When a Man Loves a Weapon Read Free Page A

herself.
    “Sonofabitch,” he muttered, knowing he had to answer.
    He was supposed to be on leave for another two weeks. The damned FBI had called him every single day. Sometimes, several times a day. She didn’t know what exactly he did, but he was assigned to freaking south Louisiana. How busy could they possibly be?
    He rolled off her and crossed the sparring ring to grab the phone, and she listened to his very brief, tense side of the conversation.
    “What?” he asked. Then, “No, it’s—”
    He stood, back rigid, muscles granite. Silent. There was a stillness to him that made her very very nervous, as if he were a predator about to spring, and she held her breath. “I’ll be there,” he said, then snapped his phone shut.
    He didn’t tell her what the call was about, and Bobbie Faye knew better than to ask, but it fucking killed her. Fucking FBI and fucking missions and fucking going away and he’d only be leaving right now if it was bad. And didn’t
that
response have all the maturity of a rabid teenager.
Gah.
    She stood in the empty living room of this tiny house he’d bought . . .
they’d
bought, she corrected herself, as he packed his overnight bag. He had a “go bag” in the bedroom for emergencies—extra clothes, phone, boots, and enough survival crap to make a Sherpa orgasmic, but this bag had more civilized stuff, like his shaving kit, nice jeans, and shirts. She didn’t even want to know what was in the hanging bag draped over the card table they used as a dining set.
    She wanted to hit something, but there was nothing to hit, kick, throw, slam, or smash. She glanced around at the emptiness: white walls, white trim, no furniture, not a single item, no rugs, just hardwood floors in desperate need of repair and refinishing. She toed one of the warped boards.
    “We’ll sand that when I get back,” he said, a little too chipper for anyone talking about a home improvement project.
    She threw him a skeptical glance. “Can you imagine me holding onto one of those big floor sanders? We’ll be lucky if I don’t take out a couple of walls with that thing.”
    “I plan on aiming you at the two we need to take out anyway.”
    “Very economical of you.”
    “Just wait ’til you see how we remove the tile in the kitchen.”
    He looked oddly happy at the thought. The man wasclearly a masochist. Of course, that explained an awful lot about their relationship.
    “You’re just trying to con me into thinking you need more power tools,” she said.
    “I’m adding it to the vows—love, honor, and router, ’til death do us part.”
    “You just made a hand tool sound dirty.”
    “Good to know,” he said, grinning.
    There was phenomenal woodwork for such a tiny house, and she focused on the Craftsman-styled shelves at the other end of the living room. They were empty, like the rest of the place. A couple of shelves had gone missing and someone had let their kid paste all sorts of stickers on the inside of the bottom cabinet. She had expected the big bad federal agent to scoff at the blasphemy of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles rubbed to a mottled gray pattern on “quality woodwork,” but he’d squatted in front of that cabinet and smiled as he traced Michaelangelo (he laughed when she knew the name) and said, “This stays, when we refinish. People were happy here. They were a family here.”
    She still, a month later, couldn’t figure out how in the hell he’d found this property, especially at a price they could afford. He couldn’t have created a more private home if he’d carved the place out of the swamp himself. He’d found it after she’d gotten out of the hospital—he hated the vulnerability of her trailer. Too many prying neighbors, too easy to rip the door open, too hard to protect. Hard to be a federal agent with just anyone able to tiptoe up to the trailer, unobserved, and overhear everything through the too-thin walls. She’d sold the trailer and most of her stuff to afford