Page 52 of Silent Threat
The lights were on now. He pulled up behind the cruiser, ran to the front door, found it unlocked, went in.
“Annie!”
Detective Finnegan came to greet him, hand on his holstered weapon. “What are you doing here?”
“Thought I’d help with the midnight feeding again. Saw the cruiser. What’s going on?”
Annie, pale and frowning, popped out from one of the rooms. “Cole?”
“What happened?”
“Let’s all sit in the kitchen. Then how about I ask some questions first?” the detective suggested, keeping himself between them. The sharp gaze he kept on Cole said somebody was in trouble.
The man took out his notepad, which already had some writing on the top page. He’d already questioned Annie. Cole wasn’t surprised when the man turned to him as they sat.
“You come by often in the middle of the night?”
Shrug. “Can’t sleep anyway.”
The man shot a look at Annie. Because her patients probably didn’t come home with her on a daily basis. Or drive by her house at midnight. Cole rubbed a hand over his chin. He sounded like a stalker.
Then he caught the wary look on Annie’s face, and he felt it like a punch in the gut.
Didshethink he was acting like a stalker? For the detective to think something like that was one thing, but Annie ...Dammit.
Cole rested his hands on his knees and sat still, no sudden movements, trying to make his body smaller and less threatening. He didn’t want to scare her. If he was scaring her ...
Desperation washed through him. “I’m a Navy SEAL,” he told Finnegan. “I’ve been trained to run toward trouble and not away from it. When something’s off, I investigate. I’ve come out with her to feed the animals before. Tonight, she wasn’t at Hope Hill. I know she’s in some kind of a stalker situation. I didn’t like the idea of her out here alone in the middle of the night, so I thought I’d drive over.”
Finnegan looked at him as if weighing every word. He wasn’t impressed by Cole’s explanation. His cold expression saidhewas protecting Annie, and Cole needed to stay out of his way. When the detective turned to Annie, the question in his eyes clearly spelled,Want a restraining order against this guy?
But Annie said, “He’s OK, Harper. He’s one of the good guys.”
And Cole realized only then that he’d been holding his breath for the last couple of seconds.
She should have told him to stay away, just to be on the safe side. And she’d gone way too far with calling himone of the good guys. She missed the mark by a mile there.
Cole didn’t correct her, because he wanted the detective to think that hewasone of the good guys. No sense getting his ass arrested tonight.
“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” he asked Annie.
And she did, beginning with someone opening her gate and her animals getting out. Then worse.Intruder. Male. Unidentified. Possibly armed. Took off when he heard the police siren.
By the time she finished, Cole wanted to kill. She’d been in the freaking closet the whole time, scared to death. If Finnegan had been on the other side of town and gotten here ten minutes later ... Cole didn’t want to finish the thought.
He’d been in front of her house. No lights. No car. He’d turned around and driven away while Annie trembled in the damn closet inches from danger.
She could have been killed.The thought threatened to explode Cole’s head. He wanted to pull her into his arms right there in her kitchen, in front of Finnegan.
“I’ll drive Annie back to Hope Hill,” he said instead.
Finnegan nixed that right out of the gate. “You go ahead on your own. Miss Murray can drive her own car when we’re done here. I’ll escort her in the cruiser.”
The dismissal rankled Cole, but he stood. He wasn’t going to argue with the detective. Not yet. Not over this. Not as long as Annie was safe. But he reserved the option to stand up to the law in any number of ways if he thought they were falling down on the job. Because there was one thing everybody needed to understand here. He wasn’t going to let Annie get hurt.
Cole drove back to Hope Hill and went inside. He didn’t go straight to his room. He stayed in the hallway window that overlooked the parking lot until Annie drove up, the cruiser behind her. To his credit, Finnegan got out and walked her to her room.
Cole waited just around the corner. When he checked after a few minutes, Annie’s door was closed, and Finnegan was walking away. Cole allowed himself to relax and went about his mission.
