“I already followed up with the hospital,” she said. “He’s recovering. He’ll be fine. And I think he’ll stay fine as long as you stay away from him.”
Pain clutched Josie’s heart. But she couldn’t argue with her friend. She never should have risked going to the hospital.
“You’re in extreme danger,” Charlotte warned her. “Whoever’s after you won’t stop now that they know you’re alive.”
They wouldn’t stop until she was dead for real.
“You have no idea who it could be?” Josie asked. She’d never wanted the facts more than she did now.
“It has to be someone with money,” Charlotte said, “to pay off a U.S. marshal.”
Josie shivered. It wasn’t any warmer in Brendan’s apartment than it was in the hall. But even if it had been, her blood still would have run cold. “And hire several assassins.”
Charlotte gasped. “Several?”
“At least three,” she replied. “More if you count whoever set the bomb.”
“Bomb!” Charlotte’s voice cracked on the exclamation.
“We’re fine,” Josie reminded her. “But whoever’s after me must have deep pockets.”
“It’s probably O’Hannigan,” Charlotte suggested. And she’d no sooner uttered his name than the phone was snapped from Josie’s hand.
Brendan had it now, pressed to his ear, as the former U.S. marshal named him as suspect number one. Charlotte hadn’t been wrong about anything else. She probably wasn’t wrong about this, either.
“If you hurt her, I will track you down—”
He chuckled at the marshal’s vitriolic threat. And he had been accused of getting too personally involved in his job.
Of course, this time he had. But then no one else had been able to take on the assignment. Maybe that was why his father had left him everything. Because Dennis O’Hannigan had known that if anyone ever dared to murder him, Brendan would be the only person capable of bringing his killer to justice.
He couldn’t share any of this with Josie though, not with the risk that she would go public with the information. Risk? Hell, certainty. It would be the story of her career. So he stepped inside his den and closed the door behind him, leaving her standing over their sleeping son.
“I’ll be easy to find,” he assured the marshal. “And I suspect that if anyone gets hurt in my involvement with Josie, it’ll be me.” Just like last time. And he began to explain to her why he couldn’t trust the journalist but why she could trust him.
Of course the marshal was no fool and asked for names and numbers to verify his story. Her thoroughness gave him comfort that she’d been the one protecting Josie all these years. But then she made an admission of her own—that she was no longer on the job.
“What the hell!” he cursed, wishing now that he’d checked her out before he’d told her what so few other people knew. “I thought you had clearance—”
“I do. Through my current security detail, I still have all my clearances and contacts,” she assured him. “But as you know, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be corrupted like so many others have been.”
She was obviously suggesting that he may have been.
“Call those numbers,” he urged her.
“I will,” she promised. “I will also keep protecting Josie. I can’t trust anyone else. That’s why I insisted she stay in hiding even after the marshals deemed she wasn’t really a witness and withdrew their protection. I had to make certain she stayed safe.”
“Why?” he wondered. Then he realized why she’d threatened him, why she cared so much: Josie had become her friend. Hell, the C of CJ’s name, for Charles, was probably for her.
But her answer surprised him when she replied, “Because of you.”
“Because of me?”
“You’re part of a powerful family,” she reminded him needlessly. “You have unlimited resources of both money and manpower. Josie said several gunmen came after her tonight and someone had set a bomb.”
“And those gunmen were shooting at me, too,” he said. “And the bomb was set at my house.”
She sucked in an audible breath of shock.
“I would never hurt her,” Brendan promised. “I can’t believe she thought that I would.” After everything they’d shared.
He hadn’t given her a declaration of his feelings, but he had shown her over and over how he felt. Despite his tough assignment, he’d let her distract him. Of course his superiors had authorized it, saying his having a relationship helped establish his cover—that he would have been more suspicious had he remained on his own.
But hell, he’d been on his own most of his life. He was used to that.
“I protected her and CJ tonight,” he said. “Hell, I would have died for her—for them.” He had wound up having to kill for them instead.
Silence followed his vehement declaration. It lasted so long that he thought he might have lost the connection. Maybe the marshal had hung up on him.
Then she finally spoke again. “I think I know why you wouldn’t hurt her, and it has nothing to do with what you’ve just told me and everything to do with what you haven’t told me.”
Maybe the cell connection was bad, because the woman seemed to make no sense. “What?”
“You love her.”
He’d thought so. Once. But then he’d learned the truth about her and why she’d tried so hard to get close to him. “I can’t love someone I can’t trust.”
She laughed now. “I thought that once, too.”
“But you fell anyway?”
“No,” she said. “My husband did—once Aaron understood my reasons for keeping things from him. He realized that I was only doing my job. Josie will understand when you tell her the truth.”
“I can’t trust her with the truth,” he said.
Charlotte’s sigh rattled the phone. “Then you won’t be able to make her trust you, either.”
“Tell her that she can,” Brendan implored her. “She trusts you.”
“For a good reason,” Charlotte said. “I tell her the truth. And I need to call these people you’ve given me numbers for and check out your story. Once I do, I’ll call Josie back, but I’m not sure she’ll take my word without proof. She’s been afraid of you for a long time.”
Brendan’s heart clutched at the thought of the woman he’d once loved living in fear of him, thinking that he would kill her if he found out she was still alive. Maybe he was more like his old man than he’d realized. He clicked off the cell phone and opened the door to his den, half expecting to find Josie listening outside.
But the apartment was eerily silent. Charlotte was right. He couldn’t make Josie trust him. And now he didn’t have the chance because she’d taken their son and run.
JOSIE WASN’T AS strong as Brendan. She couldn’t carry her son, her purse and the backpack with their overnight clothes and toys, and struggle with the special locks and security panels. So she had awakened CJ for an impromptu game of hide-and-seek.
But