Royal Rescue

chapter Eleven

While she’d held the gun when he’d handed it to her, the weight of it was still unfamiliar in her hands. Before tonight she hadn’t held one in years, let alone fired one. And when she had fired one, it had only been at targets—not people.

Could she pull the trigger on a person?

“Mommy, the ’larm clock is too loud,” CJ protested with his tiny hands tightly pressed against his ears.

Brendan scooped him up and headed toward the apartment door. “Grab your stuff,” he told her over his shoulder. He carried the boy with one arm while he clutched a gun in his other hand.

“Sh-shouldn’t we stay here?” she asked. “And just lock the door?”

His turquoise eyes intense, he shook his head. “We don’t know if the breach was someone getting inside or putting something inside.”

A bomb.

Josie gasped and hurried toward the door. But she slammed into Brendan’s back as he abruptly stopped.

“We have to be very quiet,” he warned them.

“CJ, you have to play statue,” she told their son. “No matter what happens, you have to be quiet.”

“Like on the roof?”

Not like that. She wouldn’t dare leave her little boy alone in the dark again. “Well...”

“We’re all staying together,” Brendan said, “and we’re staying quiet.”

She released a shaky sigh.

“Mommy, shh,” the little boy warned her.

A corner of Brendan’s mouth lifted in a slight grin. Then he slowly opened the door. He nodded at her before stepping into the hall. It was clear. He wouldn’t have brought their son into the line of fire.

But they needed to get out of the building. Fast.

She breathed deep, checking for the telltale odor of gas. But she smelled nothing but Brendan; the scent of his skin clung to hers. While they’d been making love, someone had gotten inside the building.

What if that person had gotten inside the apartment? He or they could have grabbed CJ before his parents had had a chance to reach him.

Her heart ached with a twinge of guilt more powerful than any she’d felt before. And she’d felt plenty guilty over the years.

She followed after Brendan, watching as he juggled the boy and his gun. “If we’re taking the elevator...”

He would need to give her the code to punch into the security panel. But he shook his head and pushed open the door to the stairwell.

Of course they wouldn’t want to be in the elevator. If the building exploded, they would be trapped. But wouldn’t they be trapped inside the stairwell, too? If the gunmen were heading up, they would meet them on the way down—and CJ would be caught in the crossfire.

Brendan didn’t hesitate though. He hurried down the first flight and then the second.

“Brendan...”

Over his father’s shoulder, their little boy pressed a finger to his lips, warning her again to be quiet.

They had stopped, but their footsteps echoed. Then she realized it wasn’t their footsteps that were echoing. It was someone else’s—on their way up, as she’d feared. But Brendan continued to go down.

“No,” she whispered frantically. “They’re coming!”

He stopped on the next landing and pushed open the door to the hall. “Run,” he told her.

“To the elevator?” They could take it now. The men wouldn’t have come inside if they’d set a bomb.

“No,” he said. “Door at the end of the hall. Go through it.” He pushed her ahead of him and turned back as the door to the stairwell opened. But he kept his back toward that door, his body between their son and whoever might exit the stairwell. Before anyone emerged, he fired and kept firing as he ran behind Josie.

She pushed through that door he’d pointed at and burst onto a landing with such force that she nearly careened over the railing of the fire escape. Brendan, CJ clutched tight against his chest, exited behind her.

He momentarily holstered his gun, even though the men had to be right behind him, and he grabbed up a pipe that lay on the landing and slid it through the handle, jamming the door shut.

How had he known the pipe was there? Had he planned such an escape before?

The door rattled as another body struck it.

“Go,” he told her. “Run!”

She nearly stumbled as she hurried down the dimly illuminated metal steps. But gunfire rang out again—shots fired against that jammed door.

Brendan, still holding their son, who was softly sobbing, rushed down the stairs behind her. The shots, the urgency, the danger had her trembling so uncontrollably that she slipped, her feet flying from beneath her.

She would have fallen, would have hit each metal step on the long way to the ground. But a strong hand caught her arm, holding her up while she regained her footing.

When they neared the bottom of the fire escape, the gun was back in his hand, the light from the parking lot lamps glinting off the metal.

She hadn’t lost the gun she’d carried. She hadn’t used it, either, and wasn’t even sure that she could. But then she heard a car door open and a gun cock.

