Mia ran up the stairs past him, suddenly extremely aware that he’d taken off his shirt nearly an hour ago. His smooth tanned skin and hard muscles had been hard to ignore even from a distance. Up close it was impossible for Mia not to stare.
He wore only a loose-fitting, bright-colored bathing suit, and it rode low on his lean hips. His stomach was a washboard of muscles, and his skin gleamed with sweat. And that other tattoo on his bicep was a sea serpent, not a mermaid, as she’d first thought.
“I’ve got some bags,” Mia called out, escaping into the coolness of her apartment, stopping for a moment to take a long, shaky breath. What was it about this man that made her heart beat double time? He was intriguing; she couldn’t deny that. And he exuded a wildness, a barely tamed sexuality that constantly managed to captivate her. But so what? He was sexy. He was gorgeous. He was working hard to overcome a raftload of serious problems, making him seem tragic and fascinating. But these were not the criteria she usually used to decide whether or not to enter into a sexual relationship with a man.
The fact was that she wasn’t going to sleep with him, she told herself firmly. Definitely probably not. She rolled her eyes in self-disgust. Definitely probably…?
It had to be the full moon making her feel this way. Or—as her mother might say—maybe her astrological planets were lined up in some strange configuration, making her feel restless and reckless. Or maybe as she neared thirty, her body was changing, releasing hormones in quantities that she could no longer simply ignore.
Whatever the reason—mystical or scientific—the fact remained that she would not have sex with a stranger. Whatever happened between them, it wasn’t going to happen until she’d had a chance to get to know this man. And once she got to know him and his vast collection of both physical and psychological problems, she had a feeling that staying away from him wasn’t going to be so very difficult.
She took her cloth grocery bags from the closet and went back outside. Alan was crouched awkwardly down on the sidewalk, attempting to clean up the mess.
“Alan, wait. Don’t try to pick up the broken glass,” she called down to him. “I’ve got work gloves and a shovel you can use to clean it up.” She didn’t dare offer to do the work for him. She knew he would refuse. “I’ll get ’em. Here—catch.”
She threw the bags over the railing, and he caught them with little effort as she turned to go back inside.
Frisco looked at the printed message on the outside of the bags Mia had tossed him and rolled his eyes. Of course it had to be something political. Shaking his head, he sat down on the grass and began transferring the undemolished remainder of the groceries into the cloth bags.
“‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we fully funded education, and the government had to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber?”’ he quoted from the bags when Mia came back down the stairs.
She was holding a plastic trash bag, a pair of work gloves and what looked rather suspiciously like a pooper-scooper. She gave him a crooked smile. “Yeah,” she said. “I thought you would like that.”
“I’d be glad to get into a knock-down, drag-out argument about the average civilian’s ignorance regarding military spending some other time,” he told her. “But right now I’m not really in the mood.”
“How about if I pretend you didn’t just call me ignorant, and you pretend I don’t think you’re some kind of rigid, militaristic, dumb-as-a-stone professional soldier?” she said much too sweetly.
Frisco had to laugh. It was a deep laugh, a belly laugh, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. He was still smiling when he looked up at her. “That sounds fair,” he said. “And who knows—maybe we’re both wrong.”
Mia smiled back at him, but it was tentative and wary.
“I didn’t get to thank you for helping me this morning,” he said. “I’m sorry if I was…”
Mia gazed at him, waiting for him to finish his sentence. Unfriendly? Worried? Upset? Angry? Inappropriate? Too sexy for words? She wondered exactly what he was apologizing for.
“Rude,” he finally finished. He glanced over at Natasha. She was lying on her back in the shade of a palm tree, staring up at the sky through both her spread fingers and the fronds, singing some unintelligible and probably improvised song. “I’m in way over my head here,” he admitted with another crooked smile. “I don’t know the first thing about taking care of a kid, and…” He shrugged. “Even if I did, these days I’m not exactly in the right place psychologically, you know?”
“You’re doing great.”
