Page 87 of Sniper's Pride

And as the days passed, Mariah expected to find it difficult to ease back into life in Two Oaks, especially when she’d been running from it all these years.

But the reality was, home was simple. It was familiar. She sank back into life in the old farmhouse like she was sinking into butter.

She met all her nieces and nephews. She caught up with Britney, Justin, and her sister Whitney. They told stories and laughed into the night around the same old bonfire out back, and when they were good and caught up on all the nuclear family scandals and disappointments— like the “misunderstanding” that had landed her brother Michael in jail—they brought in the cousins.

And as the swelling in her face went down and she got less stiff and sore with each day, Mariah found herself... closer to content than she remembered ever being before. She slept in that same room off the kitchen that had been hers as a girl, and some days she almost forgot that she’d been away for so long. That those years in Atlanta had even happened. She could wake up in the warmmornings, walk outside in her bare feet, and feel the Georgia dirt between her toes the way she always had.

She could breathe deeply the way she never had in Atlanta, and the way she imagined she might again someday in Alaska.

She ate her great aunt’s sweet potato pie, had too many beers with her cousins, and let her drawl get thick and lazy and full-on redneck again.

The bruises on her face had gone down to little more than a few shadows by the time she’d been home for a week and a half.

Mariah walked outside after sunset on that Wednesday night, looking for lightning bugs as the sky deepened from dark blue into soft black and the stars came out. She walked away from the blazing lights of the farmhouse and the laugh track on Rose Ellen’s favorite show. She picked her way across the yard, toward the woods, until she found herself at the tree line.

She stood there a moment, breathing in the rich scent of home. Jasmine and honeysuckle perfuming the night air, the rich earth, the woods and the green and, when the wind changed, the neighbor’s cows.

And when she smiled, it ached a bit, but not from her injuries.

“I know you’re there,” she said softly. She heard an owl hoot. “I expect that means you want me to.”

For a moment there was nothing but quiet. Or what passed for quiet in the country night, on a pretty spring evening in these noisy woods.

And then, where there had been only shadow a moment before, there was Griffin.

“Are you going to follow me around forever? Just hide out in the shadows for the rest of your life?”

His dark eyes glittered. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay. That your ex doesn’t come back to finish that conversation.”

“He’s got his hands full telling lies to half of Atlanta,” Mariah said with a shrug. “And besides, he’s not going to come back to Two Oaks. The last time he was here, look what happened.”

“I dropped off your things.”

The longer they stood there, the more her eyes adjusted and the more she wanted to touch him. She wanted to reach over and get her hands on him, to remind herself that no matter what he looked like out here in the dark, with only the stars to light him, he wasn’t a machine. He wasn’treallymade of stone.

He was a man, flesh and blood. And so much heart, though she knew he would deny that most of all.

“Thank you.” She had come home from breakfast with a selection of her aunts that morning to find her single suitcase waiting for her at the farmhouse door. Everything she’d taken on her run from Atlanta and left in Alaska was packed up inside it.

She’d carried her suitcase into her room, shut the door behind her, and cried into her pillow until she’d given herself a headache.

But she wasn’t crying now.

“I’m headed back tomorrow,” he told her, gruff and low. “For good.”

And then they just stood there, staring at each other.

And Mariah’s bruises had all but faded by now. Or the physical pain had, anyway. That ache inside her had spilled over into tears, sure—but that was this morning.

She’d walked around the past few days with the napeof her neck prickling, fully aware that even though she couldn’t see him, he was there again.

Watching over her. Keeping her safe.

Hiding,a voice in her had whispered this morning, after she’d draped a cold washcloth over her red, cried-out eyes.

She wasn’t the same person who had found herself in a hospital bed after that charity event. She wasn’t the girl who’d made a thousand excuses, over and over, to deny truths that had always been right there in front of her eyes.

She wasn’t even the same as she’d been when she’d arrived in Grizzly Harbor.

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