the smell before he’d turned that key, if Josie hadn’t clutched his arms …
They would have been right next to the house when a staff member inside, who must have noticed the key rattling in the door, had opened it for them and unknowing set off the bomb. Instead he and Josie had been running for the SUV, for their son, when the bomb exploded. The force of it had knocked them to the ground and rocked her vehicle.
“Are you all right?” he asked again.
She’d jumped right up and continued to run, not stopping until she’d reached their screaming son. The explosion had not only awakened but terrified him. Or maybe he felt the fear that had her trembling uncontrollably.
She jerked her chin in an impatient nod. “Yes, I—I’m okay.”
“Maybe we should have stayed,” he admitted. But his first instinct had been to get the hell away in case the bomber had hung around to finish the job if the explosion hadn’t killed them.
While Brendan wished he could soothe his son’s fears, his first priority was to keep the boy and his mother safe. And healthy. “We should have you checked out.”
She shook her head. “Nobody can see me, in case they recognize me like you did. And those other men …” She shuddered, probably as she remembered the ordeal those men had put her and CJ through. “We can’t go back to the hospital anyway.”
“There are urgent-care facilities that are open all night,” he reminded her. Maybe her new location wasn’t near a big city and she’d forgotten the amenities and conveniences of one.
She shook her head. “But someone there might realize we were at this explosion …” The smell of smoke had permeated the car and probably her hair. “And they might call the police,” she said. “Or the media.”
He nearly grinned at the irony of her wanting to avoid the press.
“And it’s not necessary,” she said, dismissing his concerns. “I’m okay.”
He glanced toward the backseat. CJ’s screams had subsided to hiccups and sniffles. Brendan’s heart ached with the boy’s pain and fear. “What about our son?”
“He’s scared,” Josie explained. And from the way she kept trembling, the little boy wasn’t the only one.
“It’s okay,” she assured the child, and perhaps she was assuring herself, too. “We’re getting far away from the fire.”
Not so far that the glow of the fire wasn’t still visible in the rearview mirror, along with the billows of black smoke darkening the sky even more.
“It won’t hurt us,” she said. “It won’t hurt us….”
“We’re going someplace very safe,” Brendan said, “where no bad men can find us.”
He shouldn’t have brought them back to the mansion. But the place was usually like a fortress, so he hadn’t thought any outside threats would be able to get to them. He hadn’t realized that the greatest danger was already inside those gates. Hell, inside those brick walls. Had one of his men—one of the O’Hannigan family—set the bomb?
He’d been trying to convince her that he’d had nothing to do with the attempts on her life, years ago or recently. And personally, he hadn’t. But that didn’t mean he still wasn’t responsible … because of who he was.
As if she’d been reading his mind, she softly remarked, “No place, with you, is going to be safe for us.”
But he wasn’t only the head of a mob organization. He had another life, but, regrettably, that one was probably even more dangerous.
“WHERE ARE WE?” she asked, pitching her voice to a low whisper—and not just because CJ slept peacefully now in his father’s arms, but also because the big brick building was eerily silent.
There had been other vehicles inside the fenced and gated parking lot when they’d arrived. But few lights had glowed in the windows of what looked like an apartment complex. Of course everyone could have been sleeping. But when Brendan had entered a special code to open the doors, the lobby inside looked more commercial than residential.
Was this an office building?
He’d also needed a code to open the elevator doors and a key to turn it on. Fortunately, he’d retrieved his keys from the lock at the mansion … just before the house had exploded.
Her ears had finally stopped ringing. Still, she heard nothing but their footsteps on the terrazzo as they walked down the hallway of the floor on which he’d stopped the elevator. He’d been doing everything with one hand, his arms wrapped tight around their sleeping son.
At the hospital she’d suspected that Brendan had held their son so that she wouldn’t try to escape with him. Now he held him almost reverently, as if he was scared that he’d nearly lost him in the explosion.
If he had parked closer to the house …
She shuddered to think what could have happened to her son.
“It’ll be warmer inside,” Brendan assured her, obviously misinterpreting her shudder as a shiver.
She actually was cold. The building wasn’t especially well heated.
“Inside what? Where are we?” she asked, repeating her earlier question. When he’d told her to grab her overnight bag, which she had slung over her shoulder along with her purse, she’d thought he was bringing them to a hotel. But this building was nothing like any hotel at which she’d ever stayed, as Josie Jessup or as JJ Brandt.
“This is my apartment,” he said as he stopped outside a tall metal door.
“Apartment? But you had the mansion …” And this building was farther from the city than the house had been, farther from the businesses rumored to be owned or run by the O’Hannigan family. But maybe that was why he’d wanted it—to be able to get away from all the responsibilities he’d inherited.
“I already had this place before I inherited the house from my father,” he explained as he shoved the key into the lock.
She wanted to grab her son and run. But she recognized she could just be having a panic attack, like the ones the nightmares brought on when they awakened her in a cold sweat. And those panic attacks, when she ran around checking the house for gas leaks, scared CJ so much that she would rather spare him having to deal with her hysteria tonight.
So she just grabbed Brendan’s hand, stilling it before he could turn the key. “We can’t stay here!”
Panic rushed up on her, and she dragged in a deep breath to control it and to check the air for that telltale odor. She smelled smoke on them, but it was undoubtedly from the earlier explosion. “Someone could remember you lived here and find us.”
“No. It’s safe here,” he said. “There’s no bomb.”
“Bu—”
Rejecting her statement before he even heard it, he shook his head. “Nobody knows where I was living before I showed up at my father’s funeral.”
Some