The look he shot her was loaded with amusement and disbelief. “She was under my care for not even thirty minutes and I managed to lose her.” He shifted his weight, trying to get more comfortable, wincing slightly at the pain in his leg. “While we were walking home, I talked to her about setting up some rules and regs—basic stuff, like she has to tell me if she’s going outside the condo, and she’s got to play inside the courtyard. She looked at me like I was speaking French.” He paused, glancing back at the little girl again. “As far as I can tell, Sharon had absolutely no rules. She let the kid go where she pleased, when she pleased. I’m not sure anything I said sunk in.”
He pulled himself up with his cane, and carried one of the filled cloth bags toward the hook and rope, sidestepping the puddle of broken glass, sodden cardboard and cranberry juiced-beer.
“You’ve got to give her time, Alan,” Mia said. “You’ve got to remember that living here without her mom around has to be as new and as strange to her as it is to you.”
He turned to look back at her as he attached the hook to the cloth handles. “You know,” he said, “generally people don’t call me Alan. I’m Frisco. I’ve been Frisco for years.” He started up the stairs. “I mean, Sharon—my sister—she calls me Alan, but everyone else calls me Frisco, from my swim buddy to my CO….”
Frisco looked down at Mia. She was standing in the courtyard, watching him and not trying to hide it this time. Her gardening clothes were almost as filthy as his, and several strands of her long, dark hair had escaped from her ponytail. How come he felt like a sweat-sodden reject from hell, while she managed to look impossibly beautiful?
“CO?” she repeated.
“Commanding Officer,” he explained, turning the crank. The bag went up, and this time it made it all the way to the second floor.
Mia applauded and Natasha came over to do several clumsy forward rolls in the grass in celebration.
Frisco reached over the railing and pulled the bag up and onto the landing next to him.
“Lower the rope. I’ll hook up the next one,” Mia said.
It went up just as easily.
“Come on, Tash. Come upstairs and help me put away these supplies,” Frisco called, and the little girl came barreling up the stairs. He turned back to look down at Mia. “I’ll be down in a minute to clean up that mess.”
“Alan, you know, I don’t have anything better to do and I can—”
“Frisco,” he interrupted her. “Not Alan. And I’m cleaning it up, not you.”
“Do you mind if I call you Alan? I mean, after all, it is your name—”
“Yeah, I mind. It’s not my name. Frisco’s my name. Frisco is who I became when I joined the SEALs.” His voice got softer. “Alan is nobody.”
Frisco woke to the sound of a blood-chilling scream.
He was rolling out of bed, onto the floor, reaching, searching for his weapon, even before he was fully awake. But he had no firearm hidden underneath his pillow or down alongside his bed—he’d locked them all up in a trunk in his closet. He wasn’t in the jungle on some dangerous mission, catching a combat nap. He was in his bedroom, in San Felipe, California, and the noise that had kicked him out of bed came from the powerful vocal cords of his five-year-old niece, who was supposed to be sound asleep on the couch in the living room.
Frisco stumbled to the wall and flipped on the light. Reaching this time for his cane, he opened his bedroom door and stagge
red down the hallway toward the living room.
He could see Natasha in the dim light that streamed down the hallway from his bedroom. She was crying, sitting up in a tangle of sheets on the couch, sweat matting her hair.
“Hey,” Frisco said. “What the h…uh…What’s going on, Tash?”
The kid didn’t answer. She just kept on crying.
Frisco sat down next to her, but all she did was cry.
“You want a hug or something?” he asked, and she shook her head no and kept on crying.
“Um,” Frisco said, uncertain of what to do, or what to say.
There was a tap on the door.
“You want to get that?” Frisco asked Natasha.
She didn’t respond.
“I guess I’ll get it then,” he said, unlocking the bolt and opening the heavy wooden door.
Mia stood on the other side of the screen. She was wearing a white bathrobe and her hair was down loose around her shoulders. “Is everything all right?”
