Page 96

He didn’t tell her he loved her then, though it moved in him like the sea. That big. That relentless. He’d save it for later, when he planned to celebrate the fact that she’d agreed to marry him in a much more naked and carnal way.
All day, if he had his way.
Here, now, he helped himself to her coffee and sat out on the porch of his cabin in pretty Fool’s Cove, glad to be alive at last.
Alive. And so in love, it hurt him, too.
And then he settled in to watch Everly Campbell, the love of his life, ride around and around in circles on a perfect replica of that pink bike from way back when, her pink and white streamers flapping in the breeze.
Keep reading for an excerpt from the next book in the Alaska Force series
SNIPER’S PRIDE
Available in May2019
After the second time her husband tried to kill her, Mariah McKenna decided she needed to get out of Atlanta.
The first time could have been an accident. She had gone to yet another strained charity dinner that night, where everyone smiled sweetly, blessed her heart, and made it perfectly, politely clear they wouldn’t be taking her side in the divorce. And even though Mariah knew better than to touch shellfish, it was always possible that there could be cross-contamination. Especially in a hotel banquet situation with complicated hors d’oeuvres passed around on self-consciously gleaming silver trays by bored college students.
Mariah knew it was entirely possible that she’d tossed back what she’d thought was a clever little cheese puff pastry when it was really something involving shrimp. She’d been too busy pretending not to notice thespeculative, not particularly friendly looks thrown her way to taste a thing.
It could easily have been an unfortunate accident. Or her own fault for not paying attention.
But she thought it was David.
He had gone out of his way to get particularly nasty with her only the day before.
“You can’t divorce me,” he’d snarled at her, getting much too close to her in the sunny parking lot of the Publix in her new neighborhood. That had been her fault, too, for not paying closer attention to her surroundings. She should have seen David’s overly polished Escalade. She shouldn’t have imagined for a single second that he’d allow her to go about without permission, having a normal life like a regular person. “Youcan’t divorceme.”
That was why, when her throat had started to close up, the first thing she’d thought about was the way his face had twisted like that, out there in a parking lot in the Atlanta spring sunshine. When David got mad, his accent—what Mariah’s mother had always calledhigh Georgia—changed. Then there was the red face, the bulging eyes, that vein on his forehead, and the way he bared his teeth. None of that was pleasant, surely.
But for some reason the fact he sounded less Georgia old money and more clipped when he was mad was what got to her the most. Because she’d worked so hard to get the redneck out of her own, decidedly lowbrow Georgia accent and she never, ever let it slip. Never.
Still, accidents happened. That was what the doctors told Mariah when she could breathe again. It was certainly what the hotel hastened to tell her, in the form ofhalf their legal team crammed into her makeshift cubicle in the emergency room.
And despite the leftover hungover feeling that stuck with her every time she flashed back to that ugly parking lot confrontation, Mariah accepted the idea that it was an accident. She wasn’t living in a Gothic novel. Her divorce was ugly, but what divorce wasn’t? There was no need to make everything worse by imagining that David wasactuallytrying to kill her.
But the second time she found herself in the hospital, she stopped kidding herself.
It was while she lay there in another hospital room cordoned off from the rest of the emergency room by a curtain—staring up at the fluorescent lights while she waited for her EpiPen to finish letting her breathe and to see whether she’d have a biphasic second reaction—that she finally understood.
There was no safe space. Not for Mariah.
David shouldn’t have been able to get into her apartment, but he had. She was still trying to breathe, feeling like there was a hand wrapped tight around her throat, so she didn’t bother telling herself any stories this time. Somehow, David had gotten in or hired someone to do it for him. She figured the latter was more likely, because David was not a man who did a thing when he could hire someone to do it for him. She felt something greasy and sick roll over inside her, then, adding to the panic. It felt a lot like shame.
Or worse, fear.
Because David or some faceless minion had been in her pretty little furnished apartment with its pastel walls and view over Piedmont Park. They had touched hervery few personal things. Riffled through her clothes. Sat on the furniture she’d started thinking of as hers. And at some point, done something to her food to make sure she ended up right back in the emergency room with a far worse reaction than before.
They’d defiled the one place that had ever been hers, then she’d put their poison in her own body, and she hadn’t even known it.
Mariah wondered what it meant about her that she found the violation of it almost harder to take than her own near death. Again.
“You need to be very careful, Mrs. Lanier,” the doctor said, scowling at her as if she’d thoughtto hell with this potentially lethal allergyand had treated herself to a big old lobster dinner.
“I’m always careful,” she replied when she could speak. “And it’s Ms. McKenna, not Mrs. Lanier. My name change hasn’t gone through yet.”
“Two anaphylaxis episodes in one month isn’t being careful, ma’am.”