Royal Rescue (8 page)

But what if she’d been right? Then she’d gotten into a vehicle with a killer. Was she about to go away for good?

* * *

T
HE FARTHER THEY
traveled from the hospital, the quieter it was. No gunshots. No sirens. He’d made certain to drive away from the emergency entrance so that he wouldn’t cross paths with ambulances or, worse yet, police cars. It wasn’t quiet only outside, but it was eerily silent inside the vehicle, too.

Brendan glanced at the rearview mirror, his gaze going first to his son. He still couldn’t believe he had a child; he was a
father
.

The boy slept, his red curls matted against the side pad of his booster seat. Drool trickled from the corner of his slightly open mouth. How had he fallen asleep so easily after so much excitement?

Adrenaline still coursed through Brendan’s veins, making his pulse race and his heart pound. But maybe it wasn’t just because of the gunfire and the discovery that Josie was alive and had given birth to his baby.

Maybe it was because of her. She was so close to him that he could feel the warmth of her body. Or maybe that was just the heat of his own attraction to her. She didn’t look exactly the same, but she made him feel the same. Just as before, she
made
him feel when he didn’t want to feel anymore.

She leaned over the console, her shoulder brushing against his as she studied the route he was taking. Did she recognize it? She’d taken it several times over those few months they had gone out. But then that was nearly four years ago.

Four years in which she’d been living another life and apparently not alone. And not with only their son, either.

“This isn’t your vehicle?” Brendan asked, unable to hold back the question any longer. It had been nagging at him since she’d said the plate wasn’t registered to her.

“What?” she asked.

“You borrowed it from someone else?” Or had she taken it from a driveway they shared? Was she living with someone? A boyfriend? A husband?

And what would that man be to CJ? His
uncle?
Stepfather? Or did he just have CJ call him
Daddy?

Had another man claimed Brendan’s son as his?

“Borrowed what?” she asked, her voice sounding distracted as if she were as weary as their son. Or maybe she was wary. Fearful of telling him too much about her new life for fear that he would track her down.

“This vehicle. You borrowed it?” Maybe that was the real reason she had worried about him wrecking it—it would make someone else angry with her.

“No,” she said. “It’s mine.”

Had someone given it to her? Gifted her a vehicle? It might have seemed extravagant to the man. But to Stanley Jessup’s daughter? She was able to buy herself a fleet of luxury vehicles on her weekly allowance.

“But it’s not registered to your name?” he asked. “To your address?”

“No, it’s not,” she said. And her guard was back up.

His jealousy was gone. The vehicle wasn’t a gift; it was registered under someone else’s name and address to protect her, to prevent someone running her plates and finding where she and her son were living.

“You do usually have your guard up,” he observed. “You are very careful.”

“Until tonight,” she murmured regretfully. “I never should have come here.”

“No,” he agreed. “Not if you wanted to stay in hiding.”

“I
have
to stay in hiding.”

“Why?” he asked.

She gasped. “I think, after tonight, it would be quite obvious why I had to...” Her voice cracked, but she cleared her throat and added, “Disappear.”

Brendan nodded in sudden realization of where she had been for almost four years. “You’ve been in witness protection.”

Her silence gave him the answer that he should have come to long ago. He was painfully familiar with witness protection. But he couldn’t tell her that. Her identity might have changed, but he suspected at heart she was still a reporter. He couldn’t tell her anything without the risk of it showing up in one of her father’s papers or on one of his news programs.

So he kept asking the questions. “Why were you put in witness protection?”

What had she seen? What did she know? Maybe she’d learned, in those few short months, more than he’d realized. More than he had learned in four years.

“What did you witness?” he asked.

She shrugged and her shoulder bumped against his. “Nothing that I was aware of. Nothing I could testify about.”

“Then why would the marshals put you in
witness
protection?”

Her breath shuddered out, caressing his cheek. “Because someone tried to kill me.”

