She realized that even if she had picked up the code Brendan had punched in, she didn’t have the key to work the elevator. He had shoved it back into his pocket.
So she abandoned the elevator and searched for the door to a stairwell. But they were all tall metal doors that looked the same. They could have been apartments. If this place were really an apartment complex …
Its austereness had Josie imagining what Serenity House must have been like. It had her feeling the horror that Charlotte must have felt when she’d been held hostage for six months.
Did Brendan intend to keep her here that long? Longer?
She kept pressing on doors but none of them opened. All were locked to keep her out. Or to keep other people inside?
“Mommy, I wanna go to bed,” CJ whined.
“I know, sweetheart.” Josie was exhausted, too. She wished she were under the covers of her soft bed and that this whole night had been a horrible nightmare.
But the smoke smell clung to her clothes and hair, proving that it hadn’t been a dream. It had happened—every horrible moment of it had been real. She lifted the sleepy child in her arms. For once he didn’t protest being carried but laid his head on her shoulder.
“I’m scared, Mommy.”
“I know.” Me, too. But she couldn’t make that admission to him. She had to stay strong for them both.
“I wanna go home!”
Me, too. Finally one of the doors opened, and she nearly pitched forward, down the stairs. She’d found the stairwell. Her feet struck each step with an echoing thud as she hurried down. Her arms ached from the weight of the child she carried, and her legs began to tremble in exhaustion.
A crack of metal echoed through the stairwell as a door opened with such force it must have slammed against the wall. Then footsteps, heavier than hers, rang out as someone ran down the steps above her. She quickened her pace. But with CJ in her arms, she couldn’t go too fast and risk tumbling down the stairs with him.
Finally she reached the bottom and pushed open the door to the lobby. There was no desk. No security. Nothing but the door with its security lock. She pressed against the outside doors, but they wouldn’t open.
Footsteps crossed the lobby behind her. With a sigh of resignation, she turned to face Brendan.
“ARE YOU GOING to stop running from me now?” he asked as she stepped from his den and rejoined him and CJ in the living room. He hated seeing that look on her face, the one he’d seen at the hospital and again in the lobby—that mixture of fear and dread swirling in her smoky-green eyes.
Because of his last name, a lot of people looked at him with fear and he’d learned to not let it bother him. But he didn’t want her or their son looking at him that way.
While she’d been on the phone with the former marshal, he had made progress with CJ. Before she’d made her call, she’d given the boy a bath and changed him into his pajamas for bed. So Brendan had told the child a bedside story that his mother used to tell him. The story had lulled the boy to sleep in his arms.
Of course the kid had been totally exhausted, too. But even as tired as he’d been, CJ had kept fighting to keep his eyes open and watchful of Brendan. If a three-year-old couldn’t trust him, he probably had no hope of getting a woman, who’d actually witnessed him losing his temper, to trust him.
He eased CJ from his arms onto the couch and then stood up to face the boy’s mother. His son’s mother. She’d been carrying his baby when she’d disappeared. If only she could have trusted him then …
Obviously still distrustful, Josie narrowed her eyes with suspicion. “What did you tell Charlotte?”
He expelled a quick breath of relief. He hadn’t known if he could trust the former U.S. marshal to keep his secrets. Out of professional courtesy she should have. But then, obviously, there wasn’t always any communication or respect between the different agencies. And she was no longer with the marshals.
Unable to suppress a slight grin, he innocently asked, “What do you mean?”
She moved her hand, beckoning him inside the den with her so that they wouldn’t awaken the child. At this point, Brendan wasn’t sure anything—even another explosion—could wake the exhausted boy. But he stepped away from the couch and joined her.
She closed the door behind her and leaned against it with her hands wrapped around the handle, as if she might need to make a quick getaway. After her last attempt, she should have realized she wouldn’t easily escape this complex.
He should have brought her and his son here immediately. But since she’d already been in witness protection, he’d worried that she might recognize a “safe” house and question, as she questioned everything, why he had access to one.
“You know what I mean,” she said, her voice sharp with impatience. “What did you say to make Charlotte Green trust you?”
The truth. But that wasn’t something with which he could trust Stanley Jessup’s daughter. He shrugged as if he wasn’t sure. “What I told her doesn’t really matter. I think it would take a lot more to make you trust me than her.”
“True.” She nodded in agreement. “Because I know you better than Charlotte does.”
Images flashed through his mind, of how she knew him. She knew how to kiss him and touch him to make him lose control. She knew how to make love with him so that he forgot all his responsibilities and worries, so that he thought only of her. And even during all the years she was gone, he’d thought of her. He’d mourned her.
He stepped closer so that she pressed her back against the door. He only had to lean in a few more inches to close the distance between them, to press his body against hers, to show her that she still got to him, that he still wanted her.
His voice was husky with desire when he challenged, “Do you?”
Her pupils darkened as she stared up at him and her voice was husky as she replied, “You know I do.”
Were those images of their entwined naked bodies running through her mind, too? Was she remembering how it felt when he was inside her, as close as two people could get?
She cleared her throat and emphatically added, “I know you.”
“No.” He shook his head. “If you did, you would have known I wasn’t the one who tried to kill you three years ago.”
“But you were so angry with me ….”
“I was,” he agreed. “You were lying to me and tricking me.”
“But I didn’t steal from you.” She defended herself from what he’d told their son earlier.
She had stolen from him; she just didn’t know it. She’d stolen his heart.
But he just shrugged. “My trust …”
“I guess that went both ways,” she said.
“You never trusted me,” he pointed out. “Or you would have known you wouldn’t find the story you were after, that I’m not the man my father was.”
She leaned wearily against the door, as if she were much older than she was. “I never found the story,” she agreed. “And I gave up so much for it.”
She had given up the only life she’d known. Her home. Her family. Brendan could relate to that loss.
Then a small smile curved her lips and she added, “But I got the most important thing in my life.”
“Our son?”
She nodded. “That’s why I have to be careful who I trust. It’s why I have to leave here.”
“You’re