Guarding Aisha

by Zoë Normandie

  My father was right about me.

  “I’m so sorry,” she cried, clutching tightly to her seat belt, desperately wishing she were more independent. “I promise it’s not going to be like this the whole time.”

  “It’s fine. Just sit back,” he said. “Like I said, girl, you need to fucking relax.”

  Something in his tone told her that was non-negotiable. He’d again transformed into full military mode. Focused. Determined. Intense.

  She sank back into her seat and tried to think only of the rash of heat left on her skin where he’d touched her back. It seared into her, like she’d never been touched before, which might as well have been the case.

  Jake pulled the car out of the lot and back onto the road, speeding into traffic toward their unknown destination. As the car whizzed down the urban street, Aisha tried to put her twisted emotions into a steel vault inside her.

  She pressed her eyes together for an instant, feeling her body shift side to side as Jake wheeled around the city blocks. She needed to toughen up if she was going to survive the rest of the journey. She needed to focus. Be strong. Fight harder.

  “Hold on,” he said, putting his corded arm across her body to prevent her from bumping around as he took a ninety-degree turn particularly fast.

  Her skin tingled where his arm brushed over her hands and wrists, and her eyes flashed open. He was so warm. So solid.

  Jake looked over at her sharply, assessing her with a furrowed brow. But he never stopped scanning left and right. Something about his demeanor—his focus and strength—provided security. She was clearly in the hands of a very skilled professional. Even with his absolute focus on the road, he was still reading her body language. He was the type that knew people. Observed them. Read them.

  She just wanted to sink into him. The realization made her guilty. She sucked in air and tensed back into her seat.

  “Shit,” he said as he looked in the rearview mirror.

  “What is it?” Aisha asked.

  “They’ve closed in on us. Just—”

  “I know: relax,” she squeaked, focusing on staying calm. In the passenger mirror, she noticed two motorcyclists gaining on them, cutting aggressively around the traffic.

  She wasn’t used to Canadian driving laws, but this wasn’t anything like driving in France. She tried to pull the baseball hat lower, even though it was a tight fit over the scarf around her hair. Her pulse pumped high into her throat, and she felt the back of her neck getting hot.

  Frustrated, she tore off her scarf, throwing it into the back seat, and fit the baseball hat back on. It was time to let the past go. She had never wanted to believe in something her father had forced upon her.

  “Whatever men you see, there will be many more that you don’t see,” she said, thinking of the last time she tried to run and her subsequent years of imprisonment in Yoman.

  The family prison was a special place reserved for those her father hated the most. And there was nothing he hated more than betrayal—especially the betrayal of women, highly disposable beings that they were.

  “I suspected that, princess.” He kept his eyes on the road, his mouth a concerned hyphen. “Just stay low, and keep that jacket over your chest. And try to chill.”

  “Aisha is my name. Not princess,” she reminded him quickly.

  Locking the steering wheel and slamming on the gas, Jake threw the car into a controlled drift that she’d seen executed only on racetracks.

  Aisha let out a sharp yelp, her native tongue crashing through. “Saa’idnee!”

  “I like ‘princess.’ Has a good ring to it.” He shrugged calmly as he slid the car across the expanse of pavement, cutting onto a quiet side street. “You look like a princess.”

  But Aisha didn’t even register the comment. A motorcyclist rocketed onto the street behind them and began closing the gap. A white SUV turned onto the street in front of them, boxing them in. Terror shook her.

  “I’m asking you to relax because if something happens, a tensely wound body breaks easier than a relaxed body,” he explained quickly, calmly, as he scanned the situation for options. “And you look pretty fucking tight right now.”

  “Tight?” she cried out.

  “Tense.” He frowned.

  A man with a black mask leaned out of the SUV with an assault rifle and started taking shots at their windshield. Jake quickly reversed the car away from the shots.

  She tried not to scream again, but she was absolutely terrified.

