“Nice to see you, too, Steve,” Frisco said, wearily running his hand through his hair, pushing it off his face. He could feel Mia watching him, watching the Navy captain.
“What were you thinking?”
“Allow me to introduce Mia Summerton,” Frisco said. “Mia, I know you’re going to be disappointed, but as much as Steve looks like it, he isn’t the White Power Ranger. He’s really only just a Navy doctor. His name’s Horowitz. He answers to Captain, Doctor, Steve and sometimes even God.”
Steven Horowitz was several years older than Frisco, but he had an earnestness about him that made him seem quite a bit younger. Frisco watched him do a double take as he looked at Mia, with her long, dark hair, her beautiful face, her pretty flowered sundress that revealed her smooth, tanned shoulders and her slender, graceful arms. He watched Steve look back at his own bloody T-shirt and battered face. He knew what the doctor was thinking—what was she doing with him?
Nothing. She was doing nothing. She’d made that more than clear.
Horowitz turned back to Frisco. “I looked at the X-rays—I think you may have been lucky, but I won’t be able to know for certain until the swelling goes down.” He pulled a chair over, and looked at the former SEAL’s knee, probing it lightly with gentle fingers.
Frisco felt himself start to sweat. From the corner of his eye, he saw Mia lean forward, as if she were going to reach for his hand. But he closed his eyes, refusing to look at her, refusing to need her.
She took his hand anyway, holding it tightly until Steve was through. By then, Frisco was drenched with sweat again, and he knew his face must’ve looked gray or maybe even green. He let go of her hand abruptly, suddenly aware that he was damn near mashing her fingers.
“All right,” Steve finally said with a sigh. “Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go home, and I want you to stay off your feet for the next two weeks.” He took his prescription pad from his leather bag. “I’ll give you something to make you sleep—”
“And I won’t take it,” Frisco said. “I have a…situation to deal with.”
“What kind of situation?”
Frisco shook his head. “It’s a family matter. My sister’s in some kind of trouble. All you need to know is that I’m not taking anything that’s going to make me sleep. I won’t object to a local painkiller, though.”
Steven Horowitz laughed in disgust. “If I give you that, your knee won’t hurt. And if your knee doesn’t hurt, you’re going to be up running laps, doing God knows what kind of damage. No. No way.”
Frisco leaned forward, lowering his voice, wishing Mia weren’t listening, hating himself for having to admit his weaknesses. “Steve, you know I wouldn’t ask for it if I weren’t in serious pain. I need it, man. I can’t risk taking the stuff that will knock me out.”
The doctor’s eyes were a flat, pale blue, but for a brief moment, Frisco saw a flare of warmth and compassion behind the customary chill. Steve shook his head. “I’m going to regret doing this. I know I’m going to regret doing this.” He scribbled something on his pad. “I’m going to give you something to bring down the swelling, too. Go easy with it.” He glared at Frisco. “In return, you have to promise me you won’t get out of this wheelchair for two weeks.”
Frisco shook his head. “I can’t promise that,” he said. “In fact, I’d rather die than stay in this chair for a minute longer than I have to.”
Dr. Horowitz turned to Mia. “His knee has already been permanently damaged. It’s something of a miracle that he can even walk at all. There’s nothing he can do to make his knee any better, but he could make things worse. Will you please try to make him understand—”
“We’re just friends,” she interrupted. “I can’t make him do anything.”
“Crutches,” Frisco said. “I’ll use crutches, but no chair, all right?”
He didn’t look at Mia. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the way her eyes had looked filled with tears, and the way that had made him feel. She was wrong. She was dead wrong. She didn’t know it, but she had the power to damn well make him do anything.
Maybe even fall in love with her.
MIA PULLED THE car up near the emergency room entrance. She could see Frisco through the windows of the brightly lit lobby, talking to the doctor. The doctor handed Frisco a bag, and then the two men shook hands. The doctor vanished quickly down the hallway, while Frisco moved slowly on his crutches toward the automatic door.
