Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  Finally she stopped. Her head fell forward, and she found her hands on her hips, gripping herself a lot harder than he ever had.

  “No,” she said, very distinctly, and she didn’t care that she would look like a crazy person if anyone happened by. Standing there, talking to the trees. “You do not get to follow me around like you’re doing surveillance. Not anymore.”

  There was a whisper of sound, though she couldn’t have said where it came from, and then a shadow between two trees turned into a man.

  A man she would have recognized even if it was as dark as it should have been at this hour. A man she would know if she were blind.

  “If I had you under surveillance,” Griffin said coolly, “you wouldn’t know I was here.”

  And Mariah could have blamed the fact that she’d been in the Fairweather, but in reality, she’d had only one drink over the course of the couple of hours she and Everly had sat there watching Caradine beat a group of fishermen at pool. She wasn’t the least bit drunk.

  She only felt that way when she looked at him.

  As if everything in the world spun around and around, the mountains and the sea and the Alaskan sky, leaving only him. Only Griffin.

  “Nothing’s changed,” she told him, as evenly as she could.

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” he said, and it took her a moment to realize that he didn’t sound like himself. He sounded furious. “Everything’s changed.”

  She studied his features, hard and beautiful, his dark eyes glinting in the late evening light. And she ignored her traitorous heart and the things it whispered.

  “Not for me, sugar,” she drawled. “I’m still in love with you. I still think you’re an idiot. And if you think that this is an opportunity for you to storm around doing your robot impersonation—”

  “You’ve ruined me,” he told her, and she’d never heard that particular tone from him before. As if he wasn’t entirely in control of himself. “You might as well have set a charge and detonated it yourself.”

  In that moment, she realized it wasn’t temper on his face, or nothing that simple. It was something else. Something pure and raw.

  He looked the way she felt.

  And deep inside her, all those broken pieces that she would simply have to learn how to live with seemed to hum. While the whispers from her heart grew louder and more insistent.

  “Griffin,” she began, as calmly as she could, when she wanted to scream. When she wanted to do all the things she’d promised herself—and him—she wouldn’t ever do. Beg. Cry. Bend herself into whatever shape would allow her to touch him again.

  But she couldn’t do that. She knew she couldn’t.

  “I don’t know what you came here for,” he told her, in that same strange tone of voice that made her shiver. And made her wonder why she’d imagined she’d wanted to see the fury of such a patient man in the first place. There was a whole proverb about how foolish that was. “Was it to torture me? Was it to rub salt in the wound?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You told me you wouldn’t beg. You wouldn’t chase after me. You told me you knew what you deserved.”

  But she hadn’t told him how much it hurt. “I do. I finally do.”

  Griffin shook his head once. Then again. He took a step toward her, and it wasn’t the way he usually moved. It wasn’t smooth like silk. It was jerky, as if he didn’t know how to operate his own body. And then he lifted his hands in the air as if he was . . .

  But no. That was impossible.

  Griffin Cisneros did not surrender to anything or anyone. And certainly not to her.

  “Tell me what that is, Mariah,” he threw at her, his voice as unsteady as the rest of him. “Tell me what you deserve. I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to give anyone anything. I think you deserve a man who can give you everything you want. Need. Dream about. And I don’t—” He stopped himself, then pulled in a harsh breath, his gaze even darker than usual. “I don’t know if that man is me. I don’t know if I’m built that way.”

  “Griffin.” And this time Mariah stepped toward him, aching when he stiffened as if a single touch from her might break him. Because that was the last thing she wanted. “I don’t need you to be anything that you’re not. I love you, not some made-up version of who I think you could be, maybe, someday. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I’ve already lived that way once already, and you had a front row seat to how that ended.”

  “The only other person who ever loved me came to hate me, in the end,” Griffin told her, as if he were delivering his own indictment. “Because I could never love her the way she needed.”

  “The difference is that you already love me the way I need,” Mariah said quietly. Softly. “You just don’t want to.”

  He broke then. She watched it happen. This big strong man made of so much steel and lethal intent, wracked from the inside out because of what she’d said.

  Because you told him the truth, a voice inside her countered.

  “You’ve destroyed me,” he told her, anguished and furious. Wide open and clearly not happy about it. “I can function in any war zone I’m dropped in, and always have. Nothing affects me. Nothing gets through. Except you.”

  “It’s okay to love me back, Griffin,” she said softly, letting her treacherous heart take over. Because she had the distinct impression that was what he’d done, right here in front of her. “I promise you, it won’t really ruin you. It only feels that way at first.”

  He was breathing hard, as if he were running—or as if he was someone else running, someone in far less stellar physical condition than he was.

  “You deserve the world, but all I have to give you is a man who spent the better part of his adult life trying to strip himself down to parts,” Griffin thundered at her, as if he wanted to use himself as a weapon. “Half the time I think I’m not trying to be a machine, I’m trying to be a man. And I fail miserably at it.”

