by Megan Crane
Griffin joined Templeton and Jonas as they scoured Juneau for their missing doomsday preacher—surreptitiously, of course, to stay off any kind of local radar despite Isaac’s well-known talent for charming any and all officials—but found nothing but rumors. Blue took a team to follow the lead on the stolen boat, searching the waterways between Juneau and Grizzly Harbor but turning up no sign of the boat in question. Or the arsenal that supposedly went along with it.
Another week raced by. Griffin flew out to handle a diplomatic extraction in the face of a burgeoning civil war and was back, problem solved with minimal impact, in a smooth seventy-two hours.
There were no further attempts on Mariah when he was methodically making his way through Juneau. Nothing happened to her when he was out of the country, receiving updates while he was navigating crumbling infrastructure to usher their client to safety. And when he was back in Grizzly Harbor again, taking his turn on the watch rotation that had functioned smoothly in his absence, everything remained peaceful.
Nothing pinged on her phone. If anyone was tracking her, they were doing a piss-poor job of it.
Griffin had been forced to reassess his take on the situation even before Isaac, after turning down three separate celebrity muscle jobs at the evening briefing, had asked for alternate theories on Mariah’s situation.
“You know how wasted Ben McCreedie gets when he’s on dry land,” Isaac pointed out.
“You think he’d show up at a stranger’s hotel room and try to break in?” Griffin was skeptical. They all knew Ben McCreedie, an older fisherman who lived in town and kept to himself when he wasn’t in the Fairweather.
“Irene Scola claims she ran him off with a shotgun a few years back when they were living together, but the judge gave him the restraining order when they broke up.” Isaac’s expression had gone contemplative. “I can tell you that whatever happened between them, Ben wouldn’t hurt a fly when he’s sober. But there’s a demon in him when he drinks.”
There were any number of men Griffin could say the same about. It was one of the many reasons he didn’t drink. He had enough on his hands with the personality he could remember and control every day. He couldn’t imagine why people found it entertaining to turn into someone else for an evening.
But he couldn’t deny the fact that no one else had come after Mariah. Had it been a drunk local at her door that night?
Alaska Force kept eyes on her all the time, whether Griffin was in town or not. Sometimes subtly, sometimes not, to confuse anyone who might be watching. Meanwhile, Mariah had made herself a part of life in the town. She never repeated her Fairweather performance with Caradine. Once she’d adjusted to the time zone change, she woke early. She liked to take walks down to the water in the blustery mornings, then up along the ridge that led out past the hot springs.
He wouldn’t call her a hiker, necessarily, but she liked to follow the first part of the trail high above the water. She usually spent a lot of time gazing out from the trees over the waves until she reached the point that marked the edge of the protected harbor, then turned back. After her walk, she picked up her laptop from the inn and either settled in the breakfast room there or went over to Caradine’s. Most days, Everly joined her, hitching a ride on whatever skiff was headed into town from Fool’s Cove. Everly worked remotely for an ad agency back in Chicago and was always in the middle of a campaign, but could handle her work anywhere. Griffin figured that Everly would get tired of actually working when all Mariah was doing was surfing around on the internet. But like everything else with Mariah, there was more to it.
“Have you gotten bored yet?” he asked her the following afternoon, stopping into Caradine’s for a cup of coffee. That morning, he’d consulted on operation prep for a mission overseas, then spent some time keeping watch on Mariah himself. He stood over her table and did his best to keep from scowling at her, because it wasn’t her fault no one was coming for her. “Grizzly Harbor must seem backward after Atlanta.”
Mariah smiled up at him in that way other people probably believed was polite. Warm, even. Maybe he was the only one who could see the challenge in it. “I’m perfectly capable of entertaining myself, Griffin. Under any circumstances.”
“I don’t understand spending all day on the internet.” Griffin shook his head in distaste. “Or any time at all. It’s all liars and self-aggrandizers pretending to care about something other than themselves. Propaganda and the fools who believe every word of it.”
“You’re talking about social media.” Mariah’s smile took on that edge he wasn’t going to snap and taste one of these days. He absolutely was not. “I don’t do much of that. I prefer the stock market.”
At first he thought she was kidding. But she gazed up at him steadily, and it occurred to him that she wasn’t kidding at all.
“You play the stock market?”
“I told you that David likes to cut me off. And I told you that I knew how to make a handful of change last longer than you’d imagine possible. If you think about it, the stock market is nothing but a natural extension of that.”
“You play the stock market,” Griffin said again, wondering how Oz hadn’t found this out already. What kind of computer whiz missed a hidden investment portfolio?
“It’s all a big secret, of course,” Mariah said, as if she were the one who’d been trained to read him instead of the other way around. “I add to it when I can and move things around, mostly for fun. I’ve never taken anything out. I couldn’t let David know that I wasn’t afraid of his favorite threat. That might have inspired him to come up with a different one.”
“So what you’re telling me is that you have money. Your own money, having nothing to do with David Lanier or his family.”