“No, I’m not murdering or torturing my niece,” Frisco said flatly and closed the door. But he opened it again right away and pushed open the screen. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Tash’s On/Off switch is, would you?”
“It’s dark in here,” Mia said, stepping inside. “Maybe you should turn on all the lights so that she can see where she is.”
Frisco turned on the bright overhead light—and realized he was standing in front of his neighbor and his niece in nothing but the new, tight-fitting, utilitarian white briefs he’d bought during yesterday’s second trip to the grocery store. Good thing he’d bought them, or he quite possibly would have been standing there buck naked.
Whether it was the sudden light or the sight of him in his underwear, Frisco didn’t know, but Natasha stopped crying, just like that. She still sniffled, and tears still flooded her eyes, but her sirenlike wail was silenced.
Mia was clearly thrown by the sight of him—and determined to act as if visiting with a neighbor who was in his underwear was the most normal thing in the world. She sat down on the couch next to Tasha and gave her a hug. Frisco excused himself and headed down the hall toward his bedroom and a pair of shorts.
It wasn’t really that big a deal—Lucky O’Donlon, Frisco’s swim buddy and best friend in the SEAL unit, had bought Frisco a tan-through French bathing suit from the Riviera that covered far less of him than these briefs. Of course, the minuscule suit wasn’t something he’d ever be caught dead in….
He threw on his shorts and came back out into the living room.
“It must’ve been a pretty bad nightmare,” he heard Mia saying to Tasha.
“I fell into a big, dark hole,” Tash said in a tiny voice in between a very major case of hiccups. “And I was screaming and screaming and screaming, and I could see Mommy way, way up at the top, but she didn’t hear me. She had on her mad face, and she just walked away. And then water went up and over my head, and I knew I was gonna drownd.”
Frisco swore silently. He wasn’t sure he could relieve Natasha’s fears of abandonment, but he would do his best to make sure she didn’t fear the ocean. He sat down next to her on the couch and she climbed into his lap. His heart lurched as she locked her little arms around his neck.
“Tomorrow morning we’ll start your swimming lessons, okay?” he said gruffly, trying to keep the emotion that had suddenly clogged his throat from sounding in his voice.
Natasha nodded. “When I woke up, it was so dark. And someone turned off the TV.”
“I turned it off when I went to bed,” Frisco told her.
She lifted her head and gazed up at him. The tip of her nose was pink and her face was streaked and still wet from her tears. “Mommy always sleeps with it on. So she won’t feel lonely.”
Mia was looking at him over the top of Tasha’s red curls. She was holding her tongue, but it was clear that she had something to say.
“Why don’t you make a quick trip to the head?” he said to Tasha.
She nodded and climbed off his lap. “The head is the bathroom on a boat,” she told Mia, wiping her runny nose on her hand. “Before bedtime, me and Frisco pretended we were on a pirate boat. He was the cap’n.”
Mia tried to hide her smile. So that was the cause of the odd sounds she’d heard from Frisco’s apartment at around eight o’clock.
“We also played Russian Princess,” the little girl added.
Frisco actually blushed—his rugged cheekbones were tinged with a delicate shade of pink. “It’s after 0200, Tash. Get moving. And wash your face and blow your nose while you’re in there.”
“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum,” Mia said to him as the little girl disappeared down the hallway.
The pink tinge didn’t disappear, but Frisco met her gaze steadily. “I’m doomed, aren’t I?” he said, resignation in his voice. “You’re going to tease me about this until the end of time.”
Mia grinned. “I do feel as if I’ve been armed with a powerful weapon,” she admitted, adding, “Your Majesty. Oh, or did you let Natasha take a turn and be the princess?”
“Very funny.”
“What I would give to have been a fly on the wall….”
“She’s five years old,” he tried to explain, running his hand through his disheveled blond hair. “I don’t have a single toy in the house. Or any books besides the ones I’m reading—which are definitely inappropriate. I don’t even have paper and pencils to draw with—”
She’d gone too far with her teasing. “You don’t have to explain. Actually, I think it’s incredibly sweet. It’s just…surprising. You don’t really strike me as the make-believe type.”
