Tested by Fire. Kathryn Springer
come out as a department about every six months. Dad says I should practice more than that. Most officers never fire their weapons, but you need to be accurate if you ever have to.”
The range was an open field with oak trees bordering the perimeter like silent sentinels. No one was there, and Finn was glad. Now that she had bullied John Gabriel into this, she was having doubts.
“Okay, Annie Oakley.” His voice was so near it startled her. “You first.”
He set up the targets while Finn pushed the clip into her handgun and put on ear protection to muffle the sound.
John watched as Finn stepped up to the line. Everything about her stance and posture was correct. Correct but wooden. For someone who came to the range two or three times a week, she seemed almost uncomfortable with a gun in her hand. The first few shots were close to the center. Then, something happened. Her concentration dissolved. The next few shots were way off. When she finished, her hand fell to her side and her head dipped slightly.
“Hey, where did you go?” he asked sharply, watching as Finn’s head snapped up again and she smiled sheepishly.
“Daydreaming, I guess.”
“Daydreaming?” He repeated the word in disbelief. “If that target decided to shoot back, I’d be picking you up off the grass.”
“Your turn.” Finn stepped back and looked away from him. She couldn’t explain what had just happened, other than the fact that Jerome Lessing’s face had suddenly loomed in her thoughts. He was free and it was her fault. Or was it?
Gunfire brought her back to reality, and she watched as John pounded six bullets directly into the center of the target.
John glanced at her, expecting to see amazement or disbelief or any of the other expressions that people had when a one-armed man actually achieved something. Instead, she was looking at him proudly. Knowingly. The admiration on her face shook him to the core, momentarily shattering the wall he had so painstakingly built over the years. Then he knew. When she had invited him to come to the range—when she had casually tossed her car keys to him—she was telling him she saw a man. Not a one-armed man. Not a man with a scar that disfigured part of his face, and had, as some people assumed, seared his brain in the process. But a man.
No one had given him a gift like that in years. No one except his colleagues at the Madison Agency, who had stopped treating him with kid gloves just a few months after he started working there. It hadn’t taken Finn that long. They had known each other less than twenty-four hours.
He wondered why he found the discovery so unsettling.
“Do you mind living so close to your grandparents?” John asked later as they headed back to the city limits. Now she was behind the wheel, which gave John a chance to study her. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but there was some emotion still lingering in her eyes that he’d noticed when they’d been at the range.
“No.” Finn shook her head. “When I got hired here, they wanted me to live with them, but I talked Gran into letting me fix up the stone house. I lived with my folks the whole time I went to college and I wanted a little space. They understood, and I don’t mind living in their backyard. Especially now that Chief is having some health problems.”
“I was surprised to see they had such a huge house to take care of.” John remembered his first glimpse of the sprawling two-story brick home as the taxi delivered him the night he arrived.
“When Chief retired, he and Gran handpicked Miranda Station. They were tired of city living and wanted a place that everyone could come home to. It’s still close enough to Chicago for impromptu family get-togethers. That’s why he had the pool put in, too, for all my relatives to enjoy when they come for a visit. I don’t think Chief has ever put his big toe in the water.”
The stately brick home they were discussing came into view and Finn eased the car into the garage. There was a vacant spot where the other car had been parked earlier.
“Looks like they went out,” Finn said.
“Your powers of observation are amazing, Officer Kelly,” John murmured.
She looked at him in mock surprise. “A sense of humor, Agent Gabriel? Be careful, I may think you are human.”
A strange expression suddenly came over his face, igniting some unidentified emotion in his eyes.
“Oh, I’m human, Finn,” he said quietly.
Finn tried to smile but found she couldn’t. A shiver of awareness rippled through her. She could hear Colin barking in the background, but everything else around her had gotten fuzzy. What’s happening here, Lord? Is John someone You’ve brought into my life for a reason…or am I supposed to run as fast as I can in the other direction?
“I think this is the night Chief and Gran play Scrabble with the Silvermans. I was thinking about grilling some burgers.” She offered the invitation as quickly as it popped into her mind. “Are you hungry?”
John hesitated. He reminded himself that he didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to get involved with Finn Kelly on any level, but he had made a promise to Seamus.
“Never mind.” She quickly picked up on his reluctance. “I just thought…”
The evening sun filtered through the trees and caught the fire in her hair as she pushed it away from her face in the unconscious gesture he was becoming familiar with. Remembering her lack of concentration at the range, he decided to push a little deeper to see if he could discover what was bothering her. Most likely she had been thinking about a boyfriend. Still, the way she seemed to disappear for a few minutes there worried him. A cop couldn’t afford to do that on duty. The stakes were too high.
“Sure. A burger sounds great.”
Her easy smile surfaced again, with no sign that she was aware of the tension that had just crackled around them minutes before. He didn’t even want to go there. The connection he felt with her was undeniable and unexpected. And unwelcome. In the first place, he was ten years older than Finn in age and one hundred years older than her in experience. Keep telling yourself that, Gabriel. He followed her into the house.
“What do you want to do?” she asked him.
“Let’s say I’m better at the outdoor range than at the indoor kind,” he admitted.
Finn studied him thoughtfully. “I’ll bet it’s hard to butter bread.”
Was she always this refreshingly honest? “I eat out a lot.”
“You can flip the burgers, then.”
“Can’t I just watch television while you make supper?”
“Very funny.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Am I laughing?”
“No, I think you fulfilled your quota of laughter already. Once a day?”
He had to actually try not to smile. She handed him a metal spatula, rummaged into the refrigerator for the pre-shaped hamburger patties and tucked a canister of seasoning salt under her elbow. “The grill is out the back door.”
The back of Finn’s house was a surprise. A flagstone patio fanned out in a V-shape, bordered by tall, colorful flowers and terra-cotta pots lined up on an old, weathered bench. The pots were home to a variety of vegetable plants. A faded quilt was folded neatly on a wicker chair and a grapevine wreath decorated an antique light pole.
Within minutes, she had the grill started.
“I’ll be right back.” Finn disappeared into the house and returned a few moments later with two glasses of iced tea.
“Thanks.” He started to take a drink and paused. “There’s something floating in it.”
“It’s a violet.” She inspected the coals and frowned.
“You want me to drink