Page 21 of Sniper's Pride

“Which they?” Caradine had replied after a long pause and a baleful glare.

“Griffin and his friends. I mean, I’m assuming he has friends. That there’s really a thing called Alaska Force and not just... him. Running around brooding at people and pretending he’s a whole battalion.”

Caradine’s mouth had curved the slightest bit in one corner. “I’m sorry to tell you that Alaska Force is all too real.”

Mariah had sighed. “I don’t know if that makes me happy or sad. I was warming to the idea of Griffin being a one-man show.”

“What I can tell you about all the men in Alaska Force is that each and every one of them is their own epic show. What you need to ask yourself is whether or not you want to be in the audience.”

“I’m not the audience. I’m a client.”

Caradine hadn’t rolled her eyes, exactly. “That’s how they get you.”

“Not me,” Mariah had said with tremendous confidence, as if she hadn’t been easily distracted by Griffin’sarm.“I already followed one worthless man around for a decade. I don’t plan to repeat the experience.”

“A woman after my own black heart.”

Mariah had waited for Caradine to ask questions. Why she was here, for example. What had made her seek out Alaska Force. But if Caradine had the slightest bit of curiosity about Mariah’s story—the way Mariah wouldhave if their positions had been reversed—she didn’t show it. She’d made Mariah another outstanding coffee and then, when the door opened, she’d waved away the people who tried to come in.

“I’m closed,” she’d said, without a shred of apology in her voice.

“Come on, Caradine,” the man argued in a low, gruff voice. “Maria and Luz need to eat before we head out into the bush. It’s all mud and puddles and overflow for miles.”

“Maria and Luz and springtime are not my problem.”

“Please?” It was a female voice that time. Mariah saw that there were two women standing there with the man on the doorstep. The speaker was tall and blond. The other was short and brunette. And both were noticeably pregnant. “You know how long the trip is.”

“Get provisions from the general store,” Caradine suggested, in a tone that didn’t invite any further argument.

Sure enough, the man—another fisherman by the looks of him—backed out of the doorway. Caradine followed, flipping the sign in the window toCLOSEDand locking the door behind him.

“Are they both...?” Mariah had asked, watching the trio make their way down the street outside.

“What they both are is a mess.” Caradine had actually rolled her eyes then. “The short one, Maria, moved here with her boyfriend. But then she took up with Jared, who grew up here with the tall one, his wife, Luz. Who then got together with Maria’s boyfriend instead. Now everybody’s pregnant, no one knows who the fathers are, and they’re all living together off the grid out there. It’s a Grizzly Harbor soap opera. With bears and stupidity.”

“You don’t like them?”

“I don’t like anyone.”

“Well, that’s handy,” Mariah had said with a smile. “Neither do I.”

She hadn’t thought about it in such stark terms before, but she realized as she said it that it was true. She’d had all kinds of friends in Atlanta. Friends from the Junior League. Friends from every charity event she’d ever been involved with. Friends from the country club, the golf club, and David’s other clubs. Friends to go to lunch with, or to Pilates with, or to art exhibitions at the High Museum with when the men were busy, and anywhere else she might want to go, too.

And not one of them had known a single real thing about her. Not one of them had been at all trustworthy. She hadn’t even questioned the fact that none of them were likely to support her when she divorced David. She’d accepted it as fact, endured any number of thinly veiled insults from thesefriends, and when it came time to leave town and run for her life, she hadn’t contacted any of them.

But it hadn’t occurred to her until right that second, sitting there in Caradine’s café, that she’d never really liked any of them all that much in the first place.

Her friendships during her marriage hadn’t had anything to do with whom she liked or whom she didn’t. One of her jobs had been to ingratiate herself with as many of the right people as possible, and she’d launched herself into it, because keeping David happy had been the closest thing to a career she had.

“My whole life has been about other people’s expectations,” she’d told Caradine, because she could tell by thelook on the other woman’s face that she didn’t care. She had no expectations about Mariah at all. And that made her the perfect person to open up to. “And now that I find myself this far away in the middle of nowhere, it turns out I have a powerful hankering to defy every one of those expectations.”

“If this involves pumping our fists and singing power ballads together, I’m going to have to decline.”

“I’m tone-deaf,” Mariah assured her, climbing to her feet. “I was raised by a long line of people who handled every disappointment the same way. With enough alcohol to take down a horse, a whole lot of bad behavior to go with it, and a vicious hangover the next morning, sure, but precious few regrets.”

“I don’t do friends,” Caradine had said, studying her. “If that’s what you’re after.”

“I’m after getting blind drunk and a little bit rowdy, like God intended when he made tequila.”

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