Never Been Kissed (15 page)

But the sun was shining down on them with all its goodwill from the bright blue sky. The breeze blew in through the open windows of the pickup truck that Brody had borrowed from his brother, and Ashley carefully, gingerly pulled one leg under her body and turned to face
Brody, where he sat driving the truck, one hand draped over the top of the wheel.

“I feel like we’re living a country music song.”

All she got for her efforts was a patronizing lip curl. She was clearly not the woman to make this man smile.

His shirt rippled and danced along his biceps. Along his rib cage. Revealing muscles and strength.

It took some effort, but she pulled her eyes away.

That, right there, that had to stop.

“Can I take this off?” She pulled at the bill of the Del Monte cap they’d found in the apartment.

“No.”

“Brody, there is no one here.” She gestured out to the dirt road, the trees and the creek beyond it. The endless uninterrupted sunlight.

It was nice. Good.

Made faking relaxation not such a chore.

“Do you know what would happen if anyone with a camera found out where you are?”

“They’d take a picture?”

He shot her a stormy look and she smiled, resting her head against the window. She was tired, having spent most of the last day formulating a plan to make Brody leave.

“After I left your family I had a job on a detail for this pop star, a kid, not much more than a boy, really. And the rules were, he never went out the front door. Ever. But one night, with me, we’re at a hotel in Kansas City, it’s the middle of the night, the middle of nowhere, and he wants to go out the front door. I argue with him, but he insists.” Brody shook his head. “I thought he was going to get killed, literally pulled apart by crying teenage girls and fat old men with cameras. By the time we got him to the car the kid was practically in shock.”

That was easily the most words he’d ever said to her at one time.

“I think you’re exaggerating the problem.”

“I think you’re naive.”

She wanted to tell him he was ridiculous, that she’d held dying babies and clung to her best friend while someone stabbed her in the arm with a knife—but he was right.

She was naive. And hopeful and a romantic and optimistic and what she truly needed to be protected from was him. From her feelings for him.

“What an interesting life you’ve led,” she said. He didn’t say anything. “I guess after you were injured, being a bodyguard was a logical choice.”

He eased them over into the grass; a small bounce made her wince, but then he stopped the truck and put it in park. One long arm, muscular and warm, slipped over the back of the bench seat and even that, even that small shift toward her, the focus of his eyes underneath the dark aviator glasses he wore that made him look like a movie star playing a bodyguard—made her heart pound.

“I’m not sure what fantasy you’ve created about me,” he said.

Oh God, you don’t want to know,
she thought, clutching her fingers together in her lap. She wanted to touch him, run her fingers along that rise of muscle, right there under the sleeve of his shirt. She wanted to follow the curve over the mound of his shoulder, the dip of his back. She wanted to put her fingers in the hair behind his ear, just to know how soft it was. She wanted to press her nose to the skin of his neck, right there, where she could see his heart beating in the cradle of a tendon.

She wanted to bite him. Taste him. Lick him.

“But there weren’t a lot of choices for a guy like me.”

“Oh please,” she said, not buying that for a second. “You’ve done pretty well, Brody. There’s a lot of guys
who come back injured and haven’t done half as well, so you can stop the woe-is-me thing.”

He blinked.

She grinned. “You ready to go fishing?”

Carefully, gingerly, she popped open her door and stepped out into the tall grass. Butterflies and crickets buzzed up around her and mud squished under her shoes. The smell of earth and sunlight and water was a powerful perfume.

Brody appeared beside her with two folding chairs and a cooler. “Wait here,” he said, “let me get set up and I’ll come help you.”

Sounded good to her and she rested against the hot metal of the passenger-side door, breathing carefully through the throb in her ribs.

This might not have been her best idea. Fishing? She hated fishing. And she could use a nap.

Brody reappeared through the bushes, and because she was exhausted by her mental lusting she forced herself not to watch him as he grabbed the fishing poles from the back.

