Page 62 of Sniper's Pride

Though he didn’t really want to consider what might cause the sorts of noises bad men would want to conceal from the neighbors.

He refused to let himself think about it.

Their next stop was Mariah’s ex-husband’s monstrosity of a house. It was set back from the winding road and hidden behind pretentious gates that were clearly there for show, not real security. Blue and Jonas melted around the edge of the property to access the back. Griffin and Isaac went in the front.

It was always amazing to Griffin what regular people could sleep through.

Fifteen minutes later they knew more about David Lanier than anyone needed or wanted, thanks to both of the women he had sleeping in his bed with him. And the resentful, mutinous staff in the kitchen, who had no qualms about ripping their boss apart in Spanish while they thought they were alone.

But Mariah certainly wasn’t one of those women crashed out in her ex’s bed. Nor was she rolling her eyes as she talked smack about him over coffee with the gardener. They couldn’t find her anywhere in the house.

And the fact that her ex was snoozing away his Saturday morning with last night’s conquests didn’t mean hewasn’tbehind Mariah’s abduction. But it didn’t feel right.

“We could check his friends and favorite haunts,” Isaac said tersely when they were back in the SUV. “Maybe he stashed her somewhere, like one of those remarkably shiny golf trophies.”

“He belongs to a lot of country clubs,” Griffin replied, forcing his jaw to work despite the way he was clenching it. “But however much they might like a full roster of nothing but white-collar criminals, I think they might frown on being used as part of an abduction.”

“Will it look like an abduction?” Jonas shrugged when Griffin glared at him. “You heard what Ernie said. He took them for a married couple. She’s a chameleon.”

Jonas and Isaac exchanged looks. Griffin figured they were bonding over the kind of blending in to enemy territory they’d both done over the years. The kind of blending Griffin had always done was different. He knew how to be mistaken for rock, not... an Atlanta society princess on a seaplane jaunt to Anchorage.

His jaw ached.

“What about her hometown?” Isaac asked when he and Jonas were done silently congratulating themselves on their Delta Force days. Assuming that was what Jonas had done in the service. “I feel like a guy who camps out for weeks in Grizzly Harbor and takes advantage of the one time she had a watch change in the middle of the night might like the symmetry of it. If this is connected to her marrying that dumbass, the hometown might make sense.”

It took Griffin a minute to realize they were all staring at him, waiting for him to sign off on this. And much as he might want to tell himself it was because he’d doneMariah’s intake and had assumed command of her case, he was pretty sure that wasn’t the reason.

But that was one more thing he wasn’t talking about.

“Why not?” he gritted out. “Nothing about this makes sense.”

It was supposed to be a solid three-hour drive from the ex-husband’s house deep in to rural Georgia, where Mariah had grown up. The way Isaac drove, Griffin figured they’d make it in more like two.

It gave him just enough time to deal with himself.

Or try to, anyway.

He kept trying to slow himself down and box himself back up. He’d spent his entire adult life packing himself away into separate internal compartments, and he liked it that way. He likedhimthat way. Over time, he’d developed a foolproof system of padlocks and heavy steel doors to keep things where they belonged.

There was no cross-contamination. There were no feelings that started in one compartment and poisoned the whole.

Machines ran on proper fuel and maintenance, not feelings.

But today he couldn’t seem to get a handle on himself no matter what he did. He was all temper and fury, running hot and much too intense, and he might have been worried about what was happening to him if he hadn’t been a whole lot more worried about Mariah.

Griffin had failed completely. It wasn’t only that he’d let sex get in the way like some punk. It was much worse than that. Mariah had become a distraction to him. He’d let that happen, day after day. And that was a piss-poor excuse for missing the fact that some jackhole had been trailing her the entire time she’d been in Grizzly Harbor.

They’d all missed him. As far as they could tell, he’d come in on the same ferry Mariah had taken and settled in to one of the rental cabins in the woods, claiming he was a writer on a creative retreat. No one had thought twice about him.

But thinking twice was Griffin’s responsibility.

Any inventory he took of his behavior since the day Mariah had showed up tallied up the same way. He’d missed everything. He’d been wrong about her, but that wasn’t likely to kill her. That was simply more evidence of what a bastard he’d been, pretty consistently, since he’d first laid eyes on her.

That he’d been wrong about the threat against her, on the other hand, might have already killed her.

It had been almost twenty-four solid hours. They’d tracked her to Anchorage and assumed she’d headed to Atlanta, but there were a whole lot of ways to get there, and not all of them direct. She could have been taken anywhere. She couldbeanywhere right now, in any condition.

He wasn’t sure he could breathe through it—and until today, he would have said he could breathe through anything.

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