Never Been Kissed Read Online Free PDF

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 beenepic, 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?