It slid open with a whoosh, and then he was outside, looking around.
Mia opened the car door and stood up. “Over here.” She saw his surprise. This wasn’t her car. This thing was about twice the size of her little subcompact—he wouldn’t have any trouble fitting inside it. “I traded cars with a friend for a few days,” she explained.
He didn’t say a word. He just put the bag the doctor had given him into the middle of the wide bench seat and slid his crutches into the back. He climbed in carefully, lowering himself down and using both hands to lift his injured leg into the car.
She got in next to him, started the powerful engine and pulled out of the driveway. She glanced at Frisco. “How’s your knee doing?”
“Fine,” he said tersely.
“Do you really think Dwayne’s going to come back?”
“Yep.”
Mia waited for him to elucidate, but he didn’t continue. He obviously wasn’t in a talkative mood. Not that he ever was, of course. But somehow the fairly easygoing candidness of their previous few conversations had vanished.
She knew his knee was anything but fine. She knew it hurt him badly—and that the fact that he’d been unable to defeat his attacker hurt him even more.
She knew that his injured knee and his inability to walk without a cane made him feel like less of a man. It was idiotic. A man was made up of so much more than a pair of strong legs and an athletic body.
It was idiotic, but she understood. Suddenly she understood that the list she’d seen on Frisco’s refrigerator of all the things he couldn’t do wasn’t simply pessimistic whining, as she’d first thought. It was a recipe. It was specific directions for a magical spell that would make Frisco a man again.
Jump, run, skydive, swim, stretch, bend, extend…
Until he could do all those things and more, he wasn’t going to feel like a man.
Until he could do all those things again… But he wasn’t going to. That Navy doctor had said he wasn’t going to get any better. This was it. Frisco had come as far as he could—and the fact that he could walk at all was something of a miracle at that.
Mia pulled the car into the condominium parking lot and parked. Frisco didn’t wait for her to help him out of the car. Of course not. Real men didn’t need help.
Her heart ached for him as she watched him pull out his crutches from the backseat. He grimly positioned them under his arms, and carrying the bag that the doctor had given him, swung toward the courtyard.
She followed more slowly.
Jump, run, skydive, swim, stretch, bend, extend…
It wasn’t going to happen. Dr. Horowitz knew it. Mia knew it. And she suspected that deep inside, Frisco knew it, too.
She followed him into the courtyard and could barely stand to watch as he pulled himself painfully up the stairs.
He was wrong. He was wrong about it all. Moving onto the ground floor wouldn’t make him less of a man. Admitting that he had physical limitations—that there were things he could no longer do—that wouldn’t make him less of a man, either.
But relentlessly questing after the impossible, making goals that were unattainable, setting himself up only for failure—that would wear him down and burn him out. It would take away the last of his warmth and spark, leaving him bitter and angry and cold and incomplete. Leaving him less of a man.
CHAPTER TEN
FRISCO SAT IN the living room, cleaning his handgun.
When Sharon’s charming ex-boyfriend Dwayne had pulled out his knife this afternoon, Frisc
o had felt, for the first time in a while, the noticeable lack of a sidearm.
Of course, carrying a weapon meant concealing that weapon. Although he was fully licensed to carry whatever he damn well pleased, he couldn’t exactly wear a weapon in a belt holster, like a cop or an old West gunslinger. And wearing a shoulder holster meant he’d have to wear a jacket over it, at least out in public. And—it was a chain reaction—if he wore a jacket, he’d have to wear long pants. Even he couldn’t wear a jacket with shorts.
Of course, he could always do what Blue McCoy did. Blue was the Alpha Squad’s XO—Executive Officer and second in command of the SEAL unit. Blue rarely wore anything other than cutoffs and an old worn-out, loose olive-drab fatigue shirt with the sleeves removed. And he always wore one of the weapons he carried in a shoulder holster underneath his shirt, the smooth leather directly against his skin.
