King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13)

by Suzanne Brockmann

  “You should’ve said something,” he’d chastised her when she’d first let him look. God, every step she’d taken, probably shortly after they left the burning SUV, had surely hurt like hell.

  “And you’d’ve done what?” she countered, chin held high. “Given me one of your socks, which would’ve left you barefoot. Nope.”

  “I would’ve packed the back of your shoe with moss,” he shot back.

  “What moss?” she asked. “We would’ve had to stop to find moss, and I was already slowing you down.”

  “Out in the world, something like this could easily get infected,” he’d informed her. “We’re lucky we have soap and water—and a first-aid kit with antibiotic ointment.”

  He’d found a large, up-to-date first-aid kit on the shelf in the pantry. Near the many, many boxes of condoms. Not that anyone was having sex in here any time soon, despite the bad-porno-worthy red bathrobes they were both wearing.

  He’d always heard that gingers should never wear red, but that was clearly an urban legend. With Tasha’s newly-washed hair curling and gleaming around a face clean of makeup and down her red-robed shoulders, she looked like anything but a fashion-don’t.

  It was weird. Without all that makeup, he would’ve thought she’d look even more like the Tasha he’d known back when they were both kids. And yeah, her freckles were more prominent with her face clean, but that was where the comparison ended. Sure, her eyes were the same deep, rich blue they’d always been, and they still held a touch of the same wiser-than-her-years, slightly sad, slightly amused wariness. But her face was a full-grown woman’s face, complete with lines made from laughter around her quick-to-smile mouth and eyes. Eyes that could flash with badly hidden longing and desire, when she thought he wasn’t watching.

  Note to self: hide the vodka and Kahlúa and whatever else went into a White Russian. Cream. Ah, there probably wasn’t any cream, and almond milk wouldn’t cut it, so he was probably safe.

  Thomas had gotten out of the bathroom to find Tash had set the table for him with a bowl, spoon, cornflakes, and almond milk. She’d already eaten and had put her clothes—with the exception of her winter jacket and her sweater—into the kitchen sink to soak. While he ate the world’s most delicious bowl of cereal, she added his clothes to the soapy water.

  Only then was it time for first aid.

  Tasha laughed a little now as he finished securing the bandage. “I forgot that there were two nights of crazed babysitter-panic at Chez McCoy.”

  “Two that I witnessed,” he pointed out. “It wouldn’t surprise me if there were a dozen more that I never knew about, at least with other, non-Tasha babysitters.”

  Captain McCoy’s daughter Joanna was a teenager now, focusing her intense energy into playing soccer. But in her pre-team-sports days, she’d been a lightning bolt in a bottle, running rings around her brother and their friends, with frequent visits to the ER. Fortunately her mom, Lucy, was a badass who wasn’t at all fazed by her daughter’s propensity to be embraced by trouble.

  Come to think of it, Jo was a lot like Tasha, which was probably why she’d been the McCoys’ favorite babysitter. Thomas knew that Tasha understood their spirited daughter in ways most people didn’t.

  “Massively bleeding head wound panic-night,” Tash told him now as she slipped her foot gingerly back into her too-large slipper. “That much blood coming from one tiny girl really freaked me out.”

  Thomas had arrived at the scene before both the ambulance and the McCoys. He’d found Tasha not just keeping herself together, but keeping Jo and her little brother calm. It wasn’t until after, when he was driving her home, that she’d let herself cry—and at that point, her emotion was mostly relief.

  “Heads bleed a lot,” he said.

  “Yup. I learned that from you, that night,” she said. “Speaking of bleeding heads, let me look at yours.”

  “I’m fine,” he reminded her.

  Tasha stood up anyway, tightening the belt of her giant robe as she motioned for him to sit on the couch, in the spot beneath the overhead light where she’d just been. “I just want to look, which is something even you haven’t been able to do, Super-SEAL, so guess what? I’ll be the one to decide if you’re really fine.”

  “It feels fine.” Thomas grumbled, but he sat where she’d directed, and tipped his head forward slightly. “I checked it out in the shower—shaved around it. It feels like it’s starting to scab.”

