Page 22 of Sniper's Pride

Caradine’s smile had been the kind of pure evil that made bad reputations. “That I can get behind.”

And that was how Mariah had found herself embracing her long-neglected inner McKenna, smack in the middle of Grizzly Harbor’s disreputable dive bar. Which happened to also be its only bar.

The first shot had tasted like cough medicine, only much worse. Mariah had wheezed and hacked her way through it, her eyes tearing up.

“The only way out is through,” Caradine had murmured, sliding the second toward her.

That one had been about the same, with less hacking.

The third, happily, went down smooth.

It was around then that Mariah stopped counting. Orcaring that she’d recently suffered an anaphylactic reaction and maybe shouldn’t have been drinking at all. She started laughing instead.

She didn’t even know what was funny. She laughed and she laughed, because everything was sunshine, inside and out. She felt silly and free, as if she were a toddler who’d finally learned how to get up on her feet and refused to sit back down again. Her thoughts spun around and around in her head, but none of them really gripped her. She leaned back against the bar so she wouldn’t fall off the side of the planet, and she let herself laugh.

Then Griffin walked in. And she couldn’t find the edge of the world any longer, so she just spun on out into the Milky Way and focused the best she could on him.

Because he was far more potent than any of the alcohol churning around in her system.

He was cut, sculpted, and beautiful. And he made her nothing short of giddy as he walked up to stand in front of her, looking dark and disapproving and unquestionably delicious. The friend he brought with him was more of the same, a man built powerful and dangerous, sporting a beard like the locals and a similar, glittering intensity in his gaze.

But he could have walked in with a parade. Griffin was the only thing that Mariah could seem to look at.

Especially when he poked at her again.

That made her laugh, too, and she moved forward so she could get in his face the way every female relative she’d ever had always did to the men in their lives, but she stopped short when he wrapped one of his huge hands around her upper arm.

His hand was much too strong. Too tough and capable, indicating he used it for more than the odd golf game.

The heat of his palm felt like fire.

She could feel it everywhere. It rolled through her, charging through her blood and her bones and all the soft, needy areas in between, kicking out the cobwebs and reminding her of all the parts of herself she’d locked away.

So many parts of herself. So many feelings and dreams she’d quickly learned to hide. Need and longing and desire. And that gnarled, battered, sharp-sweet thing she was still inclined to believe was hope.

Marriage is about compromise,her mother-in-law had told her, with standard high-class distaste for her only son’s regrettable wife. But Mariah had known better. It wasn’t David who had compromised in their marriage; it was her. It was always, always her.

David’s single compromise had been marrying Mariah in the first place. All subsequent compromises had been hers to make. And she’d made them. Oh, how she’d twisted and turned, contorting herself until she sometimes wondered if she’d even recognize who she’d been when she started.

Tonight, she knew she wouldn’t.

Because she’d been married for ten years and she’d never felt anything in all that time like the roar of heat and greed that nearly knocked her off her feet when Griffin Cisneros grabbed her by the upper arm to keep her from tripping.

And then held on.

“You don’t approve of me,” she said, tipping back her head to look up at him and take in all that severemasculine beauty. “Every time you look at me your jaw goes like this.”

She did an impression of him, jaw clenched tight, though it was possible she looked more like a horse. She wasn’t much of an actress.

“I don’t approve or disapprove of you,” Griffin said, the obvious disapproval in his tone contradicting the statement. “You’re a client. Nothing more, nothing less.”

But everything was sunshine, and she was, too, so she didn’t think twice. Mariah reached out and thunked him in the center of his chest with two fingers. And then, when he gazed down at her in exaggerated astonishment, she did it again.

Because he was shaped like one of the marble statues of Greek gods she’d seen at an exhibit at the High, but he was harder and hotter than marble. And far more impressive than any old Adonis.

“You specifically don’t approve of me,” Mariah countered. “You think I’m a gold digger.”

“I don’t think you’re a gold digger. Because I don’t think about you at all, not like that. What interests me about you is your safety.”

---