Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  Griffin sat back then, but he was only making way for the food.

  Mariah automatically smiled her thanks, but she could barely look at the plate Caradine thrust before her. She was too busy trying to parse Griffin’s tone when he’d said here you are—and then beating herself up for trying to play that game with him the way she always had with David. Forever on edge. Always trying to predict his moods and what he might find disappointing next.

  It was only when the tantalizing scent of the meal before her got to her that she blinked enough to pay attention. It was a sandwich, but not any old run-of-the-mill sandwich. A BLT, by the looks of it, piled between thick slices of obviously home-baked bread and smelling so good Mariah thought she might cry.

  Or maybe she was already on the verge of crying anyway. About anything.

  And for a while, she didn’t care that the most dangerous man she’d ever met was watching her. She just ate, because her BLT was better than it looked, and it looked like heaven.

  Mariah considered licking the plate when she was done, but she restrained herself. Barely.

  She pushed the plate away and allowed herself to look at Griffin again.

  He hadn’t gotten any less cold. Or astonishingly good-looking.

  “Did I pass your test?” she asked quietly.

  “There’s no test.”

  “Are you sure? I’m getting the distinct impression you’re deciding whether or not to help me.”

  “It’s not my decision. We vote.”

  “Based on your recommendation?”

  He sat there, and it occurred to her that he didn’t fidget. He didn’t rap his fingers on the table, or jiggle his knee. He didn’t rub his hands on his face, or adjust his position in his chair, or any of the things people normally did. If she shut her eyes, would she even know he was there?

  That made her shiver, too.

  “Here’s the thing,” Griffin said after another long, tense moment in which Mariah was sure she failed a hundred other tests. “You don’t strike me as a damsel in distress.”

  That made her laugh. “What’s a damsel in distress supposed to look like?”

  Griffin leaned back then, stretching one absurdly well-formed arm over the back of the chair next to him. He shook his head, forcing Mariah to stop contemplating the difference between the bicep of a man who perhaps visited a gym occasionally and . . . this.

  “You’re not scared. You don’t even look frazzled. You had to run from your home, get on a plane, and fly across the country to meet a bunch of strangers you think are going to help you out of what should be a terrifying situation, and you look as cool and easy as if you’re out for a quiet stroll.”

  Her heart picked up its pace, and she wondered if he could tell. If he could see her pulse betraying her.

  “I actually went to a lot of trouble to make it look like I was going to Greece. On a plane, not a quiet stroll.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you don’t look like someone who’s being chased.”

  “Is that a compliment?” She laughed again, because the notion that this man might compliment her struck her as truly hilarious. Or, possibly, she was finally losing it. “Maybe I managed to get them off my trail.”

  “Or it means that no one’s chasing you to begin with.”

  “Right.” She wasn’t laughing any longer, and she was overly aware of all the ways she actually did fidget. She made herself drop her hands to her lap and keep them there. “That would make sense in the scenario where I almost kill myself twice because that somehow sticks it to my husband who wants me dead.”

  “Why does he want you dead? A lot of people say things like that. Everybody wants to kill everybody else in rush hour traffic. Actually killing another person is a different animal. Taking steps to make that happen is crossing a line, and it’s not an insignificant line.”

  “He wants me dead because I’m an embarrassment.” Mariah’s voice didn’t even shake. She supposed that was more evidence for him. Maybe a good damsel in distress would weep. Fall on the ground. Wail and rip at her clothes. “It was one thing to be dirt-poor white trash. I think David got off on that part, honestly. He got to play at making something out of me. But I was supposed to give him children. That’s the whole point of marrying a girl like me.”

  She’d gotten so good at saying it like that. Like it didn’t matter that she couldn’t get pregnant. Like it was a joke.

  But it was gratifying that Griffin didn’t laugh.

  “Why didn’t you give him children if that was what he wanted and you wanted to stay married to him?”

  Mariah smiled and was surprised it didn’t draw blood. “Well, sugar. I did try.”

  “Do you call everybody sugar?”

  He sounded almost as sharp as her smile felt. And that look in his dark brown eyes was worse.

  “How many princesses do you know?” she retorted.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected, but it wasn’t Griffin shooting to his feet. It took Mariah a second to realize why it was so strange and alarming, other than the fact that he was suddenly towering over her. It was because he didn’t make any noise. He pushed back from the table and rose, but there was no scrape of his chair against the floor. There was no sound at all.

  That fact rolled over her like a shiver, but it was all heat.

  “I think I have all I need.” He looked down at her as he said it, which meant she had to look up.

  And up. And up. He had to be six foot two, and it seemed a lot farther up when she was sitting. All that sculpted muscle made it worse.

  “Okay. What happens now?”

  “Give me your cell phone.”

  She didn’t want to, but she did, sliding it across the table and watching him tuck it into one of his utility pockets like he was taking a piece of her.

  “Now what?”

  “You stay here. You wait.”

  She wanted to sound tough and unconcerned, but she was terribly afraid she sounded nothing but scared. Maybe that would please him. “For how long?”

  Griffin threw a few bills on the table, never shifting his hard gaze from Mariah. “The next ferry leaves on Monday. You’ll know our decision before then.”

