Thomas shut his laptop and went to finish packing for the coming red-eye flight, and the suck-fest of a week that was sure to follow.
Chapter Three
Saturday Night
Tasha’s eyes widened when she turned and saw him come out of the gate and onto the airfield. Instead of a more conventional greeting like Hey or ’Sup, she went with, “No.” She shook her head, too, adding, “Nope. Nope. No.”
Thomas smiled. He couldn’t help himself and of course she bristled, thinking he was laughing at her, rather than commiserating with her.
Her blue eyes turned decidedly chilly, staring at him, unamused, from the stony face of this weird stranger she’d become over the past five years. She was strikingly beautiful, true, but the weirdness here was off-the-charts.
Gone was the messy little girl who’d been a rough-and-tumble tomboy even as she’d insisted on wearing Disney-princess pink.
Gone was the reckless teen who’d driven her aunt and uncle crazy with worry.
She’d transformed into this carefully put-together, heavily made-up, fashionably dressed young woman, with every hair in place.
Nah, that’s where shades of her former messiness still poked through. Her hair was still untamable, and as she shook her head at him, it flashed in the airfield’s high powered lights.
Thomas shook his head back at her—coupla idiots just standing there on the airstrip next to a very slick-looking private jet, No-ing each other emphatically, in total agreement.
That didn’t change the situation, not one iota.
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he voiced his nope in the form of an apology. “Mike and Dave are going wheels up, and Rio has... Something. With his family. So, yeah. It’s me. Sorry. Really.”
She was nodding now, her movements jerky as she shifted her carry-on-sized suitcase closer to her and adjusted the big, zippered bag she wore on one shoulder.
“Well, this day just keeps getting better,” she said. “Ted needed to leave early, to make a stop in Toronto for his mother for some obviously manipulative reason, and Jeff and Kayla went with him, so this flight is just me. And now... you.”
Oh, good.
Alone on a private jet with Tasha Francisco. For six hours.
Not that he’d been looking forward to sitting in the back of the plane while she spent the flight sipping champagne and laughing with her royal boyfriend’s royal arm around her soon-to-be-royal shoulders.
But now...? It would be just the two of them.
Although, wait. If the answer to the question was Yes, baby bump, then ix-nay on the ampagne-shay for the near future. Unless she’d changed even more than Thomas had imagined possible—and no, he did not believe that.
However, dressed as she was in those skinny jeans, if the answer was Yes, he was likely gonna get a strong confirmation as soon as she got onto the plane and took off her jacket.
Tasha shifted her shoulder bag in order to unzip it, and then nearly dove inside to search for...
A giant pair of headphones.
She snapped them down over her ears, and adjusted her phone to whatever playlist she’d made for this flight to the New England mountains to meet a queen, as a flight attendant—or wait, no, she was the captain—gestured toward the stairs, letting them know it was time to board.
Thomas reached for Tash’s bag, but she gave him her back as she picked it up herself, carrying it easily up the stairs.
So he just nodded to the captain as he followed Tasha into the plane, which was radically different from the military transports on which he and his SEAL team usually flew.
Comfortable leather seats that swiveled. A sofa. An open door leading back into a bedroom with a king-sized bed that had a white comforter very similar to the one he still had in his apartment. Shit.
Tasha sat down—jacket still on—in one of the leather chairs and locked it into position facing forward, turned away from a table and a second similar chair.
Thomas sat his ass down there, behind her, glancing over at the bit of the back of her head that he could see as the real flight attendant approached to store their luggage and offer drinks.
Thomas shook his head, but the young man brought a glass filled with red wine for Tasha, who smiled up at him as she took it, took a sip.
And that was his confirmation—baby bump no. And that filled him with more relief than made sense, considering.
She glanced over at Thomas then, and in that brief moment, she let down her guard, and she was back. His Tasha. The girl he’d met on a San Diego beach so many years ago.
The girl who’d grown up—or so she’d thought at the tender age of eighteen—and gotten drunk and planted herself in his bed on his birthday.
Their birthdays were within days of each other, so maybe it was more about her birthday than his...
But, what was it she’d said, just a few minutes ago...?
No. Nope. Nope. No.
Five years after his very adamant hell-no-this-is-not-happening, she was still mortified.
But probably also damn glad that at least one of them hadn’t thrown caution to the wind that night.
Also...? Yo, drunk girl. There’s this thing called consent and it goes both ways.
Thomas took a deep breath, exhaling it fully, mindfully. He willed himself to be present, here and now, instead of time-traveling in his head to that moment when he’d first woken up and realized he was no longer alone in his bed, when Tasha had pressed herself against him and kissed him, before he’d recognized this wasn’t just his crazy brain sending him an unsettling and inappropriate dream—that she was really and truly there with him, kissing him, her skin soft and sleek beneath his hands.
“What the hell...?!” He’d gone full falsetto as he’d all but launched out of his bed, slapping on the light to reveal...
Yup, that was Tasha, and shit, shit, shit, she was naked.
Thomas had quickly slapped the light off again, right before—bonus!—he tripped over the clothes she’d left in a pile on his bedroom floor.
Okay. All right.
