How could he begin to be interested in her life, when he couldn’t even muster up the slightest enthusiasm for his own?
But he was getting way ahead of himself here. He was assuming that he’d have no trouble getting her into his bed in the first place. That might’ve been true five years ago, but he wasn’t exactly any kind of prize anymore. There was no way a girl like Mia would want to be saddled with a man who could barely even walk.
Cold day in hell. Frisco looked out at the blinding blueness of the ocean, feeling his eyes burn from the glare.
“What’s a SEAL doing with a kid who can’t swim?” Thomas asked. Most of the anger had left the teenager’s eyes, leaving behind a cynical disdain and a seemingly ancient weariness that made him look far older than his years. He had scars on his face, one bisecting one of his eyebrows, the other marking one of his high, pronounced cheekbones. That, combined with the fact that his nose had been broken more than once, gave him a battle-worn look that erased even more of his youth. But except for a few minor slang expressions, Thomas didn’t speak the language of the street. He had no discernible accent of any kind, and Frisco wondered if the kid had worked as hard to delete that particular tie with his past and his parents as he himself had.
“Natasha is the lieutenant’s niece,” Mia explained. “She’s going to stay with him for a few weeks. She just arrived today.”
“From Mars, right?” Thomas looked under the table and made a face at Natasha.
She giggled. “Thomas thinks I’m from Mars ’cause I didn’t know what that water was.” Natasha slithered on her belly out from underneath the table. The sand stuck to her clothes, and Frisco realized that she was wet.
“A little Martian girl is the only kind of girl I can think of who hasn’t seen the ocean before,” Thomas said. “She didn’t even seem to know kids shouldn’t go into the water alone.”
Mia watched a myriad of emotions cross Alan Francisco’s face. The lifeguard’s flag was out today, signaling a strong undertow and dangerous currents. She saw him look at Thomas and register the fact that the teenager’s jeans were wet up to his knees.
“You went in after her,” he said, his low voice deceptively even.
Thomas was as nonchalant. “I’ve got a five-year-old niece, too.”
Francisco pulled himself painfully up with his cane. He held out his hand to Thomas. “Thanks, man. I’m sorry about before. I’m…new at this kid thing.”
Mia held her breath. She knew Thomas well, and if he’d decided that Alan Francisco was the enemy, he’d never shake his hand.
But Thomas hesitated only briefly before he clasped the older man’s hand.
Again, a flurry of emotions flickered in Francisco’s eyes, and again he tried to hide it all. Relief. Gratitude. Sorrow. Always sorrow and always shame. But it was all gone almost before it was even there. When Alan Francisco tried to hide his emotions, he succeeded, tucking them neatly behind the ever-present anger that simmered inside of him.
He managed to use that anger to hide everything quite nicely—everything except the seven-thousand-degree nuclear-powered sexual attraction he felt for her. That he put on display, complete with neon signs and million-dollar-a-minute advertising.
Good grief, last night when he’d made that crack about wanting her to share his bed, she’d thought he’d been simply trying to scare her off.
She had been dead wrong. The way he’d looked at her just minutes ago had nearly singed her eyebrows off.
And the truly stupid thing was that the thought of having a physical relationship with this man didn’t send her running for her apartment and the heavy-duty dead bolt that she’d had installed on her door. She couldn’t figure out why. Lt. Alan Francisco was a real-life version of G.I. Joe, he was probably a male chauvinist, he drank so much that he still looked like hell at noon on a weekday and he carried a seemingly permanent chip on his shoulder. Yet for some bizarre reason, Mia had no trouble imagining herself pulling him by the hand into her bedroom and melting together with him on her bed.
It had nothing to do with his craggy-featured, handsome face and enticingly hard-muscled body. Well, yes, okay, so she wasn’t being completely honest with herself. It had at least a little bit to do with that. It was true—the fact that the man looked as if he should have his own three-month segment in a hunk-of-the-month calendar was not something she’d failed to notice. And notice, and notice and notice.
