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

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She kept her gaze locked on his face, because if simply seeing his bare butt made her stagger into a wall, God only knows what would happen if she got even just a peek of him, full frontal. “You sucker-punched me—psychologically—with your surprise naked butt. You gotta warn me if you’re gonna do that.”

  “With my...?”

  “A simple, Heads up, Francisco, here comes my bare ass! would suffice.”

  He was perplexed and amused but also a little embarrassed as he grabbed a towel to cover himself. But then he did that medic/first responder thing, where he checked her eyes even as his fingers found the pulse in her wrist. “You know we’re trying to hurry here, right? I need to get in that shower, fast.”

  “Yeah, and how’d that work out? You fail to announce, so I’m completely unprepared, and—in case you haven’t noticed—you’re now over here making sure I don’t faint, so you’re not in the shower yet.”

  It was obvious that he knew she was teasing, but the medical professional was strong in him, so he clearly felt compelled to ask, “Do you still feel faint?”

  He couldn’t have pitched her a more perfect softball. “Because of my arm? Nope. Because the most gorgeous man in the world is naked?” she asked. “Hell, yeah. Weak knees. Heart a-flutter.”

  He was very embarrassed now, but he was Thomas so he snapped back to business.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking, I was doing. Don’t rinse out your clothes. Or mine.” He slid effortlessly back to the conversation they’d been having. “Just hang them so they dry. And then, before you meet me back in here to get bandaged, grab the flashlights from the utility room—put ’em out on the coffee table so we have ’em close, then check to see if there’re any candles anywhere.”

  “There are,” she said. There was one in here, on the back of the toilet, plus a whole collection in the bedroom. She was pretty sure she’d seen some candles in the kitchen, too. “Why are you so convinced that the power’s gonna go out?”

  “If I were out there, looking to get in, I’d figure out a way to cut the power,” he told her, adding, “Heads up, Francisco, here comes my bare ass,” before he turned to walk back to the shower and dropped the towel. “That better for you?”

  Dear, sweet frolicking Jesus. “Much better, thanks,” she said as he stepped into the shower and closed the only slightly fogged clear-glass door behind him.

  “Flashlights and candles,” he reminded her as he stepped face-first under the spray. He swept his hands across his face and then up and over his head, and with his muscular arms raised like that, with the water raining down on him, his picture belonged in the dictionary under the definition for sexy. “It’ll be easier to find them before the lights go out.”

  “Got it,” Tasha said. And even though watching him shower would also be much harder to do after the lights went out, she picked up their clothes and left the bathroom to do as he’d asked.

  Their GPS system was working again, and according to the computer, Prince Tedric had pulled off the state road at a truck stop, either to get gas or food or to use the head.

  Probably all three.

  “He’s armed,” Dave reminded Rio.

  “And we’re not allowed to kill him, not even accidentally,” Rio responded. “Copy that. Although is wounding an option, I wonder?”

  The truck stop sign had been new and gigantic and brightly lit in marked contrast to the facility, which was crumbling and small and featured a restaurant called Sawbuck’s Coffee and Grub that appeared to be deserted despite the flickering dim blue neon that announced Open 24 Hours.

  Despite the still-early morning hour, a pickup truck was at the gas pumps, with one lone person standing with their back against the cold wind. Rio swung toward them, because even though the person standing there was dressed in decidedly feminine outerwear—a sky blue jacket with a hood trimmed with fake fur—they’d already learned that the prince was an outside-the-box thinker. He’d taken Jeff’s phone, so he could just as well have borrowed Kayla’s jacket.

  “Signal’s coming from around the back of the building,” Dave told him, as no, the gas-pumper definitely wasn’t Tedric. It was a woman, older than the prince by around a half-century.

  She looked back at Rio unflinchingly, an eyebrow going up in response to what had been his definite Who are you beneath that hood once-over, straightening her stance to convey a strong I dare you, punk message.

  Rio gave her a wave and a smile as he navigated around the side of the building, past the deserted hookups to the RV dumping tanks, a sadly sagging car wash, and...

