Her hand slapped against a metal pipe. “I thought he was behind here. CJ! CJ!”
“Then why isn’t he coming out?” Brendan had stayed quiet and now kept his voice to a whisper despite the panic clutching at him.
“No, it can’t be …” she murmured, her voice cracking with fear and dread.
“What?” He demanded to know the thought that occurred to her, that had her trembling now with fear.
“He’s at the edge of the roof,” she said. “He told me there was a short wall behind him. I—I told him not to go over it …”
Because there would have been nothing but the ground, twenty stories below, on the other side. If the boy was still on the roof with them, he would answer his mother. Even if he heard Brendan, he would come out to protect her, as he did before.
Oh, God!
Had Brendan lost his son only moments after finally finding him?
Tears stung Josie’s eyes, blinding her even more than the darkness. And sobs clogged her throat, choking her. She had been trying to protect her son, but she’d put him in more danger. She clawed at the pipes, trying to force them apart, trying to force her way back to where her son had been last.
“CJ! CJ!” she cried, her voice cracking with fear she could no longer contain.
She hadn’t made sacrifices only to protect her father; she had made them to protect her baby, too. If she hadn’t learned she was pregnant, she wouldn’t have agreed to let her father hire bodyguards after the first attempt on her life—a cut brake line. And if she hadn’t realized that no one could keep them truly safe, she wouldn’t have agreed to fake her death and disappear.
Everything she’d done, she’d done for her son. Maybe that was why she’d brought him to see her father—not just so the two could finally meet, but so that her father would understand why she’d hurt him so badly. As a parent himself, he would have to understand and forgive her.
“CJ …” The tears overtook her now.
“Shh,” a deep voice murmured, and a strong hand grasped her shoulder.
But the man didn’t offer comfort.
“Shh,” he said again, as a command. And his hand squeezed. “Listen.”
Since Brendan was alive, she had just assumed that the men who’d wanted to kill her and CJ were not. But maybe he had just scared them off. And now they had returned. Or maybe that other gunman, the one he’d left near her father’s room, had joined them on the roof.
She sucked in a breath, trying to calm herself. But if her child was truly gone, there would be no calming her—not even if the men had come back for them. They would need their guns—to defend themselves from her attack. This was their fault because they’d forced her to hide her son to protect him. But it wasn’t their fault that she hadn’t hidden him in a safe spot.
That was all on her.
“Shh,” Brendan said again.
And she managed to control her sobs. But she heard their echo—coming softly from behind the metal pipes.
“CJ?” He wasn’t gone. But why hadn’t he come out? “Are you hurt?”
Perhaps there were more dangers behind the pipes than just that short wall separating him from a big fall. Maybe the pipes were hot. Or sharp.
“Listen,” Brendan advised again.
The sobs were soft but strong and steady, not broken with pain, not weak with sickness. He was scared. Her little boy was too scared to come out, even for his mother.
“Tell him I’m not going to hurt him,” Brendan said, his voice low but gruff. “Or you.”
She nearly snorted in derision of his claim. When he’d realized she had been working on a story about his father’s murder, he’d been furious with her. Too furious to let her explain that even though the story was why she’d sought him out, she had really fallen in love with him.
Despite his difficult life, losing his mother, running away at fifteen, he’d seemed such a charming, loving man that she’d thought he might have fallen for her, too. But then his anger had showed another side of his personality, one dangerously similar to his merciless and vengeful father.
As if he’d heard the snort she’d suppressed, he insisted, “I’m not going to hurt either of you.”
“Did you hear him, CJ?” she asked. “You don’t have to be afraid.” Then she drew in another breath to brace herself to lie to her son. “Mr. O’Hannigan is not a bad man.”
She had actually been foolish enough to believe that once, to think that he was not necessarily his father’s son. She’d thought that given all the years he’d spent away from the old man, he might have grown up differently. Honorably. That was why she’d fallen for him.
But when he’d learned she had actually been working on a story.
He hadn’t been her charming lover. He had been cold and furious. But he hadn’t been only furious. If he’d cut her brake line, he’d been vengeful, too. But she hadn’t really meant anything to him then; she had been only a lover who’d betrayed him. Now he knew she was the mother of his child.
“He saved us from the bad men, CJ. The bad men are gone now.” She turned back toward Brendan. He was just a dark shadow to her, but she discerned that his head jerked in a sharp nod.
She pushed her hand between the pipes, but no pudgy fingers caught hers. “CJ, you can come out now. It’s safe.”
She wasn’t sure about that, but her son would be safer with her than standing just a short wall away from a long fall.
“It is safe.” Brendan spoke now, his voice a low growl for her ears only. “But it may not stay that way. We need to get out of here before more bad men show up.”
She shivered, either over his warning or his warm breath blowing in her ear and along her neck. Memories rushed back, of his breath on her neck before his lips touched her skin, skimming down her throat. His tongue flicking over her pulse before his mouth moved farther down her body.
Her pulse pounded faster, and she trembled. Then she forced the memories back, relegating them to where they belonged as she’d done so many times before. If she hadn’t been able to keep the past in the past, she wouldn’t have survived the past four years.
“CJ, why won’t you come out?” she asked.
The boy sniffed hard, sucking up his tears and his snot. Josie flinched but resisted the urge to admonish him and was grateful she had done so when he finally spoke. “Cuz I—I was bad.”
“No,” Josie began, but another, deeper voice
