All a Man Can Ask

by Virginia Kantra

  Faye ached inside. “Well… If you’re defeated—like an army, you know?—you can sometimes retreat and, and regroup and go back to the fight.”

  “Is that what you’re going to do?”

  She thought about it. Unbidden, Aleksy’s comment came back to her. I bet you were a hell of a teacher.

  “Yes,” she decided. A huge weight lifted from her chest. The relief of it made her almost dizzy. “Yes, I am. What about you?”

  He shook his head. “They won’t let me take that scholarship, Harp. I’m the first kid ever in my family to have a shot at college. Mama doesn’t want me to throw that away. And Ron says if I’m not going to get a job, I’ve got to study something practical.”

  “Then we’ll sit down with your mother and Ron and the guidance counselor and find a middle way. There have got to be schools that offer both business and art.”

  “That doesn’t help me this year. I’ve still got to choose electives. And if I take all the college prep courses, there’s no time for art.”

  The fact that he was even considering his options was encouraging.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Faye said. “You agree to some kind of treatment program, and I’ll give you lessons after school, anytime, for free.”

  He looked away. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  She tried to take hope from that.

  And the gray wash worked. The clouds breathed and brooded over a fluid landscape.

  Faye took a step back to study her painting. She actually liked the movement of the sky and the pattern of the water. And that boat in the corner, with its sails half unfurled, ready to lift to the wind and go—

  Aleksy spoke suddenly behind her and her heart gave a wild, undisciplined leap. “Jarek said there are a bunch of boats coming into the marina. For some kind of race this weekend. Want to go down, grab an ice cream, take a look?”

  She turned to glare, which was hard to pull off while her pulse was pounding in a so-glad-to-see-you rhythm.

  What was with him? What did he want? After avoiding her all morning, he expected her to drop everything and go with him into town?

  “Why?” she asked baldly. “Do you need cover to go look at the boats?”

  His brows drew together. “I might have an interest in the boats.” He nodded toward her painting. “I thought you might, too.”

  She was stunned. Disarmed. Confused.

  She ran her fingers through her hair. “I don’t need to look at a lot of boats to paint this one. I have photographs.”

  He caught her hand and linked his fingers with hers. “Then come for the ice cream.”

  He smiled at her and her insides melted and her day went all yellow, like that scene in South Pacific shot through a colored lens.

  Aleksy raised his voice. “Hey, Jamal!”

  “He’s sleeping,” Faye said, still thawing but fighting it. “What?” the boy yelled back groggily from his bedroom

  “We’re going into town.”

  “Have fun.”

  “You’re coming with us.”

  Faye tried to find a thought in the puddle her mind had become. “Is that a good idea? He needs his sleep.”

  Aleksy slanted a look down at her. “Better if he sleeps at night.”

  Her breath caught. “Better for who?”

  Jamal shuffled into the room, scowling. “Why do I have to come? You trying to keep tabs on me?”

  “No,” Aleksy said. “I really want a chaperone along on our date.”

  “It’s not a date,” Faye said.

  They didn’t date, she thought with a twist of heart.

  They had sex on the dock.

  But later, ambling down Harbor Street under the flags and the awnings, with the tourists browsing the windows and the local skateboarders jumping the curbs, she had to admit it felt like a date. The kind of date other people seemed to have, the kind that belonged between the covers of a romance novel.

  Aleksy waited for her while she stopped in the drugstore and the camera shop. He bought her a blueberry ice cream from the Rose Farms Café. He held her hand.

  It was wonderful. Surreal.

  “I feel like a white guy in a P. Diddy video,” Jamal grumbled behind them. “I thought the lady in the ice-cream store was going to ask me for ID.”

  “If you wanted to mess with her mind, you could have ordered vanilla,” Aleksy said.

  Faye counted one heartbeat, two, and then Jamal laughed.

  “Rocky Road, man,” he said. “I’m all about nuts and chocolate.”

  Faye let herself hope. He was eating again. He was laughing again. Maybe, in time, he would make a recovery. Maybe, in time, she could…

  Oops. The sun burned the top of her head and melted the ice cream in her hand. She stopped on the sidewalk to chase the drip with her tongue.

  “Well, isn’t that a pretty sight.”

  Richard Freer smiled from the entrance to his shop. A huge American flag hung in the window behind the “Liberty” sign. Both the glass and his shoes were polished.

  Faye never knew what to do with comments like that, the ones that left you violated and wondering. Was he being deliberately offensive? Or was she overreacting?

  She forced herself to smile back. “Hi, Richard.”

  “Enjoying your ice cream?”

  Aleksy inserted his shoulder between them. “We were just on our way down to the marina.”

  “I didn’t know you were a boat person.”

  “She isn’t,” Aleksy answered shortly.

  Faye appreciated his support but she didn’t want any awkwardness spoiling their afternoon. “I had a few errands to run,” she said lightly.

