Page 23 of Kane (Ghost Ops #4)

Chapter Fifteen

She’d said she wasn’t a beginner, but he didn’t know if she’d said it to get out of the class he’d wanted her to take or if she’d been telling the truth. Guess he was about to find out.

Daphne stood behind him, leaning against the back table, arms crossed over her chest. She did not look happy to be there, but damn if he was letting another day go by without knowing if she could defend herself.

He’d never taught Hannah to shoot. She’d never wanted to.

Would it have saved her? Probably not, but he’d never know.

He’d shared his theory with the guys that maybe the break-in was related to the Dashevsky Group and Dima Smirnov.

They all agreed it was worth considering, which made it even more critical that Daphne know how to defend herself.

She’d want to go back home eventually, and she’d be alone.

Kane would feel a lot better if she was armed and knew what to do with a weapon should somebody try again when she was home.

He set the target at five yards, which was close, and turned to her.

“You coming over here to learn how to load the pistol or what?”

“I know how to load a pistol, Kane.”

She had her ear protection around her neck and he did too. He slipped his on and she did the same. “Come show me then.”

She stalked over to the bay and he stepped back to watch.

Daphne didn’t wear perfume, but her hair always smelled good.

Like lavender and sunshine. He wanted to touch it, wanted to wrap a few strands around his fingers and see if they were as silky as they looked.

Her hair was a deep, gorgeous red. He didn’t know if she colored it, but he doubted it.

The girl didn’t even wear makeup, so he didn’t think she’d spend time coloring her hair.

Then again, what did he know? He’d thought he’d known his own wife and he hadn’t.

Daphne stared at the guns, her head bowed. She took a breath. Then another.

He was about to tell her to step aside when she picked up the Sig.

She chose the correct magazine, slipped it into the grip, flipped the safety off, and pulled the slide to chamber a round.

He opened his mouth to tell her what came next, but she hit the magazine release, dropped the mag into her hand and pulled the slide again to eject the bullet.

Then she dry-fired the pistol, calmly collected the unspent round, pressed it into the magazine again, and placed everything on the table before turning to him.

Belatedly, he told himself to close his mouth. Something swirled in his belly, something hot and dark and needy.

Whoa and damn.

Kane didn’t know if he was turned on by the lavender in her hair or by the way she’d handled the weapon. But he was definitely turned on after that display. He was working overtime to turn everything off again. Son of a bitch.

“Okay, so you’ve got the basics down.”

He sounded lame even to him.

Daphne smirked. Damn, she was pretty. Her green eyes flashed fire at him and her chin tipped up.

“More than the basics, Grandpa. I told you I can shoot.”

“Who taught you?”

The fire in her eyes banked. “My dad. He believed in defending his family and he thought we needed to know how to handle a weapon. I didn’t have a choice, so I learned.”

When she’d said her parents were nomads, he’d envisioned some kind of weird hippy thing where they were pacifists and didn’t eat animals. He had not envisioned a gun-loving father who made his family learn how to handle a weapon.

A mistake he should have known better than to make. Never make assumptions about people. Assumptions got you killed. Or got others killed. Something he knew all too well.

“Let’s start shooting then.”

“I can do that. But we’ll need to move that target.”

He pressed the button to bring it closer.

“No.”

He glanced at her. She’d turned those hot eyes on him again. Daphne seemed to be simmering beneath the surface. He didn’t know why, but he had to admit it was exhilarating to watch her glowing and sparking as she moved.

Like an explosion waiting to detonate. What would happen then? He’d had a glimpse of it in the gym a couple of days ago. His dick remembered all too well if the way it started to ache was any indication.

“Where d’you want it?” he growled.

“Send it to fifteen yards.”

“You sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

He sent the target. When Daphne stepped up to the board, she didn’t pick the Sig this time.

She grabbed the Glock and slammed the magazine home, racked the slide like an expert, then placed the gun on the table, barrel facing into the range.

