“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.
“It sure beats being dead,” she reminded them both, then went to fetch the blankets so that Thomas could get some sleep.
Chapter Thirteen
Tuesday
Tasha stood in the part of Ted’s super-secret sex-pod that Thomas called the utility room, staring at the weapons locker. Similar to the lock on the door to the outside world, this lock had a keypad for an entry code.
Thomas had told her that he’d tried the same four-digit code that had gotten them through the door, but this lock wanted six digits.
Was it possible...?
She keyed in the same code, seven two two eight, and then, because over the past year she’d come to know Ted rather well, and creating a pattern was a very Ted-like thing to do, she entered another two two.
And the door clicked open.
She was on the verge of a wild dance of triumph when she realized the locker was empty. Shit.
But wait, there was a drawer down at the bottom, and she pulled it open. Ammo. Yes! Boxes of 7mm bullets, which matched the caliber of the hunting rifle Thomas had found on the body of the man who’d been killed up at the burned out lodge.
The hunting rifle she and Thomas had had an argument about just this morning, right before he’d left to check for messages at Uncle Alan’s prearranged extraction point.
Thomas (holding out the rifle): I’m leaving this with you.