Never Been Kissed (13 page)

“I’m sorry—” Ashley said.

Just as he said, “Don’t.”

She stared at him and he stared back. Years ago, under his direct gaze, she would have ducked her head and turned away, changed the subject. But this new Ashley was too tough to be bullied by something as weak as a stare-down.

“I’m sorry I put you in that position. I’m sorry I got you fired.” She blew out a breath as if setting down a heavy load. “I’ve wanted to say that for years.”

“I quit, Ashley. I wasn’t fired. The second you left the hallway I knew what was going to happen and I told your mother I’d pack my bags and be gone in an hour.”

She blinked wide brown eyes at him. “You quit?” He
didn’t nod, he just didn’t look away. “Mom said she fired you.”

“Your mom is a bitch. And I imagine she wanted you to feel bad about it.”

“I don’t know how I could have felt worse,” Ashley said, bright color on her cheeks. Finally she looked away from him, but he imagined it was embarrassment more than anything. “Still, it doesn’t change the fact that I cost you your job.”

“I cost myself the job, Ashley. I knew how you felt and I didn’t shut it down.” Shutting down the crush would have had some serious side effects and he didn’t have the guts to hurt her. And never in his wildest, most uncomfortable dreams had he thought Ashley would have worked up the courage to kiss him.

She’d been the daughter of the nominee for Vice President of the United States. He’d been the injured former Marine who’d called in every favor owed him simply to get a low position on that detail.

“My mom was sure you would go to the press,” she said.

“And tell them what? A seventeen-year-old girl kissed me?”

“You could have ruined the campaign,” she said. “Maybe my whole family.”

And let your mother chew on your bones for the rest of your life?
He couldn’t imagine setting her up for that—it would take a far more vicious man than he could ever be.

“Your dad lost that campaign anyway.” There had been rumors a year later. Something about a car accident and a young girl who wasn’t his wife. He cleared his throat, pulling himself, both of them, away from the past. “Press conference is starting in a minute.” He turned up the volume and set the laptop on the coffee table between them.

“You know, Brody …” she said, smiling a little. And there was something about the smile that sent warning bells ringing in his head. This wasn’t the child he’d rejected sitting here. This was a woman full-grown.

“You can admit it, no one is here, but you liked me. Maybe not in the way I liked you, but we were friends.” She tilted her head, trying to see into him, it seemed.

He blinked at her, stunned.
Friends?
“I was an employee, hired by your family to do a job, and I failed at it. We weren’t friends.”

Though she stayed two feet away from him, her body close enough to touch, he sensed her pulling away, inside of herself. Locking the doors, closing the blinds, killing the lights. Turning the open sign to closed.

That’s how the years—and her family, and maybe even him to some degree—had taught Ashley to handle her pain.

It was in him to apologize, to do what he could to take back the hurt, but he knew it was best to leave it alone.

He liked her,
wanted
her, and if she got it into her head that they were friends or possibly more …

“Sorry,” she breathed, “my mistake.”

She glanced away, blinking, and at that moment the laptop screen buzzed to life.

The press conference was starting.

Through the roaring in her ears Ashley heard the BBC announcer, the familiar sound of Andrew Harding, the BBC’s Africa correspondent, introducing the press conference.

Not friends. Got it.
Like an arrow through her stomach, she got it. No more brave fantasies of their affection toward each other.

How ironic, she thought. It had taken her three years to get over the firebomb of throwing herself at Brody, of (as she’d thought then) making him lose his job. The trauma had been so complete she’d been unable to look at her body, her reflection in a mirror. The problems she’d always had with food became more problematic, which of course had infuriated her mother. Patty had put her on a dozen fad diets, none of which worked. Whatever feminine courage and self-esteem Ashley had been able to cobble together to make a play for Brody had vanished.

It had taken another year to stop measuring every guy she met to Brody’s standard. But even she had started to realize it was time to move on. So four years after throwing herself at Brody, she worked up enough courage to fall head over heels in unrequited love again. Joel, a senior in her anthropology department with blond hair and sparkling eyes, had laughed at all her jokes and volunteered with her at the co-op.

