eyes glistened with moisture. “It was a story I suggested that he cover.” She blinked back the tears. “But that brick—that has nothing to do with what happened in Chicago. Nobody here knows who I really am. Nobody here would have tried to kill me.”
“Just scare you,” he said. But the brick and the note were nothing in comparison to gunfire and explosions. “You should be scared,” he said. He reached out and jerked one of the folders from her hand. “This story could have gotten you killed.”
She sucked in a quivering breath. “It almost did. It is why someone tried to kill me four years ago.”
“Someone,” he agreed. And now he knew who. “But not me.”
She gestured toward those folders. “But you see why I suspected you. All the people I talked to named you as your father’s killer.”
People he should have been able to trust—men who’d worked with his father since they were kids selling drugs for Brendan’s grandfather. And his stepmother. When his father had first married her, she had pretended to care about her husband’s motherless son. But when Brendan had returned to claim the inheritance Margaret O’Hannigan thought should have been hers, she’d stopped pretending.
Josie continued, “In all the conversations I overheard while hanging out with you at O’Hannigan’s, only one suspect was ever named in his murder.”
“Me.” Did she still suspect him?
“I was wrong,” she admitted, but then defended herself. “But I didn’t know you very well then. You were so secretive and you never answered my questions.”
She didn’t know him very well now, either. But it was obvious she couldn’t stop being a journalist, so he couldn’t trust her with the truth. He couldn’t tell her who he really was, but he could tell her something about himself.
“We wanted the same thing, you know,” he told her.
“We did?” she asked, the skepticism all hers now.
“I didn’t want an award-winning exposé,” he clarified. “But I wanted the truth.”
She nodded. “That’s why I never printed anything. I had no confirmation. No proof. I could have written an exposé. But I wanted the truth.”
And that was the one thing that set her apart from the other reporters who’d done stories about him over the past four years. She wouldn’t print the unsubstantiated rumors other journalists would. She’d wanted proof. She just hadn’t recognized it when she’d found it.
“I want to know who killed him, too,” he said. “I came back to that life because I wanted justice for my father.” After years of trying to bring the man to justice, it was ironic that Brendan had spent the past four years trying to get justice for his father—for his cold-blooded murder.
“You spent a lot of time reading through everything,” she said, staring down at the desk he’d messed up. “Did you find anything I missed?”
Because he didn’t want to lie outright to her, he replied, “You weren’t the only one who must have gone through those papers. If there’d been something in there, one of the marshals would have found it.”
“Nobody else has ever seen this stuff,” she admitted.
The pounding in his head increased. If anyone familiar with his father’s murder case had looked at her records, they would have figured it out. They would have recognized that one of her sources knew too much about the murder scene, things that only the killer would have known. She never would have had to go into hiding, never would have had to keep his child from him. “Why the hell not?”
She lifted her chin with pride. “My dad taught me young to respect the code.”
“What code?”
“The journalist code,” she said. “A true journalist never reveals a source.”
Ignoring the pain, he shook his head with disgust. “After the attempts on your life, I think Stanley Jessup would have understood.”
She chuckled. “You don’t know my dad.”
“No,” he said, “you never introduced me. I was your dirty little secret.”
“He would have been mad,” she admitted. “He wouldn’t have wanted me anywhere near you, given your reputation.”
“Good,” Brendan said. He’d worried that the man had put her up to it, to getting close to him for a story. “And if he cared that much for your safety, he would have understood you breaking the code.”
She nodded. “Probably. But I didn’t think so back then. Back then, I figured he would have been happier for me to die than reveal a source.”
“Josie!” He reached for her, to offer assurance. He knew what it was like to feel like a disappointment to one’s father. But when his arms closed around her, he wanted to offer more than sympathy. He wanted her … as he always did.
“But I realized that he wouldn’t have cared about the code. He would have cared only about keeping me safe when I had CJ,” she said. “CJ!”
She said his name with guilt and alarm, as if something bad had happened to their child.
“What? What about CJ?”
PULLING HIM OFF her, leaving him, had killed her earlier. She hated disappointing her child. So she’d kept her promise and had brought Brendan with her to pick up their son.
And for the entire day they had acted like a normal family. CJ had proudly showed Brendan all his toys and books, which the rumored mob boss had patiently played with and read to the three-year-old boy. Brendan had also looked through all the photos of their son, seeing in pictures every milestone that had been stolen from him.
Through no fault of his own. It was her fault for not trusting him. But she’d felt then that he had been keeping secrets from her. And she had imagined the worst.
As Brendan, with CJ sitting on his lap, continued to flip through the photo albums, she felt every emotion that flickered across his handsome face, the loss, the regret and the awe. He loved their son.
Could he ever love her?
Or had her lies and mistrust destroyed whatever he might have been able to feel for her? If only she’d known then what that damn story would wind up costing her.
The only man she would ever love.
He glanced up and caught her watching them, and his beautiful eyes darkened. With anger? Was he mad at her?
She couldn’t blame him. She was mad at herself for all that she had denied him and her son. So today she’d tried making it up to them. She’d made all CJ’s favorite foods, played all his favorite games, and she’d pretended that last night had never happened.
The gunfire. The explosion.
She was actually almost able to forget those. It was making love with Brendan that wouldn’t leave her mind. She could almost