But try as she might, it was the softness in his eyes when he spoke to Natasha and his crooked, painful attempts to smile at the little girl that she found hard to resist. She was a sucker for kindness, and she suspected that beneath this man’s outer crust of anger and bitterness, and despite his sometimes crude language and rough behavior, there lurked the kindest of souls.
“Here’s the deal about the beach,” Alan Francisco was saying to his niece. “You never come down here without a grown-up, and you never, ever go into the water alone.”
“That’s what Thomas said,” Tasha told him. “He said I might’ve drownded.”
“Thomas is right,” Francisco told her.
“What’s drownded?”
“Drowned,” he corrected her. “You ever try to breathe underwater?”
Tash shook her head no, and her red curls bounced.
“Well, don’t try it. People can’t breathe underwater. Only fish can. And you don’t look like a fish to me.”
The little girl giggled, but persisted. “What’s drownded?”
Mia crossed her arms, wondering if Francisco would try to sidestep the issue again, or if he would take the plunge and discuss the topic of death with Natasha.
“Well,” he said slowly, “if someone goes into the water, and they can’t swim, or they hurt themselves, or the waves are too high, then the water might go over their head. Then they can’t breathe. Normally, when the water goes over your head it’s no big deal. You hold your breath. And then you just swim to the surface and stick your nose and mouth out and take a breath of air. But like I said, maybe this person doesn’t know how to swim, or maybe their leg got a cramp, or the water’s too rough, so they can’t get up to the air. And if there’s no air for them to breathe…well, they’ll die. They’ll drown. People need to breathe air to live.”
Natasha gazed unblinkingly at her uncle, her head tilted slightly to one side. “I don’t know how to swim,” she finally said.
“Then I’ll teach you,” Francisco said unhesitatingly. “Everyone should know how to swim. But even when you do know how to swim, you still don’t swim alone. That way, if you do get hurt, you got a friend who can save you from drowning. Even in the SEALs we didn’t swim alone. We had something called swim buddies—a friend who looked out for you, and you’d look out for him, too. You and me, Tash, for the next few weeks, we’re going to be swim buddies, okay?”
“I’m outta here, Ms. S. I don’t want to be late for work.”
Mia turned to Thomas, glad he’d broken into her reverie. She’d been standing there like an idiot, gazing at Alan Francisco, enthralled by his conversation with his niece. “Be careful,” she told him.
“Always am.”
Natasha crouched down in the sand and began pushing an old Popsicle stick around as if it were a car. Thomas bent over and ruffled her hair. “See you later, Martian girl.” He nodded to Francisco. “Lieutenant.”
The SEAL pulled himself up and off the bench. “Call me Frisco. And thanks again, man.”
Thomas nodded once more and then was gone.
“He works part-time as a security guard at the university,” Mia told Francisco. “That way he can audit college courses in his spare time—spare time that doesn’t exist because he also works a full day as a landscaper’s assistant over in Coronado.”
He was looking at her again, his steel blue eyes shuttered and unreadable this time. He hadn’t told her she could call him Frisco. Maybe it was a guy thing. Maybe SEALs weren’t allowed to let women call them by their nicknames. Or maybe it was more person
al than that. Maybe Alan Francisco didn’t want her as a friend. He’d certainly implied as much last night.
Mia looked back at her car, still sitting in the middle of the parking lot. “Well,” she said, feeling strangely awkward. She had no problem holding her own with this man when he came on too strong or acted rudely. But when he simply stared at her like this, with no expression besides the faintest glimmer of his ever-present anger on his face, she felt off balance and ill at ease, like a schoolgirl with an unrequited crush. “I’m glad we found—you found Natasha…” She glanced back at her car again, more to escape his scrutiny than to reassure herself it was still there. “Can I give you a lift back to the condo?”
Frisco shook his head. “No, thanks.”
