Page 28 of Sniper's Pride

“Keep me apprised,” Isaac said with a frown at his watch, which signaled he needed to get back to the lodge. “I want to know five minutes before it stops being talk.”

It was a solid vertical mile back from the beach to Griffin’s cabin, and he took it fast despite his body’s protests. He took a cold shower to test his resolve and settle himself, put in a call to the Blue Bear Inn to make sure Mariah was up and waiting for him, then took a boat into town again. With Jonas and Blue this time, because they were part of Mariah’s designated team. Everly came, too, since she wanted to go into town instead of working like she usually did in the cabin she shared with Blue.

When everyone headed off to the Water’s Edge Café to start wheedling breakfast out of Caradine, Griffin went to the inn.

And it was there, down in the lobby after Madeleine called up to Mariah’s room, that he finally admitted that he’d been in a low-boil fury for hours. Since last night, in fact. He was... agitated.

Griffin didn’t normally get agitated. He didn’t get much of anything these days. The closest he got to feelings happened over that endless Christmas week, when no one asked him to come home more often. Not directly. Instead, his sister, Vanessa, tried to guilt him into it by parading his nephews around in front of him. His mother cooked his favorite meals, as if that would accomplish the same thing. And his father, who was so good at hiding behind his amiable physician’s exterior, tried to make idle conversation about sports teams Griffin didn’t follow.

None of them knew the horrors he’d seen out there on his first tour, and he’d never known how to tell them. He’d never known how to tell anyone what it looked like up close, war and human suffering and the kinds of choices a Marine had to make to survive. And worse, to thrive. It had been much easier to close himself off and spend time with the only people who understood without his having to put it all into inadequate words. Other veterans and active-duty military were his people. They got it.

Everyone else was a civilian, a heartbeat away from becoming yet another casualty if Griffin didn’t do his job.

He usually sat in his parents’ living room like the guest he was and chose to remain, his best polite smile on his face, and wondered why they couldn’t all see that he was nothing like them any longer. That he hadn’t been since he was still technically a teenager. That he might as well be drenched in all the blood he’d spilled, for one thing, right there on his mother’s pristine cream and blue sofa. That he was much worse than the monster they likely believed he was—he was an emotionless machine with no regrets, no complications, no human connections.

His father was a hands-on doctor, engaged in his community and always accessible, but while Griffin admired that, it wasn’t him. He’d been raised with the same urge to help people, but he’d gone about it in a different way. And now that he knew precisely what his choices entailed, how could he sit around in his mother’s pretty house playing board games and acting like he was normal?

Griffin knew how to protect people from afar, a calling he took seriously.

He’d never been very good at playing games.

Christmas in his hometown was slightly agitating, he could admit, though there was also a significant part of him that enjoyed the annual test. It gave him the chance to prove all over again that he didn’t belong there. It reminded him exactly who and what he was.

A blond woman who’d made a drunken pass at him shouldn’t have registered. Griffin had long ago decided that casual sex wasn’t for him, but that didn’t keep enterprising women from trying to change his mind. Why was he letting this particular one get to him?

He stood at the bottom of the stairs, his arms folded over his chest, and heard Mariah coming long before he saw her. He heard her door open and slam shut. He heard her footsteps on the second floor hallway, then the way she jogged down the stairs.

Griffin steeled himself for her embarrassment, a bright red face and an inability to look him in the eye, and maybe a few mumbled apologies.

But when she stopped on the step that put her at eye level, all she did was smile.

She didn’t look the worse for wear. If anything, Mariah looked as if she’d had a decent night’s sleep and woken up this morning refreshed. Her blue eyes were bright and clear, and if she was embarrassed or had been up in the night counting out her regrets, there was no visible evidence.

“How are you feeling?” he asked, pointedly.

Her smile widened. “Good, thanks.”

And that was it.

Mariah looked at him, he looked back, and Griffin didn’t know how long that went on before it became noticeably awkward. And he had no choice but to lift hischin like he’d planned to have a stare-down all along, then head for the door.

She had been wasted. She might not remember that, but he sure did. She’d even said—but he refused to dwell on that. He wasn’t going to think about the sultry invitation he had turned down, and not only because he didn’t think she’d meant it.

And so what if it kept him up half the night, wonderingwhat if?

It made no sense that the whole thing scraped at him as they walked down the street in the gray morning toward the café at the water’s edge. Because he knew she never would have propositioned him if she was sober. Never in a million years.

What had she called him?A bad decision?

“What would you do if there was someone stalking you?” Mariah asked as they walked.

He angled a look down at her and didn’t like that she was wearing the same fleece-and-vest combination she’d been wearing last night. Not only because he had a clear memory of how he’d taken both items off her, but because it suggested that she really wasn’t the princess he’d accused her of being. She’d even swapped out those ridiculous leather boots for perfectly reasonable hiking shoes, annoying him even more.

“I would politely ask the stalker to find another target,” he replied, clipped and unamused.

Not that Mariah seemed to notice his tone. “What if he refused?” There was a hint of that laughter that had sucker punched him last night, though she stopped it almost as it began. He hated the loss of it as much as he hated hearing it. And then he hated himself even more.“Stalkers aren’t exactly known for their ability to see reason.”

“I would persuade him,” Griffin bit out. She glanced at him as they moved, her blue eyes not at all as foggy or bloodshot as they ought to have been. “This might surprise you, but I’m actually very persuasive.”

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