Her feelings for him forced her friends to stage an intervention to explain “gay-dar” and “just friends.”

After that was a string of friends with very limited benefits. It’s not like she could go to a bar and find a boy—she was the daughter of the Governor of Georgia. And then she met Mark. Mark, whom she dated for a year. Mark, who wouldn’t have sex unless they were married.

Seemed an awful big commitment just to get her hands on a penis.

And all of them—every single one—a friend.

But not Brody.

Brody stood and went to the fridge. “You want anything?” he asked as if all was normal.

“Can I watch this by myself?”

He turned, beer in hand. His expression blank. Unreadable. The enigmatic Brody Baxter in full armor. “You want that?”

Of course I want that, you jackass, you just gutted me.

She was interrupted by the sound of a thousand cameras firing at once on the screen. Ashley glanced down at the laptop in time to see Kate walking to the presentation table from the left.

Tall, angular, assured Kate. Her black hair was pulled back behind a headband. Her yellow shirt looked new and fussy and totally unlike Ashley’s dear friend.

Kate sat, cleared her throat, and pulled the microphone closer. “Hullo,” she said.

Ashley groaned and covered her mouth with her hands. Thick tears filled her eyes but didn’t fall. She pushed them away with her fingers.

“That’s Kate?” he asked and she nodded, smiling quickly.

He didn’t sit, but stood behind the futon, watching.

“On July 13, a friend and I hired a boat from Victoria on Mahe Island to tour some of the outer Seychelles islands.” Kate was reading from cards held in shaking
hands and it was such a strange show of nerves that Ashley wished she could be there, to help her.

Except for a cut on her lip and some swelling around it, Kate’s face was clear of bruises. There were no bandages on the arms revealed by the pale yellow shirt she wore.

“She wasn’t hurt,” Brody said as if he was noticing the same thing.

Ashley shook her head and was silent.

“By midday the boat was boarded by pirates and we were taken aboard their ship.” Ashley had brief memories of the guns and the yelling, the pebbled surface of the boat deck under her knees. “From there we traveled to a large freighter they had captured and were using as a base.”

“How long were you there?” someone in the audience shouted and Kate looked up, flustered, but then after a long, slow, shaky breath, her lip kicked up in the corner.

“Impatient bugger,” she said and the room laughed. Ashley laughed, too. Behind her she could hear Brody’s surprised huff of breath.

There’s the Kate I know.

“Let me … let me just get through this part. I’ll answer your questions when I’m done.” She glanced back down at her cards, appearing so painfully alone, a dot of yellow on a sea of blue. “Though scared, we were well fed and given plenty of water while on the freighter. We were there for four days before being taken to shore in Somalia. From there we were moved from camp to camp for nearly two weeks before settling in Garoowe for the duration of our captivity.”

“Who was your friend?” a reporter shouted, and this time she couldn’t shut them up with a smile and some bravado. The yelling became louder and she blinked from the flashes on the cameras. She looked cornered. Trapped.

“Where the hell is her family?” Brody asked. “Someone should be taking care of that woman, helping her.”

“They’re …” Ashley shook her head, her fingers pressing against her lips as if there were words she could stop, or coax free. “Proud. And super-strict. This would be awful for them.”

“Looks like a picnic for their daughter,” Brody muttered.

Kate lifted her hands. “Please, I’ll answer everything, just one at a time.”

“Who were you with?” a voice called out of the melee.

Kate winced and Ashley closed her eyes, knowing what was going to happen.

“No,” Brody breathed, catching on. “Oh, fuck no.”

Kate looked right at the camera, like she’d probably been coached to. “Ashley Montgomery.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Is this a joke?”

There was a hushed roar in the room and then another voice yelled out for clarification. “The daughter of Georgia Governor Ted Montgomery?”

Kate nodded.

“Is Ashley still in Somalia?” a reporter called out and Kate shook her head.

“Her family ransomed her.”

With those words Kate guaranteed that Ashley would be the most sought-after news story around the world. As if on cue, Harrison’s phone, which Brody kept charged by the sink, started to buzz.

Her family.

It will be okay,
she thought.
It will.