  “It is,” she said, her fingers cool against the heat of his skin.

  He pulled away slightly and looked at her over his shoulder. “Your eyes feel oddly like fingers.”

  “What are you, four, Mr. Literal?” she said. “I just want to look, in medical-ese means there might be gentle touching to further assess. In fact, in my expert assessment—expert, due to having eyes that can see it—you need to put some antibiotic ointment on that because it looks a little angry. Out in the world, something like this could easily get infected.” She tossed his own words back at him. “And—just to be clear—when I said You need to put ointment on that, I meant that I need to do it for you, since your eyes have neither fingers nor cool Martian expandable stalks that allow you to see around to the back of your head.”

  Martian Girl.

  That had been one of Thomas’s nicknames for Tasha, back when she was just a kid. It first came out of his mouth on the day he’d found her, wandering alone at the beach.

  Five-year-old Tasha had never seen the ocean before. She had no idea how to stay safe on a Pacific beach with its pounding surf and dangerous rip tides. She just ran toward the water, and would’ve splashed on in if Thomas hadn’t stopped her. He’d been afraid that his intensity had scared her a little—running after her, shouting, No!—so he’d quickly switched it up into teasing mode, asking her if she’d just arrived on earth from Mars.

  “Go ahead,” he said now, tipping his head down again so she could apply the ointment. “It’s probably best to err on the side of caution.”

  “You sure it’s clean enough?” she asked. “Or should I—”

  “I scrubbed it plenty in the shower.”

  “Okay.” Her robe brushed against him as she reached for the tube of ointment. “My hands are clean, so I’m just going to... I mean, unless there’s another way to do it that will hurt you less?”

  “It’s not going to hurt,” he lied. “Just dab it on. But don’t touch the mouth of the tube with your fingers. Drop about a dime-sized dollop into your palm, then seal up the tube of ointment. Let’s keep that as sanitary as we can.”

  “That’s a good trick,” she said. “Although now that I have a dime-sized dollop, good word, in my hand, sealing the ointment is...”

  “Here, hand it to me,” he said.

  She reached over his shoulder to hand him first the tube and then the cap, and each time the softness of her body brushed his back.

  “So about that night,” she said as he was screwing the tube closed. His fingers fumbled and she noticed because she clarified, “Massively bleeding head wound night at the McCoys’.” She laughed a little as she began to dab the ointment on the back of his head. “You seriously thought I’d bring up Five White Russians night? While we’re sitting here, castaway on a desert isle, dressed only in ridiculous bathrobes?”

  “You kind of just did,” Thomas pointed out.

  “No,” she said. “You did. With your alternative to a classic spit-take.”

  Alternative to...? “No, I—” This argument was not something he could win. “Castaway on...?” he asked instead.

  “A desert isle. Alone together,” Tasha said. “You know. Trapped in an elevator. Snowbound in a mountain cabin—I guess that’s really the closest variation to ‘stuck together in a former bomb shelter that’s now a prince’s sex-pod.’ Oh, no, there’s just one bed, but will you look at that mirror on the ceiling!”

  “The bed’s all yours,” he told her a tad desperately, because although he was following—she was talking about the r
omance novels she loved to read and, more recently, to write—there was still definitely something he was missing. What did the bed have to do with it? And ending any and all discussion about that mirrored ceiling was paramount. “I’ll take the couch.”

  “Yeah, no, I know,” she said. “I was just... Forget it. It’s awkward, being here like this, but it’s way less awkward than being dead, right?”

  “I will definitely choose awkward over dead,” Thomas said, “pretty much every single time.”

  “That’s because you are mentally healthy,” she informed him. “Not everyone is.” She cleared her throat. “So. About that night. Alan and Mia weren’t home, so I called you, and you showed up like a superhero, in full medic-mode.” She corrected herself, and he didn’t need to see her face to know she was rolling her eyes. “Hospital corpsman-mode. Why does the Navy have to insist on being different? Not only is a Navy captain a higher rank than a captain in every other branch of the service, but helo instead of chopper...? It’s annoying.”

  “See now, I think it’s everyone else who’s wrong,” Thomas said.

