could only feel. Pleasure. And love.
He loved her. That was why he had to make certain she would never be in danger again because of him. If he had to give up his life for hers and their son’s, he would do it willingly.
Her body ached. Not from the explosion or even from running from gunmen. Her body ached from making love. Josie smiled and rolled over, reaching across the bed. The sheets were still warm, tangled and scented with their lovemaking. He’d made love to her again and again until she’d fallen into an exhausted slumber.
And she realized why when she jerked awake to an empty bed. An empty room. He’d left her. She didn’t need to search her house to confirm that he was gone. But she pulled on a robe and checked CJ’s room before she looked through the rest of the house.
Her son slept peacefully, the streetlamp casting light through his bedroom window. It made his red curls glow like fire, reminding her of the explosion.
And she hurried up her search, running through the house before reaching out over the basement stairwell to jerk down the pull chain on the dangling bulb. It swung out over the steps, the light dancing around her as she hurried down to her den. He wasn’t there and neither were her folders.
He had found something in them. What?
What had she had?
Notes she’d taken from the conversations she’d over-heard in the bar and from informal interviews she’d done with other members of the O’Hannigan family. News clippings from other reporters who’d covered the story. Sloppily. They hadn’t dug nearly as deep as she had. A copy of the case file from his father’s murder, which she’d bought off a cop on the force. Brendan wasn’t wrong that many people had a price. They could be bought.
But not Charlotte.
Too bad the former U.S. marshal wasn’t close enough to help her now. Maybe Josie wasn’t close enough, either—to stop Brendan from doing what she was afraid he was about to do: either confront or kill his father’s murderer.
“But who? Who is it?” she murmured to herself.
She’d gone through the folders so many times that she pretty much had the contents memorized. Brendan had figured it out; so could she. But she couldn’t let him keep his head start on her. She had to catch up with him.
No doubt he had taken her SUV. But she had another car parked in the garage off the alley, a rattletrap Volkswagen convertible. It wasn’t pretty, but mechanically it should be sound enough to get her back to Chicago. She had bought the car from a student desperate to sell it for money to buy textbooks.
She had never had to struggle for cash as her community college students did. Her father had given her everything she’d ever wanted.
Brendan’s father had not done the same for him. In fact, if rumors could ever be believed, Dennis O’Hannigan had taken away the one thing—the one person—who had mattered most to Brendan: his mother.
Why would he want to avenge the man’s death? Why would he care enough to get justice for him?
Was it a code? Like the one her father had taught her. She shrugged off her concerns for now. She had to wake CJ and take him over to Mrs. Mallory’s.
The little boy murmured in protest as she lifted him from his bed. “C’mon, sweetheart,” she said. “I need to take you to Mrs. M’s.”
He shook his head. “I don’t wanna go. Gotta p’tect you like Daddy said.”
She tensed. “Daddy told you to protect me?”
“Uh-huh,” CJ murmured. “He’s gonna get rid of a bad person and then he’ll come home to us.”
The words her sleepy son uttered had everything falling into place for Josie. Brendan may not have trusted her enough to tell her the truth. But he had inadvertently told their son.
BRENDAN WASN’T SURE who he could trust, especially now that he knew who’d killed his father. But he knew that Josie had at least one person she could trust—besides himself.
Charlotte Green’s outraged gasp rattled the phone. “You thought I might have given up her location?”
He pressed his fingers to that scratch on his head. If the bullet hadn’t just grazed him …
No, he wouldn’t let himself think about what might have happened to Josie and his son. She’d had the gun though—she would have defended herself and their child.
He glanced around the inside of the surveillance van, which was filled with equipment and people—people he wasn’t sure he should have trusted despite their federal clearances. If U.S. marshals could be bought, so could FBI agents. He lowered his voice. “After gunmen tracked us down at my safe house and tried to kill us …”
“I didn’t even know where you were when you called me, and if I had,” she said, her voice chilly with offended pride, “I sure as well wouldn’t have sent gunmen after you and Josie and my godson.”
He still wasn’t so sure about that. But, he realized, she hadn’t told anyone where she’d relocated Josie. Why keep that secret and reveal anything else?
“You must have been followed,” she said.
He’d thought about that but rejected the notion. “No. Nobody followed us that night.”
“Maybe another night then,” she suggested. “Someone must have figured out where you would take her.”
The only people who knew about the safe house were fellow FBI agents. He glanced around the van, wondering if one of them had betrayed him, if one of them had been bought like Charlotte’s former partner had been bought and like he’d thought she might have been. “You didn’t trace the call?”
“No.”
He snorted in derision. “I thought you were being honest with me. That’s why I trusted you.”
More than he trusted the crew he’d handpicked. The other men messed with the equipment, setting up mikes and cameras, and he watched them—checking to see if anyone had pulled out a phone as he had. But then if they were tipping off someone, they could have made that call already, before they’d joined him.
“But you must have a GPS on that phone you gave her,” he continued, calling her on her lie. “You must have some way to keep tabs on her.”
She chuckled. “Okay, maybe I do.”
That was why he’d left Josie the phone. “That’s what I thought.”
“Until recently she was easy to track,” Charlotte said. “She was at home or the college.”
“Teaching journalism,” he remarked. “That’s why you kept my secret from her. You realized that I had reason to be cautious with her. That no matter how much you changed her appearance or her identity,
