“Come on,” Brendan urged her. “Your car’s over here. Hurry.”
“But—”
There was a shooter in the lot. Or had Brendan already shot him? The gun was in his free hand while his other hand clasped their son to his chest.
“Do you have the keys?” he asked.
She pulled them out of her purse and clicked the key fob. Lights flashed on the SUV, guiding them to it and also revealing it to the gunmen as they erupted from the lobby of the building.
This time she squeezed the trigger, shooting at the men pointing guns at her son and the man she loved. The weapon kicked back, straining her wrist.
“Get in!” Brendan yelled as he put their boy into the backseat. “Buckle him up!”
She dropped the gun into her bag and jumped into the passenger’s seat. As she leaned over the console and buckled up their son, Brendan was already careening out of the lot.
“Stay down!” he yelled at her, just as more shots rang out. Bullets pinged and tires squealed.
And their son continued to play statue, staying silent in the backseat. “You’re so brave,” she praised him, reaching back to touch his face.
His chin quivered and she felt moisture on her fingers—probably his tears. But he had his eyes squeezed tightly shut, trying not to cry. She pulled back her hand and studied what was smeared across her fingers. It wasn’t tears. It was something red and sticky. Blood.
“Brendan! He’s hurt!” she exclaimed, fear and dread clutching her heart in a tight vise. “Get to the hospital!
Call the police!”
“NO,” HE CORRECTED her as blood trickled down his temple. “CJ wasn’t hit.” He’d made damn certain of that.
“Th-there’s blood on his face,” she said, her voice shaking with fear and anger.
Brendan tipped the rearview mirror and studied their son in the backseat. The little boy scrubbed at his face and held up a hand sticky with blood. “It’s not mine, Mommy. It came off …” His son didn’t know what to call him, didn’t know who he was to him.
“Your daddy,” Brendan answered the boy. “I’m your daddy.”
Josie gasped, probably at his audacity for telling their child who he was. But then she was reaching across the console and touching his head. “Where are you hit?”
“Daddy?” CJ asked.
Brendan’s head pounded. He wanted to pull off the road, wanted to explain to his son who he was, wanted to let Josie touch him. But he had to tip the mirror back up and check the road behind them. Had anyone followed them?
He’d thought he’d been vigilant on his way from the estate to the complex, that he hadn’t been followed. Had he missed a tail?
With blood trickling into his eyes, he was more likely to miss one now, so he asked Josie, “Do you see anything?”
Her fingers stroked through his hair. “No. Where were you hit?”
He shook his head, and the pain radiated, making him wince. “I wasn’t hit,” he replied, lifting his fingers to his left temple. “I was grazed. It’s just a scratch.” A scratch that stung like a son of a bitch, but he ignored the pain and focused on the road. “Is there anyone behind us?”
“What?” She must have realized what he was referring to, because she turned around and peered out the rear window. “I don’t see any other lights.”
The roads were deserted this early in the morning. He passed only a garbage truck going the other direction. No one was behind him. No one had been behind him earlier, either. He blinked back the trickle of blood and remarked, “I was not followed to the complex.”
“So how did they find us?” she asked.
“Daddy?” CJ repeated from the backseat, interrupting them. “You’re my daddy?”
Josie sucked in an audible breath as if just noticing that Brendan had told their son who he was. He waited to see if she would deny it now, if she would call him a liar for claiming his child. If she did, he would call her on the lie. After his close call with that bullet, he wanted his son to know who he was … before it was too late. Before he never got the chance to tell him.
Josie turned toward the backseat and offered their son a shaky smile. “Yes, sweetheart, he’s your daddy.”
“I—I thought he was a bad man.”
Josie shook her head. “No, sweetheart, he’s a good man. A hero. He keeps saving us from the bad men.”
Was she saying that for the boy’s sake? To make CJ feel better? Safer? Or did she believe it? Had she finally really come to trust Brendan, even though he hadn’t told her the truth?
“My daddy …” the little boy murmured, as if he were falling back to sleep. Given that his slumber kept getting violently interrupted, it was no wonder that the little boy was still tired.
“Well, we know who I am,” Brendan said. A hero? Did she really see him that way? “What about who’s after us?”
She kept staring into the backseat as if watching her son to make sure that the blood really wasn’t his. Or that the news of his parentage hadn’t affected him.
“Whoever it is,” he said, “appears to want us both dead.”
“They’re gone,” she murmured. Apparently she’d been watching the back window instead. “We’re safe now.”
“We should have been safe where we were,” he replied. It was a damn safe house.
“We need to go home,” she murmured, sounding as dazed as their son. But she wasn’t just tired; she was probably in shock. She’d fired her gun at people. If that had been the first time, she was probably having an emotional reaction. She was trembling and probably not just because the car had yet to warm up. “We need to go home,” she repeated.
She wasn’t talking about his home. Neither the mansion where he’d grown up nor the apartment where he’d spent much of his adult life was safe. But she couldn’t be talking about her place, either.
Maybe her father’s? But if the news reports were correct, he’d been attacked in the parking garage of his condominium complex.
“We can’t,” he said. “It’s not safe at your dad’s, either.”
“We have to go home,” she said, her voice rising slightly now, as if with hysteria. “To what CJ and I call home, where we’ve been living.”
“Don’t you get it?” he asked. “The only one who could have tracked down where we were was your friend.’’
She leaned forward and peered into his face as if worried that the bullet had impaired his thinking. “Friend?”
“The former marshal,” he said. “She must have traced the call to where we were staying. She sent those people.” It couldn’t have been anyone else. Damn! Why had he trusted the woman?
Josie sucked in an audible breath of shock. “Charlotte? You think Charlotte is behind the attempts on my life?”
“No.” He knew she considered the woman a friend, at one point maybe her only friend. And she had to be devastated. But she also had to know the truth. “But she must have sold out to whoever wants you dead.”
Josie chuckled. Maybe she’d given over completely to hysteria and shock. “You think Charlotte Green sold out?”
He nodded, and his head pounded again. “It had to be her. You can’t