“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.
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