Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 47716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
Joe seemed to be swallowing a golf ball beside his boss. “Shit, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Sure you did. How about a bet, boys? Care to play?” She smiled innocently, waving her fingers towards the rifle once more. “I’m just a girl, right? It’s just a gun. Let me shoot it.”
“You don’t like guns,” Anton pointed out quietly.
“Nope, but I can still shoot one. Now, are we going to do this bet, or not? Looks to me like you’ve already got one started, so how about I put a little more into the pile. How many targets does that thing over there shoot out?”
Anton looked in the direction of the skeet where Vine was now pointing. Rory stood at the side of the lake beside it, confused and waiting. “One at a time, but it loads up to three and it can shoot them all off with a half of a second delay between fires.”
Her grin suddenly looked calculating. Anton didn’t like that at all.
“Good. There’s three of you, that works out perfectly,” Viviana said.
“Uh—”
“Your gun, babe?” Hesitantly, Anton brought the rifle back around to his front and offered it to his wife. Vine frowned. “No, I said your gun, Anton.”
He still didn’t understand. “You’re supposed to shoot skeets with rifles.”
“Not me,” she retorted, a little hotly. “Give me your handgun.”
Joe was the one to snort this time. “Vine, you won’t even carry a handgun. What makes you think you’ll be okay shooting a skeet with one?”
“Not a skeet, three of them,” Vine said very matter of fact. “One for each of you. If I hit the first, Anton puts the gun away. If I hit the second, Joe will never call my son the little prince in my vicinity again.”
Anton blinked in surprise. It wasn’t that he doubted his wife’s ability to shoot a gun, he knew she could, he doubted she could hit three targets, all moving, and at half second intervals. Even he would struggle with that. One at a time was child’s play, but three? Then again, he couldn’t get her to a target range if he bribed her with the world.
“And the third?” he dared to ask.
“I want some pickles and melted peanut butter. If I hit it, Rory can go pick up the pickles I need.”
Joe gagged at the mention of pickles and a sandwich condiment being used as a dip. Anton had long become accustomed to his wife’s odd cravings, but her sudden desire to shoot a gun was something else entirely. Was she trying to prove a point, or was she just pissed off?
An uncomfortable silence fell between the three standing on the dock. Vine didn’t let it last too long.
“Your gun?” she asked once more, quieter.
“Vine, there’s no way—”
Anton pulled his semiautomatic handgun from the waistband of his jeans, shutting up Joe’s obstinate rebuttal. If Viviana was anything, it was stubborn as fuck. She wouldn’t let up until one of them gave her what she wanted, so Anton would feed into whatever crazy notions she had going on inside her head. It wasn’t like she was going to hurt herself or something.
Handing over the concealed weapon to his wife, Anton said, “Have at it, baby.”
“To make it clear, you’re agreeing to my bet?” she asked, looking pointedly at the bull.
Joe smirked. “If you don’t hit the second one, I get to call him that whenever you’re around?”
“Sure.”
Anton felt something horrible settle in his stomach like a dead weight. Vine was far too confident in herself. He didn’t have anything to lose, but the same phrase kept chanting over and over in his mind: Viviana doesn’t like guns.
“I can’t speak for Rory,” Joe added as an afterthought.
“He’ll go anyway,” Vine replied.
“All right, baby, do your worst.”
Anton tried to keep the cockiness out of his tone, but he failed miserably. With a tossed smile to her husband that was anything but sweet, Vine stepped onto the dock to join them, the handgun seated in her hand.
“Uh, Vine?” Joe muttered, eyeing her grip on the gun. “You might want to hold that a little tighter when you shoot it. The kick on it is pretty rough.”
“Thanks.”
Anton swallowed the lump forming in his throat. This whole situation irked him in the wrong way.
What was it he had told Joe earlier?
Know your opponent.
Shit, he thought.
Vine didn’t give a lick of info out about her experience with guns. It was just as much dangerous as it was peculiar. Suddenly, he didn’t want his wife handling that weapon for one more second.
“Give me the gun, Vine,” Anton demanded.
“Nope. See your bet through, husband of mine.” With a talented slide of her thumb along the back of the weapon, she clicked the safety off. The gun still rested limply at her side while her free hand rolled over the top of her middle slowly. “There were two things I was told growing up. One, make the first one count. And two, don’t blink. You two think you’re the only kids who grew up with guns in your house, really? What kind of mafia child would I be if I didn’t know how to handle a weapon? And what about that Bratva blood, Joe?”