  “Good for you. Support the local businesses, I always say.” Richard switched his attention to Aleksy. “You haven’t been in to see those handguns.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “You ought to take a look. I’ve got a couple of .38s that would probably suit you.”

  “Another time.”

  “Sure. Anytime.” Richard looked Faye up and down. “I can see you’re busy.”

  Aleksy took her arm. “Well, it’s been swell, but we’ve got to go now.”

  He steered Faye down the sidewalk. Classic territorial male behavior, she thought, and wasn’t sure if she were miffed or flattered.

  “Wherever we’re going better have some place to sit down,” Jamal said.

  Aleksy turned to look at him. “Where were you a minute ago?”

  Jamal shrugged. “Around. Old white guys with guns make me nervous.”

  “Yeah,” Aleksy said grimly. “Me, too.”

  Faye tripped as realization struck. “Is he the one?”

  Aleksy tightened his grip on her elbow. “Watch your step.”

  She shook free. She should have seen it before, she thought. If she hadn’t been so eager to avoid involvement, so worried about Jamal, so blindsided by lust, she would have seen it before. But Richard Freer…he knew her aunt, for heaven’s sake.

  She craned her neck to look back at him. “What did he do?”

  Aleksy propelled her to the end of the street. “Not here,” he said.

  That made sense. Reluctantly she gave up looking over her shoulder.

  The road dead-ended at Front Street. A strip of park no more than a few yards wide separated the street from the boardwalk. Beyond the faded grass and a granite slab inscribed with the names of the town’s war dead, boats bobbed at their moorings. Gulls wheeled and cried over the open water. Faye lifted her face to the breeze.

  “Hey, there’s a bench,” said Jamal.

  Faye looked him over with a teacher’s experienced eye. He was doing much better today. Still, his face gleamed with sweat. And he’d gone fishing this morning. Maybe it would be better if he—

  “Why don’t you sit down?” she said.

  “Yeah. Maybe I’ll do that.”

  She watched him cross to the bench and then turned on Aleksy. “Now you can tell me what’s going on.”

  �
�Did you know you have ice cream on your hand?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  He removed the drugstore bag and the camera shop bag from her grasp and tucked them under his arm. Catching the hand that held her ice-cream cone, he brought it to his lips. “Here,” he said. His warm mouth sucked gently at the base of her thumb. “And here.”

  His tongue dabbed between her fingers. Her system jolted. Her breathing hitched.

  “Don’t try to distract me,” she said.

  His dark eyes watched her over their clasped hands. “Is it working?”

  Too well.

  “Not at all,” she said crossly.

  He released her hand. “Can’t blame a guy for trying.”

  “Aleksy—”

  “You’re better off not knowing.”

  “Look, pal.” The finger that he’d licked stabbed the center of his chest. “I’m a teacher. This ‘ignorance is bliss’ routine doesn’t cut it with me.”

  “What about ‘I don’t want to be involved’?”

  She sucked in her breath. No more running, she thought. No more evasion. “Maybe I’ve changed my mind about that.”

  “And maybe I haven’t.”

  “Well.” She exhaled shakily. “That’s clear, at least.”

  He’d hurt her, Aleksy saw with instant regret. He’d always accepted that he would.

  What he hadn’t guessed was that her pain would tear him, too.

  “Faye.”

  She turned and walked away from him, down the boardwalk. The wind pushed at her long flowered skirt and feathered her hair. Panic hit him. She was leaving. Women never left him. Not without long, deliberate effort on his part, anyway.

  “Damn it, Faye!”

  She didn’t look back.

  Jamal loped up beside him. “Man, what did you say to Harp? She looks pissed.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” Aleksy growled.

  Which may have been the problem. This whole communication thing sucked.

  He set his jaw and went after her.

  Chapter 13

  He found her in the Blue Moon, perched on a bar stool, nursing a beer and flirting with Mark DeLucca.

  Damn quick recovery.

  DeLucca was wiping the bar with long, slow strokes, and Faye was staring at him like he was a painting in a museum. The guy even looked like a painting, his face barely rescued from pretty boy perfection by his black eyebrows and slightly crooked nose.

  Somebody, sometime, had broken it for him.

  Aleksy would have liked to take a poke at it himself.

  DeLucca saw him by the door and murmured something to Faye that made her swivel around on her bar stool.

  She looked at him and her chin went up.

  Aleksy scowled. Fine. If she wanted to play this mad, he had plenty of experience as the heavy.

  Although he’d never actually assumed the role opposite a woman he still wanted.

  He stalked to the bar and slid onto the stool next to hers. “Give me a Miller on draft,” he ordered DeLucca.

  The bartender raised his eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to ask if that seat is taken?”

  “Butt out,” Aleksy snarled.

  “Only if the lady tells me to.”

  “It’s all right,” Faye said. “I can handle—”

  So help him, if she said “him,” he was going to break something.

