“Not me,” Thomas said.
“Well, good,” she said. “I’m average weight for my height. Fuck them. And you know what? Even if I wasn’t, fuck them twice.”
He felt himself blink at her f-bomb deployment, and then he had to laugh because, yeah, her sentiment was true. Fuck them three times. “I didn’t come over here because...” He started again. “I’m aware of the rumors—”
“Of course you are,” she interrupted him. “I didn’t expect anything less.”
“That’s not why I came over here,” he told her, and now the look in her eyes was closer to horror as he said the words she didn’t want him to utter: “We gotta talk about, you know...”
It was clear that Tasha knew Thomas was talking about That Messy Night. She was already shaking her head.
“No,” she said as the jet began slowly taxiing toward the runway. “We really don’t need to—”
“Yeah, well, I do,” he told her. “I need to apologize for—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You don’t need to apologize. Are you kidding? I’m the one who needs to—”
“I did not handle that well,” he confessed. “It was not my finest hour.”
Tasha took off her headphones then and turned toward him earnestly. “You did nothing wrong,” she said. “Oh, my God, Thomas, that was completely, totally, stupidly me. Doing everything wrong. Starting with all those White Russians.”
“Was that what that was?” he asked. After waking him with that WTF-inducing kiss, the naked girl—and eighteen was just a girl to an almost-thirty-year-old man—had bolted from his bed and into his bathroom, where she’d proceeded to stick her head into his toilet and vomit for several of the least pleasant hours of his life.
No doubt the experience had sucked for her, too, but she probably didn’t remember it quite as crystal-clearly as he did.
Before that night, Thomas didn’t own a bathrobe. He’d remedied that on his next day off, going to Target and getting one in white terrycloth that he still kept hanging on the back of his bathroom door. He’d gone into high alert, in case she rinsed and repeated—in the event that her Get drunk, get naked, get into his bed thing was gonna turn into an unhappy pattern.
But then he’d gone wheels-up, which was enormously helpful, considering how much more difficult it was for Tasha to climb into his bed unannounced while he was in the sandbox with his SEAL Team.
Of course, because he’d been gone for so long, it also made it impossible for him to sit down with Tash, like he was doing right now, and say, What the hell was that?
“I lost count after five,” Tasha admitted now—still talking about the drinks she’d had on the night, five years ago, in which she’d spent several hours naked beneath a blanket on his bathroom floor. And yeah, it had been a workout keeping her covered. Modesty was not her priority at the time.
She continued: “And I know that’s no excuse. It wouldn’t be if I were a man, so it shouldn’t be, but I just thought you were... I assumed...” Tash cleared her throat. “That you were gallantly waiting for me to turn eighteen, and...” She forced herself to look him in the eye, and he forced himself to hold her direct gaze. “That’s the way the romance novel always plays out, right? I finally grow up; you admit that you’ve loved me forever, we have crazy-great sex, and then we live happily ever after.”
“No one has crazy-great sex after five White Russians,” Thomas pointed out. Making a joke was his only real option here.
And she smiled despite her embarrassment. “Yeah, that was another thing I learned that night. God, I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry, too, for avoiding you for the past four years.”
“Five,” he corrected her. “I’ve kinda been avoiding you, too.”
“Did you... tell Uncle Alan and Mia?” she asked.
“Jesus, no,” he said, aghast. Did she honestly think...?
Tasha laughed at the look on his face.
“I mean, they obviously knew you’d been drinking. There was no hiding that when I took you home,” he added. “But the details? Nah.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “But I think Uncle Alan might’ve guessed. I think you’re here on purpose—so that we’d have to talk.”
Thomas nodded. “Uncle Navy loves us both, pretty damn fiercely,” he said. “You more than me, of course.” He took a deep breath and said it, “And I do love you, Tash. I’ve absolutely loved you forever—you didn’t get that wrong. But you’re my little sister, you know?”
She nodded at that, too. “Sister. Right. I think, in my heart, I knew you’d sister me. That’s why I took the Surprise-I’m-naked! approach. To show you up-close and personal that I wasn’t really a blood relation.” She laughed ruefully. “And five White Russians agreed that that was a truly genius move.”
“Five White Russians always give shitty advice.”
“I’d apologize for putting so much distance between us for so long, but... I’m not really sorry about that. It took me years to get over you,” she told him. “I kinda needed the space. You know, to grow up and figure out who I was, if I wasn’t going to be part of Thomas and Tasha, like some creepy, pre-arranged child-bride thing.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “That is kinda creepy. Grown man waiting on a child to turn eighteen, like it’s some kinda magic finish line?”
“Right?” she said, glancing up with a smile as the flight attendant materialized beside them to take her wine glass and inform them that take-off was imminent.
So who are you now? Thomas was just about to ask, when she added, “I still don’t fly happily. I’m gonna...” She put her headphones back on and started up her music, her knuckles going white from gripping her chair’s armrests as the jet thundered down the runway.
Thomas didn’t think twice. He just reached over and took her hand in his and let her hold on tight.
Tasha mentally kicked herself. Again.
It took me years to get over you.
She’d actually said those words to this man, and even as they’d left her mouth, she knew that she was screwed.
It had taken her years to get over Thomas King. And all it took was one conversation—this conversation, where he spoke to her so sincerely from his enormously generous heart—for all of her feelings for him to come screaming back to life.
It didn’t help that he looked so damn good. Instead of his winter blue uniform, he was wearing civilian clothes—a nicely tailored dark suit with a crisp white shirt and a royal blue tie, overcoat on his arm.
Over the years, he’d cut his hair shorter and shorter and somewhere down the line, he’d decided it was easier to just shave his head. It was a striking look—it somehow seemed to make him look both taller and more commanding.
His face had always, for her, been the definition of handsome, with his rich ochre skin and his gorgeous midnight brown eyes surrounded by thick lashes. When Tasha had first met Thomas, she was convinced that he was the most beautiful boy she’d ever seen. So it made sense that, all these years later, she’d still find him to be the most beautiful man in the world.