  And then he left her, his coffee mug the only indication he’d ever been there at all.

  Six

  “Something about her doesn’t sit right with me,” Griffin said.

  Not for the first time. Or the fifth time.

  But his Alaska Force brothers weren’t heeding his warning. Jonas was standing across the room, running his hand over his fierce black beard while scowling out the window as the Friday sunset settled on Fool’s Cove, no doubt going over the mission he’d run the previous week, solving a kidnapping issue without firing a single bullet. Templeton was lounging the way he always did, making Griffin want—also not for the first time—to knock him and the chair over to prove a point. The only reason he didn’t was that he knew precisely how lethal the seemingly affable Templeton was, and how swift the other man’s response would be, especially when he was still hopped up from the same bulletless kidnap op.

  He swept his gaze over the other members of Alaska Force gathered in the lodge, pausing for a moment on Blue Hendricks, former Navy SEAL and all-around badass, who had just gotten back from putting down a vicious cell of insurgents in a country he wasn’t officially permitted to enter. He was sitting on one of the couches with his legs stuck out in front of him, his copy of Mariah’s file in his hands, and that same satisfied look on his face he’d been wearing since last fall.

  Griffin didn’t believe in happily-ever-afters, not for men like them, but against all odds, Blue was doing a good rendition of one. He’d even gotten engaged to Everly, who was famous in these parts for being one of the few boneheaded, suicidal idiots who’d ever made it over the mountain that protected Fool’s Cove from the rest of
the island. Locals called it Hard-Ass Pass and avoided it, but Everly had driven straight over it on one of the few days it wasn’t a death trap, desperately trying to reach Blue. No one had ever expected that after Blue handled the bad situation Everly was in, she would stay. But she had. She’d even made it through an Alaskan winter.

  Griffin was confident Blue was the exception that proved the rule. The men gathered in this room were good at solving issues, with prejudice if necessary. They didn’t need to be good at the stuff civilian lives were made of. White picket fences and pretty wives, cute kids and the PTA. That was the world Alaska Force protected, not the one they lived in.

  They were men without ties. Some without pasts. That usually meant they didn’t have much in the way of futures, either. Not the way other, softer, safer people did.

  Griffin was more than happy to live out what future he had right here, doing what he did best until his sight failed and he started missing targets. Or until an enemy had a really good day, for a change.

  He dutifully visited his family every holiday season, pasting on the smile they expected and pretending he fit in with them when it was obvious he didn’t. He put in his annual time in the tony Catalina Foothills neighborhood in Tucson where he’d grown up, grinning his way through his parents’ comfortable high-desert life and performing the role of good son and decent brother for a solid week, which was about all he could tolerate. And when he left again after New Year’s, he always figured the Cisneros family gratefully sank back into the old pueblo charm of their fancy subdivision with its mountain views and its air conditioning and its high walls that kept out everything but the dark—and had no idea what kind of big, bad wolf they’d allowed near them.

  Griffin viewed his relocation to Alaska as a favor to all of them. He assumed they all agreed. But even if they didn’t, they knew better than to ask him to move back home. No one had made that mistake in years.

  Not since shortly after his ex had betrayed him so publicly, in fact. Back when he’d still allowed himself to react to things. But that required feelings, and Griffin had turned his off years ago.

  He cut his gaze to Isaac, the only one among them who’d actually come home rather than leave such petty concerns behind him, since he’d been raised out here, where glaciers vied for purchase on the gruff, cold seas. The leader of their team was dressed the way he always was, in a T-shirt with a happy saying on the front—designed to confuse the unwary into imagining he was approachable—and cargo pants that did nothing at all to disguise his deadly physique. Outside of the lodge—in town where everyone knew him, for example, and out in the wider world where he had spent most of his professional life blending in with purpose—Isaac worked harder to conceal himself. He smiled more. He pretended to be toothless and affable and a friend to all.

  But here, where it was only his handpicked group of ex–special ops brothers who’d left their various branches of the service but not their commitment to righting wrongs, everybody knew who he really was.

  Here, Isaac Gentry was a lethal reckoning.

  “Is it the fact she’s sweet and blond that you don’t like?” Templeton asked lazily, though there wasn’t a single part of the man that was in any way as boneless or relaxed as he pretended he was. “Because that sits just fine with me.”

  Griffin’s jaw ached. Again. He forced himself to stop clenching it. “Blond, yes. Sweet? No. She’s a rich man’s trophy wife who hit thirty and got replaced. Generally speaking, pampered princesses don’t like that much.”

  “I personally like a Georgia peach,” Templeton replied with a wide grin. “Sweet enough to make your teeth hurt and twice as delicious.”

  “Careful,” Blue said with a laugh as Griffin eyed those tipped-back chair legs again. “Doesn’t look like Griffin is feeling like sharing his . . . peaches.”

  Griffin smirked at Blue and made an anatomically impossible suggestion, which, of course, only made Blue— and everyone else—laugh harder. Smug bastard.

