She interrupted. “And it’s not just about sex,” she explained. “It’s the Thomas-and-Tasha-ness, too. The ease of being myself with you. I mean, I’ve been feeling little bits and pieces of that even here. Jeez, even when we were in the hide with the spiders, when you, like, let yourself forget that I’m now some horrible annoying problem to be handled.”
“The annoying problem here isn’t you, it’s the dozen armed men who are—” he started but she cut him off again.
“What if you just let that go?” She leaned in, and again he forced himself not to move. To sit still instead of leaping up and pacing—instead of running away. “Just let go of everything you think you should be to me and everything you think I should be to you? Because what if you’re wrong?”
“I know I’m not wrong about wanting to protect you,” he countered.
“Yeah, yeah, I know and I’m not mad about that,” she told him. “In fact, I happen to sincerely love that I’m up shit’s creek with a Navy SEAL paddle, I really do. But you’re not the only adult in the room anymore. I mean, you were just a kid yourself when we met, and yeah, you hit the grown-up marker before me, but I’ve been an adult, too, for a long time now.”
A long time? He could try to argue that, but he knew it wouldn’t fly. “Okay,” Thomas said instead. “Yes. You are an adult. I agree, but...” He didn’t actually have a but that was more lucid than mindlessly screaming in panic, but he knew Tasha wasn’t even close to done. And having this conversation was important, but holy flipping shit.
She filled in his silence. “What if you suck at dating, as you yourself said, because you’re still looking for that... that... ease of being, too,” she suggested. “Maybe it’s not that you just haven’t met someone you can relax and be yourself with. Maybe it’s that you already have—and I’m sitting right here.”
Oh, God, no, because sweet, holy Jesus, what if she was right? No woman he’d ever dated was ever good enough, smart enough, funny enough...
Tasha kept going. “What if... What if you met me, for the first time, just last week, at Werewulf’s? What if we were both having a burger and a beer at the bar, watching Plan 9 from Outer Space and laughing our butts off, and you needed me to pass you the ketchup? I don’t think you’d little sister me when our eyes met. I really, really don’t.”
“But I helped raise you,” he blurted.
“No, you did not,” Tasha said emphatically. “Sharon and Uncle Alan and Mia raised me. You showed me what a good, honest, kind, respectful man looks like. In the face of all of Sharon’s terrible choices and shitty mistakes, because of you, I had the opportunity to see exactly the kind of man I deserved to have in my life. And I know it’s messed up, but I was already shopping for a husband, even back when I was five, because a part of me believed what Sharon taught me—that I needed a man in order to survive.”
“That is extremely messed up,” he managed.
“Yup,” she said. “And the more I got to know you—the longer we were friends—the more I realized how insanely special you are. And I know you’re not perfect—no one’s perfect—but you really seemed perfect for me. And, yeah, I know, what flavor of crazy is it that a girl so young is thinking about things like that? But I was. I know Sharon’s constant lament played into it. If only someone—my father, God, anyone—married her, then, and only then, would we be okay. I learned that as a truth, before I could talk. Except, when I was with you, I wasn’t just okay, I was great. And as I got older, I wanted that—to feel great like that—forever. But the stupid thing is, after all the time I spent working that messy Sharon-shit out in college, after years of therapy and self-reflection, I suddenly find myself rationing jars of peanuts and olives with you and I’m still thinking, Yeah, I want this, forever.”
Tasha’s eyes were vulnerable in her face. And yeah, it was a grown-up woman’s face.
“TL;DR: I never saw you as a brother,” she whispered. “Not ever. You were always my future soulmate. So that’s my side of the brutally honest dry-heave-free conversation that we should’ve had five years ago—although I don’t think I was ready or able to have it back before all the therapy, so I do think it’s good that we waited. But come on. Your turn. Sister me again and get it over with so we can go to bed.” She rolled her eyes at herself. “Sleep. I meant sleep.”
It was hour two, and counting.
