Thomas shook his head, no. He was well aware of the struggle her uncle had had with her, when she’d first come to live in the apartment complex with Alan. Tasha had spent the first five years of her life with Sharon, whose always-changing rules never had consequences. Because of that, Tasha had frequently wandered out of Alan’s apartment and into the busy oceanside neighborhood before she’d learned that with Alan, no really did mean no, and that he took his responsibility for her safety and well-being seriously.
“I probably knew more sexual positions than you did when we first met,” Tash said, and Thomas flinched so hard, she realized she had to add, “From observation only. Relax. But I do look back on all the times that Sharon passed out with some strange man still in the room and realize just how lucky we both were that I learned pretty early on to lock that bathroom door.”
The muscle was jumping in his jaw, but Tasha wasn’t done.
“Thing is, I was a hopeless romantic. Some day my prince will come... Sharon always got so excited whenever she had a new guy in her sights. She’d do the laundry and fix her hair and laugh a lot, instead of sleeping most of the day. She would say I’m in love, and I didn’t know that was shorthand for This new guy will solve all my problems if I can just make the sex good enough to make him want to stay. I think, maybe because the truth we were living was so bleak, that I dove into the fantasy. I remember she always used to say ‘I love you, too,’ comes before ‘Let’s get naked,’ although I’m pretty sure that didn’t always work out for her, because she was a lying-piece-of-shit magnet. But it increased our likelihood of moving in with some old rich guy for a coupla weeks or months. Still, it was always in my head—a hard and fast rule. Except then I turned eighteen and I was so damn certain that you’d been telling me that you loved me for my entire life, so...”
“Well,” Thomas said, clearing his throat. “Thank you at least for waiting until then. That’s... terrifying to think about. I mean, not that dealing with a naked eighteen-year-old wasn’t bad enough.”
“You really never told Alan or Mia?” Tash asked. On the plane, he’d said he hadn’t, but she still didn’t quite believe it. Although, it gave her hope.
“Mia emailed me, a few days after that night,” Thomas said. “I’m pretty sure she would’ve called if she could’ve.”
SEAL Team Ten had gone wheels up the day after Tash’s birthday, so Mia didn’t have the option to call.
“She asked a bunch of questions,” he continued, “that I evaded by saying she should talk to you. She ultimately sent me a Don’t mess with Tasha lecture—it was pages long—ending with her version of If you hurt her, I will hunt you down and kill you. So yeah, she definitely knew something was up since I was the one who drove you home when you were so wasted. But I never gave her any details. I figured it was up to you to tell her or not.”
“Thank you,” Tasha said. “For treating me like an adult—because I was an adult.”
He narrowed his eyes and made a Hmmm sound.
“Okay, so maybe I wasn’t quite there yet, because climbing into your bed was an incredibly childish thing to do, and God, I’m so sorry I disrespected you that way, I really am, but I just want you to step back and think about why you didn’t tell Mia or Alan. You know, say, Get a handle on your crazy niece, Admiral, she’s out of control.”
“Yeah, in what alternative reality would I say that?” he protested.
“The one where you disapprove of the age difference between Jake and Zoe even though you know how much they love each other,” Tasha shot back. “The one where you drew an indelible line between you and me, and wrote adult on your side and forever-a-child on mine. The one where you refuse to step back and give a hard look at the sister-sister-sister you’ve been whispering to yourself whenever I’m in the room. The one where the future locks tightly into the choices and decisions you made in the past, even though the present—right now—looks completely different because here we are, absolutely, both on the adult side of your imaginary line.”
He was shaking his head as he looked at her. Just a little, just a constant, persistent no.
Before he could shut her down with an argument she couldn’t debate, like I’m really sorry, Tash, because I just don’t feel the same way that you do, she grabbed her book and scrambled back to her feet.
“Don’t say anything,” she told him. “Not right now. Just think about what I said. Sit with it. Sleep on it. We both need to sleep, so I’m going to bed.”
