Mia caught it, but she didn’t move. “Alan…”
His back was to her as he searched his closet, pulling out a worn olive drab army fatigue shirt, its sleeves cut short, the ends fraying. He pulled it on. It was loose and he kept it mostly unbuttoned. It concealed his gun, but still allowed him access to it. He could get to it if he needed it when he “dealt with Dwayne.” Unless, of course, Dwayne got to his own gun first. Fear tightened Mia’s throat.
He turned to face her. “Come on, Mia. Please. And then go pack some of your own things.”
She felt a flash of annoyance, hotter and sharper than the fear. “It’s funny, I don’t recall your asking me to come along with you. You haven’t even told me where you’re going.”
“Lucky has a cabin in the hills about forty miles east of San Felipe. I’m going to call him, see if we can use his place for a few days.”
Lucky. From Frisco’s former SEAL unit. He was Frisco’s friend—no, they were more than just friends, they were…what did they call it? Swim buddies.
“I’m asking for your help here,” he continued, quietly. “I need you to come along to take care of Tash while I—”
“Deal with Dwayne,” she finished for him with exasperation. “You know I’ll help you, Alan. But I’m not sure I’m willing to go hide at some cabin.” She shook her head. “Why don’t we find someplace safe for Tasha to go? We could…I don’t know, maybe drive her down to my mother’s. Then I could come with you when you go to see Dwayne.”
“No. No way. Absolutely not.”
Her temper flared. “I don’t want you to do this alone.”
He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “What, do you really think you’re gonna keep Dwayne from trying to kick my butt again? Are you going to lecture him on nonviolence? Or maybe you’ll try to use positive reinforcement to teach him manners, huh?”
Mia felt her face flush. “No, I—”
“Dwayne Bell is one mean son of a bitch,” Frisco told her. “He doesn’t belong in your world—and you don’t belong in his. And I intend to keep it that way.”
She folded her arms across her chest, holding her elbows tightly so he wouldn’t see that her hands were shaking with anger. “And which of those worlds do you belong in?”
He was quiet for a moment. “Neither,” he finally said, unable to look her in the eye. “I’m stuck here in limbo, remember?”
Positive reinforcement. To use positive reinforcement to award positive behavior meant being as consistently blasé as possible when negative behavior occurred. Mia closed her eyes for a moment, willing herself not to fall prey to her anger and lash out at him. She wanted to shake some sense into him. She wanted to shout that this limbo he found himself in was only imagined. She wanted to hold him close until he healed, until he realized that he didn’t need a miracle to be whole again—that he could be whole even if his knee gave out and he never walked another step again.
Wallowing in despair wouldn’t do him a damn bit of good. And neither would her yelling at or shaking or even comforting him. Instead, she kept her voice carefully emotionless. “Well,” she said, starting for the door with the duffel bag he’d tossed her. “I’ll get Tasha’s stuff.” She turned back to him almost as an afterthought, as if what she was about to say to him didn’t matter so much that she was almost shaking. “Oh, and when you call Lucky to ask about the cabin, it would be smart to tell him about all this, don’t you think? He could go with you when you find Dwayne. He could watch your back, and he probably wouldn’t resort to lectures on nonviolence as means of defense.” She forced herself to smile, and was surprised to find she actually could. His insult had been right on target—and it wasn’t entirely unamusing.
“Mia, I’m sorry I said that.”
“Apology accepted—or at least it will be if you call Lucky.”
“Yeah,” Frisco said. “I’ll do that. And I’ll…” It took him a great deal of effort to say it, but he did. “I’ll ask him for help.”
He was going to ask for help. Thank God. Mia wanted to take one of the colorful medals from his dress uniform and pin it on to his T-shirt. Instead, she simply nodded.
“Then I’ll stay with Tasha at Lucky’s cabin,” she said, and left the room.
13
Natasha pushed open the cabin’s screen door, but then stopped, looking back at Frisco, who was elbow deep in dinner’s soapy dishes. “Can I go outside?”
