gave him her back as she picked it up herself, carrying it easily up the stairs.
So he just nodded to the captain as he followed Tasha into the plane, which was radically different from the military transports on which he and his SEAL team usually flew.
Comfortable leather seats that swiveled. A sofa. An open door leading back into a bedroom with a king-sized bed that had a white comforter very similar to the one he still had in his apartment. Shit.
Tasha sat down—jacket still on—in one of the leather chairs and locked it into position facing forward, turned away from a table and a second similar chair.
Thomas sat his ass down there, behind her, glancing over at the bit of the back of her head that he could see as the real flight attendant approached to store their luggage and offer drinks.
Thomas shook his head, but the young man brought a glass filled with red wine for Tasha, who smiled up at him as she took it, took a sip.
And that was his confirmation—baby bump no. And that filled him with more relief than made sense, considering.
She glanced over at Thomas then, and in that brief moment, she let down her guard, and she was back. His Tasha. The girl he’d met on a San Diego beach so many years ago.
The girl who’d grown up—or so she’d thought at the tender age of eighteen—and gotten drunk and planted herself in his bed on his birthday.
Their birthdays were within days of each other, so maybe it was more about her birthday than his...
But, what was it she’d said, just a few minutes ago...?
No. Nope. Nope. No.
Five years after his very adamant hell-no-this-is-not-happening, she was still mortified.
But probably also damn glad that at least one of them hadn’t thrown caution to the wind that night.
Also...? Yo, drunk girl. There’s this thing called consent and it goes both ways.
Thomas took a deep breath, exhaling it fully, mindfully. He willed himself to be present, here and now, instead of time-traveling in his head to that moment when he’d first woken up and realized he was no longer alone in his bed, when Tasha had pressed herself against him and kissed him, before he’d recognized this wasn’t just his crazy brain sending him an unsettling and inappropriate dream—that she was really and truly there with him, kissing him, her skin soft and sleek beneath his hands.
“What the hell...?!” He’d gone full falsetto as he’d all but launched out of his bed, slapping on the light to reveal...
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.
And this sure 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. I am, 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...”