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defend him. And knowing Anna, her face had flushed to a deep shade of crimson by now. Fortunately, the room was still glued to the conflict between the two men so no one was paying attention to Anna anymore. They wouldn’t notice how personally she had just taken Eddie’s insult.
    Colin was far less concerned about Eddie’s attempt to humiliate him, if that’s what he’d been trying to do. “No, but I still don’t want to see people getting killed. Including us. You want to try to change Jeremy’s mind, then go for it. But leave us alone.”
    Colin stepped aside, indicating he expected Eddie to leave now, and after hesitating a few moments, Eddie got up and left without another word. The rest of the group still in the break room remained silent until they heard the front door of the building close and Eddie’s tires squealing out of the parking lot.
    “ That was mature,” Dylan mumbled.
    Max just shook his head. “We need to let Jeremy know about this. Maybe Eddie needs to go on leave or something. Not sure I’d want him out alone with me anywhere right now.”
    Colin was pretending to listen to their conversation but he was really focusing on Anna. He wanted her to think of an excuse to leave soon and come meet him across town for lunch so they could talk about this email. As the other hunters gradually started talking again and things got back to normal, Colin slipped out quietly and made his way to the restaurant to wait for Anna.
    She showed up about half an hour later and after spending a few minutes reading the menu, she finally let Colin speak to her. He had watched her the entire time, with a smile of adoration and complete devotion on his face. “Hungry?” he asked.
    “Starving. So this is new. First email we’ve ever gotten from one of them.”
    Colin took a sip of his water and nodded. He wasn’t quite ready to talk about the email yet though. “Anna, about last night …”
    “Colin, forget it. Please. You had every right to be pissed. If that had been you … it doesn’t matter that I would have known how innocent it was. We can’t help feeling the way we do.”
    Colin bit his lip. He couldn’t let her do this, let him off the hook for something that was killing him, that was hurting a hell of a lot worse than getting thrown by a demon halfway across a field in the English countryside had a while back.
    “But I shouldn’t have talked to you that way,” he said quietly. He couldn’t even meet her eyes when he said it. He was so ashamed of himself. And then he immediately felt guilty for that too because he knew how badly Anna felt over that and this whole conversation was turning out to be such a disaster. He really wished he had just bought the damn gift card.
    Anna took a deep breath. He knew she was trying to resist reaching across the table to take his hand, to kiss his fingers and tell him how much she loved him, how she would always love him. Knowing those things and being able to do them were so different. So completely different. “I’m sure I’ve said many, many things you didn’t deserve over the years, Colin,” and in that one sentence, Anna let herself speak the way she had when they were younger, the English accent of her youth so rich and lyrical. She had mastered an American accent in a way Colin had never been able to, which he thought wasn’t quite fair considering she’d never even minded hers. He was the one who had grown up despising his ancestry.
    Colin tried to think back over the years to anything she had ever said that could have caused the kind of pain that he had inflicted last night, but he was pretty sure she had never treated him that way. Until this assignment in Baton Rouge, they so very rarely even disagreed about anything. But Anna wanted to believe she had; she didn’t want Colin to feel so guilty, so full of self-hatred and so he tried to bury it for her sake. It was hard. He knew he didn’t deserve her forgiveness. “You do know that I trust