Here and now, sitting on that aircraft, Thomas took another deep breath and released it slowly. Steadily. Although they only had six-ish hours on this plane—only, yeah, right—they were gonna spend an entire week sharing the same close-quarters oxygen when they reached their destination.
And this sure as shit wasn’t gonna work—this pretend-it-never-happened attitude that Tash was wearing like the least effective hazmat suit in the world.
There was another seat on this fancy-ass plane—next to Tash, near the window, and Thomas stood up and headed for it, forcing her to move her feet so he could get past her to sit within talking range.
The look on her face was comically WTF, as was the level of outrage in the glare she then gave him. She lifted the headphones from one ear with one hand as she hefted the wineglass in the other and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not pregnant. I am, however, a feminist and I refuse to be bullied. It’s not healthy to be as skinny as everyone in the world seems to need me to be.”
“Not me,” Thomas said.
“Well, good,” she said. “I’m average weight for my height. Fuck them. And you know what? Even if I wasn’t, fuck them twice.”
He felt himself blink at her f-bomb deployment, and then he had to laugh because, yeah, her sentiment was true. Fuck them three times. “I didn’t come over here because...” He started again. “I’m aware of the rumors—”
“Of course you are,” she interrupted him. “I didn’t expect anything less.”
“That’s not why I came over here,” he told her, and now the look in her eyes was closer to horror as he said the words she didn’t want him to utter: “We gotta talk about, you know...”
It was clear that Tasha knew Thomas was talking about That Messy Night. She was already shaking her head.
“No,” she said as the jet began slowly taxiing toward the runway. “We really don’t need to—”
“Yeah, well, I do,” he told her. �
��I need to apologize for—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You don’t need to apologize. Are you kidding? I’m the one who needs to—”
“I did not handle that well,” he confessed. “It was not my finest hour.”
Tasha took off her headphones then and turned toward him earnestly. “You did nothing wrong,” she said. “Oh, my God, Thomas, that was completely, totally, stupidly me. Doing everything wrong. Starting with all those White Russians.”
“Was that what that was?” he asked. After waking him with that WTF-inducing kiss, the naked girl—and eighteen was just a girl to an almost-thirty-year-old man—had bolted from his bed and into his bathroom, where she’d proceeded to stick her head into his toilet and vomit for several of the least pleasant hours of his life.
No doubt the experience had sucked for her, too, but she probably didn’t remember it quite as crystal-clearly as he did.
Before that night, Thomas didn’t own a bathrobe. He’d remedied that on his next day off, going to Target and getting one in white terrycloth that he still kept hanging on the back of his bathroom door. He’d gone into high alert, in case she rinsed and repeated—in the event that her Get drunk, get naked, get into his bed thing was gonna turn into an unhappy pattern.
But then he’d gone wheels-up, which was enormously helpful, considering how much more difficult it was for Tasha to climb into his bed unannounced while he was in the sandbox with his SEAL Team.
Of course, because he’d been gone for so long, it also made it impossible for him to sit down with Tash, like he was doing right now, and say, What the hell was that?
“I lost count after five,” Tasha admitted now—still talking about the drinks she’d had on the night, five years ago, in which she’d spent several hours naked beneath a blanket on his bathroom floor. And yeah, it had been a workout keeping her covered. Modesty was not her priority at the time.
She continued: “And I know that’s no excuse. It wouldn’t be if I were a man, so it shouldn’t be, but I just thought you were... I assumed...” Tash cleared her throat. “That you were gallantly waiting for me to turn eighteen, and...” She forced herself to look him in the eye, and he forced himself to hold her direct gaze. “That’s the way the romance novel always plays out, right? I finally grow up; you admit that you’ve loved me forever, we have crazy-great sex, and then we live happily ever after.”
“No one has crazy-great sex after five White Russians,” Thomas pointed out. Making a joke was his only real option here.
And she smiled despite her embarrassment. “Yeah, that was another thing I learned that night. God, I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry, too, for avoiding you for the past four years.”
“Five,” he corrected her. “I’ve kinda been avoiding you, too.”
“Did you... tell Uncle Alan and Mia?” she asked.
“Jesus, no,” he said, aghast. Did she honestly think...?
Tasha laughed at the look on his face.
“I mean, they obviously knew you’d been drinking. There was no hiding that when I took you home,” he added. “But the details? Nah.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “But I think Uncle Alan might’ve guessed. I think you’re here on purpose—so that we’d have to talk.”
Thomas nodded. “Uncle Navy loves us both, pretty damn fiercely,” he said. “You more than me, of course.” He took a deep breath and said it, “And I do love you, Tash. I’ve absolutely loved you forever—you didn’t get that wrong. But you’re my little sister, you know?”
She nodded at that, too. “Sister. Right. I think, in my heart, I knew you’d sister me. That’s why I took the Surprise-I’m-naked! approach. To show you up-close and personal that I wasn’t really a blood relation.” She laughed ruefully. “And five White Russians agreed that that was a truly genius move.”
“Five White Russians always give shitty advice.”
