Page 75 of Sniper's Pride

Much less do it.

Hate her, sure. Shout terrible things in her face, why not. Their marriage had been ugly, so there was no reason to imagine their divorce would be anything but more of the same.

But deep down, she’d wanted to hold on to the memory of that misty fall evening in Two Oaks, when he’d shown up in that cherry red car, smiled at her as if she mattered, and told her he could change her life.

Maybe that was a strange souvenir from a terrible marriage, but she wanted to hold on to it all the same.

“Walton,” she said, and her voice was scratchy. “I can’t believe you’re the one responsible for all this.”

“I’ll tell you what, Miss Mariah,” he said with that broad smile that, she saw now, went nowhere near his hooded eyes. Had that always been true? Was she only now noticing it? “I never did care for the way you took to calling me by my Christian name. I know I offered, but any good girl of decent breeding never would have taken me up on it. It seems to me that’s part and parcel of the problem right there.” Another sad, sad shake ofthat lion’s head. “I don’t know that I blame you. It’s in your nature, after all. It’s what gold diggers do. You take advantage.”

Mariah revised that feeling of relief and focused on who was in the room instead of who wasn’t.

“Walton,” she said, lingering on his name because this time she could see that telltale coldness in his gaze. His smile was usually too wide and bright for it to show. “Did you put me in the hospital? Twice?”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.” Walton looked like he was out making Sunday social calls, shaking hands around white linen-draped tables at his clubs. Not standing in an old country barn, talking about... this. “But I don’t want my only son divorced from some backwoods trash. Bad enough he married you in the first place.”

“You were always so much more friendly to me than Mrs. Lanier,” Mariah said, astonished to discover that somewhere inside, that smarted. She was actually the faintest bit hurt. “You were always perfectly polite. You always smiled, asked after me.”

“A man either has manners or he doesn’t,” Walton said, as if she’d suggested he do something truly horrendous, like wear white after Labor Day. “I know I failed with David. I know he’s not the man I intended him to be. I know all about his dalliances, and if I could apologize for him, I would. I didn’t raise him to flaunt bad behavior.”

“But...” She swallowed, not sure how to ask the question. “If you’re apologizing for him, why am I here?”

Here in Georgia, against her will. Here in this barn, with these men all around. Here in this chair, waiting for a verdict they all knew had been passed already.

This was her sentence, not her trial.

“You shouldn’t have left him,” Walton said, tsking as if he were admonishing her.Correctingher. “The only thing you had going for you was your loyalty. All those years standing by his side, taking all that abuse when you couldn’t give him the baby he thinks he wants. I’ve always rewarded loyalty, Mariah. But then you left.”

“Rewarded...?”

Mariah hardly understood what he was saying. And not only because she was too aware of the other men behind him. The staring one muttered to the tweaker, and the tweaker slipped out through the barn door. Taking his giant gun with him.

She jerked her attention back to Walton.

“You were obedient. You were loyal. You stayed with him for ten years, almost to the point where folks were getting used to you and thinking on forgetting where he found you. You should have stayed. I’d just about decided that I could tolerate a piece of trash like you being the mother of my grandbabies, because Lord knew, you have more tenacity than my own flesh and blood.”

She couldn’t help the way her chin rose then. She’d been letting too much of her McKenna out lately, and there was no putting it back inside. Not now. Not ever again.

“No need to worry on that score.” And she let her drawl go deep country, just to remind them both who she was. Where she’d come from. “It turns out I can’t have children. A surprise, I know. Your son’s been pretty worked up about it for years.”

“I’ve had you on birth control since the day my son brought you home,” Walton said, that same merry smile on his face and a twinkle in his eyes, as if what he was saying wasn’t impossible. And heinous. “You were atramp straight out of a roadside diner, like a bad country song. I knew that left to your own devices, you’d have a litter of sticky brats to spend my family’s money, and I couldn’t have that. If you think on it a minute, you’ll see clear.”

Her heart was doing things that should have hurt more. Though it hurt enough as it was. “I didn’t... I wasn’t...”

“One thing I appreciate about you, Mariah, is how consistent you are. You wake up at the same time every morning. You eat the same thing for breakfast right after you get off the treadmill. Easiest thing in the world to slip a crushed-up pill into your morning oats. There’s not a maid in that house who doesn’t do my bidding.”

Mariah couldn’t take that in. All those years. All the terrible things David had said to her, and the way she’d privately agreed, hating her own body for betraying her. All the doctor’s appointments...

Her stomach lurched. Why had it never occurred to her that she was only ever sent to doctors David approved of—doctors who played golf with him and his father? Why had it never crossed her mind that, really, she ought to find her own?

“You let me think I was infertile for a decade,” she whispered.

Walton laughed that same booming, uproarious laugh she’d heard him use a thousand times over the years. She’d found it infectious. She still did, only now it struck her as more of an airborne toxic event.

“You should thank me,” he told her now. “Just think how losing a mother can break a child’s heart. If you’d had David’s babies, they’d have to mourn you, too. Are you really that selfish?”

Pull yourself together, baby girl,she told herself, that voice in her head sounding exactly like her own mother’s.

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