She beelined for the bedroom, and when he spoke—“Tasha, I just... can’t...”—she pretended she didn’t hear him and closed and locked the door in the face of whatever it was that he couldn’t or wouldn’t do.
Even though she knew damn well that his sentence, I just can’t ended badly for her with the words force myself to love you the way you want me to.
Until tomorrow morning, when he said it—until the moment that she emerged and let him say it to her face—she’d stay right here in her hope-filled fantasyland of maybe he would.
Yeah, and all she needed was a pink settee, and she’d become a Russian princess for real, too.
Chapter Nineteen
Wednesday
“What’s the deputy’s plan if Ted tries to jump the fence?” Rio asked as Dave rejoined him on the tarmac.
Dawn was starting to lighten the sky in the east—they’d been waiting that freaking long.
But now the Ustanzian jet was finally—finally—approaching the airstrip for a landing, and they were outside the hangar, awaiting the prince’s arrival.
If it was Rio who’d essentially stolen a plane to go after his girlfriend who was in danger, instead of taxiing to the hangar, he’d pull the jet toward the end of the runway, pop open the door, jump out, and make a break for the forest on the other side of the chain-link barrier.
“She says the fence is electrified, and the tower reminded him about that,” Dave reported. “Repeatedly.”
“So, we expect him to just surrender?” That didn’t make sense.
“The deputy said he’s been both compliant and apologetic,” Dave said. “She told me that the prince told the tower that he’ll come out of the plane with his hands up. He doesn’t want to get shot. And he really doesn’t want to get shot down.”
The plane landed then, with a roar and a squeal of tires, and Rio looked back toward the parking lot where they’d left their SUV. “Maybe I should’ve stayed with the car.” Another seven hours of delay, driving to freaking Burlington and back, was bad enough. If they had to spend one minute more than that tracking this mofo down...
But after braking, the plane turned toward the hangar and, jet engines still whining, rolled obediently toward them.
Something was seriously wrong with all of this. Why steal a plane only to chicken out when you land?
And okay, sure. The fighter jet escort had surely been intimidating, and it was still up there, circling, to make sure the Ustanzian jet stayed on the ground.
This tiny airfield had no boarding gates—only portable stairs on wheels. As the engines powered down, a team of workers trotted one of them out to meet the jet and the door opened.
And there he stood. The goddamn Crown Prince of Ustanzia with his trademark navy-blue winter coat, vaguely reminiscent of the Beatles Sgt. Pepper phase, his black skinny jeans, and his long, dark, wavy hair...
Wait a minute. This guy on the stairs had the trademark flowing locks, but his hair was blond.
“That’s not Prince Tedric,” Rio announced, and immediately ran for the SAT phone in the SUV. “Check the plane,” he shouted back at Dave. “Make sure the prince isn’t hiding in there somewhere.”
But he knew in his gut that the prince probably wasn’t—and why this whole situation had been bugging him so damn badly.
There was no doubt about it—this smelled of diversion. Of trickery. Of total goatfuckery. Ted had given some friend or underling his jacket and an order to fly to this airfield to distract and divert anyone following, while h
e, what...? If it were Rio, he’d be approaching the burned out ski lodge far more covertly, by land.
Yeah.
This was, without a doubt, a complete disaster; a total clusterfuck of a waste of their time.
And the first thing Rio needed to do was bring the admiral up to speed.
Still no contact.
Thomas had extracted from the pod before dawn—before Tasha was awake. He’d written her a very brief sticky note, left on the bathroom door—Back soon.
He’d left unspoken the end of his sentence, which went something like: hopefully with a team of SEALs and FBI agents who will rescue you from the small army of hostiles who are still out here searching for you, and who will also please please PLEASE God rescue me, please sweet Jesus, from having to continue with part eleventy-nine of last’s night’s endless and terrifying conversation.