“I’d apologize for putting so much distance between us for so long, but... I’m not really sorry about that. It took me years to get over you,” she told him. “I kinda needed the space. You know, to grow up and figure out who I was, if I wasn’t going to be part of Thomas and Tasha, like some creepy, pre-arranged child-bride thing.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “That is kinda creepy. Grown man waiting on a child to turn eighteen, like it’s some kinda magic finish line?”
“Right?” she said, glancing up with a smile as the flight attendant materialized beside them to take her wine glass and inform them that take-off was imminent.
So who are you now? Thomas was just about to ask, when she added, “I still don’t fly happily. I’m gonna...” She put her headphones back on and started up her music, her knuckles going white from gripping her chair’s armrests as the jet thundered down the runway.
Thomas didn’t think twice. He just reached over and took her hand in his and let her hold on tight.
Tasha mentally kicked herself. Again.
It took me years to get over you.
She’d actually said those words to this man, and even as they’d left her mouth, she knew that she was screwed.
It had taken her years to get over Thomas King. And all it took was one conversation—this conversation, where he spoke to her so sincerely from his enormously generous heart—for all of her feelings for him to come screaming back to life.
It didn’t help that he looked so damn good. Instead of his winter blue uniform, he was wearing civilian clothes—a nicely tailored dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a royal blue tie, overcoat on his arm.
Over the years, he’d cut his hair shorter and shorter and somewhere down the line, he’d decided it was easier to just shave his head. It was a striking look—it somehow seemed to make him look both taller and more commanding.
His face had always, for her, been the definition of handsome, with his rich ochre skin and his gorgeous midnight brown eyes surrounded by thick lashes. When Tasha had first met Thomas, she was convinced that he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. So it made sense that, all these years later, she’d still find him to be the most beautiful man in the world.
She’d gently pulled her hand free from his as the jet achieved cruising altitude. But she’d kept her headphones on for the entire rest of the flight, first pretending she was sleeping, and then—after refusing both a late night snack and the opportunity to nap in the fully appointed bedroom—she finally, truly fell blissfully asleep.
“You should’ve taken the bed,” he’d commented as the plane began its descent, as the flight attendant brought her a mug of coffee and she stirred back to life, adjusting a crick in her neck.
She looked at him questioningly, lifting her headphones off her right ear, even though she’d managed to read his lips. He repeated his words—the look on his handsome face broadcasting his wariness. Yeah, they’d talked and apologized, but it was clear that he still didn’t know quite where he stood with her. Were they friends again, or...?
“I didn’t think I’d really sleep,” she admitted, sipping the coffee carefully, but it wasn’t too hot. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”
“Everything okay?” he asked, and she shook her head and forced a smile.
“My boyfriend’s mother is a literal queen, enough said, right?” It was the tiniest tip of the truth-iceberg, but Thomas nodded.
She sighed with relief as he allowed it to be the conversation ender she’d hoped it would be. She focused on the coffee, dropping her headphones back onto her ears.
She’d obviously dismissed him, yet after she finished and her mug was whisked away, Thomas still held out his hand, offering it to her for the landing.
Tasha took it, knowing that she shouldn’t, that the sensation of their fingers intertwining would—and did—make her foolish heart leap.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no...
She let him go as soon as the jet was safely on the ground, vowing never to do that again. Sister, sister, sister, brother, brother, brother, bullshit, bul
lshit, bullshit, this man was not her brother.
Tasha let him carry her bag off the plane—why not? He wanted to.
She also let him figure out the snafu—as he called it—with the missing helicopter that was supposed to take them the final leg of their journey to the mountain-top resort.
She stood quietly, eating the wrapped breakfast sandwich the flight attendant had pressed into her hands, watching Thomas work out the details as he instead arranged for a car to drive them there. And she realized that maybe this was a good thing—being forced into his company for a full week. The heart wants what the heart wants. And her heart—her fully grown-up woman’s heart—still wanted Thomas, who didn’t want her.
Which meant that she really was the perfect bride for Ted, assuming the worst case scenario was going to happen.
So now the billion dollar question was Could she be friends with this man? Play at being his little sister? Return to their seemingly easy friendship, just like that, after laughing together at her childish, foolish, embarrassing, happened-five-long-years-ago, White-Russian induced mistake?
Sure, why not? was followed by an immediate No.
Sure, she could—if she wanted to be a masochist and continuously rub her own nose in the life she’d never have.
No, she couldn’t, if she had any amount of self-respect, since she also had a burning awareness of her own needs and a strong desire to keep her heart safe.
Spending time with Thomas King wasn’t gonna cut it in the keeping-her-heart-safe department.
So as they were waiting for the SUV to get cleaned and gassed up for the brain-numbingly long drive up to the lodge, Tash finished her sandwhich, took off her headphones, and turned to Thomas.
“I’m glad we talked on the plane,” she told him.
He, of course, heard the word she hadn’t yet spoken and said it for her. “But...?”
Tasha forced a smile. “Ted doesn’t, um, know much about you,” she understated. Ted knew everything. Well, not everything, but damn close. Although she was not lying when she added, “Nothing about, you know, that... awfulness—” another understatement “—with Sharon, when she stole all that money from Dwayne.”
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 3