Sniper's Pride

by Megan Crane

  But she leaned into him as if none of that mattered as much as the feel of his shoulder against the less hurt side of her face.

  Griffin felt humbled and exalted in turn.

  He figured she’d hide her face when they walked past the man who’d kidnapped her, but this was Mariah. She never did a single thing he expected her to do. She lifted her head, stared at the man as he lay sprawled there, facedown in the grass, and didn’t avert her gaze at all.

  “I should feel worse,” she said quietly. “That’s a human life.”

  “That’s the man who would’ve killed you if he got his hands on you.”

  “Probably. Though he had a lot of plans to hurt me first.” She considered. “A lot.”

  “Then I wish I could take the shot all over again.”

  She shifted her gaze to his, steady and blue. “I said I should feel worse. But I don’t.”

  Griffin kept walking. Then felt the strangest sensation, and looked down to find her covering his heart with one hand. He was surprised he didn’t stagger.

  “Do you carry the weight of that life?” she asked him.

  He was torn open, again. When he didn’t think there could be anything left inside him to expose.

  There was something howling in him, old ghosts, maybe. And not of pretty girls who told him lies, but the kind of tallies he’d stopped making a long time ago.

  All of those compartments, crumbling into dust.

  “I carry all of them,” he heard himself tell her, though he had never said that out loud in his life. “But that’s okay. It’s why I stay strong. I never carry more than I can lift.”

  She didn’t move her hand. He felt her trace a pattern, but he couldn’t tell what it was. He didn’t want to know.

  “But who carries you?”

  He couldn’t answer her. Or he didn’t want to, and he wasn’t sure that his throat worked any longer anyway.

  It was good that they reached the rest of the group then, and he could set Mariah down on her feet. He held onto her arm as she tested her balance, and he hated the way her sudden smile when she didn’t sag burst through him like some kind of heat lightning.

  Lightning and sunshine, and he was a goner. He knew that now.

  He forced himself to let her go, then watched as she walked carefully over to her mother to grab her in another fierce hug.

  It was excellent practice, he assured himself, not making any eye contact with his brothers. He’d let her go. He could do it again.

  Because he wasn’t the kind of man who could keep her.

  He never had been. He never would be.

  She had been a job, and the job was done.

  And if Griffin was the one who had to live with that . . . Well, he was used to carrying all kinds of weight.

  He would carry that, too.

  Nineteen

  When the ambulances finally came roaring down the dirt road, bringing with them the county sheriff’s office and the FBI and a whole lot of painful reality, Mariah was pathetically grateful to crawl up on a stretcher, surrender to the EMTs, and close her eyes at last.

  The adrenaline had worn off and all she wanted was to be away from that barn. Her mother was in safe hands in the lead ambulance, and she figured they were both happy to give themselves over to the delights of Western medicine and whatever dripped from those bags. And this time, when she felt all the bumps in the road as the ambulance left the field Mariah never wanted to see again, she got to do it lying down and not stuffed in the trunk of a car.

  She could really only count it as a win.

  At the county hospital, she was checked over by a battalion of doctors and nurses, then admitted for observation.

  “Nothing really happened to me,” she told her doctor, trying to frown despite her stiff, swollen face. “It’s a black eye, that’s all.”

  “It will be a whole lot blacker tomorrow,” the doctor said, already distinguishing herself from the emergency room doctors in Atlanta by looking concerned rather than, say, annoyed that Mariah kept exposing herself to shellfish. “You look exhausted, and I mean that clinically. Lie back. Take some fluids on board. If you’re fine now, you can be even more fine tomorrow.”

  The minute the doctor was gone, Mariah crawled out of the bed. She took a minute to find her balance, which was harder to do without Griffin there to hold her upright, and grimaced at the hospital gown they’d given her. But it was better than continuing to wear the same clothes she’d had on for more hours straight than she could count. She took her IV stand as a convenient walker should her legs give out again, and went to find her mother.

  It took poking her head into every room along the hallway, but Mariah found her. Mama was lying in her hospital bed looking mutinous and deeply grumpy, her leg bandaged and propped up before her.

  “It’s a bone bruise,” Mama said in disgust, the exact same way Mariah had said It’s a black eye. “I don’t need all the theatrics.”

  Mariah shuffled over, then perched herself on the edge of the bed, making sure not to tangle her IV lines with her mother’s.

  Rose Ellen hadn’t said a word when she’d recognized Walton back at the barn. He’d looked diminished and small as he lay huddled at Isaac’s feet, bloodied and whining, but Rose Ellen hadn’t commented on it. She hadn’t said anything while the Alaska Force men did their thing once reinforcements arrived, taking charge of the scene and answering official questions as if they were actually the ones in charge.

  Just like Mariah hadn’t said anything when she’d watched Griffin surrender his weapon to the authorities, then disappear into the back of an official vehicle without so much as a backward glance.

  They’d both stood near that horrible barn, waiting their turn while draped in those funny metallic blankets. They’d held on to each other as if they had never let go in the past ten years, staring all around them as if they were shell-shocked.