And she knew that someone had a clear shot at them. So she slid off the safety and turned with the gun braced in both hands. But before she could squeeze the trigger, a shot rang out and she heard a windshield shatter.

“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 trust her.”

“She told me to trust you,” she reminded him. “So now you’re saying that I shouldn’t?”

“No, no,” he said. “You should trust me but not her. Remember what you told our son—I’m not a bad man. I’ve saved you.”

Something jammed into his ribs, and he glanced down. She held the gun he’d given her, not just on him but nearly in him as she pushed the barrel into his side. After the night she’d had, he could understand her losing it. But was she irrational enough to pull the trigger?

Had she slid off the safety? If he hit a bump in the road, she might squeeze the trigger. She might shoot him and then he might crash the SUV and take them all out.

He hadn’t realized that he might need to protect Josie from herself.

* * *

HE WAS LOOKING at her nervously, as if he worried that she’d lost her mind. Maybe she had.

Could she do it? Could she pull the trigger? If she had to... If killing Brendan was necessary to save her life or CJ’s.

But she believed what she’d told their son. He was a hero—at least he had been their hero—time and time again the past night. Moreover, she believed in him.

She had the safety on the gun, in case there were any bullets left in it. She hoped like hell there were none. But with Brendan looking as nervous as he was, he obviously thought there could be.

And he thought she could fire the gun.

Good. That was the only way she was going to coerce him to take her where she wanted to go. Where she needed to go. Home.

“We’re doing things my way now,” she said. Since the shoot-out at the hospital, he had brought her from one place to another and neither had been safe.

“You’re not going to pull the trigger,” he said. “You’re not a killer.”

She flinched, hoping that was true. She’d fired the gun back at the complex. Had she hit anyone?

She shot back at him with a smart remark. “Guess that makes one of us.”

“Then why pull the gun on me if you don’t intend to use it?” he asked, his body pressed slightly against the barrel of her gun as if he were beginning to relax. Had he realized that she hadn’t gone crazy? That she was just determined?

“I don’t want to use it,” she admitted, “but I will if you don’t take me where I want to go.”

“It’s too dangerous,” he protested. “Since Charlotte gave up our safe house, she sure as hell gave up the place where she relocated you.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I told you—for money.”

She laughed again. “Do you have any idea who Charlotte Green is?”

He glanced at her with that look again, as if he thought she belonged in a place like Serenity House. “A former U.S. marshal.”

“Her father is king of a wealthy island country near Greece,” she shared. The last thing Charlotte needed was money. “She’s a princess.”

“What?” He definitely thought she was crazy now.

“She’s Princess Gabriella St. Pierre’s sister,” she explained. “They’re royal heiresses.” Of course Charlotte had spent most of her life unaware that she was royalty. Only upon her mother’s death had she learned the woman had been the king’s mistress and herself his illegitimate heir.

“So are you.”

She snorted over the miniscule amount of royal blood running in her veins. Her mother had been a descendent of European royalty, but she’d given up her title to marry Josie’s father. “Not anymore,” she reminded him. “I gave up that life.”

And she shouldn’t have risked coming back to it, not even to see her father, because her arrival had only put him in more danger. God, she hoped he was safe. She had asked Charlotte to check on him, to protect him. What if Brendan was actually right about her?

No, that wasn’t possible. Charlotte would never betray her.

“I have a new home,” she said. “And we’re going there. It might be the only safe place we have left to go.”

“Or it could be a trap,” he said. “They could be waiting for us there.”

“Charlotte wouldn’t have given us up,” she said. “She’s CJ’s godmother. My friend. She wouldn’t have given us up.”

She barked out directions, and he followed them. She suspected it wasn’t because of the gun she pressed into his side but because he had no place else to take her. He’d tried the O’Hannigan mansion and what had probably been some type of safe house. Why had no other tenants come out into the halls when the alarm had sounded? Why had it only been them and the gunmen?

“What if you’re wrong about her?” he asked. “What if she’s not really who you think she is?”

Then Charlotte wouldn’t be the only one she’d misjudged. Brendan O’Hannigan wasn’t who she’d thought he was, either. She had been wrong about him for so long. What if she was wrong about Charlotte, too? What if the marshal had been compromised?

She wouldn’t have sold out Josie for money, but she might have sold her out if there was a threat against someone she loved, such as her sister. Or Aaron...

The closer they got to her home, the more scared Josie became that Brendan might be right. They could be walking right into the killer’s trap.