  “It’s okay—we’ve got armor.” His voice reached a new level of focus and calm. It was like he was making an announcement at a spa. Aisha wasn’t sure if that comforted her.

  Their armored vehicle absorbed the bullets, but the windshield cracked.

  “Jake!” she screeched. “Please!”

  He groaned as he replaced the clip in his pistol. “I do like how it sounds when you scream my name.”

  Aisha clutched her seat belt tighter, feeling like she was on a rollercoaster and she couldn’t get off.

  “But we do need to get the fuck out of here now,” he added, his tone quickening.

  Charles’s navy car pulled up behind the motorcyclist and hit his rear tire, spinning him out.

  Jake pulled out his pistol from the side door, spun the wheel, and hit the gas hard, pulling up on the sidewalk beside the SUV and squeezing through to the other side. He moved the car quickly into another stream of traffic before merging onto a treed parkway and leaving Charles behind.

  Thankfully, trouble had not followed them. They were safe for the time being. Aisha’s knuckles were white from gripping everything around her, and her breath wouldn’t come easily. Her chest burned from the constant pain.

  She leaned back and winced. “God.”

  “This is fucking bullshit.” Jake shook his head.

  Was he angry at how she handled it? “I didn’t expect this…” she tried to explain.

  “What did you expect?” His eyes snapped to hers as he drove out of the city, toward the rolling forest hills in the north.

  Her eyes tracked his before he ripped them away back to the road, shaking his head disapprovingly.

  There was a lot he wasn’t telling her. It was disheartening that he refused to confide in her, and she knew it had a lot to do with how poorly she was handling herself and the situation.

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “Yeah, there’s something fucking wrong,” he snapped. “You’ve got a target on your back, and I’m guessing they want you back dead or alive.”

  “It’s not ‘they’—it’s just my father,” Aisha explained.

  Jake’s eyes whipped to hers sharply. “Your father would do this to you? Really?”

  “You don’t understand my father. He’s a very dangerous man,” she warned him. “I’m dead to him now.”

  “How the fuck was there no plan?” he growled, ready to crush the steering wheel in his grasp. “Did you just show up, unannounced, hoping it was going to work out?”

  She could tell he wanted to vent, but he just clenched his teeth, unwilling to say more, and she did the same. The answer to his question was yes. She had an opportunity when her father was at G20, and Leo urged her to take it. With Kate at the embassy, and an open door for her, there was no better time.

  Nausea crept up, but she couldn’t decide if it was the result of Jake’s driving techniques or the sheer terror of fleeing her father. But the pain in her gut reminded her just how close to death she might be. And no one would be able to stop it. Not even Jake.

  “Look, I apologize for putting you in this position…” she started, trying to level with him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, dismissing her.

  Her brows furrowed, and hurt coiled in her belly.

  After a minute, Jake looked over at her and his eyes narrowed in concern. For the second time, Aisha saw a window into a warm, generous heart. A warm heart that was buried underneath layers and layers of hard experience. But what
ever she saw, it quickly disappeared as he turned his attention back to the drive.

  “I’m very grateful for what you are doing for me.” She tried again to empathize and build rapport. “You are putting yourself on the line for me.”

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and she could tell he didn’t want to be thanked. Her words only served to deepen the chasm between them.

  “Forget it,” he muttered.

  “Not everyone would be willing—”

  “Enough.” He shot her a threatening glare.

  Silence fell over the car as she rolled up her mouth, her breath quickening again. Something about him made her heart skip. He might not be the most comforting person, but she didn’t want anyone to comfort her. Never had. He wasn’t her personal therapist. All she needed were his skills.

  And he was obviously skilled and confident in his work. She’d chosen the right people up to this point to get her out of Yoman, and out of the embassy, unscathed. Jake was clearly an asset.

  “You retired from the military?” she asked.

  His body language indicated that he didn’t want to talk about that either.

