Indecent Proposal by Molly O'Keefe Read Free Book Online

hands on their way to work, the fact that she’d gladly pay the cost for another night with Harry might indicate she wasn’t quite done paying.

Chapter 4
    Wednesday, August 7
    Harrison Montgomery’s hands couldn’t stop shaking.
    In his tumbler of water the ice cubes bounced against the crystal.
    It wasn’t the fault of the jet engines, or transatlantic turbulence. The ride, as ever, in the Montgomery family jet was smooth as silk.
    The shaking was from him. From inside him. From his muscles. His brain. The damaged edges of his exhausted heart.
    It’s done. It’s over. She is safe and we’re taking her home .
    That mantra had no effect on the shaking. He put down the glass and balled his hands into fists, hoping that might help. Exhaustion made him nauseous, but every time he slipped into a doze, all he saw was his sister, beaten and bloody, filthy and unconscious, and his eyes popped open, his heartbeat pounding in his throat.
    Ashley had been kidnapped by Somali pirates.
    The thought—even though he’d been living with it for the last three weeks—was still surreal.
    Who gets kidnapped by pirates?
    The statistics of that particular question got skewed by the fact that Ashley had spent the last year as an aid worker in Kenya and a friend had convinced her to takea vacation to the Seychelles. They’d rented a boat for a day and the pirates had picked them up.
    In the last three weeks he’d negotiated her release, gathered the ransom, and found Brody Baxter, a former bodyguard for the Montgomery family, who was the man who actually went into the tiny desert village that had been armed to the teeth to get Ashley. They then spent twenty-four excruciating hours in a Nairobi hospital making sure she was okay to fly, that there weren’t internal injuries or brain trauma.
    Thank God there weren’t.
    He’d scheduled a more thorough exam to be done by their family doctor once they got back to New York City and called ahead to their grandmother’s building, letting them know Ashley would be arriving and that she didn’t have any keys. Or ID. Or clothes.
    In front of him was all the paperwork that would allow her to enter the country without a passport with as little hassle as possible.
    Luckily, being a Montgomery had a few perks, and he could count on some political friends on that score.
    He’d done all of this—negotiating, ransoming, traveling, waiting—without the press finding out. Which was a miracle, really, considering he was a Montgomery and the press, as a rule, cared about what he and his family were doing.
    He’d also done it without major international incident or a SEAL team.
    Or sleep, really.
    All while running for the United States House of Representatives.
    And now, for some reason, with Ashley finally safe and sleeping in the back of the plane, he found himself unable to use his hands. The pen he’d picked up to finish the paperwork shook right out of his fingers.
    “It’s the adrenaline,” Brody Baxter said from the seatacross the aisle. His eyes were closed and his head shimmied against the headrest with every small bounce and shift of the plane.
    “What is?”
    Harrison yanked further at his tie, trying to get some air.
    Brody opened one dark eye. “You are jumpier than the Somali boys we got her from, and they were pretty damn jumpy.”
    Harrison stared down at the same passport paperwork he’d been looking at for the last twenty-four hours and the words blurred.
    Tears stung hard behind his eyes and he had to gasp to catch his breath.
    “She’s safe, man,” Brody said. “You did it.”
    Until the day he died, he would not forget his first glimpse of her in Brody’s arms as he ran down the tarmac toward the ambulance. Unconscious, bloody, her dress in tatters, her hair a wild mess, filthy.
    I’m too late , he’d thought, putting a hand against the ambulance so he wouldn’t fall to his knees as nurses and paramedics swarmed Brody and Ashley. If I’d worked faster, done more,