by Megan Crane
He settled in, tuning out Madeleine’s nightly phone squabble with Jaco and the text updates from various active Alaska Force missions in turn. He concentrated on his breath. In, out. He made himself still. Alert and watchful, but wholly capable of staying exactly as he was for hours. Days, if necessary.
And he was surprised, hours later, after Madeleine had closed down the front desk for the night and left to fight with Jaco in person, to hear footsteps in the hall above.
He shifted into a higher level of alertness instantly, and was on his feet before the footsteps hit the top of the stairs.
Long before they reached the bottom, he also knew that it was Mariah.
No one else was staying in the inn this week, but he also recognized the sound of her tread. Light and careful, like the rest of her, even when she barreled into the lobby and then stopped. To stare at him.
She had showered since he’d last seen her. Her hair hung all around her and gleamed in the firelight, smelling strongly of the coconut shampoo she used. She wore those jeans that looked about as soft as her skin and clung to her in ways even he couldn’t keep from admiring. She was wrapped up in that wool cape thing again, and yet despite that, her feet were bare and her toes painted a glossy red.
The contrast might kill him.
“Is something wrong?” he asked gruffly, because this was a freaking job, not a date, and he needed to stop obsessing about what she was wearing. “Did something happen?”
She studied him for a moment, as if she were coming to some decision. Then she tipped up her chin, squared her shoulders, and pulled the wrap tighter around her torso.
“Why don’t you want me here?” she asked.
Great. They were having this conversation. “It’s nothing personal.”
“Like hell.”
That was all drawl, fire and defiance, and it hit Griffin like a grenade.
“Excuse me?”
“Of course it’s personal.” Mariah stood even taller. “It’s so personal that you can barely see straight when I’m in the same room. Why don’t you just admit it?”
“I don’t have to like a mission to complete it, if that’s your concern.”
“That’s not my concern. You really don’t like me, and I want to know why.”
She moved farther into the room in that regal manner that drove him crazy. She looked like a queen, and he wanted nothing more than to get his hands on her and prove that she was as flesh and blood as he was.
He told himself it was temper, nothing more, but he knew better. Of course he knew better.
“Let me assure you, Mariah, that I have no personal feelings about you one way or the other.”
He couldn’t read the glittering expression in her eyes. But that curve in the corner of her mouth was wired directly into his sex. “I don’t believe you.”
“You want to be careful about throwing accusations around,” he warned her. “What happened upstairs? Did you get bored sitting around in your room, pretending that rural Alaska suits you? I don’t blame you. This isn’t a soft place. It takes a very specific kind of person to make it here.”
“And by ‘very specific’ do you mean . . . condescending? Patronizing? A man so uptight it must hurt when he sits down?”
“I know you’re not describing me. I’m not uptight, princess.”
“Meticulous. Disciplined. Guarded. Whatever you want to call it.”
“I am in complete control of myself. I take pride in it.” Griffin didn’t restrain the way he glared at her. He told himself it was a choice. “You should ask yourself why you don’t.”
“I’ve forgotten more things about control than you’ll ever know,” she had the nerve to throw at him. “How do you think I survived my marriage?”
“You haven’t survived it yet,” Griffin fired back. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”
“I can’t believe that you treat every client like this. In fact, I know you don’t. This is personal, Griffin. I wish you’d just admit it. Every single thing I say or do offends you, clearly.”
“You don’t offend me. You don’t bother me.” And he’d hate himself forever for the note of desperation he could hear in his own voice. “You’re a job. Not a very interesting one.”
“And you,” she said with too much quiet intensity, her blue eyes entirely too sharp, “are a liar.”
Eleven
Mariah had no idea what she was doing.
She should have been tucked up in her room, happily reading a book as night fell—later and later the longer she stayed here—the way she normally did on these blustery spring evenings.
She should have been worried about that fierce look on Griffin’s face, as if he were debating between carting her back to her room himself or maybe knocking her out right here. Anything to shut her up.
But she didn’t feel much like shutting up, it turned out. Talking to David again the other day had . . . changed her. Or maybe it was learning how to fight back. How to function inside fear, as Blue often told them in their self-defense class.
Whatever it was, she wasn’t sitting rigid and still with a smile on her face anymore, taking other people’s crap. Those days were over.
She wasn’t straightening her hair like her life depended on it. She wasn’t making sure her makeup was flawless at every hour of the day and night. She was going straight to seed, in fact.
McKennas might be weeds instead of flowers down there in the backwoods of Two Oaks, but flowers were fragile things. They bloomed awhile then died, and required all kinds of fiddling to stay alive at all. Weeds, on the other hand, took care of themselves, took over, and were almost impossible to kill off.
Just like the extended McKenna clan.
And just like Mariah.
“I know you didn’t call me a liar,” Griffin said, almost casually. Conversationally.
