about That Messy Night. She was already shaking her head.
“No,” she said as the jet began slowly taxiing toward the runway. “We really don’t need to—”
“Yeah, well, I do,” he told her. “I need to apologize for—”
“Oh, my God,” she said. “You don’t need to apologize. Are you kidding? I’m the 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, stupidly me. Doing everything wrong. Starting with all those White Russians.”
“Was that what that was?” he asked. After waking him with that WTF-inducing kiss, the naked girl—and eighteen was just 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 her Get drunk, get naked, get into his bed thing 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 hell was that?
“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...?
Tasha laughed at the look on his face.
“I mean, they obviously knew you’d been drinking. There was no hiding that when I took you home,” he added. “But the details? Nah.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said. “But I think Uncle Alan might’ve guessed. I think you’re here on purpose—so that we’d have to talk.”
Thomas nodded. “Uncle Navy loves us both, pretty damn fiercely,” he said. “You more than me, of course.” He took a deep breath and said it, “And I do love you, Tash. I’ve absolutely loved you forever—you didn’t get that wrong. But you’re my little sister, you know?”
She nodded at that, too. “Sister. Right. I think, in my heart, I knew you’d sister me. That’s why I took the Surprise-I’m-naked! approach. To show you up-close and personal that I wasn’t really a blood relation.” She laughed ruefully. “And five White Russians agreed that that was a truly genius move.”
“Five White Russians always give shitty advice.”
“I’d apologize for putting so much distance between us for so long, but... I’m not really sorry about that. It took me years to get over you,” she told him. “I kinda needed the space. You know, to grow up and figure out who I was, if I wasn’t going to be part of Thomas and Tasha, like some creepy, pre-arranged child-bride thing.”