Frisco leaned forward.
“Look, Tash is gonna come back out soon. If there’s something you want to tell me without her overhearing, you better say it now.”
Mia was surprised again. He hadn’t struck her as being extremely perceptive. In fact, he always seemed to be a touch self-absorbed and tightly wrapped up in his anger. But he was right. There was something that she wanted to ask him about the little girl.
“I was just wondering,” she said, “if you’ve talked to Natasha about exactly where her mother is right now.”
He shook his head.
“Maybe you should.”
He shifted his position, obviously uncomfortable. “How do you talk about things like addiction and alcoholism to a five-year-old?”
“She probably knows more about it than you’d believe,” Mia said quietly.
“Yeah, I guess she would,” he said.
“It might make her feel a little bit less as if she’s been deserted.”
He looked up at her, meeting her eyes. Even now, in this moment of quiet, serious conversation, when Mia’s eyes met his, there was a powerful burst of heat.
His gaze slipped down to the open neckline of her bathrobe, and she could see him looking at the tiny piece of her nightgown that was exposed. It was white, with a narrow white eyelet ruffle.
He wanted to see the rest of it—she knew that from the hunger in his eyes. Would he be disappointed if he knew that her nightgown was simple and functional? It was plain, not sexy, made from lightweight cotton.
He looked into her eyes again. No, he wouldn’t be disappointed, because if they ever were in a position in which he would see her in her nightgown, she would only be wearing it for all of three seconds before he removed it and it landed in a pile on the floor.
The bathroom door opened, and Frisco finally looked away as their pint-size chaperon came back into the living room.
“I’d better go.” Mia stood up. “I’ll just let myself out.”
“I’m hungry,” the little girl said.
Frisco pulled himself to his feet. “Well, let’s go into the kitchen and see what we can find to eat.” He turned to look back at Mia. “I’m sorry we woke you.”
“It’s all right.” Mia turned toward the door.
“Hey, Tash,” she heard Frisco say as she let herself out through the screen do
or, “did your mom talk to you at all about where she was going?”
Mia shut the door behind her and went back into her own apartment.
She took off her robe and got into bed, but sleep was elusive. She couldn’t stop thinking about Alan Francisco.
It was funny—the fact that Mia had found out he’d been kind enough to play silly make-believe games with his niece made him blush, yet he’d answered the door dressed only in his underwear with nary a smidgen of embarrassment.
Of course, with a body like his, what was there to be embarrassed about?
Still, the briefs he’d been wearing were brief indeed. The snug-fitting white cotton left very little to the imagination. And Mia had a very vivid imagination.
She opened her eyes, willing that same imagination not to get too carried away. Talk about make-believe games. She could make believe that she honestly wasn’t bothered by the fact that Alan had spent most of his adult life as a professional soldier, and Alan could make believe that he wasn’t weighed down by his physical challenge, that he was psychologically healthy, that he wasn’t battling depression and resorting to alcohol to numb his unhappiness.
Mia rolled over onto her stomach and switched on the lamp on her bedside table. She was wide-awake, so she would read. It was better than lying in the dark dreaming about things that would never happen.
Frisco covered the sleeping child with a light blanket. The television provided a flickering light and the soft murmur of voices. Tasha hadn’t fallen asleep until he’d turned it on, and he knew better now than to turn it off.
He went into the kitchen and poured himself a few fingers of whiskey and took a swallow, welcoming the burn and the sensation of numbness that followed. Man, he needed that. Talking to Natasha about Sharon’s required visit to the detox center had not been fun. But it had been necessary. Mia had been right.
Tash had had no clue where her mother had gone. She’d thought, in fact, that Sharon had gone to jail. The kid had heard bits and pieces of conversations about the car accident her mother had been involved in, and thought Sharon had been arrested for running someone over.
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