“Was it like tonight?” he asked.

She snorted derisively. “You don’t know?”

So she assumed he would know how someone had tried to kill her. But he didn’t. “You were shot at back then?”

“No,” she said. “The attempts were more subtle than that. A cut brake line on my car.” She had driven a little sports car—too fast and too recklessly. He remembered the report of her accident. At the time he had figured her driving had caused it. She was lucky that the accident hadn’t killed her. “And then there was the explosion.”

“That was subtle,” he scoffed. The explosion had destroyed the house she’d been staying in, as well as her “remains,”
so that she’d only been identifiable by DNA. “It wasn’t just a ploy the marshals used to put you into witness protection?”

She shook her head and now her hair brushed his cheek. His skin tingled and heated in reaction to her maddening closeness. He should have told her to sit back and buckle up next to their son. Or pulled her over the console into the passenger’s seat.

But she was closer where she was, so he said nothing.

“No,” Josie replied. “Someone found the supposedly
safe
house where I was staying after the cut brake line and set the bomb to try again to kill me.”

No wonder she’d gone into protection again. Faking her death might have been the only way to keep her alive. But he might have come up with another way...if she’d told him about the attempts.

But they hadn’t been talking then. He’d been too furious with her when he’d discovered that she’d been duping him—only getting close for a damn exposé for her father’s media organizations. Once Brendan had figured out her pen name, he’d found the stories she’d done. No one had been safe around her, not even her classmates when she’d been at boarding school and later at college.

None of her friends had been safe from her, either. Maybe that was why she’d had few when they’d met. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for her to leave everyone behind.

Including him.

Except her father. That was why she’d come to the hospital after he’d been assaulted. Perhaps they hadn’t actually severed contact, as she had with Brendan—never even letting him know he’d become a father.

She probably didn’t know the identity of her would-be killer or she wouldn’t have had to stay in hiding all this time. But he asked anyway. “Who do you think was trying to kill you?”

She answered without hesitation and with complete certainty, “You.”

Chapter Seven

Maybe Josie was as tired as her son was. Why else would she have made such an admission? Moreover, why else would she have let him drive her here—of all places?

She should have recognized the route, since her gaze had never left the road as he’d driven them away from the hospital. She had driven here so many times over those months when they had been seeing each other. She’d preferred going to his place, hoping that she would find something or overhear something the police didn’t know that could have led her to a break in his father’s murder investigation.

And she hadn’t wanted him to find anything at her apartment that would have revealed that she was so much more than just the empty-headed heiress so many others had thought she was. Things like her journalism awards or her diploma or the scrapbook of articles she’d published under her pseudonym.

But it didn’t matter that he had never found any of those things. Somehow he’d learned the truth about who she was anyway. And after the ferocious fight they’d had, the attempts on her life had begun.

“How could you think I would have tried to kill you?” he asked, his voice a rasp in the eerie silence of the vehicle. Even CJ wasn’t making any sounds as he slept so deeply and quietly.

Brendan had pulled the SUV through the wrought-iron gates of the O’Hannigan estate, but they had yet to open the car doors. They remained sealed in that tomblike silence he’d finally broken with his question.

“How could I
not
think it was you?” she asked, keeping her voice to a low whisper so that she didn’t wake her son. He didn’t need to know that tonight wasn’t the first time a bad man had tried to hurt his mommy. Even the authorities had suspected Brendan O’Hannigan was responsible. That was why they’d offered her protection—to keep her alive to testify against him once they found evidence that he’d been behind the attempts. “Who else would want me dead?”

He turned toward her, and since she still leaned over the console, he was close. His face was just a breath away from hers. And his eyes—the same rare blue-green as her son’s—were narrowed, his brow furrowed with confusion as he stared at her. “Why would
I
want you dead?”