  Mariah sighed, blinking back the tears threatening to spill over. She leaned closer, then slid her hands over his chest, soaking in his heat. His strength.

  And the heartbeat that told her exactly how human he was.

  “It’s the trying that matters,” she told him, tipping her face up to his.

  “That’s nothing but a pathetic excuse.” He belted the words out as if he were hitting something. Himself, maybe. “That’s what people tell themselves, but it’s a lie. It’s failure dressed up in pretty words.”

  She didn’t think there was any arguing with that bleak look on his face, so she didn’t try. Mariah slid one palm over his heart and held it there, the way she had once before.

  He remembered it, too. She felt the way he tensed—and better still, the way his heart kicked at her.

  “Your heart is safe with me, Griffin,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  He frowned at her like her words didn’t make any sense, his beautiful dark eyes still so troubled. But less bleak, maybe, when he reached out and slowly took a chunk of her hair in his hand, testing the curl around his fingers.

  “If I could keep you safe, you never would have been taken. You never would have ended up in the trunk of a car. You never would have gotten beaten up in a barn in Georgia.” He didn’t look bleak then. He looked tortured. “And then had to run for your life with that animal on your heels.”

  Mariah only laughed, arching into him, knowing as she did it that he would catch her.

  And he did.

  He always did.

  “You silly man,” she told him, reveling in the way his hands wrapped around her upper arms like he’d been made to hold her. “I wasn’t running for my life. I was running to you.”

  She watched the storm move across his face, and moved even closer.

  “They’re not the same thing. One is fear, and the other is hope.”

&
nbsp; “I can’t be anyone’s hope,” Griffin threw out.

  Mariah shrugged, liking the way he gripped her harder when she did. “Too late, sugar.”

  He stared down at her as if she were a ghost. As if she were torment and disaster, and Mariah couldn’t say she minded it much. Not if he would keep on doing it. There were worse fates than being the thing that brought a tough man to his knees.

  “I want you to stay,” he told her gruffly, as if it hurt. As if all of this hurt. “I don’t know if I can be the man you deserve, but I want to try. And I don’t usually fail.”

  He bent down to pick her up, and then held her steady as she wrapped herself around him. Mariah gazed down into his face as he looked up at her, his strong arms around her as if that was all the wall either one of them would ever need.

  “I want to make you smile,” Griffin told her, and she was overwhelmed by his heat against her. Her heart was flipping over and over, and his words sounded less like pain and more like vows. Just him and her and the trees all around them. “I want to feel that dirty laugh of yours pour over me like honey. I like you drunk and I like you sober and I like you here, Mariah. I like you wrapped all around me, day and night, and I never thought my life was empty until you left me in it all alone.” He shifted so she was flush against him. “Don’t go. Please.”

  “I love you, too,” she murmured.

  And then she kissed him, the two of them wrapped up in the light of a long Alaskan evening.

  No shadows, no fear.

  He held her, strong like stone but made of flesh and blood, and he kissed her with all the need and desperation she felt inside her, too.

  He kissed her and he kissed her, this beautiful man who believed he was less than perfectly human.

  Mariah knew better. And she wanted nothing more than to show him.

  “Give me a year,” he told her, there against her mouth. “And I’ll give you everything I have.”

  “I have a better idea,” she replied. “Just give me you. I’ll do the same in return. And we’ll see where we end up.”

  He pulled back to look at her then, like he was drinking her in. Tattooing her deep into his skin.

  “If you give me the chance,” he told her, this man who lived by his vows and would, she knew, die by them if necessary, “I’ll give you forever.”

  And as she had so many other times—whether it was running across that field in Georgia or right here, right now, on the edge of the world in the beginning of this brand-new life they could forge together—Mariah believed him.

  She trusted him. She loved him.

  So she threw herself straight off into that forever he’d promised, knowing he would catch her.

  Epilogue

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  Griffin waited for Mariah outside a lawyer’s office in Atlanta, watching her handle herself with her usual grace through the glass wall of the meeting room. He was fully prepared to haul her out of there if she looked the slightest bit upset.

  They had left Grizzly Harbor the week before, sneaking out ahead of a nasty storm that would have kept them landlocked for a few days. Griffin wouldn’t have minded all that much. Before.

  But now he was more concerned with keeping Mariah happy than he was with succumbing to his own impulses to hole up and act like a hermit.

  That was how they’d ended up spending Thanksgiving with Griffin’s family in Arizona. Griffin had been humbled by how excited his family was that he had finally stepped outside the usual strict boundaries of his relationship with them. He’d allowed them not only the extra holiday, but more access to him—and it had made his mother cry.

  Which had made him feel like a jackass.

  “Happy tears are a good thing,” Mariah had assured him on a walk through the neighborhood that had once felt like a noose around his neck. And now was simply . . . pretty. “Happy tears mean you’re doing it right. I promise.”

  The crazy thing was, he believed her.

