The Perfect Husband (13 page)

“Wait a second.” J.T. took a quick step back, waving his hands in defense. “I'm just training you!”

“Exactly. That's the help I need. So tell me,
sensei
, what's next on the list?”

He looked at her for a moment, then at Marion. His sister was mutinous and disapproving. In fact, the only calm person on the patio was Angela.

“What's your name?” Marion prodded. “If you have nothing to hide, you won't mind giving me your name.”

“I have nothing to hide and I do mind giving you my name. It's none of your business. Besides, if I remember correctly, you told J.T. you were here as his sister, not an agent.”

“Ignore her, Angela, Marion can't help herself.”

“I'm trying to offer help.”

“Then thanks but no thanks. Now, if you'll excuse me, I can afford only a month of J.T.'s time and I have a lot to learn. Is it time to eat yet? I'll make the oat-meal. J.T. is too dangerous with a saucepan.”

She headed for the house without another word. Marion released her pent-up breath in a low hiss. “Jesus Christ, J.T., what have you gotten yourself into now?”

“I'm just training her on how to protect herself, Marion. How bad can it be?”

“With you, J.T., pretty bad. But that's okay, I'll keep my opinions to myself for now. Why don't you go and pour yourself another beer.”

“I can't.”

“You can't?”

He scowled. “I agreed to stop drinking for the month.”

She arched a brow. “Of course, J.T.”

“Dammit, I am
not
an alcoholic!”

“Of course, J.T.”

She smiled sweetly and walked away.

J.T. SQUEEZED ANGELA a glass of fresh orange juice; that gave Marion her first opportunity. A cold drink created condensation on a glass, ruining fingerprints. A hot drink suffered the same due to steam. A room-temperature drink was perfect. She joined them for the end of breakfast, behaved admirably by making polite conversation, and offered to do the dishes. She set Angela's glass and spoon to the side. Later, when J.T. took Angela outside for a walk, Marion got out her fingerprint kit and went to work. One full thumbprint and two partial indexes later, she called the lab.

“The Nogales police will be faxing you some prints this afternoon. I want you to run them for me immediately. Call me here as soon as you know. Talk only to me. Are we clear? No, no, I have to go through the police — I don't have a fax machine here. It's not a big deal. They're just backwater cops, they'll cooperate. We can trust them.”

NIGHTFALL. J.T. STOOD over the barbecue wearing a Red Hot Cajun Lover apron and grilling boneless breasts of chicken. Marion was tossing a salad and downing beers as if she were determined to pick up where her brother had left off.

Tess didn't cook anything. She didn't help with anything, and J.T. and Marion seemed fine with that. It had been seven years since she'd had someone cook for her. She found she wasn't very good at letting go. Her fingers twitched at her sides while the anxiety built in her belly. She was supposed to look perfect for dinner, hair done, makeup done, dressed to the nines. She was supposed to have Samantha fed ahead of time so she would play quietly in the bassinet, where Jim could admire his child without being bothered by her. The table had to be set a certain way, candles lit, flowers fresh, forks on the left, dessert spoon above, knife and spoon on the right. Their three-bedroom house should be spotless, the old hardwood floor smelling of lemon wax while the area rugs were freshly vacuumed and cleared of children's toys.

Jim had chosen their house because of the beautifully carved wood trim around the fireplace and windows. In other old homes, some generation always made the mistake of painting the trim white or cream or olive green. Fine old wood latexed out of existence. Not in their home. Jim had turned the original oak trim over to her like a precious gem. It had survived one hundred and twenty years. It gave their home the class and elegance befitting a decorated police officer. Nothing had better happen to the mantel or the banister or the doorjambs on her watch.

When Samantha was one year old, she'd gotten her hands on a spatula covered in spaghetti sauce. She'd waved it with glee, promptly splattering red dye no. 5 all over herself, the walls, and the oak windowsill. Two drops on the hundred-and-twenty-year-old wood and Theresa couldn't get them to come all the way out. She tried Formula 409, she tried mayonnaise. She set a plant there on a lace doily and hoped Jim would never figure out that she'd failed in her mission. Two weeks later he'd dragged her out of bed at two A.M. He took her down to the kitchen. He handed her sandpaper and stain. And he stood over her until seven A.M., supervising her sanding down and restaining the window frame, his arms crossed and his face grim. Samantha began to cry upstairs.