The ferocious look on his face probably should have scared her down to her bones, but it didn’t. He didn’t. Scared wasn’t at all what she felt around Griffin Cisneros.
And she was getting tired of pretending otherwise.
She was tired of pretending.
“Here’s the thing,” she told him, gripping the soft wrap she liked to use as a kind of bathrobe and starting toward him. The floor beneath her feet was cold, but that helped. It made her more aware. “I think about my own death all the time now.”
“Congratulations, princess. It’s called mortality. And guess what? It’s going to get us all sooner or later.”
“I don’t want to die pretending I don’t feel the things I do. Even if what I feel happens to make you furious.”
And Mariah knew him better now. She’d made an extended study of this still, watchful man. She’d seen how kind he was beneath his bluster. She knew how carefully he listened. And she could see the gradations in all that ice he wrapped around himself, and knew he wasn’t quite as frosty tonight as he wanted her to think he was.
“What you feel or don’t feel has nothing to do with me.”
She shook her head at him. “Liar.”
The muscle that flexed in his jaw was almost imperceptible. Almost.
Mariah was tired of waiting. To be good enough. To be accepted. Hell, to be killed.
She was tired of acting like a flower, waiting to be watered, desperate for sun, unable to take care of herself and her own needs unless a gardener happened by.
“I’m only going to say this once,” Griffin told her in his precise, furious way. “I do not lie. I pride myself on being a man of honor, and that includes telling the truth. I don’t take honesty lightly, and I certainly wouldn’t throw it away at the spur of a moment—”
“In the name of all that is holy, Griffin. Just shut up.”
He looked faintly startled, which for Griffin was the equivalent of flinching, leaping into the air, and maybe even letting out a sc
ream.
Mariah knew it wouldn’t last, so she took advantage. She closed the distance between them, aware of the floor beneath her feet, the uneven wood giving way to the thick rug laid out before the fireplace. She was aware of the crackling warmth of the dancing flames, the wind off the harbor buffeting the windows, and the creaky sounds of the old inn all around them.
She was aware of everything, but all she truly saw was Griffin.
Beautiful Griffin, straight and tall. That impossibly sculpted face, his dark brown eyes shot through with gold and heat. That full mouth, pressed into its usual hard line.
All the lean, hard-packed muscle he carried with such neat, athletic grace.
She walked toward him, and didn’t stop until she was right there in front of him, so close that if she breathed too heavily the front of her body would press against his. For a dizzy moment, that was all she could think about.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Griffin said in a warning tone that made her heart thump. “I’m not sitting in this lobby for my health. It’s yours we’re concerned about.”
“I appreciate your concern,” she assured him. “Truly.”
“Then appreciate it quietly. Up in your room.”
He sounded furious. But Mariah was so close to him now, and she could see him. And for all his icy fury, he didn’t step back. He didn’t set her away from him. He didn’t do anything but continue to stand there, straight and stiff, his jaw clenched like he was this close to exploding.
Mariah would bet anything that he was.
“You should be careful who you tell to shut up.” Griffin’s voice had grown even darker. More intense. Which meant only that Mariah could feel it in even more places. “You might not like the response you get.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Mariah drawled.
And she didn’t do what she’d been taught, again and again, by her ex. She didn’t wait. She didn’t sit sweetly, a pleasant expression on her face, until such time as he felt she was ladylike enough to deserve an advance.
Somewhere inside, she could hear her mama hooting at the very idea of the ladylike behavior David had insisted on.
Mariah didn’t hoot along, but it was now or never.
She held Griffin’s gaze. Then she reached out, entirely too aware of her own breath, and slid her hands over his chest.
It was like sliding her palms over one of the wood-burning stoves that heated the inn. He was as hard as iron and as hot. She could feel the simmering heat and the power of him through the henley he wore, and it made her shudder because it proved what she already believed.
He wasn’t cold at all. He burned the same way she did.
She waited for him to order her to step back. But he didn’t.
His face still seemed carved from stone. But if he imagined that was a barrier, he was mistaken. She liked the stone, particularly when she could feel that all those sculpted marble ridges in his abdomen were hot to the touch.
He made her want to curl up against him and purr.
Instead, Mariah did the next best thing. She surged up onto her tiptoes, tilted her face to his, and then pressed her lips against Griffin’s.
And for a moment, it truly was like kissing some kind of statue.
He didn’t move. She would have thought he didn’t breathe, either, but her hands were on his chest. She could feel the faint movement. And better still, the wild pounding of his heart.
So she kissed him again. She kept her mouth on his, like she was teasing him awake. Like something out of a fairy tale.
Once. Again.
And then he broke.
One second he was motionless and still, the most beautiful sculpture of a man she had ever beheld.
And the next he was . . . liquid heat.
