Never Been Kissed (4 page)

“I’m trying to find her,” Harrison said, approaching the bed.

Brody was a big man and he took up a lot of space so he turned aside. Trying to give them as much privacy as he could.

You should leave,
he told himself.
The job is over. There’s no reason to stay.

He was highly attuned to when he was in the way, and he was absolutely in the way now. He’d done the messy part, the thing he was good for.

It’s time for you to go.

“Harrison,” she whispered.

“Hey,” Harrison whispered back. Brody could hear the smile in his voice. “There you are.”

Out of the corner of his eyes Brody watched as she lifted her arm, reaching for her brother, and Harrison bent over the bed, smiling at his sister, despite the tears on both their faces.

Brody was good at watching family from the corner of his eyes. His own. The ones he guarded.

But watching the Montgomerys, he had to look away, out the window to the black night, the shadows of palm trees.

“I’m so sorry,” she cried. “I’m so sorry—”

“No,” Harrison said, fiercely. “No. Don’t even say it. You’re my sister and you’re safe. That’s all that matters. That’s everything.”

“Don’t you have a campaign to run?” she asked.

“Like any of that is as important as you,” Harrison said.

Brody could hear the sheets rustling and imagined her shaking her head. He closed his eyes, wishing he were anywhere but here.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Shh, Ashley,” Harrison whispered. “Shhh, you need to rest. Get better, so we can get you home.”

“Brody?”

Brody jerked, surprised to hear her ask for him; he glanced at Harrison, who quietly backed away.

A wrinkle appeared under the stitches on her forehead and her eye filled with tears again. “Brody.” Her voice cracked, thready and thin, as if just remembering what kind of hell he’d pulled her from.

Hours ago, when they got to the hospital she wouldn’t release him and he’d let her cling to him.

Now he started to reach for her, but stopped. Despite all they’d been through in the last day, it didn’t seem right. He couldn’t quite forget her as a seventeen-year-old kid breathing the rarified air of an American princess. Untouchable on so many levels. Every level, really.

He stepped back from the bed and crossed his arms over his chest so he wouldn’t brush the hair from her forehead.

“It’s me.”

There was no room between them for words of comfort now so he fell back to a familiar position. His job. And the distance required to do it well.

“Do you know where you are?” he whispered. Her eye was clear; as it glanced around, there was no confusion.

“A hospital. Nairobi?”

Smart girl.
He bit back a smile. “Any idea what day it is?”

She blinked and shook her head, but then winced at the motion. “I was in that camp for three weeks. It’s August, right?”

“That’s right. The fifth.”

Her eye fluttered shut but she struggled to open it back up.

“It’s okay,” he told her. He dropped a finger to touch the long brown curl that hung over the side of the pillow. She couldn’t know. Couldn’t feel it. Her hair was still matted, crusted with Somali dust. They needed to get that off of her. “Go to sleep,” he told her. “You’ll be home soon.”

“Don’t … go.”

“Where am I going? You’re my ride home,” he whispered and she smiled even as her eye slid shut. Lamp light fell across the bed, making the bruises and the stitches and the red swelling look exactly as bad as it was.

He was totally aware of every single mistake he was making. The lines he was crossing. And he told himself this was all just an anomaly. In a few days he’d step off the Montgomery family jet and vanish back into his old life, his old job. His old shadows.

It would take some time, but Ashley would be forgotten. Again.

“Do you have any leads on this Kate woman Ashley was captured with?” he asked, lifting his fingers from Ashley’s hair.
Idiot. Exhausted sentimental idiot.

“Kate McGovern. I know she was another aid worker
and I know she’s English,” Harrison said, sitting back down. The light from the lamp slashed across his face as well, and the Golden Montgomery child was looking tarnished. “I’ve got a lead on her family.”

Brody stepped away from the bed to the doorframe, and the shadows that lingered on the fringe of light. “Umar said she’d been taken to Mogadishu, that her family had paid her ransom.”

