“I thought he just had a public defender. That’s what I saw listed on his case.”

“That was who showed up. I looked into him when I got back to my office, and he does a lot of defense work. For Ripkin Development. It wasn’t in the press, but I found it in court records. He tries to keep a low profile, unusual for someone who relies on word of mouth for referrals, right?”

Danny looked over. “I never liked Ripkin. Never. That fire at his house on the ocean was always bad news in my opinion. And he was creepy as fuck at the opening of the new firehouse six months ago.”

“Let’s get this logged in,” Jack said. “And we’ll get—”

“No.” Anne took her phone back. “I don’t want this going anywhere. I don’t want Ripkin to think I’m scared.”

“He just put a bullet in your fucking window,” Danny snapped. “Next time it could be your head.”

Jack nodded. “I gotta back my boy up here. Brave is just this side of stupid sometimes.”

Anne shrugged. “Fine, put in an incident report if you want. Take that lead slug back to the lab and see what you can find on it. Come back during daylight hours and see if there are footprints. Try and find out who called me and sent me the text. But I will bet this house that you will find no identifiers on anything. If this is Ripkin, he would hire a professional to scare me and they will leave nothing behind, and certainly nothing that ties this to him.”

There was some arguing at that point, and she agreed to file an incident report, but it was all just a waste of time. Then she enjoyed a lecture by Jack and his SWAT boys about staying safe, after which they left, disappearing into the night to whatever vehicle they had ghosted into the neighborhood in.

“I’m spending the night,” Danny announced before the front door was even closed.

Anne crossed her arms over her chest. She was about to say no when she saw Soot staring up at her, his eyes worried, like he sensed danger.

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“I have to take him out, and then we can see if the chicken is edible—”

Bing!

As her phone went off, she felt a spike of adrenaline. But it could be anyone, really. Right?

It was a text from that Gmail account: Left you present out in backyard.

“Shit,” she whispered.

Danny grabbed the phone and then marched to the back door. “Stay here.”

“Are you out of your fucking mind.”

Before she could stop him, he ripped open the—

When he didn’t move, her throat closed up. “What is it?”

Leaning to her desk, he took a pen out of the mug she’d put them in and crouched down. When he turned to her, there was a gun hanging upside down off the Bic, speared through the trigger circle.

“Guess this is what they used,” he muttered grimly. “And it looks like we’re calling Jack back over here.”

Her phone went off again with another text.

“Read that out loud,” Danny demanded.

Anne had to clear her throat. “ ‘Stop now and I go away. Your choice what happens next.’ ”

Chapter 45

Anne must have fallen asleep upstairs in her bed because she came awake in the middle of an explosive blur of movement. Her brain, used to dealing with accident scenes, caught up quick with what was going on. Danny, who had been naked in between the sheets with her, jumped out from under the covers with such force that he hit the wall across the way.

“Danny! Are you shot!”

Even though the drapes were unruffled and the windows were intact and the security system wasn’t going off, somehow it was as if a bullet had hit him in the gut. In the nightlight’s glow, he was clutching his stomach like it had been struck.

Scrambling over to him, she pushed his hands out of the way—

Nothing but clean, unmarred skin. Yet he was staring down at himself in horror, his face contorted from pain.

“Danny?” When there was no response, she tugged at his arm. “Come over here and sit down. Come on, let’s take a look.”

His eyes, wide and white rimmed, struggled to focus. “Anne?”

“I think it was a bad dream. Come back to bed.”

He followed her as a child would and stretched out so she could have a proper look. Trailing her fingertips over the tattoos across his torso, she double-checked that her assessment was correct. But he wasn’t injured.

“I think it was a bad dream,” she murmured as she slid in next to him and pulled the covers back into place.

Danny put his hands up to his face, his biceps thickening, his heavy chest rising and falling a number of times like he was trying to reel in his brain.

“Do you want to tell me what it was?” she said softly.

She wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. Night terrors were not uncommon, although she had never known him to have them before. Then again, she didn’t usually sleep with him.

Not that there had been much “sleeping” going on. After an anxious, anemic dinner of chicken, broccoli, and the entire half gallon of chocolate chocolate-chip ice cream she’d bought as a dessert, they’d put Soot in his crate and made no pretenses about what was going to happen the second they got upstairs.

Three times. Once in the shower. Once on the rug by the bed. Once in the bed.

As she put her arm around him, she hoped to ground him in reality. “It’s okay.”

She said that even though she didn’t know if that was true. She just wanted him to come back from where he had been.

“Yeah.” His voice was rough. “It’s okay. I’m all right. It wasn’t me.”

With a surge, he turned to her and kissed her urgently, bringing her against him, his warm hands traveling over her skin, delving between her thighs. As their mouths ground against each other’s, his hips surged, his erection hot and hard against her leg. Rolling over, she pulled him on top of her as his lips kissed their way down her neck to her collarbone. Lower. To her nipples, which he sucked as he stroked her sex.

“Anne . . . I need you.”

Raking her nails down his back, she arched against him. “I need you, too.”

He pushed his way between her legs and all but impaled her, his sex driving into her own and pumping like he was possessed. The headboard banged so hard against the wall, she was glad she didn’t live in an apartment, and as he shoved the pillows out of the way, one of them knocked some stuff off her bedside table.

Not that she cared.

She had things she didn’t want to think about, too. Things like that bullet, and Ripkin, and fires she was fighting even though their flames were out. But as he pounded into her and she linked her legs around his hips, nothing else registered. It was just the pleasure and the heat, the rising tide that wiped out everything but him.

She was dimly aware of him shifting, and then his hand was between them, his talented fingers going right for the top of her core. He knew exactly what she wanted and how to touch her—and the orgasm that shot through her was so violent, it was as if she hadn’t had sex in years.

Danny took things from there, his rhythm going back to haywire until he locked in against her and kicked deep inside of her.

And then all was still except for them breathing.

As he dropped his head into her hair, he mumbled something.

“What?”

“Must be heavy. Me. I.”

But when he went to roll off of her, she shook her head. “I like the way you feel.”

Over his big shoulder, she measured the light bleeding around the edges of the drapes. Dawn had arrived, the new day and all that BS. But she wanted to say in the cocoon of her bedroom forever, just the two of them.

Sweeping her hand down his back, she felt the muscles that fanned out from his spine, the smooth skin, the heat from his flesh. It felt good to not hurry, and with the security system on, she knew if anyone tried to get in, they’d hear about it. Also, Soot was downstairs in his crate, and going by the way he’d greeted the SWAT guys before he was properly introduced, the dog was an equally good alarm.

If Danny kept staying, she was going to have to bring the dog back up. Maybe she could put him in the bathroom.

Wrapping her arms around the vital man who was still inside of her, she put her face into Danny’s neck, his hair brushing her forehead, the shadow of his beard on her cheek. For some reason, she became acutely aware that her blunted arm was against his rib cage, and she thought about how he didn’t treat it as any different from any other part of her. He welcomed the contact, cherished it, craved it.