Frisco reached up with one hand to rub his neck. “Here’s a baldly honest truth for you, then—and it’s true whether it’s 0430 or high noon. Like I said before, I’m not drinking anymore.”
She was watching him, her hazel eyes studying him, looking for what, he didn’t know. He had the urge to turn away or to cover his face, afraid that somehow she’d be able to see the telltale signs of his recent tears. But instead, he forced himself to hold her gaze.
“I can’t believe you can just quit,” she finally said. “Just like that. I mean, I look at you, and I can tell that you’re sober, but…”
“The night we met, you didn’t exactly catch me at my best. I was…celebrating my discharge from the Navy—toasting their lack of faith in me.” He reached forward, picked up his mug of tea and took a sip. It was too hot and it burned all the way down. “I told you—I don’t make a habit out of drinking too much. I’m not like Sharon. Or my father. Man, he was a bastard. He had two moods—drunk and angry, and hung over and angry. Either way, my brothers and Sharon and I learned to stay out of his way. Sometimes one of us would end up in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then we’d get hit. We used to sit around for hours thinking up excuses to tell our friends about where we got all our black eyes and bruises.” He snorted. “As if any of our friends didn’t know exactly what was going on. Most of them were living the same bad dream.
“You know, I used to pretend he wasn’t really my father. I came up with this story about how I was some kind of mercreature that had gotten tangled in his nets one day when he was out in the fishing boat.”
Mia smiled. “Like Tasha pretending she’s a Russian princess.”
Her smile was hypnotizing. Frisco could think of little but the way her lips had felt against his, and how much he wanted to feel that sweet sensation again. He resisted the urge to reach out and touch the side of her beautiful face. She looked away from him, her smile fading, suddenly shy, as if she knew what he was thinking.
“So there I was,” Frisco continued with his story, “ten years old and living with this nightmare of a home life. It was that year—the year I was in fourth grade—that I started riding my bike for hours on end just to get out of the house.”
She was listening to him, staring intently into her mug as if it held the answers to all of her questions. She’d kicked off her sneakers and they lay on their side on the floor in front of her. Her slender legs were tucked up beneath her on the couch, tantalizingly smooth and golden tan. She was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt over her cutoffs. She’d had it zipped up at the hospital, but at some point since they’d returned home, she’d unzipped it. The shirt she wore underneath was white and loose, with a small ruffle at the top.
It was her nightgown, Frisco realized. She’d simply thrown her clothes on over her nightgown, tucking it into her shorts and covering it with her sweatshirt.
She glanced up at him, waiting for him to continue.
Frisco cleared the sudden lump of desire from his throat and went on. “One day I rode my bike a few miles down the coast, to one of the beaches where the SEALs do a lot of their training exercises. It was just amazing to watch these guys.” He smiled, remembering how he’d thought the SEALs were crazy that first time he’d seen them on the beach. “They were always wet. Whatever they were doing, whatever the weather, the instructors always ran ’em into the surf first and got ’em soaked. Then they’d crawl across the beach on their bellies and get coated with sand—it’d get all over their faces, in their hair, everywhere. And then they’d run ten miles up and down the beach. They looked amazing—to a ten-year-old it was pretty funny. But even though I was just a kid, I could see past the slapstick. I knew that whatever they were going to get by doing all these endless, excruciating endurance tests, it had to be pretty damn good.”
Mia had turned slightly to face him on the couch. Maybe it was because he knew she was wearing her nightgown under her clothes, or maybe it was the dark, dangerous hour of the night, but she looked like some kind of incredible fantasy sitting there like that. Taking her into his arms and making love to her would be a blissful, temporary escape from all of his pain and frustration.
He knew without a shadow of a doubt that one kiss would melt away all of her caution and reserve. Yes, she was a nice girl. Yes, she wanted more than sex. She wanted love. But even nice girls felt the pull of hot, sweet desire. He could show her—and convince her with one single kiss—that sometimes pure sex for the sake of pleasure and passion was enough.
But oddly enough, he wanted more from this woman than the hot satisfaction of a sexual release. Oddly enough, he wanted her to understand how he felt—his frustration, his anger, his darkest fear.
Try, she’d said. Try to make her understand.
He was trying.
“I started riding to the naval base all the time,” he continued, forcing himself to focus on her wide green eyes rather than the soft smoothness of her thighs. “I started hanging out down there. I snuck into this local dive where a lot of the off-duty sailors went, just so I could listen to their stories. The SEALs didn’t come in too often, but when they did, man, they got a hell of a lot of respect. A hell of a lot of respect—from both the enlisted men and the officers. They had this aura of greatness about them, and I was convinced, along with the rest of the Navy, that these guys were gods.
“I watched ’em every chance I could get, and I noticed that even though most of the SEALs didn’t dress in uniform, they all had this pin they wore. They called it a Budweiser—it was an eagle with a submachine gun in one claw and a trident in the other. I found out they got that pin after they went through a grueling basic training session called BUD/S. Most guys didn’t make it through BUD/S, and some classes even had a ninety-percent dropout rate. The program was weeks and weeks of organized torture, and only the men who stayed in to the end got that pin and became SEALs.”