He nodded. “Yeah, but stay on the porch. It’s getting dark.” She was out the door in a flash, and he shouted after her, “Hey, Tash?”
She pressed her nose against the screen, peering in at him.
“Good job remembering to ask,” he said.
She beamed at him and vanished.
He looked up to find Mia watching him. She was sitting on the couch, a book in her lap, a small smile playing about the corners of her mouth.
“Good job remembering to praise her,” she told him.
“She’s starting to catch on.”
“Sure you don’t want me to help over there?” she asked.
Frisco shook his head. “You cooked, I clean. It’s only fair.”
They’d arrived at Lucky’s cabin just before dinnertime. It had been close to six years since Frisco had been up here, but the place looked almost exactly the same.
The cabin wasn’t very big by any standards—just a living room with a fireplace and a separate kitchen area, two small bedrooms—one in the back, the other off the living room, and an extremely functional bathroom with only cold running water.
Lucky kept the place stocked with canned and dried goods—and enough beer and whiskey to sink a ship. Mia hadn’t said a word about it, but Frisco knew she wondered about the temptation. She still didn’t quite believe that alcohol wasn’t a problem for him. But he’d been up here dozens of times with Lucky and some of the other guys from Alpha Squad, and he’d had cola while they made short work of a bottle of whiskey and a six pack of beer.
Still, he knew that she trusted him.
This afternoon, she’d followed his directions without so much as a questioning look as he’d asked her to leave the narrow back road and pull her car onto what was little more than a dirt path. They’d already been off the highway for what seemed like forever, and the dirt road wound another five miles without a sign of civilization before they reached an even smaller road that led to Lucky’s cabin.
It was, definitely, in the middle of nowhere.
That made it perfect for SEAL training exercises. There was a lake not five hundred yards from the front porch, and countless acres of brush and wilderness surrounding the place.
It was a perfect hideout, too. There was no way on earth Dwayne Bell would find them here.
“How’s your knee?”
Frisco glanced up to find that Mia had come to lean against the icebox, watching as he finished scouring the bottom of the pasta pot. He rinsed the suds from the pot by dunking it in a basin of clear, hot water, nodding his reply. “It’s…improved,” he told her. “It’s been about eight hours since I’ve had to use the painkiller, and…” He glanced at her again. “I’m not about to start running laps, but I’m not in agony, either.”
Mia nodded. “Good.” She hesitated slightly, and he knew what was coming.
“When you spoke to Lucky…”
He carefully balanced the pot in the dish drain, on top of all the others. He knew what she wanted to know. “I’m meeting him tomorrow night,” he said quietly. “Along with a couple other guys from Alpha Squad. The plan is for Thomas to come up in the afternoon and give me a lift back into San Felipe. You and Tash will hang out here.”
“And what happens when you actually find Dwayne?”
He released the water from the sink and dried his hands and arms on a dish towel, turning to look down into her eyes. “I’m going to give him a thousand bucks and inform him that the other four thousand Sharon owes him covers the damages he caused by breaking into my condo. I intend to tell him that there�
�s no amount of money in the world that would make retribution for the way he hit Natasha before she and Sharon moved out, and he’s damned lucky that I’m not going to break him in half for doing that. I’m also going to convince him that if he so much as comes near Tash or Sharon or anyone else I care about, I will hunt him down and make him wish that he was dead.”
Mia’s eyes were wide. “And you really think that will work?”
Frisco couldn’t resist reaching out and touching the side of her face. Her skin was so deliciously soft beneath his fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think it’ll work. By giving Dwayne some money—a substantial amount of money, despite the fact that it’s only a fifth of what Sharon took—he doesn’t walk away with nothing. He saves face.” He paused. Unless this situation was more complicated than that. Unless there was something that Sharon hadn’t told him, something she hadn’t been quite honest about. But Mia probably didn’t need to know that he was having doubts.