Frisco’s knee twinged, and he glanced at the clock. It was nearly 0300. Three o’clock in the morning.
Steve Horowitz had given him a number of little vials filled with a potent local pain reliever similar to novocaine. It wasn’t yet time for another injection, but it was getting close. Frisco had given himself an injection at close to nine o’clock, after Mia had driven him home from the hospital.
Mia…
Frisco shook his head, determined to think about anything but Mia, separated from him by only a few thin walls, her hair spread across her pillow, wearing only a tantalizingly thin cotton nightgown. Her beautiful soft lips parted slightly in sleep….
Yeah, he was a master at self-torture. He’d been sitting here, awake for hours, spending most of his time remembering—hell, reliving—the way Mia had kissed him at the beach. Dear, sweet God, what a kiss that had been.
It wasn’t likely he was going to get a chance to kiss her like that again. She’d made it clear that she wouldn’t welcome a repeat performance. If he knew what was best, he’d stay far, far away from Mia Summerton. That wasn’t going to be hard to do. From now on, she was going to be avoiding him, too.
A loud thump from the bedroom made him sit up. What the hell was that?
Frisco grabbed his crutches and his handgun and moved as quickly as he could down the hall to Tasha’s room.
He’d bought a cheap portable TV. It was quite possibly the most expensive night-light and white noise machine in the world. Its bluish light flickered, illuminating the small room.
Natasha was sitting on the floor, next to her bed, sleepily rubbing her eyes and her head. She was whimpering, but only very softly. Her voice almost didn’t carry above the soft murmurings of the television.
“Poor Tash, did you fall out of bed?” Frisco asked her, moving awkwardly through the narrow doorway and into the room. He slipped the safety onto his weapon and slid it into the pocket of his shorts. “Come on, climb back up. I’ll tuck you in again.”
But when Tasha stood up, she staggered, almost as if she’d had too much to drink, and sat back down on her rear end. As Frisco watched, she crumpled, pressing her forehead against the wall-to-wall carpeting.
Frisco leaned his crutches against the bed and bent down to pick her up. “Tash, it’s three in the morning. Don’t play silly games.”
Lord, the kid was on fire. Frisco felt her forehead, her cheek, her neck, double-checking, praying that he was wrong, praying that she was simply sweaty from a nightmare. But with each touch, he knew. Natasha had a raging fever.
He lifted her and put her in her bed.
How could this have happened? She’d been fine all day today. She’d had her swimming lesson with her usual enthusiasm. She’d gone back into the water over and over again with her usual energy. True, she’d been asleep when he’d returned from the hospital, but he’d chalked that up to exhaustion after the excitement of the day—watching Uncle Frisco get the living daylights kicked out of him by old, ugly Dwayne had surely been tiring for the kid.
Her eyes were half-closed and she pressed her head against her pillow as if it hurt, still making that odd, whimpering sound.
Frisco was scared to death. He tried to judge how high her fever was by the touch of his hand, and she seemed impossibly, dangerously hot.
“Tasha, talk to me,” he said, sitting next to her on the bed. “Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me your symptoms.”
Cripes, listen to him. Tell me your symptoms. She was five years old, she didn’t know what the hell a symptom was. And from the looks of things, she didn’t even know she was here, couldn’t hear him, couldn’t see him.
He had medical training, but most of it was first-aid. He could handle gunshot wounds, knife wounds, burns and lacerations. But sick kids with sky-high fevers…
He had to get Natasha to the hospital.
He could call a cab, but man, he wouldn’t be able to get Tasha down the stairs. He could barely make it himself with his crutches. He certainly couldn’t do it carrying the girl, could he? It would be far too dangerous to try. What if he dropped her?
“I’ll be right back, Tash,” he told her, grabbing his crutches and heading out toward the kitchen telephone, where he kept his phone book.