“You okay?” he asked, coming to stand beside her, and she gathered herself from the waters she’d been scattered across. With what felt like monumental effort she pushed away from the door with a smile.

“Here, tough guy,” he murmured and he grabbed her hand and put it over his forearm, like they’d stepped back in time and he was escorting her to a ball.

The fantasy of being courted by Brody swirled around her for a second, because it was fertile, fresh ground her teenage brain had not covered, but then she put it away with the rest of her old girlish fantasies.

The trail was rough and slow-going but worth it once they passed through the bushes and she saw the small wooden pier jutting out into the wide, calm river. The
chairs sat at the end, the cooler between them, surrounded by the glitter of sun bouncing off water.

Sudden emotion gathered in a hard ball at the back of her throat. There were moments, in that three-week captivity, she’d doubted days like this would happen to her ever again.

Days of sunlight and freedom and quiet company.

It was enough to make her reconsider her stance on fishing. Maybe she’d add it to the credo.

“This is great,” she breathed, because she could feel him watching her, aware of her mood, and she was done with tears. Done with his sympathy and pity.

Done with him altogether, but he didn’t know that yet.

Brody helped her down the pier to the chairs and she gratefully sat. From the cooler he pulled a container of worms, bottles of water, and a bag of licorice (which nearly broke her because she loved licorice and he remembered that) and then lifted her feet and set them on the cooler.

His chair creaked as he sat and began assembling the fishing rods, which had been broken down.

“No one has ever said that to me,” Brody said.

“What?”

“That I have it pretty good. That I’m lucky.”

“Well, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes yes. Other times, I’m not so sure.”

“I think that’s life, Brody. You can take it from the girl kidnapped by pirates.”

He shook his head, maybe laughing, maybe despairing of her sense of humor. Hard to say.

“Do you even know how to fish?” Under his hands fishing rods clicked back together.

“Do you?”

“My brother and I built this pier. We spent summers out here fishing. We considered it a calling.”

He fed the fishing line through the hoops, guiding it up over the tip, and then he started to tie on the hook.

Does he know he’s smiling?

“I’d like to meet this brother of yours.”

He stood and cast for her, sending the hook and worm and bobber sailing out over the sparkling water before handing her the rod.

“You’re full service, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

He did the same for himself and then sat beside her in the creaky chair.

She let the crickets dominate the conversation for a while before taking as deep a breath as she could. Slowly, she let it out, blowing away all her stress and anxiety, and tried very hard to just act natural. “What’s your plan, Brody?”

“For what?” He reeled in his line a bit.

“For … after. When are you leaving?”

“Bishop?”

Faking nonchalance, she looked away as he turned toward her, but doubted its ability to convince.

“I don’t have a plan.”

“Well, you should, shouldn’t you?”

“Spit it out, Ashley.” He was on to her, as she’d known he would be.

“You’re relieved from duty.”

Without looking at him she could feel his incredulity. He was a second away from laughing at her.

“You’re kidding. It’s been three days.”

“I’m feeling better. I can dress myself, feed myself. The infection is better, my ribs are healing. I’m not worried about the concussion anymore. I’m on the mend.”

It wasn’t a total lie, more of a partial lie, and she kept her face averted, her attention on her bobber, drifting downstream with the sluggish river current.

“Is that what this little fishing trip is about?” Brody leaned back in his chair and picked up a bottle of water. “You’re trying to prove you’re all right and don’t need me anymore.”

“No.”
Damn it!
That’s exactly what she was doing. “The fishing trip is about fishing. But I don’t need you anymore.”

“What about the press conference?”

She rolled her eyes. “No one is looking for me here, Brody. And if they do happen to find me—well, I have to face the music at some point.”

“So you think I should just dump you here. Alone in the apartment above my brother’s bar?”

“I do.”

“No.”

She looked at him, only to find him smiling at her. Not his half-grin, not his wry little twists of muscle that usually passed as an expression of happiness, but a smile. With teeth.

Oh God, he had dimples.

She looked away.

“I’ll fire you.”