“I could adjust the seat, see if I could make it more comfortable for you to—”
“No, we’ve got some shopping to do.”
“But Natasha’s all wet.”
“She’ll dry. Besides, I could use the exercise.”
Exercise? Was he kidding? “What you could use is a week or two off your feet, in bed.”
Just like that, he seemed to come alive, his mouth twisting into a sardonic half smile. His eyes sparked with heat and he lowered his voice, leaning forward to speak directly into her ear. “Are you volunteering to keep me there? I knew sooner or later you’d change your mind.”
He knew nothing of the sort. He’d only said that to rattle and irritate her. Mia refused to let him see just how irritated his comment had made her. Instead, she stepped even closer, looking up at him, letting her gaze linger on his mouth before meeting his eyes, meaning to make him wonder, and to make him squirm before she launched her attack.
But she launched nothing as she looked into his eyes. His knowing smile had faded, leaving behind only heat. It magnified, doubling again and again, increasing logarithmically as their gazes locked, burning her down to her very soul. She knew that he could see more than just a mere reflection of his desire in her eyes, and she knew without a doubt that she’d given too much away. This fire that burned between them was not his alone.
The sun was beating down on them and her mouth felt parched. She tried to swallow, tried to moisten her dry lips, tried to walk away. But she couldn’t move.
He reached out slowly. She could see it coming—he was going to touch her, pull her close against the hard muscles of his chest and cover her mouth with his own in a heated, heart-stopping, nuclear meltdown of a kiss.
But he touched her only lightly, tracing the path of a bead of sweat that had trailed down past her ear, down her neck and across her collarbone before it disappeared beneath the collar of her T-shirt. He touched her gently, only with one finger, but in many ways it was far more sensual, far more intimate than even a kiss.
The world seemed to spin and Mia almost reached for him. But sanity kicked in, thank God, and instead she backed away.
“When I change my mind,” she said, her voice barely louder than a whisper, “it’ll be a cold day in July.”
She turned on legs that were actually trembling—trembling—and headed toward her car. He made no move to follow, but as she got inside and drove away, she could see him in the rearview mirror, still watching her.
Had she convinced him? She doubted it. She wasn’t sure she’d even managed to convince herself.
5
“Okay, Tash,” Frisco called down from the second-floor landing where he’d finally finished lashing the framework to the railing. “Ready for a test run?”
She nodded, and he let out the crank and lowered the rope down to her.
The realization had come to him while they were grocery shopping. He wasn’t going to be able to carry the bags of food he bought up the stairs to his second-floor condominium. And Tasha, as helpful as she tried to be when she wasn’t wandering off, couldn’t possibly haul all the food they needed up a steep flight of stairs. She could maybe handle one or two lightweight bags, but certainly no more than that.
But Frisco had been an expert in unconventional warfare for the past ten years. He could come up with alternative, creative solutions to damn near any situation—including this one. Of course, this wasn’t war, which made it that much easier. Whatever he came up with, he wasn’t going to have to pull it off while underneath a rain of enemy bullets.
It hadn’t taken him long to come up with a solution. He and Tasha had stopped at the local home building supply store and bought themselves the fixings for a rope-and-pulley system. Frisco could’ve easily handled just a rope to pull things up to the second-floor landing, but with a crank and some pulleys, Natasha would be able to use it, too.
The plastic bags filled with the groceries they’d bought were on the ground, directly underneath the rope to which he’d attached a hook.
“Hook the rope to one of the bags,” Frisco commanded his niece, leaning over the railing. “Right through the handles—that’s right.”
Mia Summerton was watching him.
He’d been hyperaware of her from the moment he and Tash had climbed out of the taxi with all of their groceries. She’d been back in her garden again, doing God knows what and watching him out of the corner of her eye.
She’d watched as he’d transferred the frozen food and perishables into a backpack he’d bought and carried them inside. She’d watched as he’d done the same with the building supplies and set them out on the second-floor landing. She’d watched as he awkwardly lowered himself down to sit on the stairs with his tool kit and began to work.