Jim made her continue to work while her arms ached, her eyelids dragged down, and her daughter sobbed her name in the little room above.

Tess curled her fingers into the lounge cushion to get them to stop shaking. Those days were gone. She could rest if she wanted. She could wear old shorts and a T-shirt to the dinner table. She could play games with her daughter in the living room without worrying about a Lego hiding under the sofa and getting her in trouble later. She could abstain from makeup. She could simply be herself.

If she could ever figure out who that person was.

She rolled onto her stomach and carefully stretched out her back. She hurt. J.T. had led her through a tough regimen of swimming and weight lifting. She figured she must have some muscle after all, because surely bone couldn't hurt that much.

J.T. had done most of it with her. He'd stretched. He'd done fifty push-ups and two hundred stomach crunches. Then he'd stood on his head with his back to the wall and lowered his straight legs until his toes touched the ground. Up and down. Up and down. Her stomach had hurt just watching.

“Take a couple of Advil before you go to bed,” J.T. advised from the grill. “You'll be grateful in the morning.”

“If I live that long,” she muttered. She rolled over onto her side. She was sore around her ribs. She hadn't realized muscle existed there.

“Food's ready. Eat up. We'll take a walk after dinner. It's important you don't get stiff.”

She said, “Aaaagh.”

“Remember, no whining.”

“For God's sake, J.T. Give the woman a glass of wine and ease up before you kill her.”

Tess looked at Marion with surprise, then gratitude. Marion had remained in the house most of the day. Tess could pinpoint her location by following the smell of chain-smoked cigarettes. Now the agent was dressed in fine linen slacks and a classic cream-colored silk blouse with billowing sleeves and graceful cuffs. With her hair pulled back in a French twist, delicate gold hoops winking at her ears, and more gold accenting her narrow leather belt, she belonged in an upper-class garden party. Her face, however, ruined the impression. Her delicate features were frozen into a hard look, her blue eyes perpetually narrowed into a stern, suspicious stare. When she walked, she had the fast, determined footsteps of a woman who would mow you down if you didn't get the hell out of her way.

If Marion MacAllister had met Jim Beckett, Tess was sure she would have fired her gun first and asked questions later.

They ate out on the patio. Marion served a salad with a light raspberry vinaigrette. J.T. barbecued chicken accompanied by dirty rice and beans. She needed protein, he told her, and dumped an extra spoonful of rice and beans on her plate.

She ate everything, discovering an appetite that was powerful and foreign to her. She started out with silverware and delicate movements. Then she gave up and followed J.T.'s example, greedily tearing the chicken into strips and popping them into her mouth with her fingers.

“Is Freddie coming back?” she asked between mouthfuls.

J.T. and Marion exchanged glances. “No,” J.T. said, his gaze never leaving Marion's.

Marion simply shrugged. She ate only the salad and half a chicken breast. After warring with herself for a full minute, Tess helped herself to the other half.

“Go easy,” J.T. commented.

“I know how to eat.”

He raised one brow but shut up. For all his words of caution, he ate two whole chicken breasts and three helping of rice and black beans. He chewed voraciously, chasing down his food with long gulps of iced tea.

And every now and then she saw his gaze slide to Marion's beer with barely tamped hunger.

“So what did we learn in fugitive training camp today?” Marion asked at last. Done with her meal, she sat back and lit up.

“Swimming and weights,” Tess volunteered.

“She has a ways to go,” J.T. supplied.

The conversation drifted. They listened in silence to the distant sound of crickets singing in the dusk and the occasional whir of hummingbirds among the cactus.

“Do you swim?” Tess asked Marion.

“A little.”

“She rides. Dressage.” J.T. pushed his plate away. His gaze rested on his sister. “At least she did when we were younger.”

“I stopped.”

“Hmm.”

“There was no point to it,” she said sharply. “No one rides horses in real life. It's not a usable or marketable skill. Really, it was a waste of time.”

“You think?” J.T. drawled neutrally.

His fingers rotated the empty glass in front of him, sliding up the condensation on the side, then twirling the base again. “I used to watch you ride. I thought you were pretty good.”

