by Lisa Childs
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 she hoped Brendan never found them.
CJ was too tired to play though. The poor child had had such a traumatic day that he was physically and emotionally exhausted. He leaned heavily against Josie’s legs, nearly knocking her over as she stood near the elevator panel.
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 safe here,” he assured her. Only people who knew what he really was knew about this place. Until tonight, when he’d taken her here.
She shook her head. “Not here. CJ and I need to go home. We’ve been safe there. I know I can keep him safe.”
He appreciated that she was a protective mother. “You don’t have to do that alone anymore.”
“I haven’t,” she said. “I had Charlotte. She was even in the delivery room with me.”
That was why Josie had named their son after the U.S. marshal.
“She’s too far away to help you now,” he pointed out. “That’s why she told you to—” he stepped closer and touched her face, tipping her chin up so she would meet his gaze “—let me.”
She stared up at him, her eyes wide as if she were searching. For what?
Goodness? Honor?
He wasn’t certain she would find them no matter how hard she looked. In his quest for justice for his father, he had had to bury deep any signs of human decency—at least when he was handling business. When he’d been with her, he’d let down his guard. He’d been himself even though he hadn’t told her who he was.
“What would I have to say to you,” he asked, “to make you trust me?”
“Whatever you told Charlotte,” she said. “Tell me what you told her.”
He shook his head. “I can’t trust you with that information.”
She jerked her chin from his hand as if unable to bear his touch any longer. “But you expect me to trust you—not with just my life, but CJ’s, too.”
She had a point. But he’d worked so long, given up so much.
If only she hadn’t lied to him…
He flinched over her disdainful tone. “Why would I be more untrustworthy than anyone else?”
“Like you don’t know why,” she said.
“Because of who I am?”
“Because of what you are.”
Charlotte had definitely not told her anything that he had shared with the former U.S. marshal.
“What am I?”
“I never got my story about you,” she said, “because you never answered my questions. But I need you to answer at least one if you expect me to stay here.”
He nodded in agreement. “I’ll answer one,” he replied. “But how do you know I’ll tell you the truth?”
“Swear on your mother’s grave.”
He wouldn’t need to tell her the truth then, because his mother wasn’t dead. Like everyone else, he had believed she’d been murdered when he was just a kid. But she was actually the first person he’d known who’d entered witness protection. The marshals hadn’t let her take him along, forcing her to leave a child behind with a man many had considered a psychopath as well as her killer.
If Brendan hadn’t run away when he was fifteen, he might have never learned the truth about either of his parents.
“Do you swear?” she prodded him. “Will you answer me honestly?”
“Yes,” he agreed, and hoped like hell he wouldn’t have to lie to her. But no matter what he’d promised her, he couldn’t tell her what he really was. “What do you want to know?”
“Before tonight, before those men on the roof—” she shuddered as though remembering the blood and the gunshots “—have you killed anyone else?”
He had promised her the truth, so he answered truthfully. “Yes.”
Chapter Ten
He was a killer. Maybe she should have believed everything she had heard and read about him—even the unsubstantiated stories.
“But just like tonight, it was in self-defense,” he explained, his deep voice vibrating with earnestness and regret, as though killing hadn’t been easy for him. “I have only killed when there’s been no other option, when it’s been that person’s life or mine, or the life of an innocent person.” He flinched as if reliving some of those moments. “Like you or our son.”
“You’ve been in these life-and-death situations before tonight,” she said.
He nodded.
“How many times?” she asked. “Twice? Three times?”
“I agreed to answer only one question,” he reminded her.
She swallowed hard, choking on the panic she felt just thinking of all the times he’d been in danger, all the times he could have died. “And you were trying to say I was responsible for what happened tonight. And for the attempts on my life years ago. You’re the one leading the dangerous life.”
He stepped back from her and sighed. “You’re right.”
She appealed to him. “So you need to let us leave, to let me go home.”
“I can’t do that.”
“How can you expect to keep me and CJ safe when you’re always fighting for your own life?” she asked.
He stripped off his suit jacket. Despite the crazy night they’d had, it was barely wrinkled, but he carelessly dropped it on the floor. And in doing so, he revealed the holsters strapped across his broad shoulders, a gun under each heavily muscled arm. She’d already known about the concealed weapons; she’d already seen all of his guns. Then he reached up and pulled one of those guns from its holster and pointed it toward her.
She gasped and stepped back, but she was already against the door and had no place else to go. Unless she opened the door, but then her son might see that the man he didn’t even realize yet was his father was holding a gun on his mother.
“What—what are you doing?” she stammered. “I—I thought you wanted me to trust you.”
“That’s why I’m giving you this gun,” he said. The handle, not the barrel, was pointed toward her. “Take it.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Don’t you know how to shoot one?”
“Charlotte taught me.” The marshal had taken her to the shooting range over and over again until Josie had gotten good at it. “She tried to give me one, too. But I didn’t want it.”
“You
don’t like guns?”
Until tonight, when they’d been shooting at her, Josie hadn’t had any particular aversion to firearms. “I don’t want one in the same house with CJ.”
“You can lock it up,” Brendan said, “to make sure he doesn’t get to it.”
“So if I take this gun, you’ll let us leave?” she asked, reaching for it. The metal was cold to the touch and heavy across her palms. She identified the safety, grateful it was engaged.
He shook his head. “Until we find out who’s trying to kill you, I can’t let you or our son out of my sight.”
“Then why give me this?”
“So you’ll trust me,” he said. “If I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn’t give you a gun to protect yourself.”
She expelled a ragged sigh, letting all her doubts and fears of Brendan go with the breath from her lungs. A bad man wouldn’t have given her the means to defend herself from him. Had she been wrong about him all these years?
Had she kept him from his son for no reason?
Guilt descended on her, bowing her shoulders with the heavy burden of it she already carried. For her student, and for that other young man’s death she’d inadvertently caused. She hadn’t needed Brendan to remind her that there were other people with reason to want to hurt her, as she’d hurt them. She hadn’t meant to.
She’d only been after the truth. But sometimes the truth caused more pain than letting secrets remain secret. If only she’d understood that sooner…
“Are you okay?” he asked, his deep voice full of concern.
How could he care about her—after everything she’d thought of him, everything she’d taken from him? He had been right that she’d stolen from him. She had taken away the first three years of his son’s life.
Her hands trembled so much that she quickly slid the gun into her purse so that she wouldn’t drop it. “I—I’m fine,” she said. “I’m just overwhelmed.”
“You’re exhausted,” he said.
And he was touching her again, his hands on her shoulders. He led her toward the couch. Like the one in the living room, it was wide and low, and as she sank onto the edge of it, it felt nearly as comfortable as a mattress.
