Why had his old roommate been trying to kill her?
“Are you okay?” he said roughly.
Her eyes, wide and glassy, locked on his face. “Danny . . . it was him. It was Moose. He lit the fires at those warehouses . . . and he was going to kill me.”
Danny slowly lowered his hands. What the hell had Moose fallen into?
“He did it for the money,” Anne mumbled. “That’s where all the money came from, for the wedding, this house, that Shelby in the garage. He was disappearing evidence in those fires, but I wasn’t able to connect him with Ripkin. I still don’t know how Ripkin is involved.”
Danny rubbed his face. “All I care about right now is that you’re okay.”
He reached out and took her hand. When she didn’t pull away, he brought her up against him and squeezed his eyes shut. Holding her tight, he looked over her shoulder at the body of his old friend.
The sadness was so deep he felt certain his heart was going to stop. He still didn’t know how a man he had lived with for all these years had turned so bad, but the one thing he was sure about was that Anne was alive.
Nothing else, even Moose, mattered more than that.
Easing back, he brushed some of the grass from her hair. “I need you to know I wasn’t with Deandra the night before the wedding. Put a bullet it in me now and send me to my twin brother, I will swear to that on my soul. She lied to Moose to make him mad, and she did it in front of the whole stationhouse, but it wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have done that to Moose.”
He let Anne looked into his eyes, for as long as she needed to, all the while praying that the truth was something she could recognize in him.
After what felt like a lifetime, she whispered, “You saved my life again, Dannyboy.”
“I will always be there for you.” As her hand raised up to touch his face, he captured it and pressed a kiss to her palm. “Always.”
chapter
53
Anne sat on the back of the ambulance and held the ice pack to her nose. The bleeding had stopped, but she was worried it was broken. Every time she poked it, it made a crunching sound and that was not good news.
“—so that was when you decided to come out here and confront him?” the detective said to her.
Two more police vehicles came up to the scene and joined the four that were already parked in a circle around the ranch. The uniforms who got out were folks she remembered from her nights at Timeout, and absurdly she wanted to wave and say hello to them, like she was the hostess of this shit party.
“Anne?”
“Sorry.” She refocused on the woman. “Yeah, I decided to come talk to him. It seemed like everything was adding up, but I needed to be sure. When I got here, I opened the back of the trailer”—edited to remove mention of her shooting the lock off—“and I saw the office equipment in there.”
“What kind of office equipment?”
“Laptops. Computers. Phones. I’m guessing that Ripkin Development was either hiding things they wanted to destroy in Ollie Popper’s extensive collection, or they have far more extensive dealings in the black market than law enforcement can even begin to contemplate.”
“Okay, so then what happened?”
Her mouth started to move again, words leaving in a stream, and she guessed she was making sense. The detective was nodding and making notes.
But Anne had stopped listening to herself.
Danny came walking around the corner of the house, two uniforms with him, the three men talking intently. When he saw that she was looking at him, he stopped, like he wasn’t sure whether he was welcome or not.
Soot, who had been by her side, let out a chuff in greeting.
“That’s all for right now. We’ll let you get treated, and you’ll have to make a formal statement.”
“Anytime you want me at the station, I’ll come down.”
“Thanks, Inspector Ashburn. We appreciate your cooperation.”
As she was left alone, Danny said something to the pair of cops and came over. “Hey. Nice nose job.”
She took the ice pick off. “Do you think it’s too much? I was just looking to get the bridge narrowed and the tip turned up a little.”
“I think we need to wait until the swelling goes down.”
“Yeah. Plastic surgery is like that.”
“Can I say hi to your dog?”
Like they were strangers. “He loves you.”
Danny got down on his haunches, that knee of his crouching. As he put his face into Soot’s, he said, “You okay there? You were limping.”
“I think Moose kicked him. At least neither of us got shot.”
As she regarded Danny, she measured every inch of him, from the way the sunlight flashed in his jet black hair, to those stupidly huge shoulders of his, to his hands. Those amazing, strong, blue-collar hands.
That had saved her life twice.
Because the truth was, she had been losing physical strength fast. And if Moose had gotten hold of that gun—and the man would have—he would have put a bullet in her head.
Tears flooded her eyes, so she closed them.
“Anne,” Danny said in a broken voice.
There was a shuffle, and then he was sitting next to her on the ambulance but not touching her. “Give us a minute,” she heard him say to someone.
She sniffled herself back into order—or tried to. Jesus, her nose hurt.
“So in the rules of evidence,” she said roughly, “the court allows deathbed confessions even if they’re heresy outside of that situation. You know, because people don’t lie when they’re just about to die.”
“No. They don’t.”
“I’m thinking it’s probably the same with people right after they kill their best friend.” She closed her eyes. “Oh, God, did this just happen. I mean, really?”
A warm, calloused hand took hers. “Yes. To both, I mean.”
“What?” Her head just couldn’t seem to process anything. “I’m not thinking straight.”
“I didn’t lie, about Deandra.” As Anne looked at him again, he stared right back at her. “You don’t have to be with me if you don’t want to, but I need to you know the truth. I didn’t lie about her. She came in yesterday morning all pissed off, spouting shit to lash out at everyone around her. The night of the rehearsal dinner she came on to me back at my apartment, it’s true, but I turned her down. Moose might have seen her dress on the floor, but what he didn’t catch was me frog-marching her out the door and locking things up so she couldn’t get back in. She wasn’t for me. She never was.”
When Anne took a deep breath, her ribs hurt, and she grimaced. Which made her nose hurt more.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I just . . . I believed what was in front of me.”
She fell into confirming her hypothesis, which had been that Danny was too good to be true.
“It’s okay.” He looked down at the ground. “It is what it is—”
“I love you.”
His head turned back to her so fast, she heard his neck crack.
“Just figured I should tell you.” Anne shrugged. “It’s too little, too late, but—”
The kiss came out of nowhere, his mouth fusing with hers, and she was too shell-shocked to respond. At first. She got with the program quick, though.
When they finally parted, she couldn’t get enough of staring into those blue eyes. “I’m sorry about Moose, too. I know . . . I can’t imagine what you’re feeling right now.”
He nodded as he brushed her hair back. “None of it seems real at all. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
His face settled into hard lines. “If anyone tries to hurt you, I will come for them. And I will take care of the situation in any way I have to.” Anne’s first instinct was to tell him she didn’t need the help, but that was reflex, not reality. She wanted him in her life in all the ways that counted, and the knight in shinning armor stuff was part of that mix.
Reaching up, she smoothed his furrowed brows. “Guess what?”
“What?”
“Two can play at that game.” She smiled a little. “I’ve got your back when you need it, too. I’m your partner, not a princess in a tower.”