She’d watched, but she’d been careful never to let him catch her watching.
Just the same, he felt her eyes following him. And he could damn near smell her awareness.
Man, whatever it was that they’d experienced back on the beach…He shook his head in disbelief. Whatever it was, he wanted some more. A whole lot of more. She’d looked at him, and he’d been caught in an amazing vortex of animal magnetism. He hadn’t been able to resist touching her, hadn’t been able to stop thinking about exactly where that droplet of perspiration had gone after it had disappeared from view beneath her shirt. It hadn’t taken much imagination to picture it traveling slowly between her breasts, all the way down to her softly indented belly button.
He’d wanted to dive in after it.
It had been damn near enough to make him wonder if he’d seriously underrated smiley-face-endowed notes.
But he’d seen the shock in Mia’s eyes. She hadn’t expected the attraction that had surged between them. She didn’t want it, didn’t want him. Certainly not for a single, mind-blowing sexual encounter, and definitely not for anything longer term. That was no big surprise.
“I can’t get it,” Natasha called up to him, her face scrunched with worry.
Mia had kept to herself ever since they’d arrived home. Her offers to help had been noticeably absent. But now she stood up, apparently unable to ignore the note of anxiety in Tasha’s voice.
“May I help you with that, Natasha?” She spoke directly to the little girl. She didn’t even bother to look up at Frisco.
Frisco wiped the sweat from his face as he watched Tasha step back and Mia attach the hook to the plastic handles of the grocery bags. It had to be close to ninety degrees in the shade, but when Mia finally did glance up at him there was a definite wintry chill in the air.
She was trying her damnedest to act as if she had not even the slightest interest in him. Yet she’d spent the past hour and a half watching him. Why?
Maybe whatever this was that constantly drew his eyes in her direction, whatever this was that had made him hit his thumb with his hammer more times than he could count, whatever this was that made every muscle in his body tighten in anticipation when he so much as thought about her, whatever this uncontrollable sensation was—maybe she felt it, too.
It was lust and desire, amplified a thousandfold, mutated into something far more powerful.
He didn’t want her. He didn’t want the trouble, didn’t want the hassle, didn’t want the
grief. And yet, at the same time, he wanted her desperately. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted any woman before.
If he’d been the type to get frightened, he would’ve been terrified.
“We better stand back,” Mia warned Tasha as Frisco began turning the crank.
It went up easily enough, the bag bulging and straining underneath the weight. But then, as if in slow motion, the bottom of the plastic bag gave out, and its contents went plummeting to the ground.
Frisco swore loudly as a six-pack shattered into pieces of brown glass, the beer mixing unappetizingly with cranberry juice from a broken half-gallon container, four flattened tomatoes and an avocado that never again would see the light of day. The loaf of Italian bread that had also been in the bag had, thankfully, bounced free and clear of the disaster.
Mia looked down at the wreckage, and then up at Alan Francisco. He’d cut short his litany of curses and stood silently, his mouth tight and his eyes filled with far more despair than the situation warranted.
But she knew he was seeing more than a mess on the courtyard sidewalk as he looked over the railing. She knew he was seeing his life, shattered as absolutely as those beer bottles.
Still he took a deep breath, and forced himself to smile down into Natasha’s wide eyes.
“We’re on the right track here,” he said, lowering the rope again. “We’re definitely very close to outrageous success.” Using his cane, he started down the stairs. “How about we try double bagging? Or a paper bag inside of the plastic one?”
“How about cloth bags?” Mia suggested.
“Back away, Tash—that’s broken glass,” Alan called warningly. “Yeah, cloth bags would work, but I don’t have any.”
Alan, Mia thought. When had he become Alan instead of Francisco? Was it when he looked down at his niece and made himself smile despite his pain, or was it earlier, at the beach parking lot, when he’d nearly lit Mia on fire with a single look?
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