Never Been Kissed Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 workerand 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.

Chapter 4
     
    New York City
    40 hours later
    August 5, 11:00 A.M.
     
    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.
    She would never eat goat again. Ever.
    Clean underwear was not to be taken for granted. It was a flat-out miracle.
    The same could be said for doors. She’d shut all of them.
     
    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