he spent in Tucson practicing his smile for his family.
He’d told himself that he was doing everyone a favor when he’d coldly walked away from the life he’d had there.
But it had taken him all these years to understand that he’d been lying to himself all along.
It wasn’t civilians or civilian life in general that wasn’t for him. It was that life. That particular life.
He hadn’t loved Gabrielle. Not with any kind of intensity or intimacy. He hadn’t shown her the truth about himself, and he’d had no intention of ever doing so.
There in his silent cabin, it was as if he’d ripped off his own skin. He felt stripped naked and vulnerable, and he hated it. God, how he hated it.
But hating it didn’t make it any less true.
He hadn’t felt even a fraction for Gabrielle, the girl he’d asked to marry him, what he felt for Mariah—the woman who’d walked away from him. It wasn’t any kind of contest. It wasn’t even close.
In the end, as Mariah had told him in Georgia and he’d denied to himself ever since, this had always and ever been about his pride.
Gabrielle had wounded his pride, never him. And Griffin had built himself a glorious temple made entirely of walls to keep the world away, the better to nurture that pride. He had abandoned his family, walked away from his life, and done it all with his self-righteousness dressed up like concern for others.
He had never been a machine. He was good at what he did, but that didn’t make him inhuman.
The sad truth was that all this time, he’d been hiding from himself. From the simple, uncomfortable reality that his ex had embarrassed him. With his best friend. And instead of dealing with that, he’d locked any feelings he had about it away and told himself he didn’t feel anything at all.
Ever.
When it was actually a lot messier. He shouldn’t have asked Gabrielle to marry him when what he’d really wanted was the idea of somebody waiting for him. And he should have let her go the moment he’d understood that he cared more about the Marines than he did about her. That what she’d really been to him was one more way to make it clear he couldn’t and wouldn’t follow in his father’s footsteps.
Instead, it had been a lot easier to wrap himself up in all his lofty talk of compartments and ice.
And all it had taken was one blue-eyed blonde with a drawl like honey, and he’d been exposed for the liar he was.
No wonder he felt like he was falling apart. He was finally seeing the truth about himself, and it was jarring.
And she
was here.
She was here.
Griffin had always prided himself on never surrendering, to anything—
But it seemed to him as he stood in his lonely cabin, in the remote and stark life he’d built to exalt the lies he preferred to tell himself, that he had finally run out of alternatives.
He could keep trying to pretend that he didn’t feel the things he did, but that was going to ruin what he truly loved about his place in Alaska Force. His brothers would only take so much. And one of these days, if he kept on the way he was, he was going to dare Isaac to fire him, and Isaac was going to rise to that challenge.
And that might truly kill him.
He knew it would.
Griffin also knew exactly whose fault it was that he was in this situation in the first place.
And she was here until morning.
Twenty-two
Mariah left the Fairweather with a smile on her face, pushing through the door and out into the long, still-bright Alaskan evening. It was ten o’clock at night and yet light outside, and that simple reality was so . . . exhilarating.
Just like the fact that she could walk herself back to her hotel room. All alone and perfectly safe.
It had been a lovely week. Grizzly Harbor was exactly as she remembered it and possibly even better, now that no one was chasing her. Now that there were no questionable shadows or strangers at her door in the middle of the night. The charming town looked even more like a postcard in the sunnier weather of almost-summer. And it was still filled with interesting people, quirky and strange in all the right ways, and most of them surprisingly accepting of an Alaska Force client turned tourist.
Well. The tourism was a side benefit. The real reason she was here, as she reminded herself daily, was because she’d decided to make a career out of the one thing she was good at—investing money and making more of it—and Everly was her very first client.
“It’s like I started a trend,” Everly had said during one of their lunches at Caradine’s, where the grumpiest restaurant owner in the world had allowed as how she, too, might not mind Mariah’s services, either—not that it made them friends or anything. “I think everyone’s wondering how many Alaska Force clients will decide they want to come live here.”
Mariah hadn’t told her that she doubted very much she was going to pack up and move here anytime soon, no matter how much she liked breathing in the fresh air here, where there was no Southern humidity and no McKennas to deal with.
She’d moved her few remaining things out of her apartment in Atlanta. Even with Walton under the watchful eye of the police—and better yet, now that he was out on bail, the pointed attention of the news media—she knew she could never feel safe there. More than that, she was done with Atlanta. The whole city felt tainted to her now. And there was a whole world out there, filled with cities her ex-husband—and David was legally her ex now, thanks to Georgia’s no-fault divorce option, which Mariah had been happy to run with because she wanted it over, so she could cut him that check he hadn’t been expecting—had no sway in whatsoever.
Maybe she’d start spending some of her money seeing each and every one of them.
When Everly had emailed her in need of a financial advisor, Mariah had jumped on it. It was an opportunity to create an actual career, when as far as she knew, there wasn’t a McKenna alive who’d ever had more than a series of jobs. It was exactly the sort of thing David had always told her she was much too stupid to do—which was maybe why she’d never told him about her experiments with the stock market.
Becoming a kind of financial advisor for friends didn’t feel like work. It felt fun.
