Page 8 of Sniper's Pride

He jerked his head in a silent order for her to followhim as he turned. He didn’t share his thoughts because he figured his nonverbal communication was doing the job for him. And he didn’t offer to take her bag, even though he knew it would horrify his own mother, because he believed in packing only what was necessary and what he could carry himself. Lessons a princess should learn. He set off into what passed for the streets of Grizzly Harbor at a brisk pace, down a winding dirt path, then up onto one of the planked boardwalks over the rocks, and didn’t look over his shoulder to see if Princess Mariah was following him.

She was—he didn’t have to look to know.

And she kept up with surprisingly little effort. He could admit that annoyed him. He’d expected her to huff and puff and complain with every step, especially since Grizzly Harbor was built on a steep hill between the unforgiving ocean and the encroaching forest.

But when he stopped in front of Blue Bear Inn, a building in the central cluster of the village painted a vivid blue that would give any actual bears a headache, she was right there with him. Looking none the worse for wear.

“I’ll show you to your room,” he said, and he didn’t like the way the hike up from the docks—or maybe just the sea air sweeping in from the sound—made her cheeks look rosy. Or that her eyes seemed about as blue as the freaking inn’s lunatic paint job. “How long do you think it will take you to get ready?”

“That depends on what I’m getting ready for, sugar.”

How did she make that sound so suggestive? He would have stood straighter if it was physically possible. It wasn’t.

“Exactly what do you think is going on here?” Griffin asked.

It wasn’t a friendly tone. Grown men had been known to recoil when Griffin hit them with all that controlled fury.

But the princess in front of him did nothing of the kind. She peered at him, her gaze sparkling. He noticed a darker navy ring around her disconcerting blue irises. Her lips curved in a new form of that chilly smile he could really only call pitying. And the way she stood there, her bag looped over one languid arm, that cape of hers tossed effortlessly over her shoulders, struck him as impossibly, dangerously regal.

Griffin didn’t enjoy being struck by anything.

“I have no idea what’s going on here,” she said, almost merrily. As if it were all part of an amusing adventure they were on together. Then she made it worse and leaned in. “This might come as a surprise to you, but I haven’t spent a whole lot of my time hunting down mysterious superheroes to help me keep my husband from murdering me. If there’s a protocol involved, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.”

“The protocol is simple. Follow orders. Stay alive.”

“That sounds a lot more like the army than I was prepared for, I’ll admit.”

If she had been someone else, Griffin might have made a crack about the paid vacation the army called basic training, as opposed to his own stint in boot camp as a Marine recruit in San Diego. But he only stared at her until the flush high on those cheekbones of hers was less about the sea air and more about him. He told himself the reasons he liked that had nothing to do with anyheat kicking around inside him. He was all ice, no fire. Always.

“If you’re going to give me orders, you’re going to have to use your words. Not that glare.” Her voice was so silky it took him a minute to understand what she’d said. “As remarkable as it is.”

Griffin felt his jaw tense again and couldn’t understand what was happening. He was not the kind of man who let a woman get under his skin. He wasn’t the kind of man who let anything get under his skin. He was unflappable all the way through. He had made an entire career out of it.

The fact that some fancy Southern princess could saunter off a ferry and get to him at all was embarrassing. And unacceptable.

“Alaska Force keeps a few rooms on hand for clients,” he said, his voice free of inflection, as it should have been from the start. He was going to have to do a serious personal inventory to determine how and why he’d veered off course. “I’ll show you to yours. If you need to change, shower, whatever, now is the time to do it. Then we’ll discuss your situation in more detail. Any questions?”

“No questions.” He didn’t like the way her head angled as she said that, because there was too much defiance in it, but he let it go. Even when her smile tipped over into a smirk. “Sir.”

He didn’t tell her not to call him that. Because it shouldn’t matter what she called him. It didn’t.Sugar. Sir.Whatever.

Griffin didn’t have to like his job. All he needed to do was complete it.

He pushed through the heavy front door of the inn,putting his shoulder behind the movement with maybe more aggression than was necessary. He nodded at Madeleine Yazzie, who was sitting in her usual spot behind the desk with a fat paperback and her dyed red hair up in her signature beehive, and headed straight for the stairs. He didn’t look around because he didn’t have to. He knew what the lobby looked like, with its mix of country charm, hunting trophies, and self-conscious attempts to look like some kind of cozy mountain lodge. It failed on almost all counts and yet was so entirely itself that it circled back around to pleasant. Griffin had stayed here himself when he’d first found his way to Grizzly Harbor in search of the legend of Alaska Force and the man who ran it. He almost smiled, thinking back on how different he’d been then, fresh out of the Marines and no good at interacting with civilians.

He’d tried. He’d gone home to Arizona to be the son his parents wanted, the brother and the fiancé he’d been when he’d left. He’d tried to pick up his life where he’d left it before his three tours. And he quickly discovered that a man who’d made himself a machine had no business spending time with humans.

Much less a beautiful, blond princess like his ex-fiancée, who’d acted like a stiff wind might break her and cried so prettily it made him feel like a monster before he’d become one. While all along she’d been lying to his face about wanting to marry him—but that was one of those compartments he didn’t open.

He heard Mariah laugh behind him, a breathy little sound that did nothing for his mood. Nothing good, anyway.

“Is that a real bear?” she asked as she climbed the stairs behind him. “Standing right next to the fireplace?”

“It was. Once.”

“It’s not that I haven’t seen my share of taxidermy,” she said in a conversational tone that told him two things. First, that she had absolutely no sense of the danger she was in here in Alaska, or here with him, or at all. And second, though she looked unruffled and languid, like she spent her days stretched out on a chaise somewhere, she was a whole lot hardier than she looked if she could take the steep stairs while carrying a load and not pant at the exertion less than a week since she’d been in the hospital. “I am from the South, after all. But my Uncle Teddy’s collection of raccoons and possums did not prepare me for... what was that exactly? A ten-foot beast of a grizzly bear?”

Griffin got to the top of the stairs, then turned to look at her. “Better a stuffed bear in the lobby than a real one outside. This is Alaska. It is not an amusement park. If you see a wild animal, you better believe you’re its prey.”

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