  Maybe they were. Mariah thought it was entirely possible she was. It wasn’t every day she ran like that—or at all—so hard and fast that her thighs now ached. She’d felt her abductor’s breath on her neck. She was sure she’d felt his fingertips graze her.

  You’re going to bleed, he’d growled again.

  And then he was gone.

  It wasn’t every day she fielded rape threats along with death threats, or heard that she’d been dosed with birth control pills for a decade. She couldn’t decide which horrendous violation was more upsetting. And the fact that she wasn’t curled up in a ball somewhere, sobbing her eyes out, told her that yes, she was in shock.

  Mariah expected she might stay there awhile.

  But now she concentrated on her mother’s hand. And how good the weight of it was on her leg.

  “How bad did he hurt you?”

  “He punched me in the face a couple of times,” Mariah said. Her face was stiffer now, which meant it hurt to use it. She made herself smile anyway. “It’s like any given Tuesday night at Uncle Teddy’s.”

  Rose Ellen didn’t smile back. “I don’t mean him. I mean the other one. The one you married.”

  “David never hit me, Mama,” Mariah said softly, holding her mother’s gaze. “If you want to know the sad truth, he didn’t have to hit me. I did everything he said anyway. I guess I wanted to.”

  Her mother looked older, and worse—frail. When she had always been the strongest woman Mariah knew. She told herself it was the harshness of the fluorescent lights. Or the fact that this marked maybe the only time in her life she’d ever seen her mother without her eye makeup on, deep and black and ready to make a statement.

  Her tough-as-nails mother had very blond eyelashes that disappeared without mascara. She looked soft and fragile, and Mariah’s ribs hurt from keeping in all that sobbing.

  “I’m sorry.” Mariah heard how choked up she sounded. And the damaged side of her face already h
urt. Extra salt wasn’t going to help anything. But she couldn’t seem to stop the tears that tracked down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry for everything. For leaving. For being so bad about keeping in touch. For being the reason all this happened to you.”

  “You wanted to better yourself,” Rose Ellen said, her voice as steady as the firm pat she delivered to Mariah’s thigh. “There’s not one thing wrong with that. You don’t need to apologize for doing what you always said you would and getting out of Two Oaks.”

  Mariah shook her head, not willing to hand off the blame that easily.

  “Two Oaks wasn’t the problem. I was the problem. I let them get to me years ago. I let them separate me from you. I don’t know if you can better yourself by pretending that the person you were before didn’t exist. That’s not improving. That’s just hiding.”

  “You’re not the one who stopped calling, baby girl. I was.”

  Mariah blinked a few times, but she couldn’t seem to form the questions that crowded her mouth. Her mother sighed, adjusting herself in the bed, and kept talking as if she’d heard those questions all the same.

  “You didn’t need all that McKenna nonsense every time you turned around, and you know as well as I do that they would have camped out in your front yard if you’d have let them.” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “You had a life, and I thought it was the one you wanted. I didn’t see any reason why you should beat yourself up about separating yourself from your roots, so I did it for you.”

  “I abandoned you,” Mariah whispered.

  “Baby girl, I let you go.” Rose Ellen’s tough mouth curved upward. “I wanted you to go. You spent your whole childhood cleaning up messes and taking care of your brothers and sisters. You deserved an easier life. I figured that’s what he was giving you.”

  “You did not. You hated him on sight. And you were right.”

  “I didn’t want to be right.” Rose Ellen reached out and took Mariah’s hand between hers. “There’s precious little happiness in this world, Mariah. I’ve never had more than a nodding acquaintance with it myself. And no two people’s happiness looks the same. You’ve never heard me call you names for going after what you want, and you never will.”

  “He made me choose,” Mariah heard herself say, as if it was torn from the deepest part of her. “And I chose wrong. I’m so sorry.”

  Her mother let out that laugh Mariah had always loved. A rough, glorious cackle, made up of late nights and cigarettes and pure joy.

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she demanded. “I’ve spent my whole life making the wrong choice. I won’t lie—that’s the only choice I know how to make. And if I’ve learned anything, it’s this: You can’t spend your time beating yourself up for doing what you thought was right. You can only try to do better the next time. Life isn’t about making the right choice, Mariah. It’s about what you do after the bad ones blow up in your face, the way they always do. Do you lie down? Or do you get up and try again? I could personally teach stupid to a bunch of rocks, but I learn from my mistakes. Or I hope I do. And either way, I always, always keep going.”

  And Mama had never been one for extended displays of physical affection. She didn’t like to cuddle, and truth be told, she’d never been all that warm. She wasn’t that kind of mother. But they were both in the hospital tonight, and not dead the way they could have been.

  Whatever the reason, Mariah lay down next to her mother, resting the unhurt side of her face on the pillow. Rose Ellen wrapped her arm around Mariah, keeping her elevated leg out of the way.

  And they lay like that for a long, long time.

  * * *

  • • •

  When Mariah woke up, it was because she was in Griffin’s arms again.