Harrison made a distracted assenting noise and leaned back in the chair, his tie pulled loose, his sleeves rolled up. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing at the guesthouse in Moorea. It seemed like a week ago.

“Sadly, we have bigger problems.”

Brody would have laughed. But life had taught him well. Things could always get worse.

“I have to leave once we get to New York,” Harrison said. “So I need you to take her to her doctor’s appointment at Mount Sinai, and afterward take her to her apartment. I’ll meet you as soon as I’m able.”

“You’re leaving her?” Brody asked, startled and angry at the idea.

“I’ll get back as soon as I can.”

Seemed cold to Brody, and he was pretty much the expert on cold. But the frigid inner workings of the Montgomery family were not his business.

“All right,” he agreed. On the bed, Ashley sighed.

So much for back to regular life.

She couldn’t be left alone, not after what she’d been through. Not with a concussion and bruised ribs. She would have trouble even feeding herself.

“What exactly are the bigger problems?” Brody asked.

“My mother.”

Yes.
He laughed all the way to the chair in the hallway. Where he sat and rubbed his throbbing knee.
That was worse.

Ashley was numb. Numb like she’d been sitting on ice for the forty hours instead of flying halfway around the world.

Getting rescued by a bodyguard from her past.

It could be shock, or the concussion or pain medication. Maybe it was PTSD, though she’d always sort of thought she was too pragmatic or too dumb to suffer from that, despite all she’d seen. The Dadaab refugee camp held hope and horror in equal amounts and she’d witnessed plenty of both.

But nothing seemed real. The car. Freedom. The clothes on her back. The family limo. Walking into Mt. Sinai to see her family doctor at dawn, to get tests run without waiting. A nurse brought her the prescriptions in a white bag.

The power of money and influence was a heady thing. If not surreal.

In an effort to break through the ice, to find herself in this new world she was suddenly living in, having survived
pirates
of all things, she made a list in her head.

A post-kidnapping credo of sorts.

That was as far as she’d gotten.

Outside the limo, the familiar sites of New York City flew past in a blur. Through the steel of the car and the numbness she was shrouded in, she could feel the frenetic energy, the noise and the smells. The lights. So many lights. As if darkness were something to be eradicated.

The opposite of Africa.

Anxiety and a low-level ache that the painkillers couldn’t totally beat back began to buzz through her, taking care of the numbness, making her uncomfortable.

It had been a year since she’d been in New York City. And it felt as if she were being dipped in a pool of neon electricity.

Good,
she thought,
feeling bad is better than feeling nothing.

The black window between the driver’s seat and the rest of the limo eased down and a brown bag was thrust through the hole. The ambrosial odor, the sweet scent of French fries hit the air with the power of a sledgehammer and her stomach immediately knotted.

“Stop trying to force-feed me,” she said, not taking the bag.

With everything else, the presence of Brody Baxter was simply indecipherable. It was baffling that Harrison had approached Brody, after all that had happened ten years ago, and it was even more baffling that Brody had accepted the job. But she was grateful, absurdly grateful, that every time she’d opened her eyes in the last few days, she’d seen his face.

His stone cold face.

In Nairobi, at the very beginning, when the doctor had looked her over, Brody had stayed right by her side, bound to her by her fist in the hem of his shirt. The pain had been
epic, the fear and shock nearly as much, and that cotton shirt warmed by his body, twisted in her grasp, was the only thing that kept her from falling to pieces.

He’d sat beside her on the jet over the ocean, through the night. Waking her every three hours because of the concussion. Each time she woke, panicked and scared, worried about Kate, thinking she was back in that hut, Yeri’s eyes watching her, Brody’s voice would ease out of the darkness.

“You’re okay,” he’d said over and over.

After they landed in New York, Harrison had pressed a kiss to her forehead and told her he was trying to pull together the missing pieces of her life, before vanishing in that way he did.

