of annoying tone men used when they thought they were entitled to an immediate answer.
“No, I came into the wilderness with a pretend gun.” Seriously. How much stupid did she have to deal with before the sun had even gotten above the trees? “For the last time, you need to get behind me.” Lacey racked the slide, and the rasping sound seemed to make her point because the man suddenly found his legs.
Lacey scanned her surroundings. There was nothing in her direct line of fire other than the raccoon and trees. If she missed the coon—which she wouldn’t—the trajectory of the bullet would send it into the ground.
She could feel Victor behind her, his gaze boring into the back of her body. But at least he’d stopped asking questions.
Deep breath, loosen shoulders, sight the target. Out of her peripheral vision, Lacey saw the zipper on Cassie and Louisa’s tent start traveling up. The raccoon took another step, and Lacey lined up the shot and pulled the trigger. A sharp crack sounded, and the coon dropped to the ground just as a tousled head appeared out of the tent.
Cassie took one look at Lacey with her still-pointed weapon and started screaming.
Lacey had pulled out a handgun and shot that raccoon as coolly as if she was doing something as innocuous as tying her boot.
Five minutes later, Victor’s heart still thundered in his chest as if she’d aimed the gun at him.
The raccoon—deader than a dead thing—was still splayed out on the ground. A small pool of blood seeped from underneath. If it wasn’t for that, it could have been mistaken for being asleep.
The gunshot and Cassie’s hysteria had gotten everyone out of their tents faster than if Meredith herself had appeared to do roll call. Including Kelvin, who thundered out of his tent in a pair of long johns like a buffalo was chasing him.
“Permit.” Kelvin barked the word at Lacey. She dug into her pocket, extracted a card, and handed it to him. Kelvin studied it with an expression that was half relief, half exasperation. “What were you thinking, bringing a gun into the BWCA without notifying me?”
“You didn’t ask, and nothing on the paperwork said there was a notification requirement.” Lacey was as calm as anyone Victor had ever seen.
“You could have killed someone.”
At that Lacey flared. “There was no chance of that. I am an excellent shot. I cleared my surroundings, I took aim, and I made my shot.”
“Coon hunting ended on March 31.”
“I wasn’t hunting.”
“And you let off a firearm within 150 yards of a campsite.”
“I had a reasonable belief the raccoon posed a danger. We tried other ways to scare him off, but they were not sufficient. He was showing all the risk signs of rabies. I had no choice.”
“We? Who’s we?”
Lacey jerked her head toward Victor. “Victor was helping me fix breakfast.”
Victor, who had thought the raccoon was cute and wanted to feed it. He had never felt stupider. And by the scathing way Lacey had looked at him, he wasn’t the only one.
“Is that true? Did you try other methods?”
Was it true? His brain seemed to have frozen on the moment he turned around and saw Lacey wielding a handgun like he’d somehow found himself in a Bond movie.
“Um, yes. I think so.”
Now Kelvin narrowed in on him. “You think so?”
Victor forced his brain past the blond-wielding-a-deadly-weapon moment. “Yes. We both threw rocks near it to try and scare it away.”
“And what did it do?”
Victor shrugged. “Just stumbled around.”
Kelvin turned his attention back to Lacey. “You should have come and gotten me.”
“I didn’t know if you were in your tent, and I was worried about the target’s proximity to Louisa and Cassie’s tent.”
The target’s proximity. She said it like the pile of fur hadn’t been a living thing only ten minutes ago. Yes, it was just a raccoon, but still.
Lacey had had a gun holstered against her leg the entire time they spent together the last couple of days. His brain was entirely incapable of knowing how to process that revelation.
If the whole book publicity thing didn’t work out, she’d have an excellent career in the CIA.
“Did you bring a gun across state lines illegally?” Kelvin suddenly seemed to become aware that he was still in his long johns—ones that left very little to the imagination if Victor did say so himself.
Lacey gave Kelvin an even more scathing look than she’d given Victor. “I flew here. That’s literally impossible without getting arrested.”