Rio was sitting behind the wheel of the SUV with the engine and heater running, staring out over the still-empty rural airfield, while Dave combat-napped beside him, seat reclined and arms folded tightly across his chest.
The good news was that the county deputy who had been waiting for them in the hangar was a badass older woman who had zero fucks left to give. She’d been told by the FBI—and probably via a direct call from the admiral, too—that Rio and Dave would take custody of the wayward prince when he arrived. So she’d intently studied their military IDs, looking them both hard in the face and checking their heights to boot, making sure they exactly matched their photographs and descriptions. And then she told them pointedly that she would remain nearby, and would escort them, in her police cruiser, all the way to Burlington.
The bad news was that the prince’s stolen jet had yet to arrive.
After stewing for an hour, Rio had called the admiral under the guise of giving him a sit-rep, but in truth to float an idea that he couldn’t shake. What if this was intentionally meant to waste their time? They were making a huge assumption here—trusting incomplete intel from a foreign government. What if Ted had stolen the jet for another reason? Was anyone tracking the wayward flight?
Francisco’s answer to that last question was a resounding yes. The royal jet had been picked up on radar. It was definitely heading toward them, currently under USAF fighter escort. ETA two more hours.
Rio had gone into heavy-duty outside-the-box thinking at that point, tossing out ideas for an alternative to Rosetti and Patterson sit on their asses for two more hours while King and Tasha remain missing in the freezing wilderness. He’d suggested that he and Dave split up. Dave could stay at the airfield, while Rio headed back up into the mountains. After the jet landed, Dave could co-pilot Ted back down to Hanscom Air Force Base, where the prince would be extra safe.
It was an inspired idea, but the admiral had given him a very hard no.
Rio wasn’t done, but he hadn’t gotten out more than a “How about—” before the admiral cut him off.
“Call me when the jet lands,” he said, abruptly ending the call.
Now, a full hour later, one of the phones stuck in the center console’s cup holders made a swooshing sound—announcing an incoming text message. Maybe the admiral had changed his mind, but when Rio reached for the phone, he realized it was Dave’s personal cell.
The incoming text showed up on the screen.
Made you miss me, didn’t I?
It was from H-less Jon, that heartless sonofabitch. It was intentional—his failure to respond to Dave’s many, many texts before now.
Dave was still sleeping hard as a second text came in, also short-and-sweet enough to show up on his lockscreen: I’m outside your apt. Lemme in.
Seriously...?!
“Yo, Dave. Your loser ex finally texted.” Rio held out the phone as Dave’s eyes opened.
“He’s okay? Oh, thank God.” Dave grabbed his phone, but then, as he read the two messages, his face tightened.
“You can do so much better,” Rio said. “Because that shit? Is bullshit.”
Dave was already nodding his agreement, but his eyes were sad. “So, you think it should be Fuck you or Fuck off...?” he asked, already typing in the identical first word of his impending response.
Rio didn’t need to think hard about it. “Off,” he declared. “Off is a shrug. Whatever, bro.”
“I kinda don’t call him bro,” Dave pointed out.
“Oops.” Rio laughed at himself. “Sorry, right. Still, you is a little too personal. Too wounded. He’ll know he got under your skin.”
/>
Dave’s smile was forced. “Yeah, well, that’s a given.” His phone whooshed as he sent the text. “I’m glad he’s okay, I am, but...”
“Damn.” Rio finished his sentence for him.
“Yeah.” He very deliberately turned his phone off and stashed it in the glove compartment. “Conversation over, I wish him the best.”
“You’re a better man than me, my friend. I’m over here wishing he lets one rip during an important meeting with his boss and is forever after known as Air-Biscuit Jon. In fact, that’s what I’m calling him from now on, so you better not patch things up.”
Now Dave’s smile was more genuine. “Understood.” He paused, then added, “Thanks for the moral support.”
“Any time,” Rio said, and as they settled back in to wait, he kicked the heat up a little higher, wondering if—wherever they were—Thomas and Tasha were managing to stay warm.
