was not pressed against the door held another hand. Pudgy little fingers wriggled in her grasp. “Mommy, what we doin’ here?”
Josie didn’t have to ask herself that question. She knew that, no matter what the risk, she needed to be here. She needed to introduce her father to his grandson. “We’re here to see your grandpa,” she said.
“Grampa?” The three-year-old’s little brow furrowed in confusion. He had probably heard the word before but never in reference to any relation of his. It had always been only the two of them. “I have a grampa?”
“Yes,” Josie said. “But he lives far away so we didn’t get to see him before now.”
“Far away,” he agreed with a nod and a yawn. He had slept through most of the long drive from northwestern Michigan to Chicago; his soft snoring had kept her awake and amused. His bright red curls were matted from his booster seat, and there was a trace of drool that had run from the corner of his mouth across his freckled cheek.
CJ glanced nervously around the wide corridor as if just now realizing where he was. He hadn’t awakened until the elevator ride up to her father’s floor. Then with protests that he wasn’t a baby but a big boy now, he had wriggled out of her arms. “Does Grampa live here?”
“No,” she said. “This is a hospital.”
The little boy shuddered in revulsion. His low pain threshold for immunizations had given him a deep aversion to all things medical. He lowered his already soft voice to a fearful whisper. “Is—is Grampa sick?”
She whispered, too, so that nobody overheard them. A few hospital workers, men dressed in scrubs, lingered outside a room a few doors down from her father’s. “He’s hurt.”
So where were the police or the security guards? Why was no one protecting him?
Because nobody cared about her father the way she did. Because she had been declared dead, he had no other next of kin. And as powerful and intimidating a man as he was, he had no genuine friends, either. His durable power of attorney was probably held by his lawyer. She’d claimed to be from his office when she’d called to find out her father’s room number.
“Did he falled off his bike?” CJ asked.
“Something like that.” She couldn’t tell her son what had really happened, that her father had been assaulted in the parking garage of his condominium complex. Usually the security was very high there. No one got through the gate unless they lived in the building. Not only was it supposed to be safe, but it was his home. Yet someone had attacked him, striking him with something—a baseball bat or a pipe. His broken arm and bruised shoulder might not hurt him so badly if the assault hadn’t also brought on a heart attack.
Would her showing up here as if from the dead bring on another one? Maybe that inner voice of hers, which sounded a hell of a lot like Charlotte’s even though she hadn’t talked to the woman, was right. The risk was too great.
“We shoulda brought him ice cream,” CJ said. “Ice cream makes you feel all better.”
Every time he had been brave for his shots she had rewarded him with ice cream. Always shy and nervous, CJ had to fight hard to be brave. Had she passed her own fears, of discovery and danger, onto her son?
“Yes, we should have,” she agreed, and she pulled her hand away from the door. “We should do that …”
“Now?” CJ asked, his dark bluish-green eyes brightening with hope. “We gonna get ice cream now?”
“It’s too late for ice cream tonight,” she said. “But we can get some tomorrow.”
“And bring it back?”
She wasn’t sure about that. She would have to pose as the legal secretary again and learn more about her father’s condition. Just how fragile was his health?
Josie turned away from the door and from the nearly overwhelming urge to run inside and into her father’s arms—the way she always had as a child. She had hurled herself at him, secure that he would catch her.
She’d been so confident that he would always be there for her. She had never considered that he might be the one to leave—for real, for good—that he might be the one to really die. Given how young she was when her mother died, she should have understood how fragile life was. But her father wasn’t fragile. He was strong and powerful. Invincible. Or so she had always believed.
But he wasn’t. And she couldn’t risk causing him harm only to comfort herself. She stepped away from the door, but her arm jerked as her son kept his feet planted on the floor.
“I wanna see Grampa,” he said, his voice still quiet but his tone determined. Afraid to draw attention to himself, her son had never thrown a temper tantrum. He’d never even raised his voice. But he could be very stubborn when he put his mind to something. Kind of like the grandfather he’d suddenly decided he needed to meet.
“It’s late,” she reminded him. “He’ll be sleeping and we shouldn’t wake him up.”
His little brow still furrowed, he stared up at her a moment as if considering her words. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you get cranky when I wake you up.”
A laugh sputtered out of her lips. Anyone would get cranky if woken up at 5:00 a.m. to watch cartoons. “So we better make sure I get some sleep tonight.” That meant postponing the drive back and getting a hotel. But she needed to be close to the hospital … in case her father took a turn for the worse. In case he needed her.
“And after you wake up we’ll come back with ice cream?”
She hesitated before offering him a slight nod. But instead of posing as the lawyer’s assistant again, she would talk to Charlotte.
Someone else had answered the woman’s phone at the palace on the affluent island country of St. Pierre where Charlotte had gone to work as the princess’s bodyguard after leaving the U.S. Marshals. That person had assured Josie that Charlotte would be back soon to return her call. But Josie hadn’t left a message—she couldn’t trust anyone but Charlotte with her life. Or her father’s. She would talk to Charlotte and see what the former marshal could find out about Josie’s father’s condition and the attack. Then she would come back to see him.
Her son accepted her slight nod as agreement and finally moved away from the door to his grandfather’s room. “Does Grampa like ‘nilla ice cream or chocolate or cookie dough or …”
The kid was an ice-cream connoisseur, his list of flavors long and impressive. And Josie’s stomach nearly growled with either hunger or nerves.
She interrupted him to ask, “Do you want to press the elevator button?”
His brow furrowing in concentration, he rose up on tiptoe and reached for the up arrow.
“No,” she said. But it was too late, he’d already pressed it. “We need the down arrow.” Before she could touch it, a hand wrapped around her wrist.
Her skin tingled and her pulse leaped in reaction. And she didn’t need to lift her head to know who had touched her. Even after more than three years, she recognized his touch. But she lifted her head and gazed up at him, at his thick black hair that was given to curl, at his deep, turquoise-green eyes that could hold such
