Never Been Kissed (18 page)

“ ‘We are so grateful that Ashley is home safe and sound. She is resting and healing in the comfort of our home, in the care of her family. Ashley has been through a terrible ordeal and we ask that you respect our privacy at this time. When she is recovered and able, she will be joining her brother, Harrison, as he campaigns for a position in Congress.’ ”

The news cycle turned over to a tropical storm building off the coast of Florida.

Brody had expected Patty to issue some kind of press release and this was a good one, the heat was definitely off Ashley now and if anyone felt like looking for her and her story, they’d be looking in Georgia.

Good,
Brody thought, feeling better than he had since last night.
Good.

But when he turned to head back to the bar Gary was staring at him. His eyes under the bill of his hat were sharp.

He knew.

Gawd. That futon. I’ve slept on more comfortable rocks.

Ashley carefully got up and shuffle-walked to the bathroom. The moon was just over the eastern trees out the window over the toilet and she thought maybe she’d been asleep for six hours.

Amazing how much better she felt. The sleep. The food. The sunlight. And maybe the fact that Brody would be leaving made her feel better, too. Instead of constantly reacting to him, she could figure out what she was going to do next with her life.

She glanced through the cracked doorway of the bedroom, where Brody lay, on his stomach, face buried in the pillows. The moonlight cast silver light over his back. All that skin.

He’s leaving tomorrow night.
Gone, back into the shadows he came from, and this time … this time she was sure she’d never see him again.

And it was good—the right thing. But part of it stung and tugged and ached. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to be alone, she was good with alone. It was the idea of being without
him
that was so disarming.

He’d saved her, stayed with her, bullied her, washed her hair, fed her, humored her.

And soon he’d be gone.

He’s not gone yet.

Ridiculous, this thought in her head. Outrageous.

It’s not like I’m going to kiss him again,
she told herself, as she crept toward the partially shut door of the bedroom.
I just want to … do something really creepy, like watch him sleep. Touch his back, the tips of his hair where it brushes his neck.

Good God, Ashley, you’ve lost it.

But as she stood in that shadowed hallway, watching him sleep, she thought about sex. And about Yeri.

Whether or not he would have raped her, she couldn’t answer. But the threat of it had lived like a knife against her throat for three weeks.

Virgin. When she stopped thinking about sex, put it away on a shelf, for years, it wasn’t surreal. It wasn’t anything. It was just an absence … a
not.

Now it was something disturbing. She was a twenty-seven-year-old virgin. She’d had one serious boyfriend in her life and two utterly unreciprocated infatuations.

That was how far she’d drifted away herself … how far down the list her needs and wants had become.

And it wasn’t even that simple, it’s not like she could throw up her hands and say, “Oh my God, I was so busy saving people that I forgot to have sex!”

But she did forget. She forgot to have pleasure. Or pain of her own. She not only removed herself from the sexual equation altogether, but also the equation of her own life. Dating, bad boyfriends, sexual mistakes, kids, a husband, a home that she didn’t share with snakes and Kate. A job that didn’t make her lock herself in a storage closet and cry most days. Standing her ground with her mother. Wanting to build something of her own. Wanting those things in Africa was a distraction from the work she’d been doing and most days, considering the stakes she was dealing with, utterly inconsequential.

And Yeri could have taken not just her virginity, and brutalized her body, he would have eliminated her choice about how and when she put herself back into the mix.

But without Yeri, without Somalia and the rest of it, she might never have found the interest, the courage, to move on.

It’s time to make some choices.
She chose not to think of how deeply ironic it was to consider her own choices as she decided to slip into bed with a sleeping man.

Like a shadow she crept through the open door of the bedroom. A floorboard creaked under her foot and she froze like a teenager sneaking back into her home after a night drinking. Not that she’d ever done that.

Not that she’d ever done anything in rebellion but kiss Brody and then run away from her family into the bosom of catastrophe. Refugee camps and disaster zones.

Standing in this room, about to sneak into a man’s bed just to listen to him breathe, she realized how weird that was. How weird she was.

I need a better rebellion.

And Brody, the silver, moonlit muscles of his back sculpted like sand dunes, was the right kind of rebellion.

Carefully, she slipped into bed, her weight barely registering on the mattress. She held her breath, watching him to see if he’d notice, but other than the slow up and down of his back, he didn’t shift. Curling up on her side, on the farthest edge of the mattress, she tucked her arms around herself and tried not to breathe too loudly.

This doesn’t feel rebellious.

It feels ridiculous.

I’m not made for this sort of stuff.
She braced herself to leave.

Brody was aware of her the moment she stood at the bedroom door. He’d just come in from downstairs and wasn’t yet asleep.

I should have moved her from the futon,
he thought.
Her ribs have to be killing her.

He was about to turn and tell her that he’d go to the futon when she shocked the hell out of him and slipped into his room.

The floor creaked, the mattress barely dipped but he could smell the flower and vanilla scent of her hair. He could feel her shifting, all along his back.

She is in my bed.