He laughed, and she knew better than to look, but she was stupid when it came to him and she did anyway. His brown throat was stretched back, his mouth open wide as he roared his amusement.

Thwarted, she growled and started to reel in her line because the bobber had gotten too far away from her.

“You never hired me, honey. You haven’t paid me a cent. Neither has your family. I’m here of my own free will and you can’t get rid of me.”

She gaped at him, stunned. “You’re not … you’re not being paid?”

He sobered, cleared his throat, and busied himself with fishing business. But his silence spoke volumes.

They’d known each other for barely six months before she’d thrown her girlish, simple self at him, been part of him losing his first job after the Corps. They weren’t friends, had never been friends despite her efforts. The implications of what he was saying didn’t make sense to her.

“Then … why?” It was barely a breath, a whisper.

“Because your brother came to me. Should I have turned him away? Let you sit in that camp for who knows how long? Do you think I’m capable of that?”

His beautiful brown eyes were stormy, full of more emotion than she’d ever seen from him, except for what she barely remembered in the hospital and the plane.

It was transfixing, she couldn’t move under the force of this sudden emotion. This hot anger from a man who’d only been cold.

And the truth was, in her life no man had ever looked at her like that. Ever.

“Of course not,” she said. Last night, she laid awake knowing that what she felt for Brody when she was seventeen
was nothing compared to what she could feel for him now. If he stayed and cared for her, his fingers in her hair, revealing things about his past, she’d suck up all those crumbs and create a cake of imagined reciprocated feeling. She’d delude herself all over again that beneath his silence and dark brooding eyes he felt something more for her than duty. More even than friendship.

And her heart would get smashed. Again.

And once was enough.

“But … I’d like you to go,” she said.

“Just like that?”

She nodded.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

An excellent question. One that had kept her up last night as well.

“I’m going to wait until the worst of the bruising is gone and then I’ll contact my family and arrange a press conference.”

“Why wait?”

“It’s not that I’m vain—”

“I know that.”

“I go on air and the story is these bruises and I have things I want to talk about at the press conference. Poverty and global aid.”

“It will be at least another week before the bruises are gone.”

“I know.”

He sucked a deep breath in through his teeth and she wondered what he thought. Was he hurt? Did he sense her feelings? Maybe he was relieved. Whatever it was, she would never know.

“Two more days,” he said. “I’ll stay two more days.”

“Including today?”

“Is it that bad?” he snapped, his voice sizzling hot.
“Am I—” He stopped. Stood. “Tomorrow night, I’ll leave.”

He walked away, up the pier. Bushes rustled as he moved past, but the truck never started. She knew it wouldn’t. He wouldn’t leave her alone.

His fishing pole, where he’d dropped it, the line still in the water, jerked and then slid across the pier, rolling until it stopped, wedged between two slats of wood.

A fish, she thought, but didn’t move. Brody caught a fish.

The line pulled taut, bending the tip of the fishing pole into an arc.

It bent and it bent, the pressure greater every second. The thin plastic line glittered like the edge of a knife in the sunlight. She held her breath, feeling like that line, waiting for it to snap, wanting it to in some perverse way.

But it didn’t.

It held. Stronger than the force trying to break it.

Brody, still feeling duped, still amazed that she’d managed to dupe him, drove slowly back into town. The fishing trip was a bust; about twenty minutes after he’d left her on that pier, he’d gone back to collect her and the rods.

She was exhausted now, her eyes closed, her head gingerly resting against the passenger-side window. But he could tell by the tension in her body she wasn’t sleeping.

She wanted him to leave.

Why that managed to be both surprising and surprisingly painful, he wasn’t sure.

Your plan had been to leave,
he reminded himself.
You were going to drop her off, make sure she could fend for herself, and then go. This is actually exactly what your plan entailed. And now you’re mad?

Instead of stopping at the apartment, he drove farther into town, into the square, and managed to get a spot in front of Cora’s. It was just after the lunch rush, so the place was mostly empty.