by Lisa Childs
Mrs. Mallory glanced from the boy to Josie and back. “He does have quite the imagination,” she agreed, his story, although true, too fanciful for the older woman to believe. “He’s a very creative boy. Did you watch a scary movie with him last night—something that brought on such a horrible dream?”
“No,” Josie replied. She touched her little boy’s trembling chin. “You have no reason to be afraid,” she told him. “You’re perfectly safe here.”
Not buying her assurances in the least, CJ shook his head and wriggled out of Mrs. Mallory’s arms. “I need my daddy to p’tect me.”
Brendan had gone from bad man to hero for his son. He needed to know that; hopefully he was alive for her to share that news with him. She needed to get to her house. If it had blown up, she would have heard the explosion—or at least the fire trucks.
He had to be okay….
Josie knelt in front of her son and met his gaze. “I am going to go get your daddy,” she promised, “and he will come back here with me to get you, okay?”
“I can get Daddy, too,” he said, throwing his arms around her neck to cling to her.
Her heart broke, but she forced herself to tug him off and stand up. He used to cling to her like this every morning when she’d first started bringing him to Mrs. Mallory, but today was the first time he’d had a reason for his fears. Not only because of the night he’d had, but also because she might not be able to come back—if she walked into the same trap his father might have. But then his godmother would take him….
Charlotte. She wouldn’t have endangered them. Brendan must have had another reason for not returning to the SUV. Maybe that injury to his head was more severe than he’d led her to believe.
“No, honey,” she said, and it physically hurt her, tightened her stomach into knots, to deny his fervent request. The timid boy asked her for so little that she hated telling him no. “I have to talk to Daddy alone first, and then we’ll come get you.”
Mrs. Mallory had always helped Josie escape before when her son was determined to cling. But now the older woman just stood in the foyer, her jaw hanging open in shock. As Josie stared at her, she pulled herself together. But curiosity obviously overwhelmed her. “His—his father? You’ve never mentioned him before.”
With good reason. She had thought he wanted her dead. “We haven’t been in contact in years,” she honestly replied.
“But he’s here?”
She nodded. “At my house.”
Or so she hoped. Maybe he’d come back to where he’d parked the SUV and found her gone. What would he think? That she’d tricked him again?
Hopefully she wasn’t the one who’d been tricked. Hopefully he wasn’t right about Charlotte.
“I—I have to go,” she said. It had been too long. Now that she’d stood up, CJ was clinging to her legs.
Finally Mrs. Mallory stepped in and pried the sniffling child off her.
“I’ll be back,” she promised her son.
“With Daddy?”
She hoped so. But when she parked in the alley behind her house moments later, her hope waned. She hadn’t seen him walking along the street. And while the house wasn’t in pieces or on fire, it looked deserted.
She opened the driver’s door and stepped out into the eerie quiet. Her neighbors would have already left for work, their kids for school. Josie was rarely home this time of day during the week. Maybe that was why it felt so strange to walk up to her own back door.
The glass in the window of the door was shattered. Of course, since Brendan had left her keys in the car, he would have had to break in to gain entrance. She was surprised he would have done it with such force, though, since the wooden panes were broken and the glass shattered as if it had exploded.
She sucked in a breath of fear. But she smelled no telltale odor of gas or smoke. The glass may have exploded, but a bomb had not.
Could a gunshot have broken the window?
If so, her neighbors would have called the police. There would have been officers at her home, crime scene tape blocking it off from the street. But there was nothing but a light breeze blowing through her broken window and rattling the blind inside.
The blind was broken, like the panes and the glass. Had Brendan slammed his fist through it? Or had someone else?
Gathering all her courage, she opened that door and stepped inside the small back porch. Glass crunched beneath her feet, crushed between the soles of her shoes and the slate floor. As she passed the washer and dryer on her way to the kitchen, she noticed a brick and crumpled paper sitting atop the washer.
Someone had thrown a brick through her window?
Brendan?
Or was he the one who’d found it and picked it up? She suspected the latter, since there had obviously been a note secured to the brick with a rubber band. The broken band lay beside the brick and the crumpled paper.
She picked up the note and shivered with fear as she read the words: You should have been the one who died.
Oh, God. She was too late. Brendan had walked into a trap meant for her.
Chapter Thirteen
The scream startled Brendan, chilling his blood. He’d lost all sense of time and place. How long ago had he left Josie and their son? Had someone found them?
He’d left them alone and defenseless but for the gun he’d given Josie. Had she even had any bullets left?
He reached for the weapon at his back, pulling the gun from under his jacket. Then he crept up the stairs from the room he’d found in the basement, the one that had answered all the questions he’d had about ever trusting Josie Jessup.
The old steps creaked beneath his weight, giving away his presence. A shadow stood at the top of the stairwell, blocking Brendan’s escape. The dim bulb swinging overhead glinted off the metal of the gun the shadow held, the barrel pointed at Brendan. He lifted his gun and aimed. But then he noticed the hair and the figure. “Josie!”