  Mariah changed him more and more every day, and he’d stopped fighting it. He’d surrendered to his feelings for her up on that hill overlooking Grizzly Harbor, which felt a whole lot like winning. That wasn’t to say he didn’t kick back into his old robot habits from time to time, but she handled conflict the way she handled everything else.

  Usually by laughing at him until he got over himself.

  He was slowly learning to do it right back.

  And if it wasn’t solved in laughter, there were other ways. More deliberate ways that had more to do with flashes of temper, and far more satisfying ways to let those flames burn through the both of them.

  Over and over again.

  At first Griffin had been afraid that losing his distance and objectivity and all those walls would ruin his ability to do his job. He was sure he would be unable to do what he needed to do and find himself sidelined without having to challenge Isaac to fire him.

  But instead, life with Mariah made him realize that he could pick and choose the kind of compartments he needed. That it wasn’t all or nothing. That he could pour himself into his work and pour himself into her, in turn.

  He’d had no idea, in all those years that he’d prided himself on being so sharp and cold and removed from petty concerns, that he’d been living only half a life. Closed down, cut off.

  He’d been nothing but black and white, and Mariah was color.

  Bright. Haunting.

  And stunningly beautiful, all the time.

  He studied her, dressed like a princess, through the glass. His princess. Her blond hair was smooth, her clothes were sleek, and she was every inch the Atlanta society queen she’d been in her previous life.

  The one she’d shrugged off when she’d come to Alaska.

  David Lanier and his father might attempt to paint Mariah as grasping, gold-digging trash who’d plotted out her own abduction, but the jury was more likely to see Grace Kelly.

  Who also happened to be a financial whiz in her spare time—more interested in gold digging from financial markets than from her ex-husband.

  Griffin was the lucky man who got all those sides of her, all the time.

  All his.

  “Okay?” he asked her when she finally left the deposition and came to him.

  The way she would always come to him, he thought with a rush of possessiveness he’d learned to revel in. Especially when she was just as possessive in turn.

  “Of course,” she replied, smiling up at him.

  Her real smile. Not the one she used as a weapon, especially here.

  He took her hand and walked with her to the elevator, then outside into a beautiful winter’s day in Atlanta that did a fabulous impression of a perfect high-summer day in Alaska. Only brighter. Softer. And faintly perfumed with flowers, even in the middle of the concrete of downtown.

  They stood there on Peachtree Street, the Atlanta skyscrapers looming around them like urban mountains, and for no reason at all, found themselves grinning at each other.

  “I love you,” Griffin said.

  As if there had ever been any doubt.

  He said it, and didn’t understand why it had been so hard to say. He’d been so sure that he was too broken to mean it the way she needed to hear it. He didn’t think he could ever love her or trust her the way she did him, but he wanted to. God, how he wanted to.

  It had been such a hard thing for all these months, and yet in the end, it was easy.

  The easiest thing he’d ever said in his life.

  He said it a few more times, to make sure.

  Right here in this city where they’d come to put demons to rest, one by one.

  Her blue eyes gleamed, bright with tears he was sure were the happy kind. “It’s because I’m all dressed up like the kind of society princess you pretend to hate, isn’t it?”

  “It’s because you’re you.
” He took both her hands in his and didn’t care if the whole city ground to a halt around them. “It’s because if I asked you to marry me now, you’d say no. This time. Because I think you’re going to take a long while to come back around on that, and I’m willing to wait. It’s because I know you love me something crazy. I can see it every time you look at me. It’s because I’ve given you a thousand reasons to leave me, and no doubt will again, but you’re not going anywhere.”

  She didn’t like his cabin—or the mile-long hike to get to it, especially in bad weather—though she’d tried her best. Mariah, though not the princess he’d originally imagined her, wasn’t exactly an outdoor woman, either. He planned to surprise her when they got back to Grizzly Harbor with the little house he’d bought for them in town, where she could keep up that routine she loved so much, and he could commute by boat to Fool’s Cove. He’d even made sure they could finally have their own little library.

  It amazed him how much he loved to make her happy.

  “No,” she whispered now, and there was so much emotion in her gaze that he was surprised it didn’t hurt. But then, he imagined there was the same kind of emotion in his. And if she had taught him anything, it was that feeling all these things was worth it. More than worth it. It was everything. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I love you when you talk like a princess, and I love you when your drawl comes out with your family, your accent so thick and rich I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” He lifted her hands to his mouth and kissed each one in turn. “I want to spend the rest of my life learning each and every one of all those imperfections that make you you. And I will.”

  “I love you, Griffin,” she whispered, and her tears weren’t staying put any longer.

  He reached over and dashed them away.

  Because this was it.

  This woman would marry him, sooner or later. She would have his babies, now that she’d been checked out by a real doctor and her fertility wasn’t in doubt any longer. They would build a life together, and it wouldn’t be a labyrinth of walled-off compartments. It wouldn’t be dark or bleak.