Unfortunately, she read his hesitation accurately. “What?” she asked, her gaze searching his face. “You were going to say more, weren’t you?”
He wanted to pull her close, to breathe in the sweet scent of her clean hair and luxuriate in the softness of her body pressed against his. He wanted that, but he couldn’t risk touching her again. Even the sensation of her smooth cheek beneath his fingers had been enough to ignite the desire he felt whenever she was near—hell, whenever he so much as thought about her. If he pulled her into his arms, he would kiss her. And if he kissed her, he wouldn’t want to stop.
“I got the sense Sharon wasn’t one-hundred-percent honest with me,” he finally admitted. Mia had been straightforward with him up to this point, sometimes painfully so. He respected her enough to return the favor. “I don’t know—maybe I’m just being paranoid, but when I find Dwayne, I’m going to be ready for anything.”
Mia’s gaze dropped to his chest, to that hidden place near his left arm where his sidearm was snugly ensconced in his shoulder holster. Frisco knew exactly what she was thinking. He was going to go meet Dwayne with that weapon Mia disliked so intensely tucked under his arm. And it was that weapon that would help make him ready for anything.
She looked up at him. “Are you going to take that thing off when we make love tonight?”
When we make love tonight. Not if. When. Frisco felt the hot spiral of anticipation. Man, he’d hoped, but he hadn’t wanted to assume. It was fine with him, though, if she wanted to assume that they were going to share a bed again tonight. It was more than fine.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice husky. “I’ll take it off.”
“Good.” She held his gaze and the air seemed to crackle around them.
He wanted to reach for her, to hold her, kiss her. He could feel his body’s reaction to her nearness, to the soft curve of her lips, to the awareness in her eyes.
He wanted Mia now, but that wasn’t an option—not with Tasha out sitting on the porch swing, rocking and singing a little song to herself. He tried to calculate the earliest he could get away with putting Tash to bed, tried to figure how long it would take her to fall asleep. Twilight was falling, and the cabin was already shadowy and dark. Even with no electricity, no bright lights and TV to distract the little girl, he had to guess it would be another hour at least before she’d agree to go to bed, another half hour after that before she was asleep.
He tried to glance surreptitiously at his watch, but Mia noticed and smiled. She didn’t say a word, but he knew she was aware of everything he’d been thinking.
“Do you know where Lucky keeps the candles?” she asked, stepping away from him. “It’s starting to get pretty dark.”
He gestured with his head as he positioned his crutches under his arms. “In the cabinet next to the fireplace. And there’s a kerosene lantern around here somewhere.”
“Candles will be fine,” Mia said, crossing to the cabinet. She threw him a very sexy smile over her shoulder. “I like candlelight, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Frisco agreed, trying not to let his thoughts drift in the direction of candlelight and that big double bed in the other room. This next hour and a half was going to be the longest hour and a half of his entire life if he started thinking about Mia, with her long dark hair and her gorgeous, luminous eyes, tumbled onto that bed, candlelight gleaming on her satin smooth skin.
Mia found a box of matches on the fireplace mantel, well out of Tasha’s reach, and lit one candle after another, placing them around the room. She looked otherworldly with the flickering candles sending shadows and light dancing across her high cheekbones, her full, graceful lips and her exotically tilted eyes. Her cutoff shorts were threadbare denim, and they hugged her backside sinfully snugly. Her hair was up in a braid. Frisco moved toward her, itching to unfasten it, to run his fingers through her silken hair, longing to see her smile, to hear her laughter, to bury himself in her sweetness and then hold her in his arms all night long. He hadn’t had a chance to do that after they’d made love in the early hours of the morning, and now he found he wanted that more than he could believe.
She glanced at him again, but then couldn’t look away, trapped for a moment by the need he knew was in his eyes.
“Maybe candlelight isn’t such a good idea,” she whispered. “Because if you keep looking at me like that I’m going to…”
“Oh, I hope so.” Frisco moved closer, enough to take the candle from her hand and set it down on the fireplace mantel. “Whatever you’re thinking about doing—I hope so.”
