The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [50]
“Fine,” he said tersely. “Fine.”
He stepped behind her without foreplay. She was flattened against his body, her shoulders molded to his chest, her hips against his groin, her thighs against his thighs. His chin settled on her shoulder and his breath whispered across her neck.
“Point,” he ordered.
She brought the gun up.
“Aim.”
She sighted the target.
“I said aim, Angela! What are you trying to shoot? The dirt? The sky? A cactus? Two hay bales aren’t enough for you?”
“I am aiming!”
“Look down that barrel, woman. Picture your husband,” J.T. muttered in her ear. “Picture his face as that bull’s-eye, sugar. And give him hell for what he did to you.”
Her body stiffened. Her arms leveled and her eyes narrowed. Suddenly she felt very calm and very cold. She sighted the target, steadied her grip, and with a triumphant flood of adrenaline, yanked back the trigger.
The bullet sailed so far wide of the target, it was going to have to catch a train to get back to Arizona.
She stood there, shocked and appalled.
“Shit,” J.T. murmured, then shook his head and rolled his shoulder. He stepped back. “We’ll try again tomorrow, Angela. You have three and a half weeks.”
She looked at the target again, then at the gun in her hand. It had betrayed her. The gun was supposed to be her advantage. If she couldn’t shoot, how could she win? If she couldn’t outfight, outrun, or outshoot Jim, how was she going to win?
“But I hit him once before.”
“You shot your husband?”
“I hit him. In the shoulder. It was solid.” She shook her head in a daze. “He was moving at the time. Maybe he ran into the bullet.”
“You shot your husband?” J.T.’s brows knit into a single dark line.
“What else was I supposed to do? Let him beat me to death with a baseball bat?”
“What?”
She wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She threw the gun to the ground.
J.T. snapped his hand around her wrist. “Don’t do that. A gun isn’t a toy. If it had been loaded, you could have shot us both.”
“Well, then at least I would’ve finally hit something!”
“Don’t take it out on the gun and don’t take it out on me, Angela. It takes time to learn these things. Did you think the money would buy you a sharpshooter’s badge?”
“You don’t get it,” she cried. Her gaze went to his fingers, tight and strong around her thin wrist. Those fingers could snap her bone the way Jim’s fingers had wrung her neck. “You don’t know, you don’t understand the things he did.”
Her voice cracked. “I lied to you, J.T. I lied.”
He went rigid. “I don’t like lia—”
“I thought if you taught me it would be enough. But let’s face it, three and half weeks won’t be enough. You have to help me,” she whispered. “You have to—”
“Don’t tell me what I have to do.”
He released her wrist. One quick movement and he’d brushed her off as if she were nothing but a clinging cholla glochid.
“You don’t under—”
“Shut up!”
She realized then that she’d been wrong. She’d thought him unaffected, but he was overaffected. His face contorted, his fists clenched at his sides. There was anger and there was rage, and then there was an emotion too potent to describe. Something had been poured into him at creation and he was consumed by it from the inside out.
He took two steps forward and she shrank back.
“What is it with women? Can you tell me that, Angela? You come here, you barge into my life, and what the hell, I let you stay. I tell you who I am, I tell you what I can give. And maybe I’m hard and maybe I’m crude. Maybe I want a beer so badly I’m waking up in a sweat in the middle of the night. But I haven’t touched one, sugar. I told you what I could give, you told me what you wanted, and we struck a deal. And now you want to change the rules?
“Now you suddenly want more and I’m the bastard for not giving more? Lady, I’ve been down the hero path, and let me tell you, the laurels don’t fit. I know they don’t fit. I don’t try to get them to fit. I