“Gimme back my gun.” Ian glowered, breath ragged. His shirt was torn at the collar and his hair was a mess.
Annie didn’t move. “No.”
“Give it back!”
“I’m confiscating it.” Beneath her uniform, her legs trembled with adrenaline, but her voice was steady.
Ian started to stutter a response but Annie cut him off.
“Look, I may not be a police officer, but I have the same power, privileges, and immunities that they do, including the power of arrest.” She held Ian’s seething gaze as she tucked his gun into her own empty holster. “And let me make one thing perfectly clear. If you ever,ever, threaten me like that again, Iwillexercise that authority. Do you understand?”
Ian’s friends looked anywhere but at their leader as he finally dropped his head and nodded. She had broken him.
“Good,” Annie said. “Then we’re done here.”
She shot a glance at Daniel. He was standing back, his featuresa perfect mask of indifference, though his chest heaved with breath and his lower lip was bleeding. When she caught his eye, he turned abruptly and crossed the street, walking back the way he’d come.
Annie grabbed her bags again, stepped past Ian and his friends with one more stone-faced glare and walked quickly around the corner.
The moment she was out of sight, she broke into a run for the Jeep.
Chapter 16ANNIE
Annie roared up the hill to the boathouse, foot hard on the gas, tires spinning over the gravel. She was mad as a hornet—fingers white on the wheel—and the more she thought about it, the angrier she felt.
She’d gone straight home to cool down, but instead had paced back and forth in her room like a caged animal. How dare Ian Ward pull a gun on her in the middle of town. How dare he make those demeaning comments to someone in a position of authority. How dare his friends block her way when she tried to leave.
She paced for half an hour before deciding at last to pour some of her wrath out on Daniel. He was a civilian. Acivilianwho had thrown himself into the line of fire. And, yes, he had quite possibly saved her life back there, but he’d put himself in grave danger, then inexplicably walked away, like a brooding teenager. None of it made sense, and she was tired of leaving every interaction with him with more questions than answers. It was time for Daniel to talk.
At the end of the road, she was not surprised to find the gate closed, and she put the Jeep into park and jumped out, scrambling over the top and hopping down on the other side.
A fire was roaring in a circle of stones near the lakeshore. Beside it, Daniel stood over the long section of cedar trunk that he’d set aside, his bare torso gleaming with sweat and firelight as he lifted a hatchet high and brought it down over and over, bits of bark and dust flying up into the sunset air and catching the light like glitter.
“Hey!” she shouted.
He didn’t look up, but the hatchet paused for a noticeable beat before he went on hacking.
“Daniel!”
Still nothing.
Annie came to a stop, facing him with only the width of the trunk between them.
“Why did you do that?” she demanded.
Her words were an accusation thrown at him rather than an inquiry, and with infuriating slowness, he looked up to meet her eyes.
For a moment, Annie thought he might not answer at all, but then he spoke so quietly that she barely caught his words over the spitting of the fire.
“I had to.”
It was déjà vu, the second time he’d said those three words to her, and for the second time, she had absolutely no idea what he meant.
“You did not! Youchoseto. It was your choice to put yourself in the middle of that mess. I didn’t ask for your help.”
Daniel gazed at her with the same expression he’d worn in the boat, as if pleading with her to understand a secret he could not voice.
“He had agun, Daniel!” Annie shouted, flinging her arms out to her sides. “A gun! You could have been killed!”