He flipped the book open, searching for the phone number for the local cab company. He quickly dialed. It rang at least ten times before someone picked up.
“Yellow Cab.”
“Yeah,” Frisco said. “I need a cab right away. 1210 Midfield Street, unit 2C. It’s the condo complex on the corner of Midfield and Harris?”
“Destination?”
“City Hospital. Look I need the driver to come to the door. I got a little girl with a fever, and I’ll need help carrying her down—”
“Sorry, sir. Our drivers do not leave their vehicles. He’ll wait for you in the parking lot.”
“Didn’t you hear what I just said? This is an emergency. I have to get this kid to the hospital.” Frisco ran his hand through his hair, trying to curb his anger and frustration. “I can’t get her down the stairs by myself. I’m…” He nearly choked on the words. “I’m physically disabled.”
“I’m sorry, sir. The rule is for our drivers’ safety. However, the cab you requested will arrive in approximately ninety minutes.”
“Ninety minutes? I can’t wait ninety minutes!”
“Shall I cancel your request for a cab?”
“Yes.” Cursing loudly, Frisco slammed down the phone.
He picked it up again and quickly dialed 911. It seemed to take forever before the line was picked up.
“What is the nature of your emergency?”
“I have a five-year-old with a very high fever.”
“Is the child breathing?”
“Yes—”
“Is the child bleeding?”
“No, I said she’s got a fever—”
“I’m sorry, sir. We have quite a number of priority calls and a limited number of ambulances. You’ll get her to the hospital faster if you drive her yourself.”
Frisco fought the urge to curse. “I don’t have a car.”
“Well, I can put you on the list, but since your situation isn’t life or death per se, you risk being continuously bumped down as new calls come in,” the woman told him. “Things usually slow down by dawn.”
Dawn. “Forget it,” Frisco said, hanging up none too gently.
Now what?
Mia. He was going to have to ask Mia for help.
He moved as quickly as he could back down the hall to Tasha’s room. Her eyes were closed, but she was moving fitfully. She was still as hot to the touch. Maybe even hotter.
“Hang on, kid,” Frisco said. “Hang on, princess. I’ll be back in a sec.”
He was starting to be able to move pretty nimbly with the crutches. He made it into the living room and out of the front door before he’d even had time to think.
But as he rang Mia’s bell again and again, as he opened up the screen and hammered on the heavy wooden door, as he waited for her to respond, he couldn’t help but wonder.
What the hell was he doing? He’d j
ust spent the past six hours resolving to stay away from this woman. She didn’t want him—she’d made that more than clear. So here he was, pounding on her door in the middle of the night, ready to humiliate himself even further by having to ask for help carrying a featherweight forty-pound little girl down the stairs.
The light went on inside Mia’s apartment. She opened the door before she’d even finished putting on her bathrobe.
“Alan, what’s wrong?”
“I need your help.” She would never know how much it cost him to utter those words. It was only for Natasha that he would ask for help. If it had been himself in there, burning up with fever, he wouldn’t’ve asked. He would have rather died. “Tasha’s sick. She’s got a really high fever—I want to take her over to the hospital.”
“All right,” Mia said without hesitation. “Let me throw on a pair of shorts and some sneakers and I’ll pull the car around to the outside stairs.”
She moved to go back toward her bedroom and her clothes, but he stopped her.
“Wait.”
Mia turned back to the door. Frisco was standing on the other side of the screen, crutches under his arms. He was staring away from her, down at the carpeting. When he looked up, all of his customary crystal anger was gone from his eyes, leaving only a deeply burning shame. He could barely hold her gaze. He looked away, but then he forced himself to look up again, this time steadily meeting her eyes.
“I can’t carry her down the stairs.”
Mia’s heart was in her throat. She knew what it had taken for him to say those words, and she so desperately didn’t want to say the wrong thing in response. She didn’t want to make light of it, but at the same time, she didn’t want to embarrass him further by giving it too much weight.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 63
