Page 99 of Sniper's Pride

Over and over again.

At first Griffin had been afraid that losing his distance and objectivity and all those walls would ruin his ability to do his job. He was sure he would be unable to do what he needed to do and find himself sidelined without having to challenge Isaac to fire him.

But instead, life with Mariah made him realize that he could pick and choose the kind of compartments he needed. That it wasn’t all or nothing. That he could pour himself into his work and pour himself into her, in turn.

He’d had no idea, in all those years that he’d prided himself on being so sharp and cold and removed from petty concerns, that he’d been living only half a life. Closed down, cut off.

He’d been nothing but black and white, and Mariah was color.

Bright. Haunting.

And stunningly beautiful, all the time.

He studied her, dressed like a princess, through the glass. His princess. Her blond hair was smooth, her clothes were sleek, and she was every inch the Atlanta society queen she’d been in her previous life.

The one she’d shrugged off when she’d come to Alaska.

David Lanier and his father might attempt to paint Mariah as grasping, gold-digging trash who’d plotted out her own abduction, but the jury was more likely to see Grace Kelly.

Who also happened to be a financial whiz in her spare time—more interested in gold digging from financial markets than from her ex-husband.

Griffin was the lucky man who got all those sides of her, all the time.

All his.

“Okay?” he asked her when she finally left the deposition and came to him.

The way she would always come to him, he thought with a rush of possessiveness he’d learned to revel in. Especially when she was just as possessive in turn.

“Of course,” she replied, smiling up at him.

Her real smile. Not the one she used as a weapon, especially here.

He took her hand and walked with her to the elevator,then outside into a beautiful winter’s day in Atlanta that did a fabulous impression of a perfect high-summer day in Alaska. Only brighter. Softer. And faintly perfumed with flowers, even in the middle of the concrete of downtown.

They stood there on Peachtree Street, the Atlanta skyscrapers looming around them like urban mountains, and for no reason at all, found themselves grinning at each other.

“I love you,” Griffin said.

As if there had ever been any doubt.

He said it, and didn’t understand why it had been so hard to say. He’d been so sure that he was too broken to mean it the way she needed to hear it. He didn’t think he could ever love her or trust her the way she did him, but he wanted to. God, how he wanted to.

It had been such a hard thing for all these months, and yet in the end, it was easy.

The easiest thing he’d ever said in his life.

He said it a few more times, to make sure.

Right here in this city where they’d come to put demons to rest, one by one.

Her blue eyes gleamed, bright with tears he was sure were the happy kind. “It’s because I’m all dressed up like the kind of society princess you pretend to hate, isn’t it?”

“It’s because you’re you.” He took both her hands in his and didn’t care if the whole city ground to a halt around them. “It’s because if I asked you to marry me now, you’d say no. This time. Because I think you’re going to take a long while to come back around on that, and I’m willing to wait. It’s because I know you love me something crazy. I can see it every time you look at me. It’s because I’ve given you a thousand reasons to leaveme, and no doubt will again, but you’re not going anywhere.”

She didn’t like his cabin—or the mile-long hike to get to it, especially in bad weather—though she’d tried her best. Mariah, though not the princess he’d originally imagined her, wasn’t exactly an outdoor woman, either. He planned to surprise her when they got back to Grizzly Harbor with the little house he’d bought for them in town, where she could keep up that routine she loved so much, and he could commute by boat to Fool’s Cove. He’d even made sure they could finally have their own little library.

It amazed him how much he loved to make her happy.

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