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 staggered 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 door, “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.
Frisco had explained how the driver of the car Sharon had struck was badly hurt and in the hospital, but not dead. He didn’t go into detail about what would happen if the man were to die—she didn’t need to hear that. But he did try to explain what a detox center was, and why Sharon couldn’t leave the facility to visit Natasha, and why Tash couldn’t go there to visit her.
The kid had looked skeptical when Frisco told her that when Sharon came out of detox, she wouldn’t drink anymore. Frisco shook his head. A five-year-old cynic. What was the world coming to?
He took both his glass and the bottle back through the living room and outside onto the dimly lit landing. The sterile environment of air-conditioned sameness in his condo always got to him, particularly at this time of night. He took a deep breath of the humid, salty air, filling his lungs with the warm scent of the sea.
He sat down on the steps and took another sip of the whiskey. He willed it to make him relax, to put him to sleep, to carry him past these darkest, longest hours of the early morning. He silently cursed the fact that here it was, nearly 0300 again, and here he was, wide awake. He’d been so certain when he’d climbed into bed tonight that his exhaustion would carry him through and keep him sound asleep until the morning. He hadn’t counted on Tasha’s 0200 reveille. He drained his glass and poured himself another drink.
Mia’s door barely made a sound as it opened, but he heard it in the quiet. Still, he didn’t move as she came outside, and he didn’t speak until she stood at the railing, looking down at him.
“How long ago did your dog die?” he asked, keeping his voice low so as not to wake the other condo residents.
She stood very, very still for several long seconds. Finally she laughed softly and sat down next to him on the stairs. “About eight months ago,” she told him, her voice velvety in the darkness. “How did you know I had a dog?”
“Good guess,” he murmured.
“No, really… Tell me.”
“The pooper-scooper you lent me to clean up the mess in the courtyard was a major hint,” he said. “And your car had—how do I put this delicately?—a certain canine perfume.”
“Her name was Zu. She was about a million years old in dog years. I got her when I was eight.”
“Z-o-o?” Frisco asked.
“Z-u,” she said. “It was short for Zu-zu. I named her after a little girl in a movie—”
“It’s a Wonderful Life,” he said.
Mia gazed at him, surprised again. “You’ve seen it?”
He shrugged. “Hasn’t everybody?”
“Probably. But most people don’t remember the name of George Bailey’s youngest daughter.”
“It’s a personal favorite.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “Amazing that I should like it, huh? All of the war scenes in it are incidental.”
“I didn’t say that….”
“But you were thinking it.” Frisco took a sip of his drink. It was whiskey. Mia could smell the pungent scent from where she was sitting. “Sorry about your dog.”
“Thanks,” Mia said. She wrapped her arms around her knees. “I still miss her.”
“Too soon to get another, huh?” he said.
She nodded.
“What breed was she? No, let me guess.” He shifted slightly to face her. She could feel him studying her in the darkness, as if what he could see would help him figure out the answer.
She kept her eyes averted, suddenly afraid to look him in the eye. Why had she come out here? She didn’t usually make a habit of inviting disaster, and sitting in the dark a mere foot away from this man was asking for trouble.
“Part lab, part spaniel,” Frisco finally said, and she did look up.
“You’re half-right—although cocker
spaniel was the only part I could ever identify. Although sometimes I thought I saw a bit of golden retriever.” She paused. “How did you know she was a mix?”
He lowered his eyebrows in a look of mock incredulousness. “Like you’d ever get a dog from anywhere but the pound…? And probably from death row at the pound, too, right?”
She had to smile. “Okay, obviously you’ve figured me out completely. There’s no longer any mystery in our relationship—”
“Not quite. There’s one last thing I need you to clear up for me.”
He was smiling at her in the darkness, flirting with her, indulging in lighthearted banter. Mia would have been amazed, had she not learned by now that Alan Francisco was full of surprises.
“What are you doing still awake?” he asked.
“I could ask the same of you,” she countered.
“I’m recovering from my talk with Tasha.” He looked down into his glass, the light mood instantly broken. “I’m not sure I helped any. She’s pretty jaded when it comes to her mom.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “She has every right to be.”
Mia looked over toward Frisco’s condo. She could see the flicker of the television through a gap in the curtains. “She’s not still up, is she?”
He sighed, shaking his head no. “She needs the TV on to sleep. I wish I could find a solution to not sleeping that’s as easy.”
Mia looked down at the drink in his hand. “That’s probably not it.”
Frisco didn’t say anything—he just looked at her. To Mia’s credit, she didn’t say another word. She didn’t preach, didn’t chastise, didn’t lecture.
But after several long moments when he didn’t respond, she stood up.
“Good night,” she said.
He didn’t want her to leave. Oddly enough, the night wasn’t so damned oppressive when she was around. But he didn’t know what to say to make her stay. He could’ve told her that he wasn’t like Sharon, that he could stop drinking when and if he wanted to, but that would have sounded exactly like a problem drinker’s claim.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 57