Although, after she’d gone to bed, while he was lying on the sofa and not-sleeping, he’d come up with his opening salvo, should part eleventy-nine take place: What about Ted? Remember Ted? Your soon-to-be fiancé with whom you share an apartment, a bedroom, a bed...? How does Ted factor into “I want this, to be locked in here with you, Thomas, forever”...?
So, good. He was ready, because part eleventy-nine was sure as shit coming at him at warp speed as soon as he walked through the door, cheerfully calling, “Honey, I’m home!”
Rescue—both physical and emotional—wasn’t coming soon, because there still had been abso-fucking-lutely zero contact.
Although Thomas had heard a jet overhead, slightly before dawn. He’d spotted it, too—an F-15 fighter. It had made at least two circles, but not directly overhead. And up way too high for the pilot to be actively searching for anyone, let alone them.
Thomas was starting to believe that whatever was happening out in the world was a total clusterfuck, because this was day four, and in what universe did Admiral Francisco not manage to send a full team in a guns-bristling warship out to the extraction point to rescue Tasha by day four?
Only dark and scary ones, for sure.
So either the U.S. had had—or was in the middle of having—a 9/11-level attack, or the admiral had, as Tash had initially feared, been among the first casualties.
The very words Thomas had told her when she’d wondered aloud about nuclear war echoed in his head, and he reminded himself again that, at least in this remote part of the Northeast, the electrical grid was still up and running.
Of course, the CONUS grid was a disparate patchwork of systems. Major US cities across the country could well be charred and smoking.
And okay, thoughts like that weren’t going to help him.
Unless he and Tasha were among the very last men and women left alive.
That grim fact would make all of his personal conflicts vanish pretty damn fast.
Except, there was still a motley platoon of men out here in the woods, searching for someone or something. Occam’s Razor said it had to be Tasha and Thomas, even though reasoning and logic couldn’t explain why they were being hunted after they’d so obviously been left alive and let go.
Reasoning and logic did point out that the still-present army of hunters indicated that something less than full nuclear annihilation had occurred. Surely in the event of that enormous a disaster, the leader of this ragtag group would have better things to do—like establishing his warlord status in the new world arena by looting all of the toilet paper from the local Ralph’s or Piggly Wiggly or whatever local grocery chain lived out here in backwoods New England. Everyone knew that in an apocalyptic world, hoarded toilet paper was a king-maker.
Therefore, it was highly unlikely that Thomas could simply throw up his hands and surrender to Tash’s debate points from last night due to reasoning based on No one else is alive here in the Thunderdome, he might as well accept his fate and start repopulating the human race with a brilliant, gorgeous, funny-as-hell woman who adored him.
The phrase accept his fate echoed as he headed back to the sex-pod—shit, ever since Tasha had called it that, he had to work to think of it as anything else. And that meant when he was with Tasha—which was every damn second he wasn’t out here attempting to facilitate their rescue—he was hard-core policing every stupid thing that came out of his mouth. Don’t say sex-pod, don’t say sex-pod...
Wouldn’t it be nice to just give up and give in?
Yeah, thanks so much for that gem of bad advice, brain. Glad I wasn’t listening to you when I went through BUD/S or I wouldn’t be a SEAL. I would’ve “given in” to the exhaustion and I’d’ve rung out.
But he’d wanted to be a SEAL with a fiery passion. He’d burned to become a SEAL. Similarly to the way he wanted this, to the way he wanted her—
What? Thomas shut that shit down fast. The idea of wanting Tasha in that way was just too damn unsettling.
Except...
What if, like she’d said, he had met her for the first time, just last week in Werewulf’s, while sitting at the bar, watching the same movie and laughing. Their age difference now wasn’t that big a thing. Yeah, she was young, and he’d catch hell from his teammates for dating a woman twelve years younger—but only because he’d given them hell in the past for doing the same. Although, Tash—a college grad—was actually older than most of the women that his teammates dated, since they went on the theory that college-age women would be on board for an easygoing relationship with fewer strings.