  “Spoken like a true naval officer,” she said. “But, you know—and here’s my point of this lovely trip into the way-back machine—it was that night—massively bleeding head wound night—that I knew you were going to become a hospital corpsman.”

  “Really.” Thomas laughed. “Because, back then, I certainly didn’t know it.”

  “It just... Well, it made sense to me,” she told him, finally done with her nursing assignment, and wiping her hands on one of the extra napkins she’d brought from the kitchen. She moved to sit down on the sofa, on the other side of the L from him. Close but not too close. “I mean, I knew you wanted to be a SEAL like Uncle Alan, but I think, back then, I didn’t want to imagine you doing the really dangerous stuff. Plus, I couldn’t imagine you killing anyone, but I could imagine you saving them, so... I jumped all over that. Of course you were going to be a corpsman. Problem solved.”

  “Corpsmen on the Teams don’t not take out targets,” he reminded her. “First and foremost, I’m a SEAL.”

  “Yeah, I know, but shhh, I don’t really want to know.” Tasha reached for the thick, white fleece blanket that she’d found in the bedroom closet. Wrapping it around herself, she made a loose loop to go over her head like a hood that she held closed at her neck. “And I certainly didn’t know that back then, so...”

  He laughed again, thinking back. “I do remember you saying things like, when you’re a medic and I taught you it was corpsman, so then you started saying that all the time. And it’s funny—I don’t exactly know the timeline, but I remember checking into it, to find out if I was qualified to be a corpsman and how much extra school I’d need. I remember Grandma saying, Why on earth would you want to do all that extra work? Isn’t it hard enough for you, trying to get into that private club?”

  Even today, the SEAL Teams were overwhelmingly white. Out of around three thousand active duty SEALs, fewer than two percent were Black men like Thomas.

  Tasha grinned at his imitation of his grandmother. “I can hear her saying that. God, I miss her so much.”

  “Yeah, I do, too,” Thomas said.

  “Do you remember introducing her to me?” she asked him, tucking her feet up under her blanket.

  Thomas squinted, trying to remember. It had to have been shortly after he’d first met Tash, when she was mostly freckles and a huge cloud of red hair. “I really don’t,” he admitted.

  “Oh, my God,” she said, helping herself to more peanuts from the second jar they’d opened. “You were so intense about it, like I think it’s very important that you meet my grandmother, so I insisted on wearing my very best dress.”

  “Let me guess, it was pink. To match the famous settee.”

  “Well, obviously,” she said. “I remember following you into your apartment, and we had to take off our shoes, and... everything was just so beautiful.”

  Thomas had learned from an early age to take his shoes off at the front door because his grandmother’s religion included a belief that “clean enough to eat off the floor” was not just an expression. She also had a strict doctrine that everything belonged in its place; that organization created efficiency—which allowed more time for creative endeavors. “Grandma ran a very tight ship.”

  “She was in the kitchen,” Tash continued. “Somehow cooking something that smelled delicious, while every counter—and the sink—was impossibly clean.”

  “Clean while you cook, Natasha!” Thomas still followed that rule because Grandma had been right. The efficiency gave him more time to put his feet up and read a good book. Gram had used her spare time to get a law degree, and then pass the bar.

  Tash grinned. “I still hear her saying that, every time I’m in a kitchen. And I always regret it when I don’t listen.”

  “She was the smartest person I ever met,” Thomas said.

  “Which is why you brought me there,” Tasha said. “To meet her. I remember you introducing us, and it felt so formal. Grandma, this is Natasha Francisco. She’s Ms. Summerton’s new neighbor, the girl I told you about? Tasha, this is my grandmother, Mrs. King. You know, for years, I thought queens were addressed as Mrs. King. It made sense at the time.”

  Thomas laughed. “Don’t make that mistake with Ted’s mom.”

  “Yeah, believe me, I won’t,” she said. “But what was I, six...? Five...? And already brainwashed by the patriarchy into thinking that a queen should be addressed by her husband’s name. I mean, sort of, right?”