“Brendan? You’re alive!” She launched herself at him, nearly knocking him off the stairs. “I thought you were dead!”
He caught himself against the brick wall at his back. “Now you know how it feels,” he murmured. Despite his bitterness, his arms closed around her, holding her against him.
Her heart pounded madly. “I was so worried about you. You didn’t come back to the car and then I found that note.”
“You thought that note referred to me?”
She nodded.
“As you can see, I’m alive,” he said. “So who does it refer to?”
She gasped as that guilt flashed across her face again.
And he remembered the sign. “Michael?”
“Yes,” she miserably replied. “Some people blame me for his death.”
“Did you kill him?”
She gasped again in shock and outrage. “No. I would never…”
“It’s not a good feeling to have people thinking you’re a killer,” he remarked.
Her brow furrowed with confusion as he set her away from him. “Where have you been all this time?” she asked. As he turned and headed back down the steps, she followed him. “You’ve been down here?” Then as she realized exactly where he’d been, she ran ahead of him and tried blocking the doorway to her den.
Bookshelves lined knotty pine walls. But it wasn’t there he’d found what he’d spent the past four years looking for.
“You broke into my filing cabinet!” she said.
He could have lied and blamed it on whoever had thrown the brick through her window. But that person would have had no interest in what he’d discovered. So he just shrugged.
“You had no right!” she said, as she hurried over to where he’d spread the files across her desk.
“I think I have more right to those records than you do,” he pointed out. “They’re all about me.”
She trembled as she shoved the papers back into folders. “But you shouldn’t have seen them.”
“That’s what you were working on when we were to
gether,” he said, his gut aching as it had when he’d found the folders. If the drawer hadn’t been locked, he probably wouldn’t have bothered to jimmy it open. But he’d wanted to know all her secrets so that he might figure out who was trying to kill her. “You thought I killed my own father? That’s the story you were after when you came after me.”
She released a shuddery sigh. “That was a lifetime ago.”
“But you’re still a reporter.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You teach journalism,” he said, gesturing toward a framed award that sat among the books on the shelves of the den. She had given up so much of her old life, except for that. No matter where she was or what she was calling herself, she was still a journalist.
“I teach,” she said, her tone rueful, “because I can’t do.”
“Because you can’t give it up.” Not for him. Not even for their son.
“I had to give up everything,” she said. “My home. My family.”
Family.
“Where’s CJ?” he asked, glancing around the shadows. She’d been alone on the stairs. Where had she stashed their child this time?
“He’s at his sitter’s,” she said. “He’s safe.”
“Are you sure?” He never should have let the boy out of his sight.
“I can trust the people here.”
Skeptical, he snorted. “She wouldn’t have thrown the brick?”
“Absolutely not,” she said. “It must have been one of my other students. Or one of Michael’s friends.”
“What happened to Michael?”
Sadness dimmed her eyes and filled them with tears. “He was killed pursuing a story.”
He touched his fingers to the scratch on his temple. It didn’t sting anymore; it throbbed, the intensity of it increasing with his confusion and frustration. “How could you be responsible for that?”
Her eyes glistened with moisture. “It was a story I suggested that he cover.” She blinked back the tears. “But that brick—that has nothing to do with what happened in Chicago. Nobody here knows who I really am. Nobody here would have tried to kill me.”
“Just scare you,” he said. But the brick and the note were nothing in comparison to gunfire and explosions. “You should be scared,” he said. He reached out and jerked one of the folders from her hand. “This story could have gotten you killed.”
She sucked in a quivering breath. “It almost did. It is why someone tried to kill me four years ago.”
“Someone,” he agreed. And now he knew who. “But not me.”
She gestured toward those folders. “But you see why I suspected you. All the people I talked to named you as your father’s killer.”
People he should have been able to trust—men who’d worked with his father since they were kids selling drugs for Brendan’s grandfather. And his stepmother. When his father had first married her, she had pretended to care about her husband’s motherless son. But when Brendan had returned to claim the inheritance Margaret O’Hannigan thought should have been hers, she’d stopped pretending.
Josie continued, “In all the conversations I overheard while hanging out with you at O’Hannigan’s, only one suspect was ever named in his murder.”
“Me.” Did she still suspect him?
“I was wrong,” she admitted, but then defended herself. “But I didn’t know you very well then. You were so secretive and you never answered my questions.”
She didn’t know him very well now, either. But it was obvious she couldn’t stop being a journalist, so he couldn’t trust her with the truth. He couldn’t tell her who he really was, but he could tell her something about himself.
“We wanted the same thing, you know,” he told her.
“We did?” she asked, the skepticism all hers now.
“I didn’t want an award-winning exposé,” he clarified. “But I wanted the truth.”
She nodded. “That’s why I never printed anything. I had no confirmation. No proof. I could have written an exposé. But I wanted the truth.”
And that was the one thing that set her apart from the other reporters who’d done stories about him over the past four years. She wouldn’t print the unsubstantiated rumors other journalists would. She’d wanted proof. She just hadn’t recognized it when she’d found it.
