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“Maybe you’re the one who needs to stop hitting people!” This from a blonde who now handed Ned a cloth from her backpack. Looked like a sock.
He pointed to Jonas. “He tackled me!” Then Ned. “And so did he!”
Ned held up one hand. “He’s right.”
“Sorry.” Blood reddened Jonas’s teeth. “I think you loosened a tooth.”
The blonde shook her head as Iris’s gaze fell on her. “Shae. You’re okay.”
Shae. Ned’s fiancée who, last Hudson had heard, was lost in Russia. Clearly not anymore.
Shae nodded to Iris’s statement, then, “Areyou? You’ve been missing for five days. Your mother was completely freaking out.”
Oh. Hudson looked at Iris, who looked at him. Whoops.
Gone for five days, and the Marshall family had sent out asearch party. Across the ocean.
Overkill, much?
But as Iris hugged Jonas, then Ned—who then shook Hudson’s hand—he couldn’t help but feel a little like maybe he’d been benched.
“What are you guys doing here? And how did you find me?” Iris stepped toward him, and he fought the urge to take her hand. Like, what—asserting his spot in her life?
He had no spot in her life, really.
“Mom texted us your phone number,” Jonas said. “Said you’d called and were in Paris. And we just landed, so then Fraser sent us an address. Said that Coco had hacked the GPS position off your phone.”
Coco, as in her cousin Coco? Huh.
“And please—why were you on a plane to Paris? Or wherever?”
“Lake Como, actually,” Jonas said. “We thought we’d check your house first.”
“For what? A dead body?”
Jonas made a face. Ned’s mouth tightened in a grim line. Hudson looked at her father, who drew in a deep breath.
“We prayed not,” her father said. “But after Shae’s abduction and Jonas’s crazy radioactive weather balloon story, and, well, even Fraser and Creed’s race through Europe, I think we might have jumped to conclusions.”
And any hope that Hudson had of quarterbacking what happened next died with Iris’s words. “You’re not wrong.”
He wanted to turn and bang his head against the plaster and concrete.
“Hudson and I have been on the run since last week.”
Silence, and Hudson drew in a breath. Then Ned looked at him, met his gaze. “Tell us everything.”
Oh. Because he’d been assigned her babysitter way back then. By Ned.
So, okay. “Let’s get something to eat.”
“I’m on board with that,” Shae said and took Ned’s hand. She didn’t seem undone by her kidnapping ordeal, so maybe that had been overblown too.
Or maybe that’s just what this family did—rolled with the crazy of their lives. Except for the night in the cave where they’d nearly drowned over and over again, Iris had held it together pretty well.
What had she said to Genesis?You stay tough…
They found a table at the nearby Café du Trocadéro and sat outside under the expansive white awning. They all—even he—looked like American tourists, with their puffy black parkas and hiking boots. Except for Iris, who wore a wool jacket and a pair of dress shoes. She also ordered tea and the sea bass fillet with fennel, while the rest ordered fish and chips or cheeseburgers and french fries.