If he had a dollar for every time a woman couldn’t pull the slide of a pistol because it was tight and she didn’t know how…

“You first,” she said, taking a step back.

“I shoot every day. I’m not the one who needs practice.”

“Humor me. One shot, Kane. Let me see what you can do.”

He grumbled as he picked up the gun and sighted it.

When he was on the exhale, he squeezed the trigger.

The answering boom, the metallic pop of the empty shell being ejected, the weight of the gun in his hand as well as the smell of hot gunpowder, were as familiar and comforting to him as homemade apple pie was to other people.

He laid the gun down and brought the target closer.

There was one hole in the target, dead center. Kane turned to her. She looked pensive. She chewed on the end of her thumbnail as their gazes met.

“You win,” she said with a fake smile. “Can we go now?”

He grinned at her. “Nope. Your turn. I did what you asked, now you show me what you’ve got. If it’s not a bullseye, that’s okay. I’ve had a helluva lot of practice to be able to shoot like that. I don’t expect you to do the same.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Daphne said with a sigh. “Move it, Gramps.”

She hip-checked him and he stepped out of the way.

She pressed the button on the side of the wall separating shooting bays and sent the target downrange.

Twenty yards instead of fifteen. He didn’t know what she was playing at but there was no fucking way she was going to land a shot anywhere near his.

She picked up the gun, widened her legs and carefully settled her right hand into her left. Then she lifted the gun and stood for a long moment, staring downrange. She took so long he thought she’d put it down again, tell him she couldn’t do it.

A moment later, the quiet shattered.

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Metal pinged as spent shell casings hit the floor in quick succession. They never allowed students to rapid fire a pistol. Or anyone but the most experienced shooters, and even then only at certain times for safety reasons. Rapid fire was dangerous in the wrong hands.

Daphne placed the gun on the board and hit the button to bring the target back. He expected to see wide shots everywhere, but that’s not what was there. Kane blinked, and then blinked again.

Surrounding his bullseye in an almost perfectly spaced circle were eight holes. Eight fucking holes at twenty yards.

He stepped up beside her. She studied the target, a frown on her face, as if she hadn’t just done an amazing bit of shooting.

“Sunshine,” he managed. Croaked, really. “What the fuck was that?”

“I know, I know. The shots aren’t even and these two—” She pointed at two holes in the paper. “—aren’t aligned. Can’t make them all perfect, I guess.”

He took her by the shoulders and turned her. Amazement coursed through every inch of him. And something else as well. Desire. Hot, fierce need. Because of a target and a few holes?

Didn’t make sense, and yet it made perfect sense. He’d been boxing Daphne up in his head for so long, keeping her behind a fence labeled No Trespassing , telling himself that she was young and sweet and innocent to the ways of the world.

She’d just blown through that fence. Literally in some ways. She was young, sweet, but maybe not innocent to the ways of the world after all. Girl could blow a perfect circle in a target at twenty yards. Twenty fucking yards. It took a shit ton of practice to do that.

“You look surprised,” she said, her voice soft.

“Baby, if you revealed you were one of Colleen’s aliens wearing a human form, I couldn’t be more surprised. Where the fuck did you learn to shoot like that?”

“Girls can shoot, Kane. Maybe not the ones who show up here for a lesson from a gorgeous dude with muscles and then make eyes at you the whole time, but a lot of us are competent.”

“That’s more than competent, Daph. It’s fucking mission-ready. Your dad must have made you shoot for hours every day.”

“Something like that,” she said, her gaze dropping.

He could see the pulse in her throat, the way it thrummed. “You never told any of us. Why?”

She shrugged out of his grip and walked away, turned to face him when there was distance between them. Then she flung her arms out as if angry or frustrated.

“Because it’s not important. Because I was hired to work up front, not to be an RSO or teach classes or anything like that. It doesn’t matter that I can shoot. I don’t need it for my job.”