Mia’s heart was hammering. Lord, when he looked at her with such desire in his eyes, every nerve ending in her body went on red alert. He touched her lightly, brushing his thumb across her lips and she felt herself sway toward him, but he dropped his hand. She knew she shouldn’t kiss him—not here, not now. Natasha was outside and she could come in at any moment.
She could read the same thoughts in Frisco’s dark blue eyes. But instead of backing away as she’d expected, he lowered his head and kissed her anyway.
He tasted seductively sweet, like the fresh peaches they’d picked up at a local farm stand and sampled after dinner. It was a hard kiss, a passionate kiss, despite the fact that he kept both hands securely on the grips of his crutches, despite that the only place he touched her was her lips.
It was more than enough.
For now, anyway.
He pulled back and she found herself gazing into eyes the color of blue fire. And then she found herself reaching up, pulling his incredible lips down to hers again. She was wrong. Once was not enough.
“Are you gonna kiss again?”
Mia sprang away from Frisco as if she’d been burned.
She turned to see Natasha standing in the doorway, watching them. How long the child had been there, she couldn’t begin to guess. She felt her cheeks flush.
Frisco smiled at Tasha. If he were the least bit perturbed, he was hiding it well. “Not right now.”
“Later?”
His gaze flickered to Mia, and she could see genuine amusement lurking there. “I hope so.”
Natasha considered this, head tilted to one side. “Thomas said if you broke Mia’s heart, he was gonna kick you in the bottom.” She sat down haughtily on the couch—the perfect Russian princess. “He really said something else, but I don’t say bad words.”
The muscles in the side of Frisco’s face twitched, but somehow he managed to hide his smile. “Well, Thomas and you don’t have to worry. I have no intention of—”
“I made you a medal,” Tash told him. “For not saying bad words, too. And for not drinking that smelly stuff,” she added, almost as an afterthought, wrinkling her nose. She looked up at Mia. “Can I give it to him now?”
“Oh, Tasha, I’m afraid we left it back in my living room. I’m sorry…”
“It’s beautiful,” Tasha told Frisco, completely seriously. “You can have it when we go back. I’ll give you the salute now, though, okay?”
“Sure…”
T
he little girl stood up and snapped off a military salute that would have impressed the meanest, toughest drill sergeant.
“Thanks, Tash.” Frisco’s voice was husky.
“Dwayne kissed Mommy and gave her a broke heart instead of getting married,” she told them. “Are you going to get married?”
Frisco was no longer unperturbed. “Whoa, Tash, didn’t we have this conversation already? And didn’t we—”
“I would rather have a broke heart than Dwayne for a daddy,” Tasha announced. “Why is it dark in here? Why don’t we turn the lights on?”
“Remember that I told you there wasn’t any electricity up here?”
“Does that mean that the lights are broke?”
Frisco hesitated. “It’s kind of like that—”
“Is the TV broke, too?”
The little girl was looking up at Frisco, her eyes wide with horror. Frisco looked back at her, his mouth slightly open. “Oh, damn,” he said, breaking her rule.
“Sweetie, there is no television up here,” Mia said.
Natasha looked as if the end of the world were near, and Frisco’s expression was nearly identical.
“I can’t fall asleep without the TV on,” Tasha whispered.
Frisco forced himself not to overreact as he went into Tash’s bedroom for the third time in less than a half an hour. Yes, he’d seen Tasha in action on the night he’d accidentally turned off the TV set. She clearly depended on the damned thing to provide soothing background noise and light. She found it comforting, dependable and consistent. Wherever she’d been before this in her short life, there’d always been a television.
But she was a five-year-old. Sooner or later, exhaustion would win and she’d fall asleep. True, he’d hoped it would be sooner, but that was life. He’d have to wait a few more hours before Mia was in his arms. It wasn’t that big a deal.
At least that’s what he tried to convince himself.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Part 1 Page 68