And it wasn’t really the age difference that was problematic. It was that Thomas hadn’t met Tasha last week at ’Wulf’s. He’d met her back when she was freaking five. He’d babysat her, for Christ’s sake.
But then she’d gotten older and started babysitting kids like Joanna McCoy, and he’d often still hung out with her, because he’d liked spending time with her. He definitely came to her rescue whenever she’d needed him—but she’d rarely needed him, because even when she was twelve or thirteen, she was going on thirty in a lot of ways.
And yeah, she’d gotten a little wild, breaking a lot of rules and stressing Uncle Navy out while she was in high school—but Thomas hadn’t been around for much of that. He’d been stationed in the sandbox for months and then years on end.
Still, whenever he came back to the States, she was always there, waiting for him at the airport, and she was right. Being with her had always been just so damn easy.
Sister, sister, sister, except, Tasha wasn’t his sister. She was right about that fact, too.
Still, his job had always been to protect her. For years, that had been Thomas’s prime directive: to protect Tasha from all of the assholes who would hurt her, including her alcoholic screw-up of a mother.
Maybe, because he knew how much Tash had loved Sharon despite the relentless dysfunction caused by her mom’s disease... And maybe because he’d always worked hard to temper her excitement at the news that Sharon was coming back home...
Sharon’s getting out of rehab, and she says this time’s the charm! She says this time it’s gonna stick!
Ah, yeah, Tash, well, that’s really great, but you know that’s something Sharon really can’t know, right?
Thomas, this time she promised!
Well, I know she really wants it to be true, but remember what we learned from those Al-Anon meetings? The fact she made that promise means she’s still got more to learn.
Maybe it didn’t matter what Thomas said, because when it came to Sharon, Tasha always ended up disappointed.
And maybe because he knew that Tash had loved him with that same intensity and ferociousness, it had seemed fitting that, after she stopped giving Sharon the power to disappoint her, that he should step into that dominant role and continuously disappoint her, too.
All because of rules that he’d arbitrarily made to help himself clarify and define their very weird relationship.
Sister, sister, not-his-sister. Really, really not-his-sister.
But if Tash wasn’t his sister, what was she?
His best friend. And how weird
had that been to be twenty-something with a fourteen-year-old best friend? No wonder he’d been shouting sister all over the place.
And the idea that he might’ve been holding open the parking spot for a girlfriend and a lover in his life...? Keeping it vacant for his tweenage bestie...? Waiting on her to grow up...? Boom. He was back to super-creepy.
Again, no wonder he’d clung so hard to sister, sister, sister.
And while he was clinging and closing his eyes to the fact that time was passing, she’d grown up. She’d left her messed-up childhood behind, working her butt off to break the cycle of dysfunction, to understand the many insidious ways her mother’s addictions and other mental health issues had damaged her. She’d stepped up with courage and optimism, moving on and building a life for herself that was complete without him.
So why did she still want him, then? That conversation last night had been one of purpose and intention. She hadn’t been playing—she’d debated with her very heart and soul.
But what if that was just residual—leftovers—from her shitty childhood? An echo of what she’d once thought she’d wanted?
Except, he was the one who’d intruded—at Alan’s request, for sure, but Tash had made it very clear that she would have preferred any other SEAL as her bodyguard during this trip.
So maybe—and this was a shocker—he could take Tasha at her word. That their being thrown together like this had opened her eyes and made her realize that she still wanted him in her life. Maybe, especially when all hell had broken loose, she’d seen just how strong their childhood bond still was—that the friendship and trust they’d shared was solid, unbreakable.
Fate had thrown them together back when she was much too young, during a time when neither of them were ready for more than that friendship, but now was indeed not then.
Tasha wasn’t his sister, and she was no longer a child.
She’d kept her distance for years—appropriately giving him space after the night of the White Russians. She’d accepted his no with both grace and respect. And then she’d grown and matured, while he’d stayed mired in the past, unwilling and unable to see her as more than the girl she’d once been.
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 17