“I want to know who killed him, too,” he said. “I came back to that life because I wanted justice for my father.” After years of trying to bring the man to justice, it was ironic that Brendan had spent the past four years trying to get justice for his father—for his coldblooded murder.
“You spent a lot of time reading through everything,” she said, staring down at the desk he’d messed up. “Did you find anything I missed?”
Because he didn’t want to lie outright to her, he replied, “You weren’t the only one who must have gone through those papers. If there’d been something in there, one of the marshals would have found it.”
“Nobody else has ever seen this stuff,” she admitted.
The pounding in his head increased. If anyone familiar with his father’s murder case had looked at her records, they would have figured it out. They would have recognized that one of her sources knew too much about the murder scene, things that only the killer would have known. She never would have had to go into hiding, never would have had to keep his child from him. “Why the hell not?”
She lifted her chin with pride. “My dad taught me young to respect the code.”
“What code?”
“The journalist code,” she said. “A true journalist never reveals a source.”
Ignoring the pain, he shook his head with disgust. “After the attempts on your life, I think Stanley Jessup would have understood.”
She chuckled. “You don’t know my dad.”
“No,” he said, “you never introduced me. I was your dirty little secret.”
“He would have been mad,” she admitted. “He wouldn’t have wanted me anywhere near you, given your reputation.”
“Good,” Brendan said. He’d worried that the man had put her up to it, to getting close to him for a story. “And if he cared that much for your safety, he would have understood you breaking the code.”
She nodded. “Probably. But I didn’t think so back then. Back then, I figured he would have been happier for me to die than reveal a source.”
“Josie!” He reached for her, to offer assurance. He knew what it was like to feel like a disappointment to one’s father. But when his arms closed around her, he wanted to offer more than sympathy. He wanted her…as he always did.
“But I realized that he wouldn’t have cared about the code. He would have cared only about keeping me safe when I had CJ,” she said. “CJ!”
She said his name with guilt and alarm, as if something bad had happened to their child.
“What? What about CJ?”
*
PULLING HIM OFF her, leaving him, had killed her earlier. She hated disappointing her child. So she’d kept her promise and had brought Brendan with her to pick up their son.
And for the entire day they had acted like a normal family. CJ had proudly showed Brendan all his toys and books, which the rumored mob boss had patiently played with and read to the three-year-old boy. Brendan had also looked through all the photos of their son, seeing in pictures every milestone that had been stolen from him.
Through no fault of his own. It was her fault for not trusting him. But she’d felt then that he had been keeping secrets from her. And she had imagined the worst.
As Brendan, with CJ sitting on his lap, continued to flip through the photo albums, she felt every emotion that flickered across his handsome face, the loss, the regret and the awe. He loved their son.
Could he ever love her?
Or had her lies and mistrust destroyed whatever he might have been able to feel for her? If only she’d known then what that damn story would wind up costing her…
The only man she would ever love.
&n
bsp; He glanced up and caught her watching them, and his beautiful eyes darkened. With anger? Was he mad at her?
She couldn’t blame him. She was mad at herself for all that she had denied him and her son. So today she’d tried making it up to them. She’d made all CJ’s favorite foods, played all his favorite games, and she’d pretended that last night had never happened.
The gunfire. The explosion.
She was actually almost able to forget those. It was making love with Brendan that wouldn’t leave her mind. She could almost feel his lips on hers, his hands on her body.
Feel him inside her…
She shivered.
“Why don’t you take a shower,” he said. “Warm up.”
God, did she still look like hell?
“It’s getting late,” she said. “CJ should go to bed, too.” The little boy had already had his bath. Brendan had helped give it to him. His rolled-up shirtsleeves were still damp from playing with the ducks and boats in the tub.
“I’ll put him to bed,” Brendan offered, as if he didn’t want to waste a minute of the time he had with his son.
She had longed to clean up, so she agreed with a silent nod. But knowing that her little boy had to be tired, she leaned down to press a kiss to his forehead. “Good night, sweetheart.”
Over the red curls of their son, she met Brendan’s gaze. His eyes were dark, but not with anger. At least not anger she felt was directed at her. But he was intense, on edge.
As if he were biding his time…
To leave? Was his desire to tuck CJ in so that he could say goodbye?
*
THE HOUSE WAS small, but it had two bathrooms. So while she was soaking in the tub in the one off her bedroom, he’d used the small shower in the hall bathroom. But when he pushed open the steamed-up door, she was standing there—wrapped in a towel, waiting for him.
His pulse quickened, and his body hardened with desire. Her gaze flicked down him and then up again, her pupils wide with longing.
“Guess I should have locked the door,” he remarked even as he reached for her. He slid his fingers between her breasts, pulling loose the ends of the towel she’d tucked in her cleavage, and then he dragged the towel off her damp body. He pulled the thick terry cloth across his own wet skin as she squeaked in protest.