Natasha Francisco.
Rio had, along with Thomas and Mike, his besties from BUD/S training, watched Tasha grow from a tomboyish pre-teen—although Thomas had known her for far longer—into a strikingly beautiful young woman.
She’d gone from being stocky and strong to curvaceous, yet still capable of kicking ass. She’d full-on skipped the waif phase that too many girls went through when they looked at the too-skinny actresses and models on their TVs and realized Hey, I don’t look like that, and started ordering salads in stead of the burgers and fries they really wanted to eat.
Rio had always really liked that about Tasha—her refusal to pretend she wasn’t hungry when she clearly was.
True, she wasn’t perfect. When she was younger, she’d been drawn to drama. About five or six years ago, there was one mysterious incident that had left Thomas badly scarred, but the man hadn’t even dropped a hint about what had happened. He’d just actively started avoiding the girl.
Who wasn’t a girl anymore.
She was engaged to a freaking prince—assuming Rio and Dave could find the son-of-a-queen before he got his royal ass killed.
Although maybe that wouldn’t be too tragic. Because even though back in the day Rio had teased Thomas mercilessly about having a fourteen-year-old girlfriend, he and Mike had always privately believed that when Tash finally grew up, she and Thomas would connect. Before their rift, they’d always been so freaking perfect together—finishing each others’ sentences the way they always did, laughing at private jokes, and communicating silently through shared looks and smiles. Best friends who turned around one day when they both were ready and, bam, just fell in love, forever.
Except, forever was harder than it looked.
Case in point: Dave and Air-Biscuit Jon. They’d started out as friends, too. Dave had told Rio that he thought that Jon cheated because he was scared of the intensity of his feelings. How flipping stupid was that? Although, okay, yeah, Rio was not unfamiliar with self-sabotage, so maybe he should lighten up the grim condemnation.
Still. Air-Biscuit Jon was a grade A hemorrhoid of epic proportions, and Rio couldn’t wait to introduce Dave to Luc.
He shut off the water and toweled dry, moving as quickly as he could, now that he’d successfully destunk himself after getting dumpster-slimed. In any other situation, he would’ve ignored the godawful stench, but he and Dave were heading up into the mountains where intel reported some dozens of hostiles were roaming around.
What’s that stench?
I dunno, Klem, maybe Kody farted again.
Nah, Kurtis, this is like Kody’s farts meets toxic waste meets rotting elephant. And it’s coming from right... over... here!
Last thing they needed was to attempt to hide and be discovered by some KKK-loving amateur commando-wanna-be, simply because dude didn’t smoke and had an accurate sense of smell.
Of course, now Rio smelled like soap and shampoo—but that would wear off fast as soon as they left the SUV and started hiking up the mountain.
Damn, he was not looking forward to that.
Although as shitty as that was going to be—the shitty icing on the shitty cake of the past few ultra shitty days—Rio knew it wasn’t going to be half as bad as whatever Thomas and Tasha were enduring right now.
If they were even alive.
Dave wasn’t here to say it. It was Rio’s own brain that was responsible for tossing out that pessimistic bullshit, so he gave himself a mental smack on the head.
Thomas King was smart enough and strong enough and yeah, lucky enough to stay alive. And if he was alive, then Tasha was, too.
And that was the goddamn truth.
Thomas had managed to silence Tasha, twice in the course of just a few minutes time.
Of course the first had been when he’d kissed her. She’d stopped talking, although she had made soft, dizzying sounds of pleasure as she’d clung to him and kissed him back.
The fact that this was real—his kissing her, Tash kissing him back—made his brain stutter and damn near short out. Mostly in ongoing shock that something he’d believed was impossible—to the degree of never letting himself consider it—could become, in a flash, something he wanted, no, needed so badly.
Except this was real. He could have this life he’d never dared imagine before.
But only if he could keep them both alive.
“Escape hatch...?” Tasha said now, finally finding her voice.
She’d been the first to get her brain working again, all of the times he’d kissed her, too. He would’ve been standing there, kissing her still, if she hadn’t pulled away and reminded him they had work to do.
Good thing one of them was taking on the role of responsible adult.
She was looking at him now in a mix of surprise, disbelief, concern for his sanity, and outrage—no doubt because he hadn’t told her about his search for an escape hatch before this.
“Escape hatch,” she said again.
“There’s gotta be one.” As he bagged up the chemicals he’d found under the sink, he explained. “This shelter was built in the early 1960s, Bay of Pigs era, right? And yeah, some of the smaller shelters of that time period didn’t have a back door, but something of this size, at this depth? Built by someone as wealthy as Uncle Prince Tedric’s King Daddy...? There might even be two alternative exits. Nothing fancy like the concrete stairs at the main entrance—I’m thinking it’d be more of a tube, a pipe. Probably large enough in circumference so that we won’t have to crawl through it—more of a walk-in-a-crouch type size. But considering our depth, and assuming it would be designed to be accessible for royalty of a variety of physical conditionings, I doubt it would have more than a moderate slope—” he angled his arm to demonstrate the mildness of the imagined pipe’s incline “—which means it’d have to be fairly long.”
Tasha had finished transferring the peanuts from jars to baggies, and was now storing them in the daypack he’d grabbed from the utility room. But her eyes lit up as she literally did that math. “And that means the escape hatch’s door to the surface is going to be far away from the pod’s main door.”
Where the hostiles were hunkered down, waiting for them to emerge.
“In theory, yeah.” Thomas nodded. With luck and stealth, he and Tasha would be able to sneak out without being detected.
“Which means they won’t know we’ve left, so they won’t follow us,” Tasha concluded. “Which is great. We’re not trapped anymore. But after we’re out of here...”
“Then what?” He finished for her, seeing her pensive concern and raising it an acknowledged grim reality as he gestured for her to follow him out of the kitchen, toward the utility room. “It’ll take us days to hike down to the airfield where we flew in, but we don’t want to go there, since someone—helo maintenance crew or car rental agency—is absolutely working with the team who’s hunting us. But okay, there’s a town nearby. If we bypass the airfield and find a warm place to hide—someone’s basement, maybe? Then we find a phone.” Assuming landlines weren’t down.
Assuming they could survive the days and nights it would take to descend the mountain.
The temperature had dropped considerably since they’d spent their first night together in that hide he’d built. It was no longer in the balmy fifties. And although they now had access to blankets to layer for warmth, the fleece was bulky and would make it harder for them to move undetected through the mountainous terrain.