Page 39 of Sniper's Pride

He stopped fighting his scowl. “No, Mariah. That’s who I am.”

She was wholly unaffected by his expression. He knew this when she rolled her eyes. At him.

“Everybody has hobbies, though I’m guessing you call yours something else so they seem more important.”

“I keep myself in peak physical condition. I train constantly, with and without my weapon. These aren’t hobbies, they’re necessities.”

“What will you do when they’re no longer necessities?” she asked.

But Griffin didn’t like to think about that inevitable day. He didn’t want to imagine what life looked like when he couldn’t shoot. When he couldn’t keep up with the team. When he wasn’thim, more weapon than man.

Instead of answering her, he threw back his coffee so fast he burned his tongue, which he figured he deserved for allowing a client to get to him. Again. It gave him something to focus on as he made his way back to Fool’s Cove to go over Mariah’s finances with Oz now that they had new information.

“How did you miss this?” he demanded, standing in Oz’s oversized cabin that was outfitted like spy central.

“Same way you did,” Oz retorted, frowning as he accessed supposedly private records on one of the hugemonitors in front of him. “Redneck roots plus a trophy marriage isn’t the kind of math that typically adds up tosecret stock market wizard.It didn’t occur to me to look.”

Griffin didn’t want to think of Mariah as a stock market wizard. Or any other kind of wizard.

He thought of her too much as it was.

About a week after the discovery that Mariah was secretly wealthy all on her own, Griffin made his way into town after a long, frustrating day paging through supplementary documents related to Mariah’s situation. David’s friends. David’s connections. The questionable first steps David had taken toward his political career. He’d also run tactical interference for another Alaska Force team that was out in the field on a security detail for a charity convoy in the middle of a bloody little coup.

The convoy made it to its destination without incident. But Griffin was back to questioning Mariah’s entire situation. Maybe this was what he’d thought it was from the start: a nasty divorce, with too many threats and maybe an attempt on her life in the heat of the moment. Maybe that first trip to the hospital was a true accident that had given David big ideas. It was possible he really had snuck into Mariah’s apartment and triggered her second attack.

But he hadn’t followed her all the way here, or made a half-assed attempt to get into her hotel room. If he had, they would have found him. Alaska Force knew every outsider currently on the island—writers and artists, wildlife photographers and extreme hikers—and none of them were David Lanier.

You really want that to be true,a derisive voice insidehim said when he made his way into the community center that same evening and stopped in the doorway of the room where Blue was teaching a handful of women down-and-dirty self-defense.You want any excuse to make her go away.

Because the longer she stayed here, the more it felt as if she’d always been here. Because she wanted to know hishobbies.Because he’d spent his whole adult life convincing himself it was his calling and his duty to be nothing more than a weapon, with no inconvenient feelings to mess up his aim or his commitment, and Mariah made him question that.

She kept reminding him he was as flesh and blood as anyone, and Griffin didn’t know what the hell todowith that.

Instead, Griffin concentrated on the fact that she, Everly, and Caradine did self-defense with Blue in the afternoons when Blue was in town. It was smart. They gathered in the community center that was also Grizzly Harbor’s City Hall—containing its mayor’s office and set next to the post office that was open only at the postmaster’s whim—in the multipurpose room that was mostly used for garrulous town meetings and the occasional flea market when the weather was bad.

This afternoon, while the rain poured down outside and Griffin questioned everything, Mariah was practicing how to be deadly. How to strike, counterattack, and explode into decisive action when grabbed. Blue taught them how to fall, how to roll. How to do their best to keep from ever going to the ground, but also what to do if they found themselves there anyway.

And Griffin had dedicated his life to the practical, elegant application of violence. He trained so that hedidn’t have to fight, and fought so that nations didn’t have to go to war. And he had never been a blunt instrument. He and his rifle were lethal poetry, stillness and a perfect shot, fused together and made one on more battlefields than he could count.

He had seen every variation of fighter possible, from street brawlers to black belts with craft to spare, but he’d never seen anything like Mariah McKenna, with that frown of deep concentration on her face, her elegant hands high and in front of her, moving in to attack.

It did something to him.

She was a pretty blond princess with a killer palm strike, and she made him feel jumbled up inside. She made him want things he knew full well he couldn’t have. Things he didn’t even want anymore.

That had all shifted straight on into temper by the time Blue’s class was over.

“You should join in next time,” Mariah said, walking over to him as the class broke up. Like they were friends. Like they had any kind of personal relationship.

Griffin preferred the way Caradine simply walked out, forestalling any attempts to engage her in idle chitchat. Everly and Blue were more sociable, but they were having an animated discussion about palm strikes with two local women.

Which meant if Griffin wanted to scowl at Mariah, there was no one around to comment on it, for once.

“I already know how to fight,” he said. Short and curt. “I don’t need a class.”

“You mistake my meaning entirely.” And she smiled at him, all challenge. “I want to hit you. Hard.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d said something like that to him. But today, it didn’t land the way it had before.

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