Mia was still watching him as if he were telling her the most fascinating story in all of the world, so he continued.
“So one day,” Frisco told her, “a few days before my twelfth birthday, I saw these SEALs-in-training bring their IBSs—their little inflatable boats—in for a landing on the rocks over by the Coronado Hotel. It was toward the end of the first phase of BUD/S. That week’s called Hell Week, because it is truly hell. They were exhausted, I could see it in their faces and in the way they were sitting in those boats. I was sure they were all going to die. Have you seen the rocks over there?”
She shook her head, no.
“They’re deadly. Jagged. And the surf is always rough—not a good combination. But I saw these guys put their heads down and do it. They could’ve died—men have died doing that training exercise.
“All around me, I could hear the tourists and the civilian onlookers making all this noise, wondering aloud why these men were risking their lives like that when they could be regular sailors, in the regular Navy, and not have to put themselves in that kind of danger.”
Frisco leaned closer to Mia, willing her to understand. “And I stood there—I was just a kid—but I knew. I knew why. If these guys made it through, they were going to be SEALs. They were going to get that pin, and they were going to be able to walk into any military base in the world and get automatic respect. And even better than that, they would have self-respect. You know that old saying, ‘Wherever you go, there you are’? Well, I knew that wherever they went, at least one man would respect them, and that man’s respect was the most important of all.”
Mia gazed back at Frisco, unable to look away. She could picture him as that little boy, cheeks smooth, slight of frame and wire thin, but with these same intense blue eyes, impossibly wise beyond his tender years. She could picture him escaping from an awful childhood and an abusive father, searching for a place to belong, a place to feel safe, a place where he could learn to like himself, a place where he’d be respected—by others and himself.
He’d found his place with the SEALs.
“That wa
s when I knew I was going to be a SEAL,” he told her quietly but no less intensely. “And from that day on, I respected myself even though no one else did. I stuck it out at home another six years. I made it all the way through high school because I knew I needed that diploma. But the day I graduated, I enlisted in the Navy. And I made it. I did it. I got through BUD/S, and I landed my IBS on those rocks in Coronado.
“And I got that pin.”
He looked away from her, staring sightlessly down at his injured knee, at the bruises and the swelling and the countless crisscrossing of scars. Mia’s heart was in her throat as she watched him. He’d told her all this to make her understand, and she did understand. She knew what he was going to say next, and even as yet unspoken, his words made her ache.
“I always thought that by becoming a SEAL, I escaped from my life—you know, the way my life should have turned out. I should’ve been killed in a car accident like my brother Rob was. He was DUI, and he hit a pole. Or else I should’ve got my high school girlfriend pregnant like Danny did. I should have been married with a wife and child to support at age seventeen, working for the same fishing fleet that my father worked for, following in the old bastard’s footsteps. I always sort of thought by joining the Navy and becoming a SEAL, I cheated destiny.
“But now look at me. I’m back in San Felipe. And for a couple nights there, I was doing a damned good imitation of my old man. Drink ’til you drop, ’til you feel no pain.”
Mia had tears in her eyes, and when Frisco glanced at her, she saw that his jaw was tight, and his eyes were damp, too. He turned his head away. It was a few moments before he spoke again, and when he finally did, his voice was steady but impossibly sad.
“Ever since I was injured,” he said softly, “I feel like I’ve slipped back into that nightmare that used to be my life. I’m not a SEAL anymore. I lost that, it’s gone. I don’t know who I am, Mia—I’m some guy who’s less than whole, who’s just kind of floating around.” He shook his head. “All I know for sure is that my self-respect is gone, too.”
He turned to her, no longer caring if she saw that his eyes were filled with tears. “That’s why I’ve got to get it all back. That’s why I’ve got to be able to run and jump and dive and do all those things on that list.” He wiped roughly at his eyes with the back of one hand, refusing to give in to the emotion that threatened to overpower him. “I want it back. I want to be whole again.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MIA COULDN’T HELP herself. She reached for Frisco.
How could she keep her distance while her heart was aching for this man?
But he caught her hand before she could touch the side of his face. “You don’t want this,” he said quietly, his eyes searching as he gazed at her. “Remember?”
“Maybe we both need each other a little bit more than I thought,” she whispered.
He forced his mouth up into one of his heartbreakingly poignant half smiles. “Mia, you don’t need me.”
“Yes, I do,” Mia said, and almost to her surprise, her words were true. She did need him. Desperately. She had tried. She had honestly tried not to care for this man, this soldier. She’d tried to remain distant, aloof, unfeeling, but somehow over the past few days, he had penetrated all of her defenses and gained possession of her heart.
His eyes looked so sad, so soft and gentle. All of his anger was gone, and Mia knew that once again she was seeing the man that he had been—the man all of his pain and bitterness had made him forget how to be.
He could be that man again. He was still that man. He simply needed to stop basing his entire future happiness on attaining the unattainable. She couldn’t do that for him. He’d have to do it for himself. But she could be with him now, tonight, and help him remember that he wasn’t alone.
“I can’t give you what you want,” he said huskily. “I know it matters to you.”
Love. He was talking about love.
