Red hair...?
Thomas stood up, because holy shit, his eyes plus the waning light hadn’t played a trick on him. That was, absolutely, Tasha behind the SUV’s steering wheel.
He stepped—just a little—into the road, arms up and out, trying to make himself the largest, most visible target possible.
He knew when she saw him, because she hit the brakes. Hard. The SUV’s tires grabbed the road as she skidded past him to a stop, leaving long streaks of rubber behind her.
She immediately scrambled out and ran toward him as she called his name. “Thomas! Oh my God! Are you okay?”
“How the hell did you—” He was already running toward her, too, meeting her halfway in an awkward embrace because, shit, he was bloody. And, oh yeah, he was naked. Also, she wasn’t exactly leaping into his arms to be rescued. No, despite the handcuffs on her wrists—some fool had cuffed her hands in front of her, thank God, or she wouldn’t’ve been able to drive—she clearly thought she was rescuing him. She tried to support his weight by pulling his arm across her shoulders as she led him toward the passenger seat of her car.
She didn’t let him finish his question, either. “Get in! Quick! They’re behind us.”
“I got this,” he said as he reached to open the SUV’s door, and she ran around the vehicle and pulled herself behind the wheel. “Go, but no one’s behind you.”
“They must be.” She gunned the engine and accelerated back onto the road, still heading up the mountain as he tried to make sense of this. “I didn’t exactly make a stealth getaway.”
The clock on the dash read 1:47 PM. So he hadn’t been out for that long—and they were still about an hour from when they should’ve arrived at the resort. It was only after they failed to show up that they’d officially be missing and an alarm would go out.
Tasha glanced at him and reached to crank the heat. “God, you must be freezing. My sweatshirt’s still in the back. How bad is it?”
He turned to look, and saw that her entire suitcase was still back there—open, with the contents spilling out.Hisbag, however, was gone, and with it his medical kit. Damnit. As a hospital corpsman, he felt almost as adrift without his medical kit as he did as a SEAL without a weapon.
Tasha’s sweatshirt, though, was a hoodie. It was huge and warm-looking. It was pink, of course, bearing the words “Impolite Arrogant Woman.” He grabbed one of her T-shirts—it was soft and gray and saidNope—to dry himself off as best as he could after putting that sweatshirt on his lap. Not that being naked in front of Tasha Francisco was even close to being the worst of his problems right now.
“Do you have your phone?” he asked.
“They took it,” she informed him as she took the next series of tight curves like a professional race car driver. He would’ve expected no less from her. “Along with my laptop. And all your things.”
“I don’t suppose you have an extra pair of jeans in here, in my size?”
“Best I can do is pajama pants with a drawstring belt,” she answered. “They’re red. Plaid.”
Of course they were. Thomas found them easily. They were flannel, but they were thin. Still, anything was better than sitting here bare-assed. Assuming he could get them up his XL legs.
“I stole them from Ted,” she told him as if reading his mind. “And he’s tall and jacked, too, so they should fit. There’s also a pair of slipper socks in there. They’re pink. And fuzzy. Your feet must be freezing. And God, your head... Thomas, you’re still bleeding.”
Shit, yeah, he still was. The tee he’d been using as a towel was ruined. He used it to dry off his feet. “Sorry. I’ll try my best not to get any blood on your sweatshirt, but—”
“I don’t care about my sweatshirt,” she told him hotly. “I care about your head. Where they hit you. How bad is it? Do we need to find a hospital?”
She was serious—like it was merely a matter of making the choice to stop and get medical aid.Nah, Princess, let’s stop at the next Starbucks, instead. It’s nothin’ a good latte won’t fix...But he didn’t say that, because it suddenly occurred to him...
“Areyouokay?” he asked, even as he reached up, wincing as he touched the place on his head where he’d been hit. There was a lump, and it was definitely sore and bruised, but as far as he could tell the brunt of the bleeding was from a relatively superficial scrape. “They hurt you?”
Tasha shook her head.
“You lying?” he asked as he pulled on the red plaid pants, tying the drawstring around his waist, then finally getting the hoodie up and over his head. “Cause I’d like you to put a little voice to thatno.”
“No,” she said, not just giving him that, but putting her words into a full sentence, too. “They did not hurt me. Nor did they tell me what they wanted or why they... you know...”
“How exactly did you get away?” he asked, because this was still not making any sense to him. He found her slippers—neon and hard to miss, fuzzy was an understatement—and pulled them on, too. They were vaguely reminiscent of tube socks, with no real heel, so one size truly did fit all.
“I pretended I was helpless,” she told him. “And they believed it. They left me in the car—in the back. They also left the keys in the ignition, so...”
Damn, that did not make sense. Go to all that trouble to grab Tasha—a roadblock, all those men, all those weapons—and then just leave her in the car, with the keys right there, no less...?
Unless...