Chapter Eighteen
Thomas was sitting there, his eyes unfocused, looking shell-shocked as hell, so Tasha had mercy on him. She was feeling lightheaded herself, having just bared her soul to him. And a large part of her wanted to stop time right here and now, so she could live forever in this moment of hopeful maybe.
She picked up her book and stood. “I think it’s time for me to lock myself into the Hall of Mirrors, so you can get some sleep. I know you want to get out to the extraction point at dawn, and that’s coming at us, fast.”
He looked up at her then. “I didn’t know,” he said. “About any of that. I mean, I knew things were terrible with Sharon, I just didn’t know you were... I mean, you were a kid, so the whole playing-princess Will you marry me thing was just... you being a kid. It was... cute. I thought. And I knew when you were a teenager, you still had a crush on me, but Tash, I’m so much older than you.”
Tasha sat back down, unwilling to stop him if he truly did want to keep talking. “Twelve years isn’t so much—”
“It sure as shit was when you were twelve and I was twenty-four.”
“Yeah, but I’m not twelve anymore,” she pointed out. “You know, Jake is more than twenty years older than Zoe.”
“I’m familiar with the fact that Admiral Robinson’s second wife is significantly younger than he is, yes.”
“Ooh,” she said. “So judge-y. Not a good look for you. He was widowed, you do know that, right? It’s not like he ditched his old wife to run off with the hot scientist babe who helped him save the world.”
“Their age difference raises eyebrows up the chain of command and in the Pentagon and... You’re the one who thinks I’m perfect,” he countered. “I know I’m not.”
“I don’t think you’re perfect,” Tasha corrected him. “I think you’re perfect for me. It’s different.”
“And I’m saying that I’m not perfect for you, because I’m too old.”
“No, I’m pretty sure you’re saying that I’m not perfect for you because I’m too young and hot and someone in the Pentagon who’s married to his third trophy wife might find out and think you’re the exact same kind of scumbag that he is, even though he’d be wrong—and the hell with what he thinks, anyway. Cravenness is also not a good look for you, Grandpa, but I promise that I, with my youth and hotness and a bit of time and patience, can help you learn to be more brave.”
He laughed at that, which was good, because it made him breathe. He’d been sitting so still, she’d been thinking she might need to start CPR on him.
But he was shaking his head even as he laughed, and she saw the resistance in his dark brown eyes. “I know you didn’t see me as a brother, but I... saw you as a sister,” Thomas told her. “You were the age my baby brother would’ve been, if he’d lived.”
“Yes, I know that,” Tasha said quietly.
When Thomas was twelve, his mother had died shortly after giving birth to an infant who’d been unable to survive outside of her womb, turning tragedy into trauma for Thomas and his family.
So he’d now not only just sistered her, but by bringing up the awfulness that had rocked his world and changed his life forever, he’d made it impossible for her to be funny or flip in any kind of counterargument.
She went direct. “But I’m not your sister. As much as I loved Grandma King, she wasn’t my grandma, she was yours. Her real name was Thomas’s Grandma King. I just left off the Thomas’s, but it was always there, unspoken. Same way that Uncle Alan was mine. You never called him that—it was always Uncle Navy—because he was my uncle. So again, I’m not your sister, I’m not your cousin. We were close neighbors for a while, yeah, good friends after that. But you didn’t start little-sistering me until I was thirteen years old. I remember when you started. I asked Grandma King about it, because it freaked me out. You were training with the Team, and you came back early because you were injured, and I went with Grandma King to see you in the hospital. And I got worried because I thought maybe you’d hit your head and had some kind of weird amnesia or vision trouble and actually believed I was Christine.”
When Tasha first met Thomas, he was living with his much older sister Christine and her family, in the same apartment complex where Uncle Alan lived. When Christine got her dream job as a librarian at Yale University, she and her husband and kids moved to Connecticut, and Thomas moved in with his grandmother. Christine was smart and beautiful—she had the most fabulous and varied pairs of funky and stylish eyeglasses—and Tasha would’ve loved to look just like her, but she didn’t. Not even a little.