  “You could say that,” he responded slowly. He pulled off the treed parkway into a thicket of pine trees. He parked the car in a small, deserted parking lot at the mouth of a trailhead. “It looks like we shook them. For now. But there’s something we need to do before we head to the safe house.” He turned off the engine.

  She wondered if she should be feeling nervous or scared that this man, who was still a stranger, had taken her to a deserted location. Before she could consider it further, he leapt out of the car and walked toward the trunk. He took his pistol with him. What was he doing?

  Jake fumbled in the trunk. Upon retrieving a small black bag, he came around to her door. Aisha trembled, fear mounting. Her stomach did three flips, and her hands clenched the car seat.

  Just as he was opening the door, she screamed and threw her hands up in front of her face. “Please!” she yelled.

  Silence. Nothing.

  She drew her hands down, only to see him cautiously studying her. He frowned and held out the bag for her.

  He raised an eyebrow at her. “What, don’t trust me yet?”

  “No. I mean, yes,” she replied slowly. “I don’t know. Should I?”

  He blinked, watching her. She shifted uncomfortably.

  “Jake?” she prodded.

  “You can trust me.” A grin tugged at his lips.

  This time, it was a real grin. A big, white-toothed, sexy-as-hell grin that sat in the middle of a tanned, scruffy face and intense eyes. He unnerved her and intrigued her at the same time.

  She became breathless. He was so incredibly mouthwatering...

  “Okay,” Aisha managed to get out, holding her breath.

  His grin fell, and he turned serious again. “We don’t know if you’re being tracked, so you’ll need to change.” He handed the bag over. “You have to get rid of everything on your person,” he said in a businesslike tone. But she didn’t miss how he rolled his tongue over his bottom lip, and a devilish look crossed those camouflage eyes for a fleeting moment. She wondered what he was thinking as he stood over her, his hulking frame taking up the entire doorway.

  And what exactly did he mean by everything?

  “Do you have a cell phone? Anything electronic?” he continued briskly.

  “No. I brought nothing.” She looked down, like she was admitting a dirty secret. “I don’t even have a passport.”

  Jake nodded. “Okay. So everything comes off.” He motioned from her head to her toes, but his voice gentled. “Everything.”

  That was a tone of voice that she had not yet heard. It was empathetic and caring.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why my clothes?”

  The empathy dissolved. He exhaled like he was mustering the strength to deal with her constant questioning. Aisha knew she tended to do that.

  “Just trust me.” He waved his hand. No further discussion. He was a man who demanded obedience. But there was nothing that made Aisha more driven to be disobedient.

  He ordered her to the back of the car. “Change back there.” At her surprised expression, he added sardonically, “I won’t watch.”

  She didn’t know how else to react, so she just continued nodding, bobbing her head like it was floating in space. She saw the logic. For all she knew, her father had sewn tracking beacons into the very seams of her dress. There was no way to be sure except to get rid of it all. And a part of her was happy to rid herself of the past. They said you never got sand out of your clothes once you wore them in Yoman. The blowing wind brought sand into everything, even the immaculate palace.

  He helped her climb to the back of the car. “Pass everything to me, one by one, and I’ll deal with it.”

  He walked a few feet away, leaving the car door open, and placed a small metal barrel on the ground. She wondered what else he kept in the trunk.

  Her hands fumbled and trembled as she slipped off her scarves and tunic. Next were the tights and stockings. Then the remaining pieces—her bustier and underwear. God, she hoped he didn’t have a secret camera in the back.

  It wasn’t that she was devoutly religious and never had stripped before. No, she was truly agnostic and had relished her days in Paris and Lyon, where she had found love, and sex, and many enjoyments from the West. Her desire to keep her clothes on was couched in a shyness and uncertainty, perhaps even an insecurity, that had been with her all her life.