He understood and yet he didn’t. Why keep something that big a secret? She was working in a gun range and she was an expert marksman. Unless she hated shooting because she’d been forced to do it. Kind of like a kid forced to play piano for hours a day.

Something his mother had tried to get him to do when he was eight.

He’d hated every minute of it. To this day he could do scales like frigging Mozart, but he’d forgotten everything else.

He’d quit piano at thirteen, but he had a lot of years of sitting at the instrument when all he’d wanted to do was go outside and play with his friends.

Kane shoved a hand through his hair. “You don’t want to do this anymore, I take it? Prefer I put everything away and we go to the house?”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “No, it’s fine. We can finish. I don’t hate shooting, Kane. But I don’t love it either.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“No. And I don’t want to buy one.”

He didn’t ask why, but he thought he knew.

She ran many of the background checks on people who bought at the range, and she knew the process required.

Filling out the ATF form, submitting it to the NICS.

All the system did was look for criminal convictions, mental health issues, drug use, domestic violence orders, etcetera.

But the woman didn’t want to apply for credit, insisted on paying cash for her car. She’d filled out the required employment paperwork when they’d hired her, but maybe that was her one exception. It would be hard for anyone looking for her to access that kind of information anyway.

Hell, it’d be hard to access any of the information—but only having one point of entry wasn’t a bad strategy. The more places your data went, the more opportunities to be found.

“You could buy one of mine. Private sales don’t have to go through the system.”

It was a loophole that some states were still trying to close, but the gun lobby had so far kept it from happening.

She arched an eyebrow. “You aren’t worried I’ll rob a bank with your gun and then you’ll have to answer questions? What if I have a record, Kane? You might be selling a gun to a criminal.”

“If you think Seth didn’t check you out before we hired you, you’re not as smart as I thought you were.”

“I’m sure he did. But the NICS…. Well, there could be things in there you boys don’t have access to.”

He cocked his head. “Are you trying to make me suspicious, Sunshine? Do you want me to tell him to dig deeper?”

She shoved her hands into her jeans pockets and shrugged. “You can do what you want. I’m not worried. I was merely pointing out you have to be careful about selling weapons privately. You never know where they’ll end up.”

“Yeah, I’m aware. Still think you need one, though. I’ll take my chances and loan you one. If you decide to head over to the Perrys’ cattle farm and rustle up some cows, I’ll say you stole it from me.”

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need any cows, Gramps. Got plenty of bull around this place.”

“But you’ll accept the pistol?”

She hesitated. “If it makes you feel better, yes.”

“Honey, knowing you could shoot the balls off that bull at twenty yards makes me feel a whole lot better than I did.”

She tilted her head to the side and looked at him like he was a puzzle to be solved. “Were you worried about me, Kane?”

Why lie?

“Somebody broke into your apartment and spooked you. And since we don’t know who or why, yeah, I worried about you. Still do, but now I know you’ve got terrific aim, I’m not worried about you being alone in your apartment when you’re ready to go back.”

“I’d really rather not have to shoot anyone. I’m a target shooter.”

“Understood.” He clipped on a new target and sent it to twenty-five yards. “So let’s shoot some targets. Best shot wins.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Wins what?”

He gazed at her, suddenly overwhelmed by an urge to tug her into his arms and hold her close. What would it be like if this woman was his? If he let himself try again?

He shook his head and gave her a smile he didn’t quite feel. “Dunno. How about the winner gets to decide what they want and the loser has to do it or buy it or whatever?”

“Okay, but I’m not buying anything over fifty-dollars. Just so you know.”

He laughed. “Got it, babe.” He clipped another target to the bay next door and sent it out. “Which weapon you want?”

“I’ll take the Glock.”

“Figured you’d say that. What’s the objective?”

“Three rounds. One in the center, one in the forehead, one in the throat. Bonus points if you can hit the eyes too.”

“Lock n’load, baby. Prepare to get smoked.”

She grinned at him, and he felt an ache in his chest. “Game on, Gramps.”