His mind was buzzing and blank. And then, after a moment of stillness, he could feel her shifting again.

He turned his head, caught her about to roll off the mattress.

“What are you doing?”

She jumped and then winced.

“Sorry,” he breathed.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t … this … I’m sorry.” Her blush was neon. She was going to hyperventilate if she didn’t calm down.

And he knew in a lightning bolt of insight and lust that of course she was here for him. Of course this was the twenty-seven-year-old version of that kiss. He pressed his hips deeper into the mattress, trying to cut off blood flow to his cock, but it only excited him.

She—in his bed—excited him.

“The futon,” she whispered, but wasn’t looking at him. Liar, he wanted to say and lean over to press his lips to the sweet swell of her breasts over the edge of the tank top she wore. He wanted to curve his hand along the back of her leg to her ass and he wanted to pull her against him. Flush. Tight. So she couldn’t breathe without tasting him.

It was ridiculous, she was in no shape for anything that was running through his head.

He arched his hips into the mattress, searching for pain or relief he couldn’t say and he knew he had to get out of there.

“I’ll go,” he breathed but she put a hand against his arm and he stopped on a dime. Everything. His heart, his lungs. His brain. Everything just stopped so it could concentrate on her touch.

“Don’t … I mean … you don’t have to. The futon’s really uncomfortable.” The moon was so full, so bright, he could see her eyes, the curls against her neck. Her skin was the color of milk.

They laid there connected by her hand and his inability to move and every single thought he had about her that he never should have had. That kiss in the hallway ten years ago circled them as if looking for a place to land.

Her thumb brushed the crease of his inside elbow and all that blood waiting for direction pounded in his veins, flooded into his cock, and he bit his back teeth against the need to groan. He clenched his hands against the need to touch her.

As he watched, her mouth parted, her lips damp, her eyes wide.

She looked like the kid she’d been.

But she was a woman and she knew what was happening between them. The dark lust that colored their atmosphere.

“You’re leaving,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

Ahhh … that explains the courage. The ambush.

But he wasn’t leaving; she just didn’t know that yet. Maybe if he were, he’d take her up on the invitation in her eyes. He’d give in to the desperate pounding ache in his body to touch her, to kiss her.

But you’re not leaving.

And this can’t happen again.

“What are you asking for, Ashley?” There was an edge
of anger in his voice, because he was tired of being the reasonable one. When all he wanted was to ease deep into her and feel her breaking over him, like a wave constantly coming back for more.

“Nothing—”

“Don’t lie. Don’t sneak into my bed and say you’re not asking for something.”

She pulled her fingers away but he grabbed them. Too hard maybe, because she gasped. Inside his palm her fingers twitched.

They were both breathing hard, breathing like people in a race.

“I just … I just wanted to be close … to you,” she finally breathed.

“Is that how you ask to be fucked?”

She gasped, shocked or turned on, he wasn’t sure, could barely filter through his own reactions. The lust and fury and desire and grief that swirled in him.

Oh God, he wanted to kiss her. He wanted to push her back against those pillows and fuck her.

Instead he took her hand and pressed a chaste, hungry, fervent kiss against the hot tips of her fingers.

“Go to sleep,” he told her and stood in a rush to go out to the futon.

Ashley had a lot of experience with shame. It was an old friend. She knew it inside and out. Shame for not being like her family, for not being what her mother thought she should be. Shame for being white and rich in a refugee camp. Shame for throwing herself at Brody, and her broken gay-dar, and the way she couldn’t seem to be knowing and casual about her body the way other women were.

But wanting to be, so badly, that she concocted outrageous fantasies where men just forced pleasure on her,
just overcome all of her worries and sensibilities and doubts and allowed her to live in the moment.

And even after Yeri, she still wished Brody would turn to her and show her what she was missing.

She knew shame.

Hours after Brody had left, she was still staring at the circulatory system of cracks in the bedroom wall—but she didn’t feel shame.

Is that how you ask to be fucked?

Those words, they hummed through her like a hive of bees.

She
wished
she felt ashamed, shame would be familiar, because what was filling her right now was the opposite.

She was … on fire.

On fire and smiling.

It took her awhile of burning inside out last night to realize why she wasn’t ashamed. She’d crawled into his bed, only to chase him out of it, and that was a pretty shameful thing.

And pretending that she’d gone there for anything other than to be close to him was ridiculous.

The futon? Please. That fooled no one.

It was as lame a teenager move as had ever been perpetrated.

And honestly, she should be ashamed.

But he
wanted
her.

He’d been hard and hot and nearly wild with it. As wild as she’d ever seen him.

He didn’t walk out of that room last night because he didn’t want her, because he wasn’t interested. He walked out for different, infuriatingly Brody reasons that probably had more to do with her injuries and being hired to protect her and whatever it was that made him believe they weren’t friends years ago.

And now he was in the kitchen making her breakfast.

Listening to him cook, the clang of dishes and sizzle of bacon, she realized she knew friendship as much as she knew shame. She knew every side of friendship, good, bad, lopsided, all of it.