Royal Rescue

chapter Six

Vivid curses reverberated inside Brendan’s head, echoing the cries of the woman and the child. Those cries had to be of fear—just fear. He’d made certain that they wouldn’t be hit, keeping them low as the shots rang out. If only he’d had backup waiting...

But just as he had taken on the gunmen inside the hospital, he also had to confront this one alone—while trying to protect people he hadn’t even known were alive until tonight. So he didn’t utter those curses echoing inside his head, not only because of his son but also because he didn’t have time.

He’d taken the gun off the guy he’d left alive. But that didn’t mean the man hadn’t had another one on him, as Brendan always did. Or maybe if he’d come down to ambush them in the garage he’d retrieved a weapon from his vehicle.

Where the hell were the shots coming from? Since they ricocheted off the cement floor and ceiling and pillars, he couldn’t tell. So he couldn’t fire back—even if he’d had a free hand to grab one of his concealed weapons.

His hands were full, one clasping his son tightly to his chest while his other wrapped around Josie’s arm. He lifted her from the ground and tugged her toward the car she’d unlocked. Thankfully, it was next to two bigger SUVs that provided some cover as he ushered them between the vehicles.

“Do you still have the keys?” he asked.

Josie stared at him wide-eyed, as if too scared to comprehend what he was saying, or maybe the loud gunshots echoing throughout the parking structure had deafened her. Or she was just in shock.

Brendan leaned closer to her, his lips nearly brushing her ear as her hair tickled his cheek. Then he spoke louder. “Keys?”

She glanced down at her hand. A ring of keys dangled from her trembling fingers.

He released her arm to grab the keys from her. Then, with the keys jamming into his palm, he pulled open the back door and thrust her inside the vehicle.

“Stay low,” he said, handing their son to her. As he slammed the door shut behind them, a bullet hit the rear bumper. The other vehicles offered no protection if the shooter was behind them now.

Brendan let a curse slip out of his lips. Then he quickly pulled open the driver’s door. As he slid behind the steering wheel, he glanced into the rearview mirror. He couldn’t see anyone in the backseat. Josie had taken his advice and stayed low.

But he noticed someone else. A dark shadow moved between cars parked on the other side of the garage, rushing toward Josie’s SUV. In the dim lighting, he couldn’t see the guy’s face, couldn’t tell if this was the supposed orderly from the sixth floor. He couldn’t risk the guy getting close enough for Brendan to recognize him.

He shoved the keys in the ignition. As soon as the motor turned over, he reversed. He would have slammed into the cars behind them, would have tried to crush the shooter. But Josie and the boy were not buckled in, so he couldn’t risk their being tossed around the vehicle.

And Brendan couldn’t risk the gunman getting close enough to take more shots. If these guys were all hired professionals, they were bound to get an accurate shot. So he shifted into Drive and pressed his foot down on the accelerator. If only he could reach for one of his weapons and shoot back at the shadow running after them...

But he needed both hands on the wheel, needed to carefully careen around the sharp curves so he didn’t hit a concrete pillar, or fling Josie and his son out a window. He had to make sure that he didn’t kill them while he tried so desperately to save them.

Josie didn’t know what would kill them first: the gunshots or a car accident. Since Brendan was driving so fast, he must have outdistanced the gunman so no bullets could fly through the back window and strike CJ. She quickly strapped him into his booster seat. As short as he was, his head was still beneath the headrest.

“Stay down,” Brendan warned her from the front seat as he swerved around more sharp corners and headed up toward the street level and the exit. “There could be more—”

Hired killers? That was probably what he’d intended to say before stopping himself for their son’s sake, not wanting to scare the boy.

“Bad men?” she asked. She hadn’t expected any of them or she never would have brought her son to the hospital. She wouldn’t have put him at risk. How the hell had someone found out she was alive?

He had acted surprised. Had he really not known until tonight?

She had so many questions, but asking Brendan would have been a waste of time. He had never told her anything she’d wanted to know before. And she wasn’t certain that he would actually have any answers this time. If he really hadn’t known she was alive, he would have no idea who was trying to kill her.

She needed to talk to Charlotte.

Leaning forward, she reached under the driver’s seat and tugged out the purse she’d stashed there earlier. She hadn’t left only her identification inside but also her cell phones. Her personal phone and that special cell used only to call her handler. But Josie couldn’t make that confidential call, not with Brendan in the vehicle.

“What are you doing?” he asked, with a quick glance in the rearview mirror. He probably couldn’t see her, but he’d felt it when she’d reached under his seat. Was the man aware of everything going on around him? Given his life and his enemies, he probably had to be—or he wouldn’t be alive still.

“Getting my purse,” she said.

“Do you have a weapon in it?” he asked.

“Why?” Did he want her to use it or was he worried that she would? She reached inside the bag and wrapped her fingers around the can of mace. But even if he wasn’t driving so fast, she couldn’t have risked spraying it and hurting her son.

His gaze went to the rearview mirror again. “Never mind. I think we lost him,” he said. But he didn’t stop at the guard shack for the parking garage. Instead he crashed the SUV right through the gate.

CJ cried, and Josie turned to him with concern. But his cry was actually a squeal as his teal-blue eyes twinkled with excitement. What had happened to her timid son?

She leaned over the console between the seats. “Be careful.”

“Are you all right?” he asked. “And CJ?”

“We’re both fine. But is the car all right?” she asked. One of the headlamps wobbled, bouncing the beam of light around the street. “I need to be able to drive it home.”

But first she had to get rid of Brendan.

“You can’t go home,” he told her. “The gunman was coming up behind the vehicle. He could have gotten your plate and pulled up your registration online. He could already know where you live.”

She didn’t know what would be worse: the gunman knowing where she lived or Brendan knowing. But she wouldn’t need to worry about either scenario. Charlotte had made certain of that. “The vehicle isn’t registered to me.”

JJ Brandt was only one of the identities the U.S. marshal had set up for her. In case one of those identities was compromised, she could assume a new one. But for nearly four years, she had never come close to being recognized. Until tonight, when no one had been fooled by her new appearance or her new name.

Thanks to Brendan’s interference, JJ Brandt hadn’t died tonight. Literally. But she would have to die figuratively since Brendan might have learned that name. And she would have to assume one of the other identities.

But she couldn’t do anything until she figured out how to get rid of him. Maybe she needed to ask him how to do that. He was the one around whom people tended to disappear.

First her.

But according to the articles she’d read, there had been others. Some members of his “family” and some of his business rivals had disappeared over the past four years. No bodies had been found, so no charges had been brought against him. But the speculation was that he was responsible for those disappearances.

She’d believed he was responsible for hers, too, blaming him for those attempts on her life that had driven her into hiding. Since he’d saved her on the roof and again in the garage, she wanted to believe she’d been wrong about him.

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?

* * *

THE 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.”