  “Do we have rules against helping blond princesses, pampered or otherwise?” Isaac asked mildly, cutting through the hilarity without having to raise his voice. He studied Griffin like he could see straight through him. He probably could. “Because that sounds a lot like your thing, not ours.”

  Griffin wasn’t surprised when the vote went against him, with more talk of peaches and princesses before they moved on to thornier issues involving ongoing cases. There was a possible situation developing in nearby Juneau, but he gave their disgruntled would-be enemy only half of his attention while his temper kicked at him like a lit fuse.

  He knew Mariah was nothing more than another client. He didn’t have to like her, he only had to save her, and that shouldn’t have been difficult. It was one more mission, and missions didn’t require that he turn himself inside out with souped-up enthusiasm—they required his skill and dedication.

  That was what he was telling himself after the meeting, out on the rambling porch that ran along the front of the lodge and offered views out over the water of the protected cove in the long blue spring twilight. He didn’t need to like any part of this. He’d performed the initial intake, he’d handed her cell phone over to Oz so he could make sure no one could trace it without Alaska Force’s knowledge, and now that the vote was in, Griffin was running point on Mariah’s situation. He didn’t have to start cartwheeling around, pretending he was happy about it. Or her. Like most things in his life, it wasn’t required that he love every moment. Or any moment. He just had to do it.

  Her case was simple enough. Identify and neutralize the threat. Impress upon her husband that divorce was the better choice, assuming he was behind the attempts on her life. And keep her alive while they did it.

  The lodge door slapped open, and Griffin knew it was Isaac who stepped out to join him without having to look. He recognized the other man’s tread and the patter of his dog’s feet, as Horatio—far smarter than most people, with his different-colored eyes and a huge helping of his owner’s attitude—had come outside with him.

  The fact that Griffin could hear Isaac coming meant he had something to say. Great.

  None of his other brothers would roll up on him when he was clearly dealing with stuff. There were certain boundaries between snipers and everyone else. It was the nature of the job. He’d accepted it a long time ago.

  Hell, he’d embraced it.

  Isaac came and stood with Griffin because he didn’t care about boundaries, and for a while it was just the two of them, and Horatio at Isaac’s feet. They stared out at the seething dark water of the cove as the tide came in, grasping at the rocky shore. They watched the last hint of light in the sky fade, darkness coming almost two hours later than it had at the start of the month. Spring had finally started showing signs of life around here. The clocks had jumped forward after another deep, dark Alaskan winter, and summer was coming.

  But Griffin knew Isaac hadn’t come out here to stare at the scenery or discuss the changing seasons.

  “Are you going to be able to handle this?”

  Griffin shot him a look. “Of course.”

  “She’s not Gabrielle.”

  He should have known that was coming. He should have expected it.

  “I’m well aware she’s not my ex-fiancée, Isaac.” Griffin could hear his own clipped tone, an unwise choice in Isaac’s presence, but he didn’t stop. “I can actually tell the difference between pretty blond white women.”

  But if he expected Isaac to back off, he was about to be disappointed. His leader reached down and smoothed his hand over Horatio’s head. And Griffin was pretty sure the dog was giving him the same yeah, right look.

  Isaac didn’t actually say yeah, right. He didn’t have to. “You sure about that? I’ve never seen you get bent out of shape about anything. No mission, no matter how screwed up. No person, place, or thing. And especially not a client. Until today.”

&nb
sp; “I’m not sure why registering some reasonable skepticism equals bent out of shape.”

  “You seem extra skeptical.”

  Griffin shrugged. “You haven’t met her. Maybe when you do, you’ll stop treating me like a high school kid who’s knotted up over some cheerleader and remember that my instincts and interpretations of situations have saved your butt more times than you can possibly count.”

  Isaac didn’t say anything. And that was worse than if he had, because it allowed Griffin to replay what he’d said again and again, entirely too aware of how much like a high school kid he’d sounded. He could remember being that high school kid himself before he’d enlisted on his eighteenth birthday, complete with Gabrielle as the cheerleader in question, who he’d been so sure he was in love with when really he’d been sixteen and an idiot. And even worse than the unscheduled trip down memory lane was his shrug, which was a giant tell that he wasn’t as at ease or comfortable as he was trying to pretend he was—because Griffin wasn’t a fidgeter. He could spend astonishing amounts of time without moving, awake and alert, his entire being focused on a target.

  He’d confirmed everything Isaac was saying.

  “I haven’t thought about Gabrielle in a long time,” Griffin said stiffly, before Isaac could point any of that out. “It’s like that whole situation happened to someone else.”

  Someone significantly dumber.

  “I believe you,” Isaac said quietly. Too quietly. Griffin kept his eyes on the water surging at the shore below, but he could feel when Isaac’s sharp gray gaze slammed into him. “But here’s the thing about betrayal. It gets in there and it changes how you think. How you see things. You don’t have to think about it directly for it to color everything.”

  “Gabrielle did what was right for her,” Griffin said, hating that it took effort to sound matter of fact. Not stiff or defensive or gruff, because he didn’t like talking about ancient history. Not because she had some hold on him after all these years. She didn’t. “Much as that sucked for me at the time, I can’t blame her. I wasn’t the man she sent off to the Marines.”