him earlier, either. He blinked back the trickle of blood and remarked, “I was not followed to the complex.”
“So how did they find us?” she asked.
“Daddy?” CJ repeated from the backseat, interrupting them. “You’re my daddy?”
Josie sucked in an audible breath as if just noticing that Brendan had told their son who he was. He waited to see if she would deny it now, if she would call him a liar for claiming his child. If she did, he would call her on the lie. After his close call with that bullet, he wanted his son to know who he was...before it was too late. Before he never got the chance to tell him.
Josie turned toward the backseat and offered their son a shaky smile. “Yes, sweetheart, he’s your daddy.”
“I—I thought he was a bad man.”
Josie shook her head. “No, sweetheart, he’s a good man. A hero. He keeps saving us from the bad men.”
Was she saying that for the boy’s sake? To make CJ feel better? Safer? Or did she believe it? Had she finally really come to trust Brendan, even though he hadn’t told her the truth?
“My daddy...” the little boy murmured, as if he were falling back to sleep. Given that his slumber kept getting violently interrupted, it was no wonder that the little boy was still tired.
“Well, we know who I am,” Brendan said. A hero? Did she really see him that way? “What about who’s after us?”
She kept staring into the backseat as if watching her son to make sure that the blood really wasn’t his. Or that the news of his parentage hadn’t affected him.
“Whoever it is,” he said, “appears to want us both dead.”
“They’re gone,” she murmured. Apparently she’d been watching the back window instead. “We’re safe now.”
“We should have been safe where we were,” he replied. It was a damn safe house.
“We need to go home,” she murmured, sounding as dazed as their son. But she wasn’t just tired; she was probably in shock. She’d fired her gun at people. If that had been the first time, she was probably having an emotional reaction. She was trembling and probably not just because the car had yet to warm up. “We need to go home,” she repeated.
She wasn’t talking about his home. Neither the mansion where he’d grown up nor the apartment where he’d spent much of his adult life was safe. But she couldn’t be talking about her place, either.
Maybe her father’s? But if the news reports were correct, he’d been attacked in the parking garage of his condominium complex.
“We can’t,” he said. “It’s not safe at your dad’s, either.”
“We have to go home,” she said, her voice rising slightly now, as if with hysteria. “To what CJ and I call home, where we’ve been living.”
“Don’t you get it?” he asked. “The only one who could have tracked down where we were was your friend.”
She leaned forward and peered into his face as if worried that the bullet had impaired his thinking. “Friend?”
“The former marshal,” he said. “She must have traced the call to where we were staying. She sent those people.” It couldn’t have been anyone else. Damn! Why had he trusted the woman?
Josie sucked in an audible breath of shock. “Charlotte? You think Charlotte is behind the attempts on my life?”
“No.” He knew she considered the woman a friend, at one point maybe her only friend. And she had to be devastated. But she also had to know the truth. “But she must have sold out to whoever wants you dead.”
Josie chuckled. Maybe she’d given over completely to hysteria and shock. “You think Charlotte Green sold out?”
He nodded, and his head pounded again. “It had to be her. You can’t trust her.”
“She told me to trust you,” she reminded him. “So now you’re saying that I shouldn’t?”
“No, no,” he said. “You should trust me but not her. Remember what you told our son—I’m not a bad man. I’ve saved you.”
Something jammed into his ribs, and he glanced down. She held the gun he’d given her, not just on him but nearly in him as she pushed the barrel into his side. After the night she’d had, he could understand her losing it. But was she irrational enough to pull the trigger?
Had she slid off the safety? If he hit a bump in the road, she might squeeze the trigger. She might shoot him and then he might crash the SUV and take them all out.
He hadn’t realized that he might