  She knew it was him before she knew what was happening. It was the scent of him, maybe. Or the particular strength of his arms and the comforting wall of his chest. She cradled the part of her face that didn’t hurt in the crook of his neck, let him push her IV along, and only complained when he set her down in her hospital bed again with a gentleness that might have made her cry if she’d had any tears left in her.

  “You can’t go wandering off,” he told her gruffly, standing there at the side of her bed, his dark eyes glittering with things she knew he’d never say. She felt them anyway. “People think you’re lost. After the last two days, that makes everybody jumpy.”

  “You found me.” She smiled as best she could with her poor, swollen face, and the funny thing was, it hurt less when it was directed at him. “You always do.”

  Griffin stayed where he was beside her bed, like some kind of sentry, and it took her a minute to realize that he hadn’t gone off somewhere to shower and change, maybe eat a big dinner, or whatever it was mighty commandos did after saving the day. He was wearing the exact same thing he’d had on out there at the barn. The same cargo pants covered with dust and dirt, and the same black T-shirt that was really more a love letter to his remarkable torso.

  It made her heart flip over, imagining Griffin finishing up with the police and the federal officers—who likely had a lot of questions for the man who’d fired the bullet that had killed her abductor—and then racing right over to see her in the hospital.

  Almost like he cared.

  And Mariah had told him she loved him a thousand times or more by now, but she knew better than to say it just then. It was the way he stood there like he was carved from stone. Or wished he was, anyway.

  He was still the most beautiful man she had ever seen. And now she knew what he could do. She’d seen it. She’d felt her abductor hit the ground right behind her, and only then had she understood that it hadn’t been a bee she’d heard go by in that second before she’d been sure he was about to grab her.

  She must have run another five steps at least before she heard the shot.

  Griffin was beautiful, he was indisputably lethal, and as she gazed up at him, she knew that she had never seen another human being so lonely.

  She wanted to save him the way he’d saved her. If she could have, she would have gathered him up in her arms and held him close until she melted away all those solitary walls he had put up around him.

  And even lying down in her hospital bed, she could see that he was gearing himself up to lay down the law. She even had an idea of what he planned to say.

  But she wasn’t ready.

  She just wasn’t ready.

  “Will you stay with me?” she asked him softly. “Just until I fall asleep?”

  He wore that anguished look again, the way he had back in the barn. He was going to say no. He was going to refuse her and leave, as she had no doubt that he wanted to. She held her breath—

  But he didn’t.

  “Sure,” he said, as if the single word cost him more than she could possibly imagine. “I can stay. Until you sleep.”

  He lowered himself into the chair beside her bed like it might bite him. Mariah rolled over to her side so she could look at him.

  She wanted to look at him forever.

  But her eyelids were heavy, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever been so tired in all her life.

  Just as she wasn’t sure her heart was still in one piece or at all functional when he leaned forward, reached out, and pulled her hand between his.

  He didn’t say another word.

  But his hands were so warm. His steady, intense gaze made her feel safe. And even though she fought to stay awake, to hold on to him as long as she could, as soon as the heat of his palms soaked into hers, she fell asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next time she woke up, it was morning and her IV was disconnected.

  She expected Griffin to be gone, and actually caught her breath when she saw that he was still there. He’d left the chair and was standing by the window, his hands clasped behind his back in a way that str
uck her as profoundly military.

  And even more lonely than last night.

  “They’re releasing you today,” he told her without turning around. And Mariah had been around the Alaska Force team long enough now to know better than to ask how he’d known she was awake. “You can put on real clothes if you want. They should have your discharge papers soon.”

  “Shouldn’t they have woken me up to discuss this?” It hurt to talk. It hurt to blink, for that matter. Mariah took a moment to catalog all the different and surprising ways she hurt, particularly when she heaved herself into a sitting position. She would have grimaced—if she wasn’t sure that would hurt even more. “I’m pretty sure there’s a whole law.”

  Griffin turned slightly from the window and raised a brow at her. “I’m very charming.”

  “More charming than federal law?”

  “The nurse said I had to be your husband. So I told her I was.”

  Mariah didn’t have a handy quip for that. She should have thrown something back at him, made it funny.

  But instead they stared at each other for much too long. Until it got too hot and intense.

  Mariah was the one who looked away first, as if the stiff hospital blankets were suddenly deeply fascinating.

  “You’re going to have to make a police statement. And the FBI want to talk to you, too. I could put them off another day.”

  “There’s no need to delay anything,” she said, sounding hushed. As if they were in a church instead of an antiseptic hospital room. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not fine, Mariah. You’re beat-up. Battered. If I could—”

  “For God’s sake, Mariah!”

  The voice from the doorway made Mariah jump. She was aware of Griffin moving, blocking her from whatever was coming.

  But she didn’t need to see the person at the door to recognize him.

  “David?” she asked, stunned.

  Her ex-husband looked the roughest she’d ever seen him when he moved into her line of sight. Which was to say, he looked as if he’d had an excellent night’s sleep followed by a visit from his masseuse and a consultation with his tailor. Only the faintest hint of puffiness around his eyes and the fact that he’d left his jaw unshaven suggested that he had any more pressing affairs to attend to today than counting the family money.