“I’m doing just fine. I plan to hand David all the money he ever gave me, with interest, in the divorce—a message I feel he’ll understand as it’s intended. And when I do, I’ll still be more than fine.” She tipped her head to one side, her blue eyes too bright for Griffin’s peace of mind. Making him question if he’d really needed a cup of coffee . . . or if he’d wanted this. Her. He gritted his teeth against the surge of his own temper. “Do you think that’s relevant?”
Griffin wanted it to be relevant. He wanted it to matter. He wanted something—anything—to shake free so he could figure out what was happening here, fight it into submission, and send her on her way.
Griffin fired off an email to Oz as he stood there, mulling over the new piece of information. Mariah didn’t simply save her money. If he wasn’t mistaken, she made her own. He imagined that was the kind of thing a man like David might find offensive.
David, who had gone through with his threat two weeks ago and closed down Mariah’s access to his bank accounts and credit cards because he must have thought that would harm her. He clearly didn’t know about her stock market adventures. And he hadn’t left Atlanta.
They’d kept eyes on him since they’d agreed to take Mariah’s case. They also monitored his phone, yet could find no evidence that he was in contact with anyone outside Georgia, and certainly not someone who might have followed Mariah all the way to Alaska.
Still, there was the lock on her door and the fact that someone had clearly gone at it. And there was that uneasy tickle that Griffin kept feeling in his gut, telling him there was more here than met the eye—and it probably wasn’t her finances.
“I’ll let you know what’s relevant,” he told her.
“It’s a hobby,” she said lightly. Her head tipped to one side. “You must have some of those.”
“I have missions.”
“That’s your job.”
He stopped fighting his scowl. “No, Mariah. That’s who I am.”
She was wholly unaffected by his expression. He knew this when she rolled her eyes. At him.
“Everybody has hobbies, though I’m guessing you call yours something else so they seem more i
mportant.”
“I keep myself in peak physical condition. I train constantly, with and without my weapon. These aren’t hobbies, they’re necessities.”
“What will you do when they’re no longer necessities?” she asked.
But Griffin didn’t like to think about that inevitable day. He didn’t want to imagine what life looked like when he couldn’t shoot. When he couldn’t keep up with the team. When he wasn’t him, more weapon than man.
Instead of answering her, he threw back his coffee so fast he burned his tongue, which he figured he deserved for allowing a client to get to him. Again. It gave him something to focus on as he made his way back to Fool’s Cove to go over Mariah’s finances with Oz now that they had new information.
“How did you miss this?” he demanded, standing in Oz’s oversized cabin that was outfitted like spy central.
“Same way you did,” Oz retorted, frowning as he accessed supposedly private records on one of the huge monitors in front of him. “Redneck roots plus a trophy marriage isn’t the kind of math that typically adds up to secret stock market wizard. It didn’t occur to me to look.”
Griffin didn’t want to think of Mariah as a stock market wizard. Or any other kind of wizard.
He thought of her too much as it was.
About a week after the discovery that Mariah was secretly wealthy all on her own, Griffin made his way into town after a long, frustrating day paging through supplementary documents related to Mariah’s situation. David’s friends. David’s connections. The questionable first steps David had taken toward his political career. He’d also run tactical interference for another Alaska Force team that was out in the field on a security detail for a charity convoy in the middle of a bloody little coup.
The convoy made it to its destination without incident. But Griffin was back to questioning Mariah’s entire situation. Maybe this was what he’d thought it was from the start: a nasty divorce, with too many threats and maybe an attempt on her life in the heat of the moment. Maybe that first trip to the hospital was a true accident that had given David big ideas. It was possible he really had snuck into Mariah’s apartment and triggered her second attack.
But he hadn’t followed her all the way here, or made a half-assed attempt to get into her hotel room. If he had, they would have found him. Alaska Force knew every outsider currently on the island—writers and artists, wildlife photographers and extreme hikers—and none of them were David Lanier.
You really want that to be true, a derisive voice inside him said when he made his way into the community center that same evening and stopped in the doorway of the room where Blue was teaching a handful of women down-and-dirty self-defense. You want any excuse to make her go away.
Because the longer she stayed here, the more it felt as if she’d always been here. Because she wanted to know his hobbies. Because he’d spent his whole adult life convincing himself it was his calling and his duty to be nothing more than a weapon, with no inconvenient feelings to mess up his aim or his commitment, and Mariah made him question that.
She kept reminding him he was as flesh and blood as anyone, and Griffin didn’t know what the hell to do with that.
Instead, Griffin concentrated on the fact that she, Everly, and Caradine did self-defense with Blue in the afternoons when Blue was in town. It was smart. They gathered in the community center that was also Grizzly Harbor’s City Hall—containing its mayor’s office and set next to the post office that was open only at the postmaster’s whim—in the multipurpose room that was mostly used for garrulous town meetings and the occasional flea market when the weather was bad.
This afternoon, while the rain poured down outside and Griffin questioned everything, Mariah was practicing how to be deadly. How to strike, counterattack, and explode into decisive action when grabbed. Blue taught them how to fall, how to roll. How to do their best to keep from ever going to the ground, but also what to do if they found themselves there anyway.
