Page 16 of Sniper's Pride

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 BlueHendricks, 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 hisprofessional 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.”

---