“You watched me ride?”

“Yeah. I did. Could never figure out how you managed it. Such a tiny thing commanding a twelve-hundred-pound beast around the ring. I used to think you belonged to the horse more than you belonged to us.”

“I never saw you at the arena.”

“I didn't want to interrupt.”

“Huh,” Marion said. There seemed to be a wealth of suspicion in that grunt.

J.T. turned to Tess. “What did you do?”

“Who, me?”

“I assume you had a childhood, unless that stork story's true after all.”

The question caught her off guard. She wasn't used to anyone asking about herself. “I did Girl Scouts,” she answered finally. “I didn't have hobbies or things like that. I worked after school. My parents owned a general store with a small deli. Cheese, fudge, gourmet foods. It was a lot of work.”

“Working-class parents?” Marion asked. “New England, right? You have a northern accent.” She was obviously taking mental notes.

“Down, girl,” J.T. said lightly. He offered Tess a crooked grin. “Forgive Marion. Unlike you, we never worked as children — our father did the smart thing and married money. Now Marion is hell bent on overcoming this stigma by turning into a workaholic. We can't take her anywhere anymore. She's liable to arrest the host for income tax evasion.”

“One of us had to have follow-through. You certainly don't.” Marion stubbed out her cigarette and reached for another. She said to Tess, “You want to know a little bit about your hero? Well, let me tell you.”

“Uh-oh,” J.T. said.

“J.T. at seventeen. He's into orienteering. Do you know what orienteering is?”

Tess shook her head. Tension swept over the table. J.T. hadn't moved, but his expression was tighter. Lines had appeared at the corners of his mouth. Marion leaned forward and plunged on.

“Orienteering is a sport from Scandinavia, developed during one of the world wars. Basically you're turned loose with a detailed topographic map of an area and thirteen controls—”

“Flags,” J.T. supplied.

“Flags to find. You have a compass, you have a map, and you have three hours to find however many flags you can find.

“It can be brutal. The courses are rated for difficulty and the truly advanced ones — the red and blue courses — aren't even forest trails, they're just flags left in the forest. You get to plow through the underbrush, hike up mountains, cross teeming rivers. People get lost. People get injured. You have to know what you're doing.”

“I knew what I was doing,” J.T. said. “I made it back.”

“Barely!” Marion returned her attention to Tess. “So here's J.T., seventeen years old and already arrogant. You think he's insufferable now? You should've known him then.”

“I was a saint.”

“Get over it. These competitions, class A meets, are a big deal. You compete by age group and prizes are given out. Our father always dominated the blue course, the hardest level. He always won first prize. Then we have J.T. He's still too young for the blue course. He's seventeen and the toughest course for him is the red, and he's good. Everyone thinks he'll win it and everyone's talking about how the father will take blue and the son will take red. The colonel's already choosing the spots on the mantel.”

Her jaw set, her gaze hardened. “Morning of the meet.
Morning of the meet
. Does J.T. register for his category in the red course? No. He registers for blue. A seventeen-year-old kid registering for blue.”

“I'd already done red,” J.T. said. “I wanted something new.”

“You would've won!”

“Trophy's nothing but cheap metal that gathers dust.”

“So what happened?” Tess demanded to know.

“Einstein here,” Marion supplied in a low growl, “goes running off in his orienteering suit. Three hours later he's nowhere to be found. Two hours after that they're arranging the search parties, when all of sudden from the underbrush comes this huge commotion. Thrashing and cursing and swearing. Mothers are running to cover ears of their children, and lo and behold, it's J.T. Half of his face scratched off, both of his hands mutilated, and his ankle in a twig brace. He'd fallen off the side of a hill.”

“It happens.”

“It wouldn't have if you'd stuck to red!”

“It did. And I made it back.” He turned to Tess with a wicked grin. “Walked two miles on a broken ankle. How's that for
cojones
?”

“More like stupidity,” Marion muttered.

“The colonel was impressed.” J.T.'s voice was deceptively innocent, but Marion flinched. “That was the kind of thing Daddy liked,” J.T. continued, his eyes fastened on Marion's face. “Enduring pain. Having balls. Walking on broken bones. Being an m-a-n.”