And Griffin had dedicated his life to the practical, elegant application of violence. He trained so that he didn’t have to fight, and fought so that nations didn’t have to go to war. And he had never been a blunt instrument. He and his rifle were lethal poetry, stillness and a perfect shot, fused together and made one on more battlefields than he could count.
He had seen every variation of fighter possible, from street brawlers to black belts with craft to spare, but he’d never seen anything like Mariah McKenna, with that frown of deep concentration on her face, her elegant hands high and in front of her, moving in to attack.
It did something to him.
She was a pretty blond princess with a killer palm strike, and she made him feel jumbled up inside. She made him want things he knew full well he couldn’t have. Things he didn’t even want anymore.
That had all shifted straight on into temper by the time Blue’s class was over.
“You should join in next time,” Mariah said, walking over to him as the class broke up. Like they were friends. Like they had any kind of personal relationship.
Griffin preferred the way Caradine simply walked out, forestalling any attempts to engage her in idle chitchat. Everly and Blue were more sociable, but they were having an animated discussion about palm strikes with two local women.
Which meant if Griffin wanted to scowl at Mariah, there was no one around to comment on it, for once.
“I already know how to fight,” he said. Short and curt. “I don’t need a class.”
“You mistake my meaning entirely.” And she smiled at him, all challenge. “I want to hit you. Hard.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d said something like that to him. But today, it didn’t land the way it had before.
Today it seemed to sizzle, searing into him as if she really had put her hands on his body.
He couldn’t seem to keep himself from remembering her husky, intoxicated voice after her tequila night in the Fairweather. The way she’d propositioned him, leaning in close, making him feel like a cursed saint on a pyre of his own morality when he’d refused her.
“It’s cute that you think you could hit me,” he said, though his voice was too low. Too intense. Too revealing. “Or that you think I’d stand here and let you.”
“I have it on excellent authority that my palm strike is fierce.”
She was taunting him. He recognized it, and still, the only thing he could really focus on was the awareness in her blue eyes that reminded him of the blazing summer skies of his Arizona childhood, before he’d decided he didn’t get to have anything that bright. The same awareness that was like a fire in him, storming through him, changing him. Making him regret every promise he had ever made to himself.
Which in turn made him furious. At her.
“What do you think I do for a living?” He sounded more vicious than necessary. “This isn’t a game. The fact that you think it is makes me question why we’re trying to help you in the first place.”
If he expected her to wilt, he was disappointed. But then, he should have known better. This was the same woman who’d listened to torrents of abuse from her jackhole ex-husband and hadn’t so much as blinked.
She regarded him steadily, too. “Let’s be honest. You’re looking for an excuse. Any excuse. You didn’t want to take me on in the first place.”
“Correct.”
“I imagine it must be upsetting for you that I’m still here. No one’s taken me down with a quick dose of lobster, clearing up your problem. That must be hard.”
“There’s no lobster in Alaska. Crab, sure. Or shrimp.”
“I’ll make a note.”
She was hopped up on a false sense of her own power after another hour spent hitting and kicking things, learning about pressure points, and getting herself out of a series of choke holds. Griffin understood all about the things adrenaline could do.
“And I don’t want you dead, Mariah. I want your problem solved. So you can get back to your life.”
And leave me to mine. But he didn’t say that out loud.
“What life do you think I’m in a rush to get back to? I didn’t particularly care for the life I was leading before I met David. Much as I love my family, living anywhere near them means surrendering to them entirely.” She laughed, but it was more a sound of surprise than amusement. “And I don’t think I realized until this very minute that I had the perfect childhood to prepare me for life with David. Where surrender was also required, daily.”
“Now you get to make a new life. No surrender necessary.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, Griffin, but that’s what I’m doing. Every day.”
“Not here,” he gritted out.
But when she smiled, almost as if she felt sorry for him, that made it worse.
He ushered her across the street to the inn and wasn’t surprised when Mariah headed straight upstairs, stalking up the steps before him. She stood aside when he opened her door, then waited as he checked her room.
“Thank you,” she said when he was done. Icily.
“My pleasure,” he replied in the same tone.
He headed back downstairs and took up his preferred position in the lobby, where he could see anyone who came or went. He settled in with his back to the wall, his rifle out of sight, prepared for another long shift. He knew Mariah liked to stay up in her room in the evenings. She read books—mostly the kind of thrillers and historical fiction he read himself, though he had no plans to admit that to her. In case she wanted to talk more about hobbies. She watched movies on ancient videotapes and slightly newer DVDs from the general store. She had a hot plate in her room so she could cook modest dinners, because Caradine very rarely felt like cooking dinner, and the other restaurants—such as they were—were either seasonal, indifferent, or the grill at the Fairweather.
She lived like any other Grizzly Harbor resident. Griffin had to remind himself that she didn’t belong here, she wasn’t a local, and he blurred those lines in his head to his own detriment.