The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [51]
His hair slipped free from its band and flew around his face. She could feel his hot breath on her cheek, the strength of his body bending over hers.
She said, “Liar.”
He stiffened as if struck. “What?” It was daylight and the sky stretched out blue and unchecked as only a desert sky could spread. But he squeezed her view down to just his presence, just his black, glowering, threatening presence.
She brought her chin up. She couldn’t shoot a gun so she might as well talk smart. “You can say what you want, but I know more about you than you think. You’re not as cold as you pretend. You care about your sister very much. You obviously loved your wife and son.”
“Oh, those are great credentials. My sister hates me and my wife and son are dead. I’m going back to the house.”
“Wait.” Her hands reached for him. He slapped them down.
“I thought you didn’t trust anyone, Angela? I thought you said you were going to take care of yourself!”
The words stung. “I’m not as good as I thought.”
“Learn to be better.” He yanked open the gun case, stuffed the gun and spent shells back in, and walked away.
ELEVEN
TOUGH DAY AT work, darling?” Marion called out with mocking sweetness as J.T. stalked back into the pool area. “Women are the root of all evil,” he growled, then stormed into the house, tossed the gun case into his safe, and locked it up tight. That detail attended to, he walked back across the living room, unbuttoning the fly of his jeans as he went.
He thrust open the sliding glass door just in time to encounter Angela about to do the same. They both froze. He scowled first. “Rosalita will dye your hair. Three o’clock. Go eat lunch.”
“Coward,” she said, and shouldered her way past him. He stood stock-still for a moment longer, flexing and unflexing his fingers.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Marion asked innocently, and took a long sip of an icy cold beer. One of his beers. One of his favorite beers.
“Shit.” He ripped his T-shirt off over his head in a single yank. Two quick jerks, and he kicked his jeans across the patio. Clad only in boxers, he made a beeline for the pool. He clambered up to the low diving platform and assumed a runner’s stance.
“Cannonball?”
“Watch and learn, little sister.” He bolted down the slim board, energy harnessed, focused, then unleashed with the force of lightning. Bam, bam, bam, leap . . . and soar through the air like an eagle. Free, suspended, graceful. Fuck them all.
He dove clean and arrow-straight into his deep blue pool, firing all the way to the bottom.
And the crowd goes wild.
J.T. didn’t come up right away. He drifted along the beautiful blue tiles, suspended like a stingray as his lungs began to burn. He rolled over on his back, fighting to remain down, reveling in the feel of oxygen-starved tissue.
Semper fidelis, baby. Once a marine always a marine.
God, sometimes he missed those days, treading freezing cold water next to his buddy as part of the hydrograph survey team. They’d do a neat over-the-horizon insert, navigate to the beach, and hide the craft. Then, while two guys directed, they’d extend the chem-light rope out three hundred meters into the ocean, a pair of marines treading water every twenty-five meters in order to analyze the gradient and consistency of the ocean floor, information that would be used for a major beach campaign. It could take eight hours to get all the info. Eight hours of dark silence, treading water and feeling your legs go numb. Basic biological functions happened in the course of eight hours. New guys got embarrassed or ashamed. Old guys simply accepted the warmth of urine suddenly passing through cold water as a kind of camaraderie, a kind of sharing that made your teammates closer to you than your wife or mother or sister. You couldn’t explain that to women. They just didn’t get it.
Being a marine made you part of something, linked you to something noble. He’d gone out there with guys, good guys who did good work and never offered