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.
Andthissure 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. Iam,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.”
“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 aboutThat Messy Night. She was already shaking her head.
“No,” she said as the jet began slowly taxiing toward the runway. “We reallydon’tneed to—”
“Yeah, well,Ido,” he told her. “I need toapologizefor—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Youdon’t need to apologize. Are you kidding?I’mthe 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,stupidlyme. Doingeverythingwrong. Starting with all those White Russians.”
“Wasthatwhat that was?” he asked. After waking him with that WTF-inducing kiss, the naked girl—and eighteenwasjust 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 herGet drunk, get naked, get into his bedthing 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 hellwasthat?
“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...?