  There was no one back there. No trucks, no cars—and certainly no sign of the small blue Honda hybrid that Tedric was believed to be driving—although no one had been absolutely sure about the make or model of his vehicle.

  Rio gazed across that empty expanse of a potholed tarmac and gravel parking lot, landing on...

  A battered dumpster.

  Dave sighed. “Welp,” he said. “According to GPS we’ve found Jeff’s phone. Rock, paper, scissors for the dumpster dive?”

  “Fuck,” Rio said. “Me.”

  “For the record, you could make a fortune in Hollywood as a stunt butt.”

  “Oh, good.” Thomas was using sterilized tweezers to painstakingly pick the debris from Tasha’s wound. He was being careful to get it all, since his antibiotic options were limited to the topical ointment from the first-aid kit. Normally, with any kind of gunshot wound, an oral antibiotic prophylaxis was given as a matter of course. “We’re still talking about this.”

  They’d moved into the kitchen, where the light was better.

  He’d pulled one of the counter-height stools into the center of the little room, and with Tasha perched upon it, her arm was at a better height for his surgery, as it were.

  With her robe off her left shoulder and upper arm, her still-damp hair swept to the side, her long, graceful neck was exposed. She’d pulled the right side of her robe over her breasts and was clasping it closed at her waist.

  Thomas was bracing himself—and keeping her from moving—with a hand on her shoulder, and her skin was soft and cool beneath his fingers. She was an unbelievably beautiful, grown-up woman, and definitely not his sister, a fact he was fully aware of despite his focus on his work.

  “It’s keeping me distracted while you... ooh!” She tried not to move, but she definitely winced as she sharply inhaled.

  The bit of junk he was going after had gotten stuck, so he stopped digging and released her, to give her a break. “Sorry. We’re almost done. There’s a few more pieces of something—fabric from your jacket, I think. They’re big enough to... I really don’t want to leave that in there.”

  She looked at him, over her shoulder. “Isn’t this where you’re supposed to give me a shot of whiskey and a stick to bite down on?”

  Thomas couldn’t not smile at her even as he raised his eyebrows in a very clear Seriously?

  She smiled happily back at him, and he was again struck by how vibrant and alive she was—and how very grateful he was that this hadn’t ended tragically. And how weird it still felt to be in this odd, alternative-feeling world in which he’d kissed her. A world in which it was very, very okay for him to kiss her. A world in which his automatic mental chants of little sister were quickly doused by reality.

  “Or...” You could kiss me. She didn’t say the words, but he read them clearly in her eyes. “You could just let me continue to distract myself with our electrifying ass-chat.”

  Thomas laughed as he returned his attention to her almost-clean wound, trying to find the best way to remove the debris without hurting her. “In that case, I will take your misguided stunt-butt comment as the compliment you intended it to be, and counter with Thanks, but oh hell no.”

  “A moment of silence for the world’s tragic loss. Although, wait, if you’re almost done with my arm,” she pointed out, “that means my knees are next. And that’s making me sweat because...” She pulled up her robe sligh
tly to examine them and made a face. “I scrubbed them, I swear, but it doesn’t look like I did.”

  “I’ll get them clean,” he reassured her.

  “Yeah, no, I really just want you to look,” she said. “Give me a thumbs up or down. I can’t bandage my arm—” she tried to see it again by straining to look over her shoulder and once again failed “—well, if I were here alone, I’d muddle through, but it would be a challenge, and I wouldn’t be able to get it as clean as you can. But my knees...? That I can do. Melvin can attest to the high level of my personal nursing skills, if you need a reference.”

  “It doesn’t make sense for you to—”

  “Yes, it does.” She cut him off. “I’ll handle my knees while you tick off whatever’s left on your Get Ready for the Lights to Go Out doom-list.”

  She was determined so Thomas surrendered. “Fair enough,” he said. “You ready for me to go again?”

