clinging, reaching for a towel just after she’d pulled herself out of some indoor swimming pool, probably in her high-end apartment’s fitness center.
Thomas hadn’t seen anything more than a very healthy young woman, but the rumors persisted. And even though the links that screamed TEDRIC BABY BUMP PROOF! landed him—squinting through his eyelashes, just in case—on a bunch of shitty photos of Tasha wrapped in a giant and completely body-obscuring, cold-weather appropriate winter coat, the rumors didn’t appear to be dying down any time soon.
Mostly because the prince and his girlfriend didn’t deny it.
It was then that Thomas had stumbled upon the video of that steamy kiss.
He scrolled back a few dozen frames and froze on Tasha who was, indeed, looking dead into the camera’s lens.
The girl he knew—or thought he knew—would’ve hated that kind of attention, but here she was, definitely playing to the camera.
Of course, five years was a long time, and as people grew from child to adult, they often changed.
As for Queen Wila’s reaction to said baby bump...? A terse, “You’ll have to ask my son—or his little red-haired friend.”
Ouch.
So. This week was going to be even more stressful for Tasha than he’d imagined. And Uncle Navy—who always did his homework, too—damn well knew it. No wonder he wanted Thomas’s presence to be large.
Thomas shut his laptop and went to finish packing for the coming red-eye flight, and the suck-fest of a week that was sure to follow.
Chapter Three
Saturday Night
Tasha’s eyes widened when she turned and saw him come out of the gate and onto the airfield. Instead of a more conventional greeting like Hey or ’Sup, she went with, “No.” She shook her head, too, adding, “Nope. Nope. No.”
Thomas smiled. He couldn’t help himself and of course she bristled, thinking he was laughing at her, rather than commiserating with her.
Her blue eyes turned decidedly chilly, staring at him, unamused, from the stony face of this weird stranger she’d become over the past five years. She was strikingly beautiful, true, but the weirdness here was off-the-charts.
Gone was the messy little girl who’d been a rough-and-tumble tomboy even as she’d insisted on wearing Disney-princess pink.
Gone was the reckless teen who’d driven her aunt and uncle crazy with worry.
She’d transformed into this carefully put-together, heavily made-up, fashionably dressed young woman, with every hair in place.
Nah, that’s where shades of her former messiness still poked through. Her hair was still untamable, and as she shook her head at him, it flashed in the airfield’s high powered lights.
Thomas shook his head back at her—coupla idiots just standing there on the airstrip next to a very slick-looking private jet, No-ing each other emphatically, in total agreement.
That didn’t change the situation, not one iota.
“Yeah, no, sorry,” he voiced his nope in the form of an apology. “Mike and Dave are going wheels up, and Rio has... Something. With his family. So, yeah. It’s me. Sorry. Really.”
She was nodding now, her movements jerky as she shifted her carry-on-sized suitcase closer to her and adjusted the big, zippered bag she wore on one shoulder.
“Well, this day just keeps getting better,” she said. “Ted needed to leave early, to make a stop in Toronto for his mother for some obviously manipulative reason, and Jeff and Kayla went with him, so this flight is just me. And now... you.”
Oh, good.
Alone on a private jet with Tasha Francisco. For six hours.
Not that he’d been looking forward to sitting in the back of the plane while she spent the flight sipping champagne and laughing with her royal boyfriend’s royal arm around her soon-to-be-royal shoulders.
But now...? It would be just the two of them.
Although, wait. If the answer to the question was Yes, baby bump, then ix-nay on the ampagne-shay for the near future. Unless she’d changed even more than Thomas had imagined possible—and no, he did not believe that.
However, dressed as she was in those skinny jeans, if the answer was Yes, he was likely gonna get a strong confirmation as soon as she got onto the plane and took off her jacket.
Tasha shifted her shoulder bag in order to unzip it, and then nearly dove inside to search for...
A giant pair of headphones.
She snapped them down over her ears, and adjusted her phone to whatever playlist she’d made for this flight to the New England mountains to meet a queen, as a flight attendant—or wait, no, she was the captain—gestured toward the stairs, letting them know it was time to board.