“Nah, the FBI team leader got us food,” he told her.
“That’s good. That second dish was supposed to be for you, but... I ate it.” She made an apologetic face. “I’m sorry. I was still so hungry and... You were gone a long time.”
That second steak had been for him? Okay, now he was feeling a little less weird. Or was he? She’d gotten him a fancy dinner, assuming, what? That he’d come up here and sit and eat it with her at the prince’s bedside? Or was he supposed to take it and go? God, he wanted to go, he wanted to get out of here, but he also, absolutely, didn’t want to leave without Tasha.
Unless she wanted him to go without her.
“The debrief took a while,” he told her, talking over the crazy in his head. “It was pretty thorough. We had both Uncle Navy and Queen Mom on conference call.”
Her eyes lit up at that. “So, thorough and noisy. I spoke to Alan again on the phone, just briefly. He’s pissed that they just left us there.”
“Yeah,” Thomas agreed. Pissed was putting it mildly. The admiral’s head had been on the verge of exploding.
“He told me casualties in LA and Tampa were much lower than they’d feared—thank God,” she continued. “Oh! And that Mia spoke to Christine. Everyone’s safe.”
Thomas nodded. Mia and his sister Christine were still close friends even after all these years, and he’d been glad to get that news. “Uncle Navy told me that, too.”
Tasha was still clinging tightly to herself. “I wish I’d been there to hear him skewer the queen.”
“He’s an admiral,” Thomas reminded her. “He didn’t come close to skewering anyone.”
“No, I know,” she said. “But he’s gotten really good at scathing subtext. That had to be entertaining.”
“I’m not sure I’d use that word,” Thomas said.
“Anything you can share?” she asked, adding, “From the debrief. Oh, and just for the record, in my defense, Andrea volunteered to go out for another. Filet mignon,” she added. “For you. So I could eat yours.”
“Andrea?” he asked. He hadn’t met an Andrea when they first arrived at the hospital.
“The queen’s assistant.”
“The queen’s assistant.” Thomas suddenly seemed to be unable to do anything but repeat Tasha’s words. “She sent her assistant?”
“Her top aide, yes.”
Apparently, the queen finally appreciated just how important Tasha was to the prince.
“So what’d you find out?” she asked eagerly. “Who were those men in the woods?” She stopped herself. “Wait, you probably want to shower and change. You’re standing there, holding your real clothes.”
“Nah,” Thomas said. “It’s okay. It’s not really that complicated a story. I mean, it’s absolutely as stupid as you can imagine—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “Were we right?” She glanced toward the open door, and lowered her voice to nearly inaudible. “It was Hendrake?”
Queen Wila’s Shakespearian-named uncle. “Yeah,” Thomas told her. “The story’s already going public. So you don’t have to...”
“Okay, good,” she said. “Wow. Hendrake.”
“His original target was you,” Thomas said, and the surprise on her face turned to shocked disbelief. “And yeah, he was definitely trying to pin it on a terrorist group—the car bomb. It was set to go off after they let you get away, when the SUV stopped. But the team of geniuses who came up with the plan didn’t bank on you traveling with your own bodyguard, so the kidnapping team didn’t know what to do with me. Apparently, they didn’t want to shoot me and add a gunshot victim to what was supposed to be a simple terrorist bombing.
“Luckily for me, disposing of my body was also outside of their pay grade,” he continued. “They figured if they knocked me out and stripped me, I’d die from exposure. They seemed to think that a dead naked Black guy found frozen to death in the mountains near where you died would add to the mystery. That I’d be considered more suspect than victim—you know, maybe I lost my shit and killed you...?”
“As if Uncle Alan would’ve ever believed that,” she whispered.
Thomas nodded. “Yeah.”
“They also didn’t know how ridiculously hard you are to kill,” she said. “Or how hard I’d be to kill because you were with me.” She shook her head, still overwhelmed and a little confused. “But... why me? Why would Hendrake...?” She couldn’t even finish the sentence.
“Baby bump,” Thomas told her, and even though her mouth dropped open, she immediately understood.
She made a sound that was half outrage, half laughter. “Hendrake thought I was pregnant, so he was trying