Royal Rescue

chapter Twelve

Brendan could have taken the gun away from her at any time. He could have snapped it out of her hand more easily than he had taken the weapon off the faux orderly who’d grabbed him on the sixth floor. But he hadn’t wanted to hurt her. She had already been hurt enough. And if he was right, she was about to be hurt a hell of a lot more.

He intimately knew how painful it was to be betrayed by someone you loved. As a friend, as a lifeline to her old life, she had loved Charlotte Green. And he’d been fool enough to trust the woman with the truth about himself.

But he’d wanted her to convince Josie to trust him. Now Josie held a gun on him, forcing him to bring her back to a trap. Should he trust her?

Was she part of it? Was this all a ploy to take him down? If not for the boy, he might have suspected her involvement in a murder plot against him. But she loved her son. She wouldn’t knowingly endanger him.

As he drove north, light from the rising sun streamed through her window, washing her face devoid of all color. Her eyes were stark, wide with fear, in her pale face.

“Are you sure you want to risk it?” he asked.

“You’re trying to make me doubt myself,” she said. “Trying to make me doubt Charlotte.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

She looked at him, her eyes filling with sadness and pity. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“I shouldn’t have,” he said. “But I trusted you.”

She pulled the gun slightly away from his side. “You gave me this gun.”

“The one you’re holding on me.”

“I wouldn’t really shoot you,” she assured him, and with a sigh, she dropped the gun back into her purse.

“I know.”

“Then why did you come here?” She sat up straighter as they passed a sign announcing the town limits of Sand Haven, Michigan. Another sign stood beyond that, a billboard prompting someone named Michael to rest in peace.

Josie flinched as she read the sign.

“Do you know Michael?” he asked.

She jerked her chin in a sharp nod. “I knew him.”

“I’m sorry.” Had her recent loss explained why she’d been so desperate to see her father that she’d risked her safety and CJ’s?

She hadn’t been in contact with her father, as he’d initially expected. The man, who’d looked so sad and old at her funeral, had believed she was dead just as Brendan had.

“You hadn’t seen your dad until—” he glanced at the sun rising high in the sky “—last night?”

“I didn’t see him last night, either,” she said.

“But you were on the right floor,” he said, remembering the lie she’d told him.

She bit her lip and blinked hard, as if fighting tears, before replying, “The assault brought on a heart attack. I didn’t want his seeing me to bring on another one.”

“So he has no idea that you’re really alive?”

She shook her head. “I thought it would be better if he didn’t know. I thought he’d be safer.”

“You and your father were close,” he said. “It must have been hard to leave him.”

“Harder to deceive him,” she said.

But she’d had no problem deceiving him when she’d been trying to get her story. But then she hadn’t loved him.

He drew in a deep breath and focused on the road. She’d given him directions right to her door. Giving her the gun had made her trust him. But she had placed her trust in someone she shouldn’t have.

“Let me go in first,” he suggested as he drove past the small white bungalow where she lived now. “Let me make sure that it’s not a trap.”

She shuddered as if she remembered the bomb set at his house. There had been very little left of the brick Tudor; it wouldn’t take a very big bomb to totally decimate her modest little home.

He turned the corner and pulled the SUV over to the curb on the next street. After shifting into Park, he reached for the door handle, but she clutched his arm.

Her voice cracking, she said, “I don’t want you to go alone.”

“You can’t go with me,” he said. “You have to protect our son.”

“If you can’t?” She shook her head. “It’s not a trap. It can’t be a trap.” She had been on her own so long that she was desperately hanging on to her trust for the one person who’d been there for her.

He forced a reassuring smile for her sake. “Then I’ll be right back.”

She stared at him, her eyes wide with uncertainty. She wanted to believe him as much as she wanted to believe that Charlotte hadn’t betrayed her.

“I’ll be back.” He leaned across the console and clasped her face in his hands, tipping her mouth up for his kiss. He lingered over her lips, caressing them slowly and thoroughly. “Wait here for me.”

She opened her mouth again, but she made no protest. He opened the driver’s door and then opened the backseat door. She turned and looked over the console as he leaned in and pressed a kiss against his son’s mussed red curls. The boy never stirred from his slumber.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you for telling him that I’m his father.”

