Page 59 of Sniper's Pride

She had lived all her life without knowing that it was possible to feel that way about anyone.

And up there at thirty-five thousand feet above the earth, chasing the night across the country, Mariah kept her eyes shut tight and did her best not to cry out loud at the sheer unfairness of it all.

It didn’t seem right that she’d suffered a decade with David and only got one night with Griffin. She wanted more. She wanted so much more. She recalled what it had been like waking up in that bed, feeling dreamy and satisfied straight through, wondering what it would be like when she saw him again. The man loved nothing more than pretending he was an icicle, so she’d anticipated there would be more of that—but now she knew what it was like when he melted.

How was she supposed to live without it?

A cross-country plane ride in the dark was a lot of time to think about her life.

She had nearly died twice before she’d discovered what it was like to truly live, and that struck Mariah as a terrible shame. If she’d known how little time she had, she would have done everything so very differently. Of course, the twenty-year-old she’d been would always have taken that ride in David’s fancy car the night they’d met. Because that twenty-year-old had wanted to get out of Two Oaks more than she wanted to breathe, and Mariah couldn’t begrudge the choices she’d made even in retrospect.

But it hadn’t taken her ten years to know better. It hadn’t even taken a pair of maids in his bed. That was where her cowardice came in.

She had known within eighteen months that David wasn’t any kind of Prince Charming. She’d been fully aware he wasn’t much of a man well before the five-yearmark. She could have left. She could have figured out her life then, instead of waiting for it to get to this point.

But if you’d been that smart,a voice inside her whispered, more kindly than she felt about herself at the moment,you never would have met Griffin.

And he was worth it, she decided, somewhere over Missouri. One night with Griffin was worth ten years of David.

She’d had no idea that her body could do the things it had done spontaneously with Griffin. She’d had no idea that she couldfeelthose things, over and over again.

She’d had no idea.

And if she wasn’t on a red-eye flight headed straight toward what might very well be her own unpleasant end, she might have been more reserved. She might have lied to herself, built a few walls, tried to play it cool to modify her own expectations.

But the reality was, she’d fallen for that man, and hard.

From the very first moment he’d looked at her as if she’d offended him simply by walking off the ferry, she’d been fascinated by him. That fascination had only grown worse over her weeks in Alaska, and by the time she’d stormed down the hotel stairs to get in his face, well. She’d been done for.

Griffin had listened to her. She trusted him. He was kind beneath his gruffness, when the men she’d known these past ten years had been polite on the surface and vicious underneath. He had seen her drunk and scared, all of her Atlanta polish gone, and that hadn’t seemed to faze him. He had even let her goad him, repeatedly, without exploding into anything like a violent tantrum.

All that, and he had touched her anyway.

More than touched her, he’d turned her inside out with sheer joy.

He pretended to be so cold, but up in that bed, Griffin had showed her the truth about him. He’d trusted her, too.

No one else in her life ever had.

Mariah didn’t sleep as the plane took her closer and closer to the end of the line, because she didn’t want to miss a single second of what might be all that was left of her life.

Griffin will come,she told herself fiercely.He’ll come.

But if he didn’t...

She wished she had more time. She wished she’d spent what time she’d had better, too. She wished she hadn’t let all that distance grow between her and her family, so confident that sometime, somewhere, there’d be some far-off future when she could fix it.

She wished and she wished, but no matter how hard or how fervently, the plane still landed in Atlanta early the next morning.

No Alaska Force men waited for her as the plane emptied. No reassuring officials surrounded them as they walked through the airport.

It was all too tempting to give in to that knotted, panicked weight in her gut and give up in defeat.

Mariah didn’t let that happen. Griffin would find her.

She trusted him, even now.

The man shoved her into a car he’d left in a long-term parking lot and drove her out of the Atlanta airport. He headed away from the city instead of into it, driving south. He drove for about forty-five minutes, then took an exit toward one of Georgia’s many small towns madeof tidy brick buildings and lush greenery. He kept going through what passed for the town center, then pulled off the narrow two-lane country road onto a dirt track.

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