Chapter 16 Annie
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. A civilian who 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! You chose to. 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 a gun, Daniel!” Annie shouted, flinging her arms out to her sides. “A gun! You could have been killed!”
Slowly, Daniel laid the hatchet down inside the charred rut he’d created in the cedar trunk and came around to stand before her, sweat gleaming on his collarbones and in the hollow of his throat.
“I wasn’t, though.”
Annie’s gaze dropped. His lip was split where Ian had hit him, right at the corner, and it was swollen, giving his mouth a slightly lopsided appearance.
She couldn’t stop the tears that brimmed over as she stared at him, at that split lip and the grazed skin on his shoulder where it had scraped the sidewalk. All at once, her anger flickered out like a snuffed candle, and she felt only guilt over the price he had paid for stopping the fight.
“You’re such an idiot,” she whispered, voice choked with emotion as her hand moved without her permission, her fingers stretching upward to touch the broken corner of his mouth.
Daniel flinched in pain, but did not back away, and Annie moved her hand to the back of his neck and pulled his head down toward hers.
Some dam of willpower in her had broken like a log in a fire, and for this one moment in time, she did not think about Jamie or Brendan or any of the consequences of what she was about to do.
Instead, she closed her eyes and pressed her lips to his.
In the silence around them, the fire crackled and a hawk called to its mate across the water, and then Daniel responded, gathering her in his arms and pulling her to his chest with the tenderness of a first breath.