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."
Exorcise? 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.
Chapter 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-pul-ley 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.
Man, whatever it was that they'd experienced back on the beach... He shook his head in disbelief. Whatever it was, he wanted some more. A whole lot of more. She'd looked at him, and he'd been caught in an amazing vortex of animal magnetism. He hadn't been able to resist touching her, hadn't been able to stop thinking about exactly where that droplet of perspiration had gone after it had disappeared from view beneath her shirt. It hadn't taken much imagination to picture it traveling slowly between her breasts, all the way down to her softly indented belly button.
He'd wanted to dive in after it.
It had been damn near enough to make him wonder if he'd seriously underrated smiley-face-endowed notes.
But he'd seen the shock in Mia's eyes. She hadn't expected the attraction that had surged between them. She didn't want it, didn't want him. Certainly not for a single, mind-blowing sexual encounter, and definitely not for anything longer term. That was no big surprise.
"I can't get it," Natasha called up to him, her face scrunched with worry.
Mia had kept to herself ever since they'd arrived home. Her offers to help had been noticeably absent. But now she stood up, apparently unable to ignore the note of anxiety in Tasha's voice.
"May I help you with that, Natasha?" She spoke directly to the little girl. She didn't even bother to look up at Frisco.
Frisco wiped the sweat from his face as he watched Tasha step back and Mia attach the hook to the plastic handles of the grocery bags. It had to be close to ninety degrees in the shade, but when Mia finally did glance up at him there was a definite wintry chill in the air.
She was trying her damnedest to act as if she had not even the slightest interest in him. Yet she'd spent the past hour and a half watching him. Why?
Maybe whatever this was that constantly drew his eyes in her direction, whatever this was that had made him hit his thumb with his hammer more times than he could count, whatever this was that made every muscle in his body tighten in anticipation when he so much as thought about her, whatever this uncontrollable sensation was—maybe she felt it, too.
It was lust and desire, amplified a thousandfold, mu
tated into something far more powerful.
He didn't want her. He didn't want the trouble, didn't want the hassle, didn't want the grief. And yet, at the same time, he wanted her desperately. He wanted her more than he'd ever wanted any woman before.
If he'd been the type to get frightened, he would've been terrified.
"We better stand back," Mia warned Tasha as Frisco began turning the crank.
It went up easily enough, the bag bulging and straining underneath the weight. But then, as if in slow motion, the bottom of the plastic bag gave out, and its contents went plummeting to the ground.
Frisco swore loudly as a six-pack shattered into pieces of brown glass, the beer mixing unappetizingly with cranberry juice from a broken half-gallon container, four flattened tomatoes and an avocado that never again would see the light of day. The loaf of Italian bread that had also been in the bag had, thankfully, bounced free and clear of the disaster.
Mia looked down at the wreckage, and then up at Alan Francisco. He'd cut short his litany of curses and stood silently, his mouth tight and his eyes filled with far more despair than the situation warranted.
But she knew he was seeing more than a mess on the courtyard sidewalk as he looked over the railing. She knew he was seeing his life, shattered as absolutely as those beer bottles.
Still he took a deep breath, and forced himself to smile down into Natasha's wide eyes.
"We're on the right track here," he said, lowering the rope again. "We're definitely very close to outrageous success." Using his cane, he started down the stairs. "How about we try double bagging? Or a paper bag inside of the plastic one?"
"How about cloth bags?" Mia suggested.
"Back away, Tash—that's broken glass," Alan called warningly. "Yeah, cloth bags would work, but I don't have any."
Alan, Mia thought. When had he become Alan instead of Francisco? Was it when he looked down at his niece and made himself smile despite his pain, or was it earlier, at the beach parking lot, when he'd nearly lit Mia on fire with a single look?
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 did 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 gun 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 was 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.
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