Of course, five years was a long time, and as people grew from child to adult, they often changed.
As for Queen Wila’s reaction to said baby bump...? A terse, “You’ll have to ask my son—or his little red-haired friend.”
Ouch.
So. This week was going to be even more stressful for Tasha than he’d imagined. And Uncle Navy—who always did his homework, too—damn well knew it. No wonder he wanted Thomas’s presence to be large.
Thomas shut his laptop and went to finish packing for the coming red-eye flight, and the suck-fest of a week that was sure to follow.
Chapter Three
Saturday Night
Tasha’s eyes widened when she turned and saw him come out of the gate and onto the airfield. Instead of a more conventional greeting like Hey or ’Sup, she went with, “No.” She shook her head, too, adding, “Nope. Nope. No.”
Thomas smiled. He couldn’t help himself and of course she bristled, thinking he was laughing at her, rather than commiserating with her.
Her blue eyes turned decidedly chilly, staring at him, unamused, from the stony face of this weird stranger she’d become over the past five years. She was strikingly beautiful, true, but the weirdness here was off-the-charts.
Gone was the messy little girl who’d been a rough-and-tumble tomboy even as she’d insisted on wearing Disney-princess pink.
Gone was the reckless teen who’d driven her aunt and uncle crazy with worry.
She’d transformed into this carefully put-together, heavily made-up, fashionably dressed young woman, with every hair in place.
Nah, that’s where shades of her former messiness still poked through. Her hair was still untamable, and as she shook her head at him, it flashed in the airfield’s high powered lights.
Thomas shook his head back at her—coupla idiots just standing there on the airstrip next to a very slick-looking private jet, No-ing each other emphatically, in total agreement.
That didn’t change the situation, not one iota.
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he voiced his nope in the form of an apology. “Mike and Dave are going wheels up, and Rio has... Something. With his family. So, yeah. It’s me. Sorry. Really.”
She was nodding now, her movements jerky as she shifted her carry-on-sized suitcase closer to her and adjusted the big, zippered bag she wore on one shoulder.
“Well, this day just keeps getting better,” she said. “Ted needed to leave early, to make a stop in Toronto for his mother for some obviously manipulative reason, and Jeff and Kayla went with him, so this flight is just me. And now... you.”
Oh, good.
Alone on a private jet with Tasha Francisco. For six hours.
Not that he’d been looking forward to sitting in the back of the plane while she spent the flight sipping champagne and laughing with her royal boyfriend’s royal arm around her soon-to-be-royal shoulders.
But now...? It would be just the two of them.
Although, wait. If the answer to the question was Yes, baby bump, then ix-nay on the ampagne-shay for the near future. Unless she’d changed even more than Thomas had imagined possible—and no, he did not believe that.
However, dressed as she was in those skinny jeans, if the answer was Yes, he was likely gonna get a strong confirmation as soon as she got onto the plane and took off her jacket.
Tasha shifted her shoulder bag in order to unzip it, and then nearly dove inside to search for...
A giant pair of headphones.
She snapped them down over her ears, and adjusted her phone to whatever playlist she’d made for this flight to the New England mountains to meet a queen, as a flight attendant—or wait, no, she was the captain—gestured toward the stairs, letting them know it was time to board.
Thomas reached for Tash’s bag, but she gave him her back as she picked it up herself, carrying it easily up the stairs.
So he just nodded to the captain as he followed Tasha into the plane, which was radically different from the military transports on which he and his SEAL team usually flew.
Comfortable leather seats that swiveled. A sofa. An open door leading back into a bedroom with a king-sized bed that had a white comforter very similar to the one he still had in his apartment. Shit.
Tasha sat down—jacket still on—in one of the leather chairs and locked it into position facing forward, turned away from a table and a second similar chair.
Thomas sat his ass down there, behind her, glancing over at the bit of the back of her head that he could see as the real flight attendant approached to store their luggage and offer drinks.
Thomas shook his head, but the young man brought a glass filled with red wine for Tasha, who smiled up at him as she took it, took a sip.
And that was his confirmation—baby bump no. And that filled him with more relief than made sense, considering.
She glanced over at Thomas then, and in that brief moment, she let down her guard, and she was back. His Tasha. The girl he’d met on a San Diego beach so many years ago.
The girl who’d grown up—or so she’d thought at the tender age of eighteen—and gotten drunk and planted herself in his bed on his birthday.
Their birthdays were within days of each other, so maybe it was more about her birthday than his...
But, what was it she’d said, just a few minutes ago...?
No. Nope. Nope. No.
Five years after his very adamant hell-no-this-is-not-happening, she was still mortified.
But probably also damn glad that at least one of them hadn’t thrown caution to the wind that night.
Also...? Yo, drunk girl. There’s this thing called consent and it goes both ways.
Thomas took a deep breath, exhaling it fully, mindfully. He willed himself to be present, here and now, instead of time-traveling in his head to that moment when he’d first woken up and realized he was no longer alone in his bed, when Tasha had pressed herself against him and kissed him, before he’d recognized this wasn’t just his crazy brain sending him an unsettling and inappropriate dream—that she was really and truly there with him, kissing him, her skin soft and sleek beneath his hands.
“What the hell...?!” He’d gone full falsetto as he’d all but launched out of his bed, slapping on the light to reveal...
Yup, that was Tasha, and shit, shit, shit, she was naked.
Thomas had quickly slapped the light off again, right before—bonus!—he tripped over the clothes she’d left in a pile on his bedroom floor.
Okay. All right.
Here and now, sitting on that aircraft, Thomas took another deep breath and released it slowly. Steadily. Although they only had six-ish hours on this plane—only, yeah, right—they were gonna spend an entire week sharing the same close-quarters oxygen when they reached their destination.
And this sure as shit wasn’t gonna work—this pretend-it-never-happened attitude that Tash was wearing like the least effective hazmat suit in the world.
There was another seat on this fancy-ass plane—next to Tash, near the window, and Thomas stood up and headed for it, forcing her to move her feet so he could get past her to sit within talking range.
The look on her face was comically WTF, as was the level of outrage in the glare she then gave him. She lifted the headphones from one ear with one hand as she hefted the wineglass in the other and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not pregnant. I am, however, a feminist and I refuse to be bullied. It’s not healthy to be as skinny as everyone in the world seems to need me to be.”