“I lied to you. I tricked you,” she said, although she doubted he needed any reminders. And given how angry he’d been with her, she shouldn’t have reminded him, shouldn’t have brought back all his rage and vengeance. He might forget that she was the mother of his son. Of course he had earlier mentioned those things to their son. He’d included stealing, too, although she’d stolen nothing from him but perhaps his trust.

Despite how angry he’d been, Brendan literally shrugged off her offenses, as if they were of no consequence to him. His broad shoulder rubbed against hers, making her skin tingle even beneath her sweater and jacket. “I’ve been lied to and tricked before,” he said.

She doubted that many people would have been brave enough to take on Dennis O’Hannigan’s son—the man that many people claimed was a chip off the block of evil. She still couldn’t believe that she had summoned the courage. But then she’d been a different woman four years ago. She’d been an adrenaline junkie who had gotten high on the rush of getting the story. The more information she had discovered the more excited she had become. She hadn’t been only brave—she’d been fearless.

Then she had become a mother, and she had learned what fear was. Now she was always afraid, afraid that her son would get sick or hurt or scared. Or that whoever had tried to kill her would track them down and hurt him.

And tonight that fear, her deepest, darkest fear, had been realized. She shuddered, chilled by the thought. But the air had grown cold inside the car now that Brendan had shut off the engine. His heavily muscled body was close and warm, but the look on his ridiculously handsome face was cold. Even colder than the air.

“And,” he continued, “I never killed any of those people.”

With a flash of that old fearlessness, she scoffed, “Never?” All the articles about Brendan O’Hannigan alleged otherwise. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”

“You, of all people, should know better than to believe everything you hear or read,” he advised her.

Growing up the daughter of a media magnate, she’d heard the press disparaged more than she’d heard fairy tales. Fairy tales. What was a bigger lie than a fairy tale? Than a promise of happily-ever-after?

“If it’s coming from a credible source, which all of my father’s news outlets are, then you should believe the story,” she said.

He snorted. “What makes a source
credible?
”

As the daughter of a newsman, she’d grown up instinctively knowing what a good source was. “An insider. Someone close to the story.”

“An eyewitness?” He was the one scoffing now.

She doubted anyone had witnessed him committing any crime and lived to testify. She shivered again and glanced at their son. She shouldn’t have put his life in the hands of a killer. But the gunman in the garage had given her no choice. Neither had Brendan.

“Even grand juries rarely issue an indictment on eyewitness testimony,” he pointed out, as if familiar with the legal process. “They need evidence to bring charges.”

Had he personally been brought before a grand jury? Or was he just familiar with the process from all the times district attorneys had tried to indict his father? But she knew better than to ask the questions that naturally came to her. He had never answered any of her questions before.

But he kept asking his own inquiries. “Is there any evidence that I’m a—” Brendan glanced beyond her, into the backseat where their son slept peacefully, angelically “—a bad man?”

She hadn’t been able to find anything that might have proven his guilt. She’d looked hard for that evidence—not just for her story but also for herself. She’d wanted a reason not to give in to her attraction to him, a reason not to fall for him.

But when, as a journalist, she hadn’t been able to come up with any cold, hard facts, she’d let herself, as a woman, fall in love with an incredibly charming and smart man. And then he’d learned the truth about her.

What was the truth about him?

* * *

B
RENDAN WAITED
, but she didn’t answer him. Could she really believe that he was a killer? Could she really believe that he had tried to kill
her?

Sure, he had been furious because she’d deceived him. But he’d only been so angry because he’d let himself fall for her. He’d let himself believe that she might have fallen for him, too, when she’d actually only been using him.

He wasn’t the only one she’d used. There were the friends in boarding school she’d used as inside sources to get dirt on their famous parents. Then there was the Peterson kid in college with a violence and drug problem that the school had been willing to overlook to keep their star athlete. She’d used her friendship with the kid to blow the lid off that, too. Hell, her story had probably started all the subsequent exposés on college athletic programs. It had also caused the kid to kill himself.