The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [62]
He looked at her silently.
“I’m staying here,” she stated. “Even if the Nogales police know who I am, Jim has no contacts in Arizona, right? And the FBI agents in Quantico who called Marion, they can be told to keep their mouths shut, right?”
“I’ll speak to Marion about it.”
“Fine, then it’s settled. You don’t understand, J.T. You think you do. You watch me try to swim and shoot at hay bales and you think I’m helpless. But there is one thing I’m good at. I know how to think like Jim Beckett.” Her lips twisted. Her eyes were shiny with a glaze of tears. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “I’m staying. If he does find me here, then I’ll deal with him. Or you’ll get to deal with him. You may not like it, you may not agree with me, but I was smart when I came here. If there’s any person fit to take on Jim Beckett, it’s an angry, arrogant asshole like you.”
Christ, she looked like something. She looked strong and she looked fierce. He wanted to yank her down onto his lap and kiss her until her fingertips gripped his shoulders and she roared his name with need. He wanted to feel her quiver as she came.
“We’re back on the shooting range tomorrow, Angela. You can put your money where your mouth is then, because, sugar, from here on out, I’m going to push you hard.”
“Good!”
“You might want to leave now, Angela, or I’m going to rip your clothes off and take you on the patio.”
“Oh.”
“You’re still not moving.”
“It’s just the beer,” she assured him hastily as she remained in place. He shifted forward and she finally jolted to life. She scurried across the patio, thrust open the sliding glass door, and ran into the house. He could already picture the lock on her bedroom door slamming shut.
He remained sitting in his garden, listening to the crickets, thinking about her story, and staring at the two unopened cans of Michelob.
FOURTEEN
THE SUN WAS straight up, no longer fierce but having gentled through the course of the week to a kindly benefactor. It caressed Tess’s cheeks and arms, trying to infuse her skin with a hint of color.
The rest of the desert, however, remained acrimonious. The saguaros looked grim and mocking, the sagebrush shuddered in the breeze. A gray roadrunner darted by. In the distance the bleached-out hills sat glumly, weighted down by rickety shanties and hundreds of lines of drying laundry.
The world was muted gold, dried-out brown, and sun-sapped green. Tess stood in the middle of it, wearing a worn white tank top with khaki shorts and feeling just as insipid and plain as her surroundings.
“Are you going to shoot ’em or sculpt ’em?” J.T. quizzed dryly. He’d stripped off his T-shirt to catch a little sun. Clad in ripped denim cutoffs and beat-up sandals, he looked more like a California surfer dude than a desperado. After two hours of watching Tess miss the targets, he also looked bored.
Marion had stopped by the first hour to lend her expertise. Like J.T., she insisted Tess needed to find the zone.
“Concentrate,” the agent had told her again and again. “Visualize your hand extending to the target, touching the bull’s-eye, and sending a bullet through the brain.”
In case that didn’t work, J.T. had been modifying her .22, decreasing the trigger pressure for a smoother pull, and trimming the grip so the gun would fit more comfortably in her hand. There were six fundamentals to shooting: position, grip, breath control, sight alignment, trigger squeeze, and follow-through. Tess was now trying to focus on all of them at once. She had a headache.
Tess adjusted her earplugs and rolled her shoulders. Her hands and forearms throbbed dully. It took a lot of strength to pull a trigger repeatedly. Marion had shown off her own forearms, roped with long lines of wiry sinew. To become an agent, a cadet had to be able to pull a handgun trigger twenty-nine times in thirty seconds. A lot of female cadets couldn’t do it, but lean,