  It was almost poetic that to truly leave her past behind, she had to remove every stitch of clothing her father had once bought for her. Of course he bought everything—she had nothing of her own. She had no money. She wasn’t even allowed to hold her own passport or identification cards. She was a nameless alien in this foreign land, with only three people who knew who she was.

  And Jake was apparently one of them.

  “Done,” she called out. She balled her possessions into a lump, naked in the back seat with her feet up on a long, mysterious black metal box.

  When Jake came by the door, she pressed the scratchy black bag up against her full breasts for a modicum of privacy.

  He at least pretended to avert his eyes as he proclaimed loudly to the open air, “You can trust me.”

  “You keep saying that,” she said, passing him the last remnants of clothing.

  “Convinced yet?” he joked, returning to the barrel outside.

  In the back of the car, she rummaged through the bag for replacement clothing. At that point her world was so shaken that she was losing the ability to care. To feel. To cry. She felt terrified and hollow and less than human.

  She peered out at Jake’s muscular form. At least he was professional. Or trying to be. He threw everything she handed him into the metal barrel before pouring a liquid over top and lighting it all with a match. Poof.

  Everything she had. Up in flames. Let it burn, she thought.

  Her mysterious driver hovered over it all, the light and shadows of flames dancing before his eyes.

  Aisha observed the intimidating man more closely. Why did he leave the military? Why was he there, burning clothing in a hiking parking lot, driving a defector around? Why did he scare her? She had so many questions, none of which she could ask.

  3

  Aisha rummaged through the black bag and pulled out a grey cotton bra and panty set, black yoga pants, a relaxed grey hooded sweater, and a black jacket.

  Understated. Fitted. Comfortable. American.

  Once dressed, she pulled her long black hair through the hole in the back of the baseball hat and stepped out of the car. Jake turned around to meet her, and she could see he was fighting the urge to linger with his gaze. He looked at her from top to bottom—and back again, a grin pulling at his lips.

  “You look,” he said almost dreamily, “Western.” He quickly returned to his all-business tone. “And that is going to help us.”

  “Really?” she asked with a ho
peful smile. “Where did you get all this from?”

  Jake just raised an eyebrow mysteriously in response and turned back to the barrel. She followed him, pulled in by his dark presence, and touched his arm.

  “Jake?”

  He looked down at where she’d touched him, at the electricity running between them. She quickly retracted her hand, and he licked his bottom lip.

  “I had a girlfriend,” he said. “She always kept an overnight bag in the back.”

  “Oh.” Aisha dropped her hand and awkwardly crossed her arms. “What happened to her?”

  He frowned, “She isn’t around anymore.”

  Aisha nearly jumped back, wondering if the insinuation was that he’d had a hand in it. She had to remind herself that her suspicion was just trauma from her past bubbling up. Most men didn’t seek to maim, murder, and incinerate women.

  “Was he tracking me?” Aisha asked, turning back to the burning barrel.

  Jake considered her question before responding. “I don’t have any other way to explain how those assholes followed us… but we’ve just burnt to shit any possible tracker.”

  So many questions were at the tip of Aisha’s tongue, but she hesitated to ask anything else.

  “Let’s go before any more friends turn up here,” he dictated, shuffling off. She knew how to keep her mouth shut.

  He dumped the ashes of the barrel in the trailhead garbage. Some of the ashes were caught by the breeze, and Aisha watched the last vestiges of her life float away. It was over—for the time being, anyway—and something unexplainable stirred inside her. Excitement? Trepidation? Fear?

  As she turned around, Jake quickly ushered her back into the car. She wasn’t sure if it was by accident, but he placed his hand lower on her back than she’d expected. The thrill from his touch made her already supple spine even weaker. It had been so long since she had enjoyed even a hug. Her heart was beyond lonely.

  Jake buckled himself in, and she realized that she would be on her own soon. She was going to need strength. Perseverance.

  Her chest tightened with worry, and she blew out air to calm her beating heart. Her life was on the line, and she was beholden to strangers.