“That makes us even.” Mia gently freed her hand from his, and touched the side of his face. He hadn’t shaved in at least a day, and his cheeks and chin were rough, but she didn’t care. She didn’t care if he loved her, either. “Because I can’t give you what you want.”
She couldn’t give him the power to become a SEAL again. But if she could have, she would.
She leaned forward and kissed him. It was a light kiss, just a gentle brushing of her lips against his.
Frisco didn’t move. He didn’t respond. She leaned forward to kiss him again, and he stopped her with one hand against her shoulder.
She was kneeling next to him on the couch, and he looked down at her legs, at the soft cotton of her nightgown revealed by her unzipped sweatshirt and finally into her eyes. “You’re playing with fire,” he said quietly. “There may be an awful lot of things that I can’t do anymore, but making love to a beautiful woman isn’t one of them.”
“Maybe we should start a new list. Things you can still do. You could put ‘making love’ right on the top.”
“Mia, you better go—”
She kissed him again, and again he pulled back. “Dammit, you told me—”
She kissed him harder this time, slipping her arms up around his neck and parting his lips with her tongue. He froze, and she knew that he hadn’t expected her to be so bold—not in a million years.
His hesitation lasted only the briefest of moments before he pulled her close, before he wrapped her in his arms and nearly crushed her against the hard muscles of his chest.
And then he was kissing her, too.
Wildly, fiercely, he was kissing her, his hot mouth gaining possession of hers, his tongue claiming hers with a breathtaking urgency.
It didn’t seem possible. She had only kissed him once before, on the beach, yet his mouth tasted sweetly familiar and kissing him was like coming home.
Mia felt his hands on her back, sweeping up underneath her sweatshirt and down to the curve of her bottom, pulling her closer, seeking the smooth bareness of her legs. He shifted her weight toward him, pulling her over and on top of him, so that she was straddling his lap as still they kissed.
Her fingers were deep in his hair. It was incredibly, decadently soft. She would have liked to spend the entire rest of her life right there, kissing Alan Francisco and running her hands through his beautiful golden hair. It was all she needed, all she would ever need.
And then he shifted his hips and she felt the hardness of his arousal pressing up against her and she knew she was wrong. She both needed and wanted more.
He pulled at her sweatshirt, pushing it off her shoulders and down her arms. He tugged her nightgown free from the top of her shorts, and she heard herself moan as his work-roughened hands glided up and across the bare skin of her back. And then he pulled away from her, breathing hard.
“Mia.” His lean, handsome face was taut with frustration. “I want to pick you up and take you to my bed.” But he couldn’t. He couldn’t carry her. Not on crutches, not even with a cane.
This was not the time for him to be thinking about things he couldn’t do. Mia climbed off of him, slipping out of his grasp. “Why don’t we synchronize watches and plan to rendezvous there in, say…” She pretended to look at an imaginary watch on her wrist. “Oh two minutes?”
His face relaxed into a smile, but the tension didn’t leave his eyes. “You don’t need to say ‘oh.’ You could say 0430, but two minutes is just two minutes.”
“I know that,” Mia said. “I just wanted to make you smile. If that hadn’t worked, I would have tried this….” She slowly pulled her nightgown up and over her head, dropping it down into his lap.
But Frisco’s smile disappeared. He looked up at her, his gaze devouring her bare breasts, heat and hunger in his eyes.
Mia was amazed. She was standing half-naked in front of this man that she had only known for a handful of days. He was a soldier, a fighter who had been trained to make war in more ways than she could probably imagine. He was the toughest, hardest man she’d ever met, yet i
n many ways he was also the most vulnerable. He’d trusted her enough to share some of his secrets with her, to let her see into his soul. In comparison, revealing her body to him seemed almost insignificant.
And she could stand here like this, she realized, without a blush and with such certainty, because she was absolutely convinced that loving this man was the right thing to do. She’d never made love to a man before without a sense of unease, without being troubled by doubts. But she’d never met a man like Alan Francisco—a man who seemed so different from her, yet who could look into her eyes, and with just a word or a touch, make her feel so totally connected to him, so instantly in tune.
Mia had never considered herself an exhibitionist before, but then again, no one had ever looked at her the way Frisco did. She felt her body tighten with anticipation under the scalding heat of his gaze. It was seductive, the way he looked at her—and nearly as pleasurable as a caress.
She reached up, slowly and deliberately, taking her time as she unfastened her ponytail, letting him watch her as she loosened her long hair around her shoulders, enjoying the sensation of his eyes on her body.
“You’re not smiling,” she whispered.
“Believe me, I’m smiling inside.”
And then he did smile. It was half crooked and half sad. It was filled with doubt and disbelief, laced with wonder and anticipation. As she gazed into his eyes, Mia could see the first glimmer of hope. And she felt herself falling. She knew in that single instant that she was falling hopelessly and totally in love with this man.
Afraid he’d see her feelings in her eyes, she picked up her sweatshirt from the floor and turned, moving quickly down the hall to his bedroom. To his bed.
Frisco wasn’t far behind, but she heard him stop at Natasha’s room and go inside to check on the little girl.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 65