  “Maybe that came from playing chess. If you lose the king, you lose the game.” When Tash had come to live with her uncle, Alan had had little-to-no experience with young children, and had taught her games like chess and all kinds of weird varieties of poker. Being Tasha, however, she ate it up. She could still rule the poker table at a game of Night Baseball in the Rain.

  “In chess, the queen kicks ass to protect the incredibly fragile and impotent king,” she countered. “Chess was the beginning of my feminist enlightenment.”

  “Chess and proximity to Mia,” Thomas said.

  “And your grandmother,” Tasha told him. “You know, I’m pretty sure you introduced me to her so I’d have a safe place to run, if things went south with Uncle Alan.”

  “I didn’t know him very well back then,” he said. “And you just seemed so vulnerable. I mean, you were definitely a tough little kid, but...”

  “It wasn’t until I was older that I realized what you did,” she said. “That day. You gave me one of your famous Plan Bs.”

  Huh. She was right. He had.

  “I guess I figured it couldn’t hurt,” he said. “And then, after your mom got out of rehab, and you went back to live with her...” Tasha’s mother had opted for rehab in the face of a DUI charge. But she hadn’t truly wanted to be there, so when she came out, she got messy again, fast. Knowing that Tasha could run to his grandmother for help made him sleep easier at night. “Everyone needs a Plan B.”

  Right now, my Plan B is Ted.

  Tasha didn’t say it aloud because Thomas looked exhausted. He hadn’t slept since before they’d boarded the plane.

  So instead she said, “It makes more sense for me to sleep on the couch. I’m shorter, I take up less room. Why don’t you go into the—”

  Thomas cut her off. “I need to be between you and the door.”

  “No one’s getting through that thing,” she argued, but he was already starting to make no-noises, so she surrendered. “Okay. Whatever. You win.” He needed to sleep. ASAP. Not argue with her. Again. “I’ll get you blankets and pillows.” She stood up. “Hey, speaking of Plan B, what’s our Plan A? If you didn’t know about this bomb shelter, then Uncle Alan doesn’t know about it either, and God only knows where Ted is.” Please, let it be somewhere safe. “It’s gonna be hard to get rescued if we stay down here.”

  “The admiral set up an emergency extraction point,” Thomas told her. “It’s not too far from
here. In the morning, I’ll go over and check, see if anyone left a message for us, and leave them one—let them know we’re alive. I fully expect to find some kind of communication—maybe even a hidden SAT phone—but if not, I’ll check in again in the afternoon. Rinse and repeat, until we connect.”

  “So, we should or shouldn’t worry about rationing the food?”

  Thomas didn’t laugh at the ridiculousness of her question. He nodded, which was a clue that his proclaimed fully expect to find a message wasn’t quite as full an expectation as he was pretending. That was hard to believe—that her uncle wouldn’t pull out all stops to find her, and to find her fast...?

  “I say we wake up and have a modest breakfast,” Thomas told her evenly, “and in the event that I don’t find a message from Uncle Navy, we’ll revisit this discussion about rationing. Sound good?”

  Tash nodded. She headed for the bedroom and the blankets, but stopped and turned back to look at him. Even though she yearned for the safe feeling that came from sleeping with his arms around her again, the way they’d ended up back in last night’s blind, there was no reason for that to happen again. No matter how cold she still felt in the depths of her soul from being kidnapped and terrified that Thomas was going to die, the pod’s constant sixty degrees took freezing to death off their lists of potential threats. “You don’t have to worry that I’ll do something stupid. I mean, really stupid. I can’t guarantee complete non-stupidity, but I promise I’ll stay out of your bed.”

  She’d surprised him with her bluntness—his deep brown eyes widening before he shook his head and laughed. “You know, I think you enjoy awkward,” he said.

  Tasha laughed a little. Keeping things awkward was her only current option, because her past solution—putting a solid three thousand miles between them—wasn’t possible here. The awkwardness kept her from falling into a warm, lovely fantasyland in which hope sparked. There, she’d start believing that she could have a future with this man. But Thomas King didn’t love her. Not like that. The awkwardness shoved her face in it and forced her to remember. But the idea that she enjoyed it...? Not even close.