Page 97 of Sniper's Pride

Griffin shook his head once. Then again. He took a step toward her, and it wasn’t the way he usually moved. It wasn’t smooth like silk. It was jerky, as if he didn’t know how to operate his own body. And then he lifted his hands in the air as if he was...

But no. That was impossible.

Griffin Cisneros did notsurrenderto anything or anyone. And certainly not to her.

“Tell me what that is, Mariah,” he threw at her, his voice as unsteady as the rest of him. “Tell me what you deserve. I don’t know how to do any of this. I don’t know how to give anyone anything. I think you deserve a man who can give you everything you want. Need. Dream about. And I don’t—” He stopped himself, then pulled in a harsh breath, his gaze even darker than usual. “I don’t know if that man is me. I don’t know if I’m built that way.”

“Griffin.” And this time Mariah stepped toward him, aching when he stiffened as if a single touch from her might break him. Because that was the last thing shewanted. “I don’t need you to be anything that you’re not. I love you, not some made-up version of who I think you could be, maybe, someday. That’s exactly what I don’t want. I’ve already lived that way once already, and you had a front row seat to how that ended.”

“The only other person who ever loved me came to hate me, in the end,” Griffin told her, as if he were delivering his own indictment. “Because I could never love her the way she needed.”

“The difference is that you already love me the way I need,” Mariah said quietly. Softly. “You just don’t want to.”

He broke then. She watched it happen. This big strong man made of so much steel and lethal intent, wracked from the inside out because of what she’d said.

Because you told him the truth,a voice inside her countered.

“You’ve destroyed me,” he told her, anguished and furious. Wide open and clearly not happy about it. “I can function in any war zone I’m dropped in, and always have. Nothing affects me. Nothing gets through. Except you.”

“It’s okay to love me back, Griffin,” she said softly, letting her treacherous heart take over. Because she had the distinct impression that was what he’d done, right here in front of her. “I promise you, it won’t really ruin you. It only feels that way at first.”

He was breathing hard, as if he were running—or as if he was someone else running, someone in far less stellar physical condition than he was.

“You deserve the world, but all I have to give you is a man who spent the better part of his adult life trying to strip himself down to parts,” Griffin thundered at her, asif he wanted to use himself as a weapon. “Half the time I think I’m not trying to be a machine, I’m trying to be a man. And I fail miserably at it.”

Mariah sighed, blinking back the tears threatening to spill over. She leaned closer, then slid her hands over his chest, soaking in his heat. His strength.

And the heartbeat that told her exactly how human he was.

“It’s the trying that matters,” she told him, tipping her face up to his.

“That’s nothing but a pathetic excuse.” He belted the words out as if he were hitting something. Himself, maybe. “That’s what people tell themselves, but it’s a lie. It’s failure dressed up in pretty words.”

She didn’t think there was any arguing with that bleak look on his face, so she didn’t try. Mariah slid one palm over his heart and held it there, the way she had once before.

He remembered it, too. She felt the way he tensed—and better still, the way his heart kicked at her.

“Your heart is safe with me, Griffin,” she whispered. “I promise.”

He frowned at her like her words didn’t make any sense, his beautiful dark eyes still so troubled. But less bleak, maybe, when he reached out and slowly took a chunk of her hair in his hand, testing the curl around his fingers.

“If I could keep you safe, you never would have been taken. You never would have ended up in the trunk of a car. You never would have gotten beaten up in a barn in Georgia.” He didn’t look bleak then. He looked tortured. “And then had to run for your life with that animal on your heels.”

Mariah only laughed, arching into him, knowing as she did it that he would catch her.

And he did.

He always did.

“You silly man,” she told him, reveling in the way his hands wrapped around her upper arms like he’d been made to hold her. “I wasn’t running for my life. I was running to you.”

She watched the storm move across his face, and moved even closer.

“They’re not the same thing. One is fear, and the other is hope.”

“I can’t be anyone’s hope,” Griffin threw out.

Mariah shrugged, liking the way he gripped her harder when she did. “Too late, sugar.”

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