  She took in a deep breath and exhaled it hard on a rush of air, then nodded. Her shoulders started to go upward as she tensed, and he held onto her, shaking her just very slightly. “Try to stay loose,” he advised. “And tap your fingers on your leg so your focus isn’t on your arm.” That was a trick he’d learned from the nursing team in Landstuhl, to distract from the sharp pain of a needle stick. “Okay, here we go.”

  “It’s so handy to have a hospital corpsman at hand,” Tasha said through clenched teeth as she tapped. “The perfect ass is just a very nice bonus.”

  “And here I’d hoped we’d moved on with that discussion of your sweaty knees,” he said, leaning in and wishing the light was a few thousand watts brighter, or that he had an extra hand to hold up a flashlight. Please God, let him get it right away, and not have to hurt her again.

  “Sweat-inducing scraped knees,” she said. “Very different.”

  “Yes! Got the first one.”

  “Go, team!” Tasha exhaled loudly as she relaxed her shoulders and circled her head to release the tension in her neck.

  It would’ve been so easy to reach out and help her along with a little gentle massage. But as much as he wanted to, Thomas knew that finishing up and getting her bandaged while they still had electric light took priority, so he settled for another shoulder grip and light shake.

  “You’re doing great. Ready to go again?” he asked.

  “Last time?” she asked hopefully.

  “Not quite.”

  “Second to last?”

  “I can’t promise, but I hope so.”

  “I love that you don’t lie to me,” she said, tapping on her leg again. “All right, I’m ready.”

  Thomas braced himself and leaned in. “On three, two, one.”

  “Ooh! Ouch ouch ouch!”

  “Shit,” he said. Talk about sweaty knees—he now had sweaty everything. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Keep going. It was a life-altering experience for me—the Pre-Shower Ass-ening,” she informed him. Apparently, she still wasn’t done with her... what had she called it? Ass-chat.

  “The Pre-Shower...? I’m sorry, no.” She’d given it a name, which meant it would forever live in infamy—and be endlessly discussed—like the night of the massively bleeding head wound or Pink Settee-Palooza. Although that last one—the day that the pink settee had been delivered by the furniture store—was Uncle Navy’s creation, so maybe her propensity to name events was genetic.

  Tash, meanwhile, was blithely ignoring him. “Pre for you, post-shower for me,” she explained through her clenched teeth, as if that was his issue. “And I mean, yes, I know you told me that you kissed me intentionally, and I love that you said that, I do. But part of me was still going, But did he really, or is he just taking responsibility? Because you are very intensely into taking full responsibility for anything that goes wrong.”

  As Thomas used the tweezers—a ridiculously tiny tool in his XL hands—as gently as he could to grab hold of another bit of fuzz and thread, he shook his head at her use of the word wrong. But before he could even inhale in order to comment, she’d already continued.

  “But you waltzing into the bathroom and casually dropping trou is on a different level entirely.”

  “Got another,” he announced, releasing her again. “One more to go.”

  Tasha looked over her shoulder at him as he wiped off the tweezers. “You didn’t overthink. You just acted, because showering quickly was your mission. I’ve been around Navy SEALs all my life, remember, and... My point is that you treated me like a teammate, an equal. Not like—” she cleared her throat “—a child.”

  “Because you’re not a child,” Thomas told her, and with sudden clarity, he understood why she needed to bandage her knees herself. It wasn’t entirely about wanting to free him up to allow him to perform other tasks. “Quick, build a time machine so I can go back a few months and tell that to myself.”

  “I’m okay with this current timeline,” she told him.

  Thomas had already moved around to look more closely at her poor, bruised, scraped knees—giving her a chance to take a breath before he finished poking at her injured arm—and he realized the awkwardness that came with no longer being positioned safely behind her. He was now directly facing her, and glancing up meant that he was he looking directly into her eyes.

  He hesitated.

  If he were Tasha, he would just say it. Just full-on blurt it, ass-chat and Pre-Shower Ass-ening style. So he did. “You don’t wish that I’d kissed you before you moved in with Ted?”

