slid the keys into his suit pocket. “And come back for you.”
With a soft click, she closed the back door. “I’ll go with you.”
As they headed up the brick walk toward the front door, she reached inside her bag for the can of mace. She would spray it at him and retrieve the keys while he was coughing and sputtering.
She could get away from him. She could protect her son and herself.
“Remember the first time you walked up this path with me?” Brendan asked, his deep voice a warm rasp in the cold.
She shivered as a tingle of attraction chased up her spine. Their fingers had been entwined that night. They had been holding hands since dinner at a candlelit restaurant.
“I teased you about playing the gentleman,” he reminisced. “And you said that you were no gentleman because you just wanted to get me alone.”
Her face heated as she remembered what a brazen flirt she’d been. But she’d acted that way only with him. And it hadn’t been just for the story. It had been for the way his gorgeous eyes had twinkled with excitement and attraction. And it had been for the rush of her pulse.
Brendan chuckled but his voice was as cold as the night air. “You really just wanted to get inside.”
That wasn’t the situation tonight. Inside his house, with its thick brick walls and leaded-glass windows to hold in her screams, was the last place Josie wanted to be. Maybe he hadn’t been a bad man four years ago, but he’d only just begun taking over his father’s business then. Now that business was his. And he’d been leaving his own legacy of missing bodies.
“You just wanted to search my stuff,” he angrily continued, “see what secrets you could find to shout out to the rest of the world through one of your father’s publications.”
“You’re so bitter over my misleading you,” she remarked. “Can’t you see why I would think you’re the one who wants me dead?”
He sighed and dragged out a ring of keys from his pants pocket. She recognized them because she’d tried so often to get them away from him—so she could make copies, so she could come and go at will in his house, business and offices.
“If you would realize why I am so bitter,” he said, “you would also understand why the last thing I want is for you to be gone.”
He turned away from the door and stared down at her, as he had that first night he’d brought her home with him. His pupils had swallowed the blue-green irises then, as they did now. “I wanted you with me that night...and all the nights that followed.”
There was that charm that had given her hope that he was really a good man. That charm had distracted and disarmed her before.
But she hadn’t had CJ to worry about and protect then. So now she kept her hand wrapped tightly around the can of mace. And when he lowered his head toward hers, she started to pull it from her purse.
But then his lips touched hers, brushing softly across them. And her breath caught as passion knocked her down as forcefully as he had earlier in the parking garage.
He had saved her tonight. He had saved her and her son. And reminding herself of that allowed her to kiss him back. For just a moment though...
Because he pulled away and turned back toward the door. And she did what she should have done as he’d lowered his head—she pulled out the can of mace and lifted it toward him.
Then she smelled it. The odor lay heavy on the cold air, drifting beneath the door of the house. She dragged in a deep breath to double-check.
Maybe she was just imagining it, as she had so often the past four years, waking in the middle of the night shaking with fear. She had to check the stove and the furnace and the water heater.
And though she never found a leak, she never squelched those fears. That this time no one would notice the bomb before it exploded.
This time the fire wouldn’t eat an empty house. It would eat hers, with her and CJ trapped inside. But this wasn’t her house.
It was Brendan’s, and he was sliding his key into the lock. Would it be the lock clicking or the turning of the knob that would ignite the explosion?
She dropped the damn can and reached for him, screaming as her nightmare became a fiery reality.
Chapter