And Mariah was all about having fun these days. It had been good to spend a couple of months back home in Two Oaks. She’d reconnected with all her family members. There’d been some hard conversations, certainly, but in the end, they’d all ended up on the same page. And there had been a lot of laughter to go with it. She’d careened around the countryside in beat-up old pickups. She’d gone fishing in quiet rivers and had taken hikes through the woods. She’d danced in questionable bars, partaken of a small McKenna cure or two, and eaten her mama’s biscuits and gravy to make it through a few painful morning-afters.
But two months in—as much as she loved her family, and as much as she loved being able to appreciate her hometown and her people in a way she hadn’t growing up—the truth of the matter was that she still didn’t want to live there.
Everly’s email had seemed like a godsend. First, the idea that she could be any kind of financial advisor to anyone would never have occurred to her on her own. There was still too much David in her head.
But mostly, she wanted to go back to Alaska. She needed to go back to the place she’d been taken from. She needed to stay there, then leave under her own power. Mariah wasn’t sure how she knew this was what she needed, only that it was necessary.
Crucial, even.
She’d been back in Grizzly Harbor a week now, she was leaving on the morning ferry without any interference from horrible men who wanted to abduct her, and she liked it as much as she had before that awful man had forced her back to Georgia with him. She liked coffee with Caradine and self-defense classes with Blue. She liked laughter with new friends in the Fairweather or quiet evenings with her books. She liked the way summer took ever more of a hold, most evident in the light that wore on later and later into the night.
But she would have been lying if she’d tried to tell herself that it was the same as it had been before that man had appeared at her door with a wig and all those vile threats.
It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t.
Because everywhere she went in this town, she saw Griffin.
At first she thought that maybe he was following her around again, and her heart had leaped at the notion—but he wasn’t.
Or if he was, he had no intention of revealing himself this time.
And either way, she was left with an emptiness that she knew was going to sit there forever. It was the precise shape and size of how much she missed him. And how much she wished she’d made a different choice that night out behind her mother’s old farmhouse.
But after everything that had happened, after her whole life up to this point, Mariah refused to allow herself to run after him. She refused to go back on the promise she’d made to the both of them that night.
She deserved more.
Even if she would never feel whole again, she deserved more.
And so did he.
It was better to feel less than whole alone than with him. Because if she knew anything, it was how quickly relationships that were unbalanced in that way ended up crushing the person who felt more.
She’d already lived it once. She wasn’t doing it again—and certainly not with Griffin, who made her feel so much more than David ever had that she might have laughed about it. If it didn’t hurt.
It was a cool night tonight. Much warmer than when she’d been in town before, and yet so much colder than Two Oaks. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her cargo pants, the ones she admitted only to herself that she’d bought because they reminded her of the kinds of things the Alaska Force men wore.
But that was one more thing she kept between her and her grieving heart.
She wandered up the street, nodding at the people who were also outside, soaking in the weather now that summer was almost here. This week was the Grizzly Harbor Music Festival. As far as Mariah could tell, it was an opportunity for every local person who’d ever built their own instruments or whiled away the winter singing songs to themselves to come on out, sit somewhere on the docks or outside the various shops along the boardwalks, and perform for their friends.
She skirted around a man playing a handmade ukulele who was engaged in a duet with a woman whose soprano singing voice sent chills down Mariah’s spine. Then she headed for her last night in Blue B
ear Inn. She’d asked for her same room and had been surprised how easy it was to sleep in it, despite the memory of the man who’d shoved his way in through the door.
“If I’d seen him take you out of here, I’d have shot him myself,” Madeleine had told her when she’d checked back in, so stern and serious her red beehive shook as she spoke.
“I’d have appreciated that,” Mariah had said, and smiled so the other woman knew there was no blame there.
She didn’t blame anyone but Walton for the things his minions had done. And would have found a way to do, sooner or later, no matter if Griffin and his Alaska Force buddies had locked her in a cage for her own protection.
The street was clear between the singers and the inn, and Mariah smiled down at her feet as she walked, pleased that she didn’t have to worry about the cold or the possibility of icy patches that could take her down without warning. Grizzly Harbor felt like a different town in all this light and relative warmth.
She’d packed her things before she’d met Everly and Caradine in the Fairweather for a farewell drink, on the off chance she succumbed to tequila again. But she didn’t go into the inn and to her room to sleep through her last hours here. At the last moment she followed an urge, turning to follow the stairs chopped into the side of the hill that led up to a lookout point Caradine had showed her. It was set high above the town, a gorgeous spot with a sweeping view out over the harbor, toward the sea.
Mariah made the steep climb and then sat on the cleared landing at the top, gazing out at this place that still felt to her like a spot of real magic tucked away at the edge of the world.
She tipped her head back. She stared up at the sky, still light at this hour, as if she could see where the stars ought to be if she looked hard enough.
When she lowered her head again, her heart felt lighter.
This was what she’d needed, this quiet moment on the side of a mountain, to leave this place again and finally find her own way in the world.
She picked her way down the stairs again, and as she went she started to feel a prickle on the back of her neck. Mariah told herself it was that stiff breeze, kicking down from the mountains and always colder than the sea air. She went down a few more steps, but it was still there. And stronger.