  Tasha’s eyes widened. “Oh, shit,” she said. “Ted.”

  Damn, she was young and careless. As Thomas focused on looking at her knees—after quickly checking in with Melvin, who was healing nicely, and taking a fraction of a second to note that her legs were soft and smooth against his hands—he hated that that was the first thought that had popped to mind, but there it was. Tasha obviously hadn’t given Ted a second thought before this—hell, she hadn’t given him much of a first thought. Not even when they’d first walked into this place that she’d quickly labeled a sex-pod.

  Ted’s sex-pod.

  She didn’t care that Ted had a sex-pod because she’s always loved you. And yes. The caveman part of his brain was into the idea of Tasha having loved Thomas forever.

  Except, she hadn’t said no to Ted when he’d said Let’s move in together.

  And Thomas’s caveman brain was definitely disgruntled about that, let alone the very existence of Ted, even as the more highly developed part of him understood that Ted’s presence in Tash’s life was absolutely his own damn fault. He was the one who’d been absolute in his conviction that they could never be romantically involved. How could he fault her for believing him?

  “Okay,” he said. “You’re good to bandage your knees yourself. Lots of antibiotic ointment on them, though. Let’s finish up your arm.”

  Before he could move back around her, she said, “Wait. I want to tell you some... details about my relationship with Ted.”

  Thomas met her eyes again at that, and his Oh hell no must’ve been written all over his face, because she laughed a little and made her own face back at him.

  “Not those kind of details,” she said. “I’m not talking about... okay, although, I kind of am, because there aren’t any details like that, and, well, you need to know that. Here, I can talk while you finish my arm. Keep going. I don’t want to slow us down.”

  He went to the sink so he could wash his hands again, and she raised her voice to be heard over the running water.

  “But I do want you to know that... Well, I believe, completely, that we—you and I—wouldn’t be here right now if we hadn’t spent all that time apart. That’s what I meant when I said that I like this timeline. I’m really glad I got this chance to get to know you—to really know you, to see you without the fairytale gauze over the lens, you know?” Tasha turned to watch him as he dried his hands and went back to his position behind her, where he picked up the tweezers. “And I think, in any other timeline, that I wo
uldn’t have dared to say all those things I said last night—things that somehow, miraculously, made you decide you finally needed to kiss me.”

  Thomas gently turned her so that he had access to her injury again. “On three, two, one.”

  Her shoulder tightened beneath his hand, but this last time was a charm, because he got the offending material on his very first try. Thank God. “All done.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide. “That was fast.”

  “The hard part’s done, anyway. I still need to drown it in antibiotic ointment, then bandage it.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and then waited, as if she wanted him to say something.

  So he did. Even as he reached for the ointment and gauze that he’d already picked out for her bandage. “When I kissed you,” he told her, “I wasn’t thinking about Ted.”

  “I wasn’t either,” she said. “Because—”

  He cut her off before she got off up to speed with her explanation, because why really didn’t matter. “But we should’ve been. Especially you. And part of me is freaked out. My judge-y inner grandpa, I believe you call it. The part of me that’s a traditionalist. The part that learned right and wrong—without a lot of wiggle room—from my grandmother. So I’m not sure how to process the fact that you weren’t thinking about him. That you were so okay with kissing someone else when just a few days back you were on the verge of getting engaged to him.”

  Tasha shook her head, no. “But you’re not someone else and I wasn’t... I mean, I was, but I wasn’t...” She took a deep breath and started again as he opened the paper wrappers on the gauze. “It wasn’t going to be a real engagement. Ted and I had a... well, I know this sounds insane but... it was a business arrangement.”

  Okay, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.

  She kept going. “His mother was pushing all these women at him—women who would make acceptable—” she gave the word air quotes “—wives for the crown prince. And God, it just really exhausted him. He hated it. He wanted her to stop, so... I was working as his personal assistant—we’re friends, but I needed a part-time job so he paid me to organize his life.”