Page 76 of Sniper's Pride

Behind Walton, the staring man said something to her original abductor, then left through the barn door, too.

Griffin had told her to run, she reminded herself. That she would know when she should.

She tensed in her seat, told herself she could and would do this, and then focused her attention back on her father-in-law. Who looked the same as he always did.

It made this worse.

“I’m not following,” she said, trying to sound submissive and docile. The way he liked women to address him. “David and I were engaged for months. Why didn’t you stop the wedding if you were opposed to it?”

Another chuckle. “It never occurred to me he’d go through with it. He sure showed me.”

“I was his... rebellion?”

“Let’s be real clear, now that it’s just you and me.” Walton moved closer, and then, sickeningly, reached out to fit his palm against her cheek. He leaned in so close, she had no choice but to look at the red of his nose. Capillaries that spoke of the drinks he liked too much and the dissipation he took as his rightful due. “You’ve always been a mighty fine piece of ass, Miss Mariah. At first I was going to kill you off. Make it look like an accident, nice and simple, no muss and no fuss. But then you had to go and run. It would have been one thing if you planned to stay away for good, but who stays in Alaska? I knew you’d be back.”

Mariah was frozen straight through, but the worst part was that she could still feel her heart kicking hard and panicked. Her pulse was an impossible racket inside her. She wasn’t sure if her head ached more than her stomachlurched, but despite that, she stayed still. Entirely too focused on his meaty, damp hand against the side of her face.

“You caused me a lot of trouble, is the thing,” Walton said, and his hand moved down to stroke its way over the nape of her neck, making her shudder in revulsion. “I think I deserve a taste of that fine ass. It’d be a shame to waste it, don’t you think?”

It took three seconds. One of disbelief. One of sheer horror.

Then one more second ofhell no.

“Well, Walton,” she said, and she smiled as she said it, “since you asked, I would really rather die.”

And it was worth it for the blank look on his face. The shock that followed. It was worth watching his temper take hold, his mouth tightening, color flooding his face until he was even redder than he was before.

It was even worth it when he lifted that moist hand off her face, then hit her.

A sharp pain and a dull, deep ache exploded in her cheek at once. She tasted copper. Her head rocked back, and she might have tipped straight out of her chair if she hadn’t been holding on to it, pretending to be tied down.

When she turned her head back around to face him, there was blood in her mouth and her face felt swollen. She was pretty sure there were tears on her cheeks.

But she smiled anyway.

She’d thought a slap was supposed to sting, but then again, what Walton had done was wind up and clobber her. So maybe it wasn’t surprising that she felt less slapped and more as if he’d tried to cave in her cheekbone.

When her swollen cheek started to feel numb, she decided that was another gift.

“This could have been easy,” Walton told her, all red nose and nothing even remotely kind in those deep-set eyes. “All you had to do was be nice to me. I wouldn’t have hurt you much at all. But now look what you’ve gone and done.”

Mariah went with her gut instinct then, suicidal though it might have been, and laughed at him.

She laughed until he hit her again, harder this time, then she pulled herself woozily back around to stare at him. And laughed some more.

“I want to make sure you live with this one thought, Walton,” she said, and her voice sounded fuzzy. Or maybe it was that her tongue kept snagging on her teeth when he hit her, so it was puffy, too. “You might get a piece of this ass. But you’ll have to take it. And the only way you dared try this was by hiring your own personal army, kidnapping me from an island in Alaska, and tying me down to a chair. That’s the kind of man you are. For the rest of your life, when you look in a mirror, you’ll always know that this gold-digging, no-account, backwoods, trailer trash piece of ass wasthat muchbetter than you.”

Walton’s face was red again, fleshy and dangerous. But she smiled once more—and maybe this was what bravery was. Doing the thing, saying the thing, because it had to be done and it had to be said, and it didn’t matter at all that inside, she was curled up tight and hiding. What mattered was that Walton couldn’t see it.

What mattered was that she didn’t want to show him how scared she was, so she didn’t.

This time when he reached over, he put his hand around her throat and squeezed.

“You’re going to pay for that,” he said without anyparticular inflection, the way he used to ask her to pass the salt.

He’d hit her twice on the same side of her face. Her eye felt weird and swollen, as if maybe she had her first black eye. But she forced herself to hold that awful gaze of his, no matter what.

She didn’t want this man to touch her. But if he was dead set on taking his piece, at least that meant she would stay alive that much longer.

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