Page 29 of Sniper's Pride

She laughed. And it was laughter, for God’s sake. Everybody laughed. He didn’t understand why he was acting like he’d never heard a woman laugh before. Why it felt like a bolt of lightning shot straight through him.

“I believe you,” Mariah said when her laughter faded.

Griffin couldn’t believe he had to remind himself that this was a job. He was working, not hanging around a pretty woman for his own entertainment. Something he really shouldn’t have had to keep telling himself.

“The good news is that whoever is following you is now following me,” he told her, stepping back into his usual role. Calm, cool, collected. He had always been an exemplary sniper. He knew how to calm himself down. How to steady himself into perfect stillness. Mariah was no more than a new situation he needed to conquer. But he had no doubt he would, because that was what he did. “It’s also extremely unlikely that anyone followed you here, and we’re tracking your cell phone now, so we’ll know if anyone uses it to hunt you down.”

He saw a flash of color move over her face then, but he couldn’t tell what had made her flush. Especially not when she trained her eyes on the uneven boardwalk before her. The fact that she no longer had what passed for cell phone privacy? Emotion? A stray memory of last night?

Why did he want to know so badly?

“This is certainly the most remote place I’ve everbeen,” she said after a brief pause he chose not to analyze.

“It’s remote. It’s also a small town. There aren’t that many people here, and we all know each other. Too well, you might say.”

The way she smiled clawed at him, but by then they were walking up to the café’s front door. He stopped her before she could go inside, not knowing how to ask the question. But he wanted to know what she was hiding from him.

He needed to know it, because he liked to have all the information before he did any job. That was all.

Of course that was all.

“Mariah—”

“Please don’t tell me we have tohave a conversation,” she said quickly. “Or maybe you want me to apologize? I do. It’s all a blessed blur, I’m afraid, but please accept a blanket apology for anything I might have said or done last night.”

“You don’t remember?”

“It’s just so blurry.” He didn’t believe that bland smile she aimed at him. Not at all. “Bits and pieces. That’s all.”

“You don’t remember telling me that I’m beautiful.”

It was a statement, not a question, and he wouldn’t have thrown it at her if he hadn’t been so aware that she was lying to him. He’d had no intention of discussing what had happened last night. He’d spent the entire boat ride over patting himself on the back for the high road he planned to take.

But here he was. No high road in sight.

“I sure don’t.” Her smile was impenetrable, which was how he knew she’d practiced it. It was likely howPrincess Mariah kept people at arm’s length. “But I’m sure you’re aware that you’re a very attractive man, Griffin. I assume they give you access to mirrors out there in the woods, or wherever y’all live. I can only apologize for stating the obvious.”

“You also told me that you figured a death threat was as good as a divorce decree, and wondered if I’d like to be your rebound.”

Though she hadn’t used those words. Not exactly.

“Now you’re making me blush,” she told him, despite clear evidence to the contrary. She wasn’t blushing at all at that point. She wore that cool smile, she was holding his gaze, and there wasn’t the faintest hint of embarrassment—or anything else—anywhere on that pretty face of hers. “I sure wish I could remember any of the scandalous things I said to you, but I can’t. I hope it wasn’t too much for you to handle.”

And he knew, without a shred of doubt, that despite the sweet honey of that drawl and the wide-eyed innocence of her gaze, she knew perfectly well she was issuing him a challenge.

“I didn’t try to handle you, Mariah,” he told her, low and dark and perilously close to out of control. Not that he’d allowed himself to get truly out of control since he was approximately eighteen, and boot camp had taken care of that short-lived impulse. “If I did, you can trust that you wouldn’t have any trouble remembering it the next day.”

Then he reached past her, opening the door and making a show of ushering her in like the fine, proper gentleman his mother had tried to raise before the Marines had made him into... something else entirely.

And she went, gliding ahead of him like it had beenher idea in the first place, but he figured she was showing her hand. If Mariah had been half as innocent as she was acting, she should have been more bothered by him. That she wasn’t suggested she was taking pains to cover up her actual reactions. He liked that.

Not that he should let this woman—a client—get to him in the first place.

When he got to the table where Jonas and Blue waited, he was all business.

It took them two solid hours. They dug into every aspect of Mariah’s life. Her childhood. Her marriage. The kind of political aspirations David Lanier had; the family connections he had no qualm about using; and the names of every friend, connection, or story someone else had ever told in her presence about people who had known David before she met him. All to build a full picture.

“People don’t usually start with murder,” Blue told Mariah, kicked back in his chair with his tablet in his hands as he put in requests to Oz for different streams of information on David, his family, and all other aspects of Mariah’s story. “They usually warm up with something else first.”

---