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 had suspected he hadn’t even been alive; they’d thought that instead of running away, he might have been murdered, like they believed his mother was. Some had refused to believe that he was his father’s son, despite his having his father’s eyes. The same eyes that her son had.
His stepmother had still demanded a DNA test before she had stopped fighting for control of her dead husband’s estate. She hadn’t stopped slinging the accusations though. She had obviously been the source of so many of the stories about him, such as the one that Brendan had killed his father for vengeance and money. She had even talked to Josie back then to warn her away from a dangerous man.
Given the battle with his stepmother and the