Page 35 of Sniper's Pride

This.She leaned into the unfamiliar feeling that washed over her like another gust of salt-edged wind.This is what it’s like to feel content.

When her cell phone buzzed in her pocket, she almost didn’t recognize the sound. It seemed out of place here, as if she hadn’t only run across the country but had gone back in time, too.

She fished her phone out and frowned down at the screen.

David.

Mariah stared at the cell phone in her hand like it was suddenly a snake. A spider. Something repulsive that could bite—and would if she moved a single muscle.

She didn’t decline the call. She didn’t toss the phone aside. Or even shove it back into her pocket. She was as frozen in place as she’d been in her hotel room last night.

It kept buzzing.

This time she didn’t pinch herself.

And she felt out of time and place here, standing outside on a breezy, chilly afternoon, with mountains looming everywhere and the constant murmur of the sea in the background. Alaska didn’t feel real. She was so far away from everything she had ever known. She wouldn’t say she felt truly happy or content so much as adjacent to both, but she was reasonably sure that she was about assafe as it was possible to get, and that felt like a blessing. It felt new.

Seeing David’s name on her phone made her feel like Alaska was the dream and this phone call was waking her up, whether she wanted it or not.

Maybe you’re hung over,a caustic voice inside her suggested.

It was possible it was all of the above.

But she picked up the call.

“Hello, David,” she said, as calm and composed as always.

He’d taught her well.

“Where the hell are you?”

“I can’t imagine how that’s any of your business,” Mariah said. Pleasantly. Because the nastier David got, the more perfectly ladylike she became in response.

Mostly because it drove him crazy, she could admit.

“You haven’t been back to that stupid apartment in days,” David snarled at her. “Chandler Stanhope said you’d been to the emergency room. I’ve been looking for you, expecting to hear you’d been found dead in a ditch.”

No such luck,Mariah thought.

“Chandler Stanhope is a powerful attorney, as he likes to be the first to remind you, and he should know better than to talk to you about someone else’s medical issues when he’s supposed to be representing the hospital. There are laws.”

“It’s time to stop playing games, Mariah. This has gone on long enough and it’s starting to get embarrassing.”

“Then I can’t possibly be doing it right. Or surely the embarrassment would have set in some time ago.”

“Let me guess. Did you run back home?”

David’s voice took on that nasty tone that always, always boded ill. It was the tone he used when he made her sit, posture perfect, an impenetrable smile on her face, in a rigid-backed chair in his formal dining room. For hours.

It was the tone he used as he’d whispered those nasty things to her, breaking down all the ways she’d shamed him and all the ways she would never, ever be worth the time and effort he’d put into dragging her out of the backwoods.

It was the tone he used to cut her down to size, chop her into pieces, and remind her of her place.

And she wasn’t immune. Even here, a continent away from him, she froze. She stood straighter, automatically, and her free hand went to smooth down the waves in her hair, because the sight of her so unruly would send him into apoplexy.

It was a pleasure to remind herself that he couldn’t see her.

“I should have known,” David was saying in that ugly way of his, his drawl getting clipped right on cue. “You can pick up white trash and polish it, but it’s always going to be white trash, isn’t it?”

---