Page 3 of What About Love

Chapter 1

THREE MONTHS LATER...

Movement and a blast of gunfire off to her left had Angie twisting and returning fire. She lined up a shot as one of the gunmen ran toward the alley across the street. She pulled the trigger again. Wide left, another miss—dammit! Ducking, she ran to the brick half-wall up ahead. Crouching low, she took a deep breath, preparing to fire over the top. Tires squealed as a car took the nearby corner on two wheels and came racing down the street toward her.

Her heart pounded in her ears as she waited for it to come closer and launch her counterattack.

Silently, she counted. Three... Two... On one, she popped up and fired again.

The tires, take out the tires,her trainer’s voice seemed to scream in her head.

Moving objects always kicked her ass. When she took aim, she prayed that of the four remaining rounds in her Glock, one of them would find rubber and take out the car.

A quartet of reverberating shots later, she reached for her second magazine. Before it left the built-in pouch on her belt, a buzzer blared and the overhead lights came on. Angie watched in frustration as the holographic images flickered and disappeared.

Shit! Not getting past the first rounds meant she’d failed again.

Licking her lips nervously, she peered up at the control room where she knew she’d find Dan Ogilvie, her instructor. She grimaced, seeing he wasn’t alone at the wide window. Side-by-side he stood with Cap Rossi, owner of Rossi Security, Inc., her new boss.

Crap on a freaking cracker! Both big men stood with their arms crossed, staring down at her. Not a good sign.

Dan shifted, and the intercom came on. “Stow your gear and come up for review, rookie.”

She wanted to scream with her frustration. This was the twelfth time she’d run this simulation, and each time she’d failed miserably. Stationary shooting—short and long range, AR15, M16, Ruger Mini-14, low light, no light—if her target was standing still, she could nail it dead to rights. If it was moving... Well, as Dan had so eloquently put it more than once, she couldn’t hit the broad side of a slow-moving Hummer with four flat tires, running on fumes, and driven by his eighty-nine-year-old cataract-riddled grandmother.

Dan Ogilvie, or Dano, as everyone called him, was usually unflappable. It was one of the reasons Cap had selected him as her trainer. That wasn’t the case with the simulator and Angie, both of which had him at his wits’ end and very...uh, well...flappable. He’d spent hours with her, trying first one technique, which failed then another, also unsuccessful. He’d consulted with Cap about it, but the boss didn’t seem worried, stating Lil T could fix her when he got back.

That’s when she’d learned that Lil T had been the first choice to train her. But he was out of town when she’d come on board, T having taken over almost all the bounty hunting cases, which the Rossi guys called skips or skip traces, from the newly married and honeymooning Dex Russell. Instead, Cap had assigned Dan to instruct her in the “Rossi way,” which suited Angie just fine.

T had a hand, quite literally, in keeping her from bleeding to death on the awful day she’d been stabbed, and she owed him her life. Before that, they’d had a weird sexual tension. Mostly it was because of her unusually intense reaction to the drop-dead gorgeous Italian man. From the moment she laid eyes on him, her girl parts had awakened and demanded attention. The fact he’d propositioned her at the club, thinking her a submissive of all things, and finding her attractive enough to offer to play with for the evening, making clear it was a one-off, nothing more, hadn’t diminished those feelings.

On the other hand, T ran hot and cold. One moment, sexy and charming, the next, scrutinizing her as if she were a bug under a microscope. And he’d been at the hospital. Though the memory was foggy, she knew for certain it had been him. Mara had confirmed it for her, as had several of the smitten-at-first-sight nurses. She didn’t have witnesses to his soft kiss on her forehead and the tender brush of his fingers on her cheek tenderly, but Angie knew it was real and not a morphine-induced dream. His whispered words were in and out, like she had been, but she was certain he had told her goodbye and called herbaby.

She hadn’t seen him since; work, taking him out of town. He hadn’t called to check on her, either, which seemed odd after, according to Meg, Regan, and Mara, he’d spent two straight days by her bedside. It was possible she was imagining it. They had no connection other than work and him saving her life—a trivial matter to him, perhaps, although freaking important to her—but his sudden trip to LA seemed manufactured, like he was avoiding her.

Since she had a mild case of hero worship for a man who had essentially ghosted her, being assigned to Dan was a good thing.

Looking up at him now, his face grim with disappointment, she heaved a sigh and slowly climbed the stairs to face the music.

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