“You told him.”

“But you didn’t contradict me,” he said. “He would have believed what you told him over whatever I told him.” Because he loved and trusted his mother. Brendan was a stranger to him. And if he was right about the trap, he may forever remain a stranger to him.

The little boy might grow up never knowing his father.

* * *

BRENDAN HAD BEEN gone too long. Longer than he needed to check out the house and make sure it was as safe as she was hoping it was.

But what if it wasn’t?

The keys dangled from the ignition. He hadn’t taken them this time, because he wasn’t sure he’d be coming back. Josie’s heart rate quickened, pounding faster with each second that passed.

She needed to go to her house. Needed to check on him.

Or perhaps she should call Charlotte for backup. But he wouldn’t need backup unless Charlotte had betrayed them. Panic and dread clutched her heart. Not Charlotte. Not her friend, her son’s godmother.

Charlotte couldn’t have revealed Josie’s new location, not even to protect someone else. But maybe someone had found out anyway. Josie needed to learn the truth.

She wriggled out of the passenger’s seat, over the console and behind the steering wheel. Then she turned the keys in the ignition.

CJ murmured as the engine started. He was waking up. She couldn’t leave him in the car and she couldn’t bring him with her—in case Brendan was right about her house being a trap now.

So she brought her son where she brought him every morning, where she would have brought him that morning if she hadn’t taken a leave from work. She drove him to day care. It was only a few blocks from her house, at the home of a retired elementary schoolteacher.

Mrs. Mallory watched CJ and two other preschool children. The sixty-something woman opened the door as Josie carried him up the walk. And the smile on her face became tight with concern the closer Josie came.

“Are you all right?” the older woman anxiously asked.

How awful did she look?

A glance in the mirror by the door revealed dark circles beneath her eyes, and her hair was tangled and mussed, looking as though she’d not pulled a comb through it in days. She probably hadn’t.

“I’m fine,” Josie assured her. “I’m just in a hurry.”

Mrs. Mallory reached out for the sleepy child. “I wasn’t even expecting you. I thought you were taking some time off.” As she cradled the boy in one arm, she squeezed Josie’s shoulder with her other hand. “You really should. Let this whole tragic situation with Michael die down.”

“So people are blaming me?”

Mrs. Mallory bit her lip and nodded. “It’s not your fault, though, honey. That boy wanted to be a reporter since he wasn’t much older than CJ here.”

“But I suggested the story....”

“But you didn’t pull the trigger,” the older woman pointed out. “People are blaming the wrong person and they’ll realize that soon enough. Just give them some time. Or take some for yourself.”

She had no time to lose—not if Brendan had walked into a trap. “Even though you weren’t planning on it, would you mind watching him for a little while?”

“’Course not,” the older woman assured her, and she cuddled him close in her arms. She was wearing one of the velour tracksuits that CJ loved snuggling into. “I was just starting to miss him.”

CJ lifted his head from Mrs. Mallory’s shoulder as if just realizing where he was. “Daddy? Where’s my daddy?”

Mrs. Mallory’s eyes widened with shock. The boy had never mentioned him before. Of course, before last night he hadn’t even known he had a father. Or a grandfather.

“You have to stay here with Mrs. M,” Josie told him, leaning forward to press a kiss against his freckled cheek, “and be a good boy, okay?”

His bottom lip began to quiver and his eyes grew damp with tears he fought back with quick blinks. “What if the bad men come here?”

“Bad men?” Mrs. Mallory asked, her brow wrinkling with confusion and uneasiness.

Josie shrugged off the question. “He must have had a bad dream.”

If only that had been all it was...

Just a bad dream.

The little boy vehemently shook his head. “The bad men were real and had guns. They were shootin’ at us and then there was a big bang!”

Josie shook her head, too, trying to quiet the boy’s fears and Mrs. Mallory’s. “It must have been quite the dream,” she said, “and his imagination is so vivid.”

Mrs. Mallory glanced from the boy to Josie and back. “He does have quite the imagination,” she agreed, his story, although true, too fanciful for the older woman to believe. “He’s a very creative boy. Did you watch a scary movie with him last night—something that brought on such a horrible dream?”

“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.