Brody sat down opposite the small mountain of pillows she’d been using as a table earlier. His beer bottle hit the table with a
thunk.

Ashley took it as a personal mission not to look at him.

“Did you know she was going to do that?”

“I told her she could.”

“Ashley.” He sighed, and she could see his flexing muscles under the T-shirt he wore. “Do you know what that means?”

When she looked at him her expression was stone cold. She’d known, and she’d done it anyway. Good or bad, she’d made a decision and she was going to see it through.

“Her family sold everything to get her free. This is her way of trying to take care of them. Of herself.”

“How much did she get?” he asked.

“Not enough for what she did for me,” she said.

After a moment Brody nodded.

“You seem unharmed,” one of the reporters asked and Brody focused on the laptop.

“The pirates didn’t hurt us.” Kate touched her lip. “This was at the end.”

“Was Ashley Montgomery released unharmed as well?”

Kate looked down at the microphone. “There was one pirate, Yeri …” Ashley reached out to close the laptop but not before Kate said: “At night he would come into our hut—”

Ashley slammed the top of the laptop down so hard it slid onto the floor at his feet.

The silence pounded.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as he blinked. “If it’s broken, the laptop, I’ll replace it.”

“I don’t care about the computer.” She could feel his eyes burning holes through her skin. Carefully, on legs that wobbled, she stood.

“What was she going to say about Yeri?”

“He’s the one who hit me.” She took a shuffling step toward the solace of the bedroom, where she could at least
attempt to shut him out. “Thank you for waking me up, I’m … I’m tired. The bath and everything, so exhausting, all that hair combing …” She was babbling, but couldn’t stop. “I’m going back to sleep now.”

At the door to her room she saw the freshly made bed, the new sheets he’d put on for her, and she didn’t want to be touched. Or moved. Or thankful. But she was.

She turned to thank him; he was standing so close she nearly fell backward.

Carefully, so gently she actually barely felt it, he pulled her into balance.

“Let me help you,” he said and she nodded, because she was tired and reeling and, she realized, shaking. Not just trembling, but shaking, and the second he touched her he knew it, too.

Silently, he helped her into bed, lifted her feet to slide them under the thin white sheets with faded blue flowers on them. He pulled the top sheet up to her chest.

“Thank you, I—”

Brody braced his hands on the pillow near her shoulders; his eyes, so dark and knowing, pierced her skin. His face was so close she could touch it if she wanted. She could reach up and cup his cheek in her hand, feel the silk of his hair against her fingers.

Not friends,
she thought.
Not friends and not anything else.

But God, she wanted to touch him. She wanted to hold herself to the rock and heat of him. An anchor against the tides bullying her.

“What did Yeri do?” he asked.

“He watched us while we slept,” she told him. The truth, and yet not. “It was scary.”

His eyes moved slowly over her face, from her hair, dry now and soft, to the stitches on her forehead, across her bruises and back up to her eyes.

She couldn’t breathe. If he were any other man, in any other situation, she’d be sure he was going to kiss her. But she was never sure of Brody.

“You’re not telling me the truth.”

Because I’m a virgin. I’m a virgin and it sounds ridiculous even to me.

“He didn’t rape me.”

“You were unconscious, Ashley. For a long time.”

“The doctor said there was no sign of trauma. The rape kit was negative.” But somehow that negative kit did nothing to dispel all her own fear. He would have raped her, there were times she was sure he would do it. Nights when she and Kate wouldn’t have been able to scare him away.

And her virginity would have been taken in a violent, awful act, against her will.

There was no kit that could end that fear. That fear had seeped into her bones.

Clearly unconvinced, Brody stared, so she did the one thing that would guarantee he would leave.

She touched him.

Her hand cupped his shoulder, her finger slipped over the neckline of his shirt to touch his skin, feel his pulse in his neck. An accident, but a good one. A breathtaking, heart-stopping accident.

She opened her mouth to speak but found all her energy focused on her hand, on feeling him, absorbing him. Under her palm his skin twitched and it was hot, hotter than she would have thought. And smooth. The muscle under his arm shifted, a tremor to the larger earthquake of him stepping back. Away.