Tall, Dark and Dangerous Part 1

by Suzanne Brockmann

  But she had thought that. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she was cowering. Man, he felt sick.

  He crouched down next to the table as best he could. “Natasha, did your mom hit you when she was angry?” He couldn’t believe softhearted Sharon would hurt a defenseless child, but liquor did funny things to even the gentlest of souls.

  The little girl shook her head no. “Mommy didn’t,” she told him softly, “but Dwayne did once and I got a bloody lip. Mommy cried, and then we moved out.”

  Thank God Sharon had had that much sense. Damn Dwayne to hell, whoever he was. What kind of monster would strike a five-year-old child?

  What kind of monster would scare her to death by shouting at her the way he just had?

  Frisco sat down heavily on the picnic table bench, glancing up at Mia. Her eyes were soft, as if she could somehow read his mind.

  “Tash, I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his aching, bleary eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “This some kind of friend of yours?” the black kid said to Mia, his tone implying she might want to be more selective in her choice of friends in the future.

  “He’s in 2C,” Mia told the boy. “The mystery neighbor—Lt. Alan Francisco.” She directed her next words to Frisco. “This is Thomas King. He’s a former student of mine. He lives in 1N with his sister and her kids.”

  A former…student? That meant that Mia Summerton was a teacher. Damn, if he had had teachers who looked like her, he might’ve actually gone to high school.

  She was watching him now with wariness in her eyes, as if he were a bomb on a trick timer, ready to blow at any given moment.

  “Lieutenant,” Thomas repeated. “Are you the badge?”

  “No, I’m not a cop,” Frisco said, tearing his eyes away from Mia to glance at the kid. “I’m in the Navy….” He caught himself, and shook his head, closing his eyes briefly. “I was in the Navy.”

  Thomas had purposely crossed his arms and tucked both hands underneath them to make sure Frisco knew he had no intention of shaking hands.

  “The lieutenant was a SEAL,” Mia told Thomas. “That’s a branch of special operations—”

  “I know what a SEAL is,” the kid interrupted. He turned to run a bored, cynical eye over Frisco. “One of those crazy freaks that ride the surf and crash their little rubber boats into the rocks down by the hotel in Coronado. Did you ever do that?”

  Mia was watching him again, too. Damn but she was pretty. And every time she looked at him, every time their eyes met, Frisco felt a very solid slap of mutual sexual awareness. It was almost funny. With the possible exception of her exotic fashion-model face and trim, athletic body, everything about the woman irritated him. He didn’t want a nosy neighbor poking around in his life. He didn’t need a helpful do-gooder getting in his face and reminding him hourly of his limitations. He had no use for a disgustingly cheerful, flower-planting, antimilitary, unintimidatable, fresh-faced girl-next-door type.

  But every single time he looked into her hazel eyes, he felt an undeniable surge of physical attraction. Intellectually, he may have wanted little more than to hide from her, but physically…Well, his body apparently had quite a different agenda. One that included moonlight gleaming on smooth, golden tanned skin, long dark hair trailing across his face, across his chest and lower.

  Frisco managed a half smile, wondering if she could read his mind now. He couldn’t look away from her, even to answer Thomas’s question. “It’s called rock portage,” he said, “and, yeah. I did that during training.”

  She didn’t blush. She didn’t look away from him. She just steadily returned his gaze, slightly lifting one exotic eyebrow. Frisco had the sense that she did, indeed, know exactly what he was thinking. Cold day in hell. She hadn’t said those exact words last night, but they echoed in his mind as clearly as if she had.

  It was just as well. He was having a pure, raw-sex reaction to her, but she wasn’t the pure, raw type. He couldn’t picture her climbing into his bed and then slipping away before dawn, no words spoken, only intense pleasure shared. No, once she got into his bed, she would never get out. She had “girlfriend” written all over her, and that was the last thing he needed. She would fill his apartment with flowers from her garden and endless conversation and little notes with smiley faces on them. She’d demand tender kisses and a clean bathroom and heart-to-heart revelations and a genuine interest in her life.

  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 t
his 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 personal 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.