Page 42 of Sniper's Pride

She should have been worried about that fierce look on Griffin’s face, as if he were debating between carting her back to her room himself or maybe knocking her out right here. Anything to shut her up.

But she didn’t feel much like shutting up, it turned out. Talking to David again the other day had... changed her. Or maybe it was learning how to fight back. How to function inside fear, as Blue often told them in their self-defense class.

Whatever it was, she wasn’t sitting rigid and still with a smile on her face anymore, taking other people’s crap. Those days were over.

She wasn’t straightening her hair like her lifedepended on it. She wasn’t making sure her makeup was flawless at every hour of the day and night. She was going straight to seed, in fact.

McKennas might be weeds instead of flowers down there in the backwoods of Two Oaks, but flowers were fragile things. They bloomed awhile then died, and required all kinds of fiddling to stay alive at all. Weeds, on the other hand, took care of themselves, took over, and were almost impossible to kill off.

Just like the extended McKenna clan.

And just like Mariah.

“I know you didn’t call me a liar,” Griffin said, almost casually. Conversationally.

The ferocious look on his face probably should have scared her down to her bones, but it didn’t. He didn’t.Scaredwasn’t at all what she felt around Griffin Cisneros.

And she was getting tired of pretending otherwise.

She was tired ofpretending.

“Here’s the thing,” she told him, gripping the soft wrap she liked to use as a kind of bathrobe and starting toward him. The floor beneath her feet was cold, but that helped. It made her moreaware.“I think about my own death all the time now.”

“Congratulations, princess. It’s called mortality. And guess what? It’s going to get us all sooner or later.”

“I don’t want to die pretending I don’t feel the things I do. Even if what I feel happens to make you furious.”

And Mariah knew him better now. She’d made an extended study of this still, watchful man. She’d seen how kind he was beneath his bluster. She knew how carefully he listened. And she could see the gradations in all that ice he wrapped around himself, and knew he wasn’t quite as frosty tonight as he wanted her to think he was.

“What you feel or don’t feel has nothing to do with me.”

She shook her head at him. “Liar.”

The muscle that flexed in his jaw was almost imperceptible. Almost.

Mariah was tired of waiting. To be good enough. To be accepted. Hell, to be killed.

She was tired of acting like a flower, waiting to be watered, desperate for sun, unable to take care of herself and her own needs unless a gardener happened by.

“I’m only going to say this once,” Griffin told her in his precise, furious way. “I do not lie. I pride myself on being a man of honor, and that includes telling the truth. I don’t take honesty lightly, and I certainly wouldn’t throw it away at the spur of a moment—”

“In the name of all that is holy, Griffin. Just shut up.”

He looked faintly startled, which for Griffin was the equivalent of flinching, leaping into the air, and maybe even letting out a scream.

Mariah knew it wouldn’t last, so she took advantage. She closed the distance between them, aware of the floor beneath her feet, the uneven wood giving way to the thick rug laid out before the fireplace. She was aware of the crackling warmth of the dancing flames, the wind off the harbor buffeting the windows, and the creaky sounds of the old inn all around them.

She was aware of everything, but all she truly saw was Griffin.

Beautiful Griffin, straight and tall. That impossibly sculpted face, his dark brown eyes shot through with gold and heat. That full mouth, pressed into its usual hard line.

All the lean, hard-packed muscle he carried with such neat, athletic grace.

She walked toward him, and didn’t stop until she was right there in front of him, so close that if she breathed too heavily the front of her body would press against his. For a dizzy moment, that was all she could think about.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Griffin said in a warning tone that made her heart thump. “I’m not sitting in this lobby for my health. It’s yours we’re concerned about.”

“I appreciate your concern,” she assured him. “Truly.”

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