Thomas glanced at her, eyebrow raised in anticipation for the end of her sentence.
“Talk,” she said. She cleared her throat. “More.”
“As in hold a debrief or a Q&A or, I dunno, maybe even a follow-up debate?”
Tash laughed softly. “I’m feeling intense socially-trained pressure to apologize, but I’mnotsorry. About our awkwardly timed debate, I mean. Too many people just shut up and have sex despite all the noise in their heads and... That’s not me.” She made an impatient tsking noise. “Well, it’s not the me I want to be. The me that I can allow myself to be when I’m with you—because I trust you so completely.”
Damn, hearing her say that... The emotion he was feeling was overwhelming. He suddenly understood exactly what she’d meant when she’d said,My heart is...but then couldn’t finish. Because he’d never felt anything like this before either.
“I’m glad,” he murmured.
“Me, too,” she said. “So, no regrets?”
He shot her aSeriously?look and she smiled.
“You changed your mind really fast—about waiting. I wanted to make sure you didn’t have, I don’t know, whiplash...?”
“It’s not whiplash,” he told her, “because that shit hurts worse in the aftermath. This is more like... leaping backwards, blindfolded, into the ocean, off a really high cliff. You’re disoriented and it’s terrifying, and hitting the water is... shocking, to put it mildly. But just like that, you’re submerged, immersed, and it’s cool and peaceful and... You’re in it. Deep. And yeah, you gotta figure out which way is up so you can breathe, but once you get that handled, it feels so damn good.”
“Leaping,” she said, “is a generous word. I’m pretty sure I pushed you off that cliff.”
“Nah,” Thomas said. “If anything, you jumped first, shoutingFollow meeeeee!” He let his voice trail as if falling, and she smiled, but it was despite herself, and he could tell that she still didn’t quite believe him. “I left that cliff of my own volition, Tash,” he continued. “Deciding factor was thepants.” He gestured down to them. “A woman makes you pants like these, that’s a major statement. Turns out it’s a relationship goal I didn’t even know that I had.”
She was laughing now.
“Really, though,” he said. “I don’t lie to you, remember?”
Tasha nodded, her heart right there, in her eyes, for him to see. Funny how that no longer scared the hell out of him. “If you want,” she told him, “we can go faster.”
Thomas nodded. “You set the speed.”
She moved out in front of him, candle held high. “Follow meeeeee!”
Thomas laughed. “Always and forever,” he said, and picked up his pace.
* * *
The prince had left his car exactly where Dave had guessed he would. It was the smartest place to stop on the little back road, to hike up the mountain to the ski lodge. It wasn’t the closest as birds could fly, but it avoided several impassably deep ravines and unscalable cliffs.
It was next to the ski lodge’s perimeter fence, too—a chain link structure they could see from the road, clearly marked with bothDo Not EnterandPrivate Propertysigns.
“Looks like Prince Ted’s not a total idiot,” Rio said.
His Royal Hiney had even maneuvered his vehicle into a getaway position—heading back down the mountain—as if he’d realized that after finding Tasha they’d need to make a quick escape.
Dave had gotten out of their SUV before Rio’d even fully hit the brakes, and he now reported, “Engine’s not icy cold,” his hand on the little car’s hood.
Rio popped the hatch, giving Dave access to the weapons locker that was right there in the back. “Grab and go,” he told the younger SEAL as he prepared to wrestle the SUV into a similar heading-down-the-mountain parking job. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“I’ve got the good map,” Dave answered as he included ammo and a heavier winter jacket in his grab.
“Don’t kill him,” Rio reminded him, but Dave was already over the fence and gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was cold and getting colder.
The afternoon sun was low in the sky and going down fast. In Boston, at this time of year, the sun set shortly after four o’clock. Here in this part of Maine, any extra minutes of daylight’s relative warmth that they gained by being slightly farther west was lost by being significantly farther north.
