murmured regretfully. “I never should have come here.”
“No,” he agreed. “Not if you wanted to stay in hiding.”
“I have to stay in hiding.”
“Why?” he asked.
She gasped. “I think, after tonight, it would be quite obvious why I had to...” Her voice cracked, but she cleared her throat and added, “Disappear.”
Brendan nodded in sudden realization of where she had been for almost four years. “You’ve been in witness protection.”
Her silence gave him the answer that he should have come to long ago. He was painfully familiar with witness protection. But he couldn’t tell her that. Her identity might have changed, but he suspected at heart she was still a reporter. He couldn’t tell her anything without the risk of it showing up in one of her father’s papers or on one of his news programs.
So he kept asking the questions. “Why were you put in witness protection?”
What had she seen? What did she know? Maybe she’d learned, in those few short months, more than he’d realized. More than he had learned in four years.
“What did you witness?” he asked.
She shrugged and her shoulder bumped against his. “Nothing that I was aware of. Nothing I could testify about.”
“Then why would the marshals put you in witness protection?”
Her breath shuddered out, caressing his cheek. “Because someone tried to kill me.”
“Was it like tonight?” he asked.
She snorted derisively. “You don’t know?”
So she assumed he would know how someone had tried to kill her. But he didn’t. “You were shot at back then?”
“No,” she said. “The attempts were more subtle than that. A cut brake line on my car.” She had driven a little sports car—too fast and too recklessly. He remembered the report of her accident. At the time he had figured her driving had caused it. She was lucky that the accident hadn’t killed her. “And then there was the explosion.”
“That was subtle,” he scoffed. The explosion had destroyed the house she’d been staying in, as well as her “remains,” so that she’d only been identifiable by DNA. “It wasn’t just a ploy the marshals used to put you into witness protection?”
She shook her head and now her hair brushed his cheek. His skin tingled and heated in reaction to her maddening closeness. He should have told her to sit back and buckle up next to their son. Or pulled her over the console into the passenger’s seat.
But she was closer where she was, so he said nothing.
“No,” Josie replied. “Someone found the supposedly safe house where I was staying after the cut brake line and set the bomb to try again to kill me.”
No wonder she’d gone into protection again. Faking her death might have been the only way to keep her alive. But he might have come up with another way...if she’d told him about the attempts.
But they hadn’t been talking then. He’d been too furious with her when he’d discovered that she’d been duping him—only getting close for a damn exposé for her father’s media organizations. Once Brendan had figured out her pen name, he’d found the stories she’d done. No one had been safe around her, not even her classmates when she’d been at boarding school and later at college.
None of her friends had been safe from her, either. Maybe that was why she’d had few when they’d met. Maybe that was why it had been so easy for her to leave everyone behind.
Including him.
Except her father. That was why she’d come to the hospital after he’d been assaulted. Perhaps they hadn’t actually severed contact, as she had with Brendan—never even letting him know he’d become a father.
She probably didn’t know the identity of her would-be killer or she wouldn’t have had to stay in hiding all this time. But he asked anyway. “Who do you think was trying to kill you?”
She answered without hesitation and with complete certainty, “You.”
Chapter Seven
Maybe Josie was as tired as her son was. Why else would she have made such an admission? Moreover, why else would she have let him drive her here—of all places?
She should have recognized the route, since her gaze had never left the road as he’d driven them away from the hospital. She had driven here so many times over those months when they had been seeing each other. She’d preferred going to his place, hoping that she would find something or overhear something the police didn’t know that could have led her to a break in his father’s murder investigation.
And she hadn’t wanted him to find anything at