Free Royal Rescue by Lisa Childs Page A

summoned the courage. But then she’d been a different woman four years ago. She’d been an adrenaline junkie who had gotten high on the rush of getting the story. The more information she had discovered the more excited she had become. She hadn’t been only brave—she’d been fearless.
    Then she had become a mother, and she had learned what fear was. Now she was always afraid, afraid that her son would get sick or hurt or scared. Or that whoever had tried to kill her would track them down and hurt him.
    And tonight that fear, her deepest, darkest fear, had been realized. She shuddered, chilled by the thought. But the air had grown cold inside the car now that Brendan had shut off the engine. His heavily muscled body was close and warm, but the look on his ridiculously handsome face was cold. Even colder than the air.
    “And,” he continued, “I never killed any of those people.”
    With a flash of that old fearlessness, she scoffed, “Never?” All the articles about Brendan O’Hannigan alleged otherwise. “That’s not what I’ve heard.”
    “You, of all people, should know better than to believe everything you hear or read,” he advised her.
    Growing up the daughter of a media magnate, she’d heard the press disparaged more than she’d heard fairy tales. Fairy tales. What was a bigger lie than a fairy tale? Than a promise of happily-ever-after?
    “If it’s coming from a credible source, which all of my father’s news outlets are, then you should believe the story,” she said.
    He snorted. “What makes a source credible? ”
    As the daughter of a newsman, she’d grown up instinctively knowing what a good source was. “An insider. Someone close to the story.”
    “An eyewitness?” He was the one scoffing now.
    She doubted anyone had witnessed him committing any crime and lived to testify. She shivered again and glanced at their son. She shouldn’t have put his life in the hands of a killer. But the gunman in the garage had given her no choice. Neither had Brendan.
    “Even grand juries rarely issue an indictment on eyewitness testimony,” he pointed out, as if familiar with the legal process. “They need evidence to bring charges.”
    Had he personally been brought before a grand jury? Or was he just familiar with the process from all the times district attorneys had tried to indict his father? But she knew better than to ask the questions that naturally came to her. He had never answered any of her questions before.
    But he kept asking his own inquiries. “Is there any evidence that I’m a—” Brendan glanced beyond her, into the backseat where their son slept peacefully, angelically “—a bad man?”
    She hadn’t been able to find anything that might have proven his guilt. She’d looked hard for that evidence—not just for her story but also for herself. She’d wanted a reason not to give in to her attraction to him, a reason not to fall for him.
    But when, as a journalist, she hadn’t been able to come up with any cold, hard facts, she’d let herself, as a woman, fall in love with an incredibly charming and smart man. And then he’d learned the truth about her.
    What was the truth about him?
    * * *
    B RENDAN WAITED , but she didn’t answer him. Could she really believe that he was a killer? Could she really believe that he had tried to kill her?
    Sure, he had been furious because she’d deceived him. But he’d only been so angry because he’d let himself fall for her. He’d let himself believe that she might have fallen for him, too, when she’d actually only been using him.
    He wasn’t the only one she’d used. There were the friends in boarding school she’d used as inside sources to get dirt on their famous parents. Then there was the Peterson kid in college with a violence and drug problem that the school had been willing to overlook to keep their star athlete. She’d used her friendship with the kid to blow the lid off that, too. Hell, her story had probably started