Brody had taken her to the hospital and waited in the hallway while Dr. Goldstein looked her over extensively. Brody’s shadowy shoulders had been visible through the frosted glass window. And she’d stared at those shoulders, biting her lips through the rape kit.

A very strange touchstone, and probably a dangerous one, but she cut herself some slack.

If you couldn’t make bad decisions after being kidnapped, when could you, really?

She would have smiled at her own ridiculousness if her face hadn’t been so thick and swollen.

So now, the limo stopping and lurching through Manhattan traffic, all she had was a brand-new blue sling, a prescription for painkillers and some antibiotics for the infection starting in the slice in her arm.

One of the few pleasures of having been kidnapped—no luggage.

And she had Brody.

“I’m not hungry,” she said, pushing the switch to roll up the window. He must have hit the lock on his side because it paused halfway, the bag and his arm still reaching into her space.

He didn’t say anything, he didn’t ever have to. Brody’s actions were speeches of intent. Epic poems of argument. He simply held that bag toward her until finally she grabbed it.

“You’re just as bad as the Somalis,” she said.

“It’s not goat,” he answered as if he knew.

And maybe he did. Maybe he’d been kidnapped by pirates a thousand times. She knew less than nothing about him, despite all her painful girlish curiosity ten years ago.

Under the smell of French fries she caught a whiff of cheeseburger and her stomach unknotted enough to roar with excitement. Like most teenagers, fast food had been her favorite thing on the planet when she was seventeen, and in the six months Brody worked for her family he had probably seen her eat a hundred of these meals.

It was still her favorite guilty pleasure.

But it had been a year since she’d had McDonald’s, her stomach would never be able to handle it. Though it would serve Brody right if she threw up all over him. She curled the bag closed and set it by her feet. Reintroduction to North American cuisine would have to start small.

She caught his gaze through the open window, those dark eyes missed nothing. And the quick brain behind them connected the dots.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Try this.” He handed her an orange juice. And half a bagel. Perhaps his breakfast? She quickly calculated how she could split it. How many people she could feed if she was careful. Three? Four?

“Ashley.” Just that word, full of concern, and she blinked. Right. Not Africa. New York.

“Thank you,” she said and took what he offered.

She sipped the orange juice, icy cold and bright, a revelation of tangy sweetness.

Orange juice was going on the credo. Orange juice every day.

She tore into the bagel like a starving woman, which, she realized, she actually was.

The pirates had fed her well, but half the time she’d been unable to eat. The lingering stomach bug she’d gotten in Kenya had roared back in Somalia. And off and on for three weeks, she and Kate had taken turns helping each other to the third-world privy.

Kate.

The thought of her friend, of the last time she’d seen her, being dragged off by Aferi, her lip bleeding from the smack Yeri had given her, put her stomach back in knots. Ashley had screamed and fought as best she could but Yeri, who for three weeks had watched her with ownership and hate, hit her on the head with the butt of his AK-47.

Ashley touched the bandage, the stitches small bumps beneath it. The world had gone black until she’d woken up in that plane with Brody.

“Brody?” Ashley asked and in the front passenger seat of the car he turned toward her. “Have you heard anything from Harrison about Kate?”

“Nothing new.”

He was watching her, his eyes unreadable.

Her belly was full of being watched by men, so she stuck out her tongue and pushed the button to roll up the glass. Brody turned away as it started to rise, but not before she saw him smile.

The limo slowed and then finally stopped and Ashley looked out the window to the familiar pre-war apartment building on 82nd Street in the glamorous Upper East Side. Nonnie’s apartment. Exhausted, worn to the bone, Ashley felt tears prick the back of her eyes again.

Her mom’s eccentric mother had died years ago, but
the apartment, filled with Nonnie’s beautiful odd things, was the next best thing.

The limo door opened and there was Brody, helping her out, his hands careful and fleeting as he touched her shoulder, her hand.

“Thank you,” she said for the thousandth time.