The painkillers had made Thomas a bit loopy, Grandma King had told her. They’d made him overly emotional and a bit sloppy, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t as glad to see Tasha as he’d exclaimed. Just that he didn’t have the ability to hide what he was feeling.
It was a good thing, Grandma King had also told her, for Thomas to treat her like a sister—a little sister—considering her age.
Tasha hadn’t really understood that at the time. She just knew that she didn’t like it very much.
But Grandma King had more to say—that being in any hospital was always hard for Thomas, since that was where he’d seen his mother for the last time before she’d died.
And that was when Grandma King had told Tasha how Thomas’s mom had died—after giving birth to a baby who’d died, too.
Tash had been stunned. Even though Thomas had told her that his father had gone to prison after being charged with assault because he’d hit the doctor whose negligence had let his mom die, she hadn’t realized that his mother had died after giving birth. This wasn’t the 1800s. Childbirth didn’t have a mortality rate anymore—women didn’t die from it.
Grandma King had corrected Tasha, annoyance in her usually quiet voice. White women tended not to die in childbirth in the twenty-first century. The statistics for Black women were different.
Shockingly different.
After Thomas got out of the hospital, Tash had talked with him about that, too. And that—back when she was thirteen—was the very first time he’d told her that she reminded him of the little brother he’d never met, which always felt odd to her. But okay. She was not an expert in psychology or human behavior, and if he said that seeing her made him think of the sibling he’d never known, then she believed him.
But it seemed to come out of nowhere, after all those years of friendship.
It wasn’t until she found Patricia, her therapist, that she’d thought in any depth about the timeline of what she’d always considered Thomas’s Weird Phase—the way he suddenly started calling her his sister, and then his suddenly being connected at the hip to Rachel whenever he attended any SEAL family event. And she realized that it lined up rather neatly with her headfirst dive into puberty.
“You know,” she told him now, “when I was thirteen, I started wearing a bra. I started needing one. My body was changing. Really quickly.” Almost overnight, she’d gone from her solidly square block of a little girl’s shape to a curvy, more womanly one. “It happened while you were overseas. I think you came back, and took
one look at me, and started chanting, Sister, sister, sister, to keep me at a distance.”
He gave her his absolute-nope face. “You were thirteen. I didn’t need any convincing to keep my distance.”
“No,” Tash corrected him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean... Not for you. I mean, not entirely. See, it was definitely good that you did that.” Grandma King knew it, too, even though Tasha hadn’t understood at the time. “Because I had all these crazy hormones happening, and that plus being more than a little screwed up from the dysfunction of living in Sharon’s world, combined with the fact that I never, not even for one second, stopped actively adoring you...? If you’d shown any admiration that was even slightly salacious about how grownup I looked in my skinny jeans...? I for sure would not have waited to turn eighteen to climb into your bed.”
“Are you kidding? You were so innocent.”
“It’s the freckles,” she said. “Freckles always fool everyone.”
He clearly had no patience for her attempt to make light, and he shifted in his seat. “I’m not sure what any of this has to do with anything—”
“You said you wanted to have a conversation about what happened. I’m trying to make a point.”
To his credit, he swallowed whatever retort was on the tip of his tongue, and even though he eyed the door to the stairwell—the only real escape route out of this pod—he still didn’t leap up and run away. He simply said, “Okay.”
So she told him, “Thomas, I lived with Sharon. Think about what that was like before she was trying to get clean, when something—or someone—that she wanted bumped into her inability to pay a babysitter, even though we usually lived in a studio apartment. I was given a piece of candy or a soda pop, and ordered to go to sleep on a pile of pillows in the bathtub, and to not, under any circumstances, come out of the bathroom. Do you honestly think I did what she said?”
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 16