Page 98 of Sniper's Pride

He stared down at her as if she were a ghost. As if she were torment and disaster, and Mariah couldn’t say she minded it much. Not if he would keep on doing it. There were worse fates than being the thing that brought a tough man to his knees.

“I want you to stay,” he told her gruffly, as if it hurt. As if all of this hurt. “I don’t know if I can be the man you deserve, but I want to try. And I don’t usually fail.”

He bent down to pick her up, and then held her steady as she wrapped herself around him. Mariah gazed down into his face as he looked up at her, his strong arms around her as if that was all the wall either one of them would ever need.

“I want to make you smile,” Griffin told her, and she was overwhelmed by his heat against her. Her heart was flipping over and over, and his words sounded less like pain and more like vows. Just him and her and the trees all around them. “I want to feel that dirty laugh of yourspour over me like honey. I like you drunk and I like you sober and I like you here, Mariah. I like you wrapped all around me, day and night, and I never thought my life was empty until you left me in it all alone.” He shifted so she was flush against him. “Don’t go. Please.”

“I love you, too,” she murmured.

And then she kissed him, the two of them wrapped up in the light of a long Alaskan evening.

No shadows, no fear.

He held her, strong like stone but made of flesh and blood, and he kissed her with all the need and desperation she felt inside her, too.

He kissed her and he kissed her, this beautiful man who believed he was less than perfectly human.

Mariah knew better. And she wanted nothing more than to show him.

“Give me a year,” he told her, there against her mouth. “And I’ll give you everything I have.”

“I have a better idea,” she replied. “Just give me you. I’ll do the same in return. And we’ll see where we end up.”

He pulled back to look at her then, like he was drinking her in. Tattooing her deep into his skin.

“If you give me the chance,” he told her, this man who lived by his vows and would, she knew, die by them if necessary, “I’ll give you forever.”

And as she had so many other times—whether it was running across that field in Georgia or right here, right now, on the edge of the world in the beginning of this brand-new life they could forge together—Mariah believed him.

She trusted him. She loved him.

So she threw herself straight off into that forever he’d promised, knowing he would catch her.

Epilogue

SIX MONTHS LATER

Griffin waited for Mariah outside a lawyer’s office in Atlanta, watching her handle herself with her usual grace through the glass wall of the meeting room. He was fully prepared to haul her out of there if she looked the slightest bit upset.

They had left Grizzly Harbor the week before, sneaking out ahead of a nasty storm that would have kept them landlocked for a few days. Griffin wouldn’t have minded all that much. Before.

But now he was more concerned with keeping Mariah happy than he was with succumbing to his own impulses to hole up and act like a hermit.

That was how they’d ended up spending Thanksgiving with Griffin’s family in Arizona. Griffin had been humbled by how excited his family was that he had finally stepped outside the usual strict boundaries of hisrelationship with them. He’d allowed them not only the extra holiday, but more access to him—and it had made his mother cry.

Which had made him feel like a jackass.

“Happy tears are a good thing,” Mariah had assured him on a walk through the neighborhood that had once felt like a noose around his neck. And now was simply... pretty. “Happy tears mean you’re doing it right. I promise.”

The crazy thing was, he believed her.

Mariah changed him more and more every day, and he’d stopped fighting it. He’d surrendered to his feelings for her up on that hill overlooking Grizzly Harbor, which felt a whole lot like winning. That wasn’t to say he didn’t kick back into his old robot habits from time to time, but she handled conflict the way she handled everything else.

Usually by laughing at him until he got over himself.

He was slowly learning to do it right back.

And if it wasn’t solved in laughter, there were other ways. More deliberate ways that had more to do with flashes of temper, and far more satisfying ways to let those flames burn through the both of them.

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