Special Deliveries Collection. Kate Hardy

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СКАЧАТЬ House?” It was the private psychiatric hospital where Josie’s former student had been killed pursuing the story she’d suggested to him. She had known there were suspicious things happening there. She just hadn’t imagined how dangerous a place it was. Guilt churned in her stomach; maybe Brendan had had a good reason for being so angry with her. Her stories, even the ones she hadn’t personally covered, always caused problems—sometimes even costing lives. “I’m fine now,” Charlotte assured her. “And so is Gabby.”

      “Was she there, too?” Princess Gabriella St. Pierre was Charlotte’s sister and Josie’s friend. Josie had gotten to know her over the years through emails and phone calls.

      “No, but she was in danger, too,” Charlotte replied.

      And Josie felt even guiltier for doubting her friend. “No wonder I haven’t heard from either of you.” They’d been busy, as she had just been, trying to stay alive.

      “We think we’ve found all the threats to our lives,” Charlotte said. “But in the process, we found a threat to yours. My former partner—”

      Josie shuddered as she remembered the creepy gray-haired guy who had called himself Trigger. Because Josie hadn’t felt safe around him, Charlotte had made certain that he wasn’t aware of where she had been relocated.

      “He was trying to find out where you are.”

      She hadn’t liked or trusted the older marshal, and apparently her instincts had been right. “Why?”

      Charlotte paused a moment before replying, “I think someone paid him to learn your whereabouts.”

      “Who? Did he tell you?”

      “No, Whit was forced to kill him to protect Aaron.”

      Whit and his friend Aaron had once protected Josie. They were the private bodyguards her father had hired after the accident caused by the cut brake lines. But then Whit had discovered the bomb and involved the marshals. He had helped Charlotte stage Josie’s death and relocate her. But no one had wanted to put Aaron in the position of lying to her grieving father, so he’d been left thinking he had failed a client. He and Whit had dissolved their security business and their friendship and had gone their separate ways until Charlotte had brought them back together to protect the king of St. Pierre.

      “I would have called and warned you immediately,” the former marshal said, “but I didn’t want to risk my phone being tapped and leading them right to you.”

      So something must have happened for her to risk it. “Why have you called now?”

      “I saw the news about your father,” Charlotte said, her voice soft with sympathy. She hadn’t understood how close Josie had been to her father, but she’d commiserated with her having to hurt him when she’d faked her death. “I wanted to warn you that it’s obviously a ploy to bring you out of hiding.”

      “Obviously,” Josie agreed.

      Charlotte gasped. “You went?”

      “It was a trap,” Josie said, stating the obvious. “But we’re fine now.” Or so she hoped. “But please check on my dad.” The man who had fired at them in the garage was probably the one Brendan had left alive on the sixth floor. He could have gone back to her father’s room. “Make sure my dad is okay. Make sure he’s safe.”

      “I already followed up with the hospital,” she said. “He’s recovering. He’ll be fine. And I think he’ll stay fine as long as you stay away from him.”

      Pain clutched Josie’s heart. But she couldn’t argue with her friend. She never should have risked going to the hospital.

      “You’re in extreme danger,” Charlotte warned her. “Whoever’s after you won’t stop now that they know you’re alive.”

      They wouldn’t stop until she was dead for real.

      “You have no idea who it could be?” Josie asked. She’d never wanted the facts more than she did now.

      “It has to be someone with money,” Charlotte said, “to pay off a U.S. marshal.”

      Josie shivered. It wasn’t any warmer in Brendan’s apartment than it was in the hall. But even if it had been, her blood still would have run cold. “And hire several assassins.”

      Charlotte gasped. “Several?”

      “At least three,” she replied. “More if you count whoever set the bomb.”

      “Bomb!” Charlotte’s voice cracked on the exclamation.

      “We’re fine,” Josie reminded her. “But whoever’s after me must have deep pockets.”

      “It’s probably O’Hannigan,” Charlotte suggested. And she’d no sooner uttered his name than the phone was snapped from Josie’s hand.

      Brendan had it now, pressed to his ear, as the former U.S. marshal named him as suspect number one. Charlotte hadn’t been wrong about anything else. She probably wasn’t wrong about this, either.

       Chapter Nine

      “If you hurt her, I will track you down—”

      He chuckled at the marshal’s vitriolic threat. And he had been accused of getting too personally involved in his job.

      Of course, this time he had. But then no one else had been able to take on the assignment. Maybe that was why his father had left him everything. Because Dennis O’Hannigan had known that if anyone ever dared to murder him, Brendan would be the only person capable of bringing his killer to justice.

      He couldn’t share any of this with Josie though, not with the risk that she would go public with the information. Risk? Hell, certainty. It would be the story of her career. So he stepped inside his den and closed the door behind him, leaving her standing over their sleeping son.

      “I’ll be easy to find,” he assured the marshal. “And I suspect that if anyone gets hurt in my involvement with Josie, it’ll be me.” Just like last time. And he began to explain to her why he couldn’t trust the journalist but why she could trust him.

      Of course the marshal was no fool and asked for names and numbers to verify his story. Her thoroughness gave him comfort that she’d been the one protecting Josie all these years. But then she made an admission of her own—that she was no longer on the job.

      “What the hell!” he cursed, wishing now that he’d checked her out before he’d told her what so few other people knew. “I thought you had clearance—”

      “I do. Through my current security detail, I still have all my clearances and contacts,” she assured him. “But as you know, that doesn’t mean I couldn’t be corrupted like so many others have been.”

      She was obviously suggesting that he may have been.

      “Call those numbers,” he urged her.

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