He angled his head to one side, opening his mouth over hers, and she felt the sound he made—half fury, half need—light her up inside. His hands were on her face, moving her head where he wanted it, and taking control with a swiftness and a certainty that made her toes curl.
And it was better than an explosion. It was deeper. Wilder.
It was greedy. Need and longing, fury and something darker still.
Mariah had never felt anything like this in her life.
She wrapped her arms around the hard column of his neck and arched against him, thrilling to the scrape of her breasts against that iron wall of his chest at last.
The world stopped. Then it spun. And either way, the only thing that mattered to her was Griffin.
He kissed her like a starving man, but she was just as hungry.
She couldn’t get close enough. She couldn’t taste him enough. She couldn’t get enough.
And when he pulled his mouth from hers, his hands wrapping around her shoulders and holding her away from him, his gaze was the darkest she’d ever seen it.
Furious all over again, but this time without a shred of that deep chill she was used to seeing in him.
“Griffin . . .” she began, through lips that no longer felt entirely like hers.
“You think this is a game.” His face was so close that it was almost like another kind of kiss. “You think—what? If you shatter every boundary I have it will end well? Because it won’t. You have no idea who I am. You have no idea what I’m capable of. The control that I keep over myself isn’t for me, Mariah. It’s for you. It’s for the world in general. You don’t need to see what happens when I’m out of control.”
“Do you even know?” she demanded, spurred on by something she couldn’t have named if she tried. It was that ache she felt within her. The taste of him in her mouth. The feel of him tattooed into her palms. The particular scent that was only his, salt and man, that she knew might haunt her forever. “Do you have the slightest idea who you are when you let yourself go?”
“I could tell you what it’s like to be a Marine sniper, but you wouldn’t understand. I could toss out my number of confirmed kills. But those aren’t things I talk about with civilians.”
“I don’t think the things you’ve done make you any kind of monster.”
“Neither do I. But you know what would? Acting like I have anything in common with all the happy civilians who walk around with no idea what price is paid to keep them free. I know the price. I chose to pay it. And I make sure to keep the weapon they made me under total control at all times, so people like you never have to know what it costs.”
She could see how deeply he meant that. How it let him stand taller and wrap another chilly barrier around himself.
But she wanted his heat.
“You don’t drink. You don’t have one-night stands, and you’re certainly not in a relationship. You work out every single day and act as if missing a session might kill you. There’s self-control, and that’s a good thing. But then there’s being a control freak.”
There was something like anguish on his face as his hands tightened on her shoulders.
“You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“I know exactly what I’m talking about.” She hardly recognized her own voice. “You’re talking to the only person around who wears more masks than you do. Do you really think I don’t know what that costs? You think I don’t know how hard it is to stay cool and collected no matter what?”
“I must have missed the part of your file that talked about the time you spent having drill sergeants and commanding officers in your face.”
“I had David,” she threw right back at him. “Ten years of a controlling husband monitoring every twitch of eyelid and every chip in my nail polish. And I’m betting that the consequences I put up with were more unpleasant than an extra set of push-ups.”
Griffin let go of her and stepped back, but that only proved she was getting to him. His hands ended up on his lean hips, and he looked male and pissed, yet stil
l so beautiful it took her breath away. And it was worse now, because she’d tasted him.
There was no way she was going to get past that anytime soon.
“The situation is my fault, not yours,” he said, sounding cold and detached again. But she didn’t believe that distance anymore. “I’m the professional. I should have known better.”
“That’s what happens when you block stuff up. All that pressure has to come out somehow.”
“I’m sure you know you’re a beautiful woman,” Griffin said with deliberate, pointed courtesy. And a faint note of pity besides. It stung, even though she knew that he was deliberately putting distance between them. “You’d have to know, wouldn’t you?”
“Men like my ex-husband don’t typically waste their time pulling ugly ducklings out of roadside diners,” Mariah replied, letting her drawl get good and thick. “They tend to go right for the swans. If I keep my mouth shut, wear my hair right, and stay pretty, who knows? People might forget that I’m nothing but some no-account country girl, not quite a hillbilly, married to someone way above my station.”
“I always assumed trophy wives knew better than anyone else what made them a trophy.”
Her lips still felt swollen from his, and he was talking about trophy wives.
So Mariah smiled, letting her voice get sweet and syrupy. “We surely do. Why? Are you looking for one?”
“Mariah.”
Her name was a command. One she ignored.
“It’s not only about being pretty,” she said, feeling dangerous herself as she glared at him. “You have to stay pretty in the very specific manner that appeals to whoever considered you a trophy in the first place. All the time. No days off. No yoga pants on the sofa, binge-watching television programs. No fluctuations in weight or fitness levels. To be determined by him, not you. Not a scale, not a trainer. He’s the final authority on how much you eat, when you eat it, whether it’s stuck to your thighs, and what you should do to get it off. Because the thing you really sign up for when you become a rich man’s trophy wife is availability.”