  “—things,” she said. She turned to Aleksy. “What do you want?”

  Damned if he knew.

  He took a swig of his beer. “You left kind of suddenly back there.”

  Her big brown eyes were cool. Her voice was frosty. “Were you worried I was leaving you with responsibility for Jamal?”

  He tried to chip his way through the ice. “Jamal can take care of himself. I was worried about you.”

  “You don’t need to. I’m a big girl, Detective.” She hitched her canvas bag on her shoulder and dropped a five on the bar. “I’ll go keep Jamal company while you finish your beer.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No, you stay.” She might as well have said it to a dog. She slipped from her stool. “Thanks, Mark. I’ll see both of you later.”

  He watched her march to the door, slim and indomitable in her flowered skirt and flat sandals.

  DeLucca shook his head. “You are in such deep—”

  “Tell me about it,” Aleksy said.

  The bartender took a final swipe with his rag. “So, who’s this Jamal? Old boyfriend?”

  “Nope. One of her kids.”

  Mark sent another look after the slight figure in the flowered skirt. “She must be older than she looks.”

  “She’s a teacher.”

  “Elementary?”

  “No.” With an unaccustomed feeling of pride, Aleksy said, “She teaches art at a high school on the south side.”

  “Well, that explains it,” Mark said.

  “Explains what?”

  “What she’s doing with you. Obviously the lady likes hard cases.”

  “Very funny.” Aleksy took another pull of his beer.

  “So, the kid followed her up here?”

  “Yeah.” Aleksy watched, brooding, as Mark filled a bowl with peanuts. “He screws up big time and then shows up hoping she’ll take him in. Which of course she does, seeing as she is just about the warmest, sweetest woman in the world and a total sucker.”

  “Lucky for him,” Mark observed.

  Aleksy frowned. “Yeah.”

  Mark moved to the other end of the bar to take an order from a couple of guys in polo shirts and overpriced shoes. When he came back he said, “Lucky for you, too.”

  Aleksy narrowed his eyes. “You got something to say to me, DeLucca?”

  The bartender shrugged and filled two mugs with draft. “Just that sooner or later most of us need somebody who will give us a second chance. The kid. Me. You.”

  “You learn that in bartending school?”

  “No,” Mark said. He didn’t offer to elaborate.

  And Aleksy didn’t ask. He had troubles enough of his own.

  On the other hand, DeLucca kind of had a point there. So when he got back from serving the polo shirts, Aleksy said, “You’ve got a lot of tourists in. For midweek, I mean.”

  It was an olive branch, cautiously extended.

  Warily, Mark accepted it. “Our share. They come up early for the owners’ day regatta at the Algonquin.”

  “You race?”

  Mark’s eyes gleamed. “Not that one.”

  “Why not?” Aleksy asked, genuinely curious now.

  “That one’s for the Sunday sailors.”

  Aleksy put it all together—the quiet scorn, the tattoo… “Navy?” he guessed.

  Mark smiled thinly. “Marines.”

  Well, hell. “Afghanistan?”

  “Toward the end of my tour, yeah.”

  The bar door banged open. Jamal stood in the entryway, taking great gulps of air.

  “Denko! Man, come quick! Some bastard knocked Harp down and snatched her purse.”

  “And you’re sure you didn’t see his face at all?” Jarek Denko asked gently.

  Faye struggled to concentrate. Her palms stung. Her wrist throbbed.

  Mark DeLucca had cleaned her hands and bandaged her wrist with surprising skill and compassion. He was trained as a first responder, he’d told her, when Aleksy first brought her into the bar.

  But despite the tape’s support and the bag of ice he’d plopped on her wrist, the pain of the old fracture was bad enough to be distracting.

  “Damn it, Jare, we’ve been over this,” Aleksy snapped. He prowled forward, hands thrust in his pockets, violence simmering in his eyes. “The son of a bitch pushed her from behind. All she saw was the ground. And his back when he took off.”

  “And there was nothing about his back that caught your attention?” Jarek continued, undisturbed by his brother’s outburst. “Nothing unusual about his clothes, for instance?”

  Faye closed her
eyes, trying to filter details of the snatching through the pulse of pain and the shock of reaction. “Dark pants, navy shirt and a—gray?—ball cap. Nothing unusual. He wore sneakers,” she offered, opening her eyes. “He was very ordinary, really. Medium height, medium build, medium complexion. His hair was dark, I think.”

  “But there was nothing familiar about him?” Jarek persisted.

  “No. I’m sorry,” she said, feeling inadequate. “I don’t know many people in town.”

  Jarek’s smile warmed his cool gray eyes. “Very understandable.”

  “Woman from the hardware store was a witness,” Aleksy said. His voice still had an edge. “Marcia somebody. I wrote it down.”

  “Tompkins?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well, that’s good. If your thief was a local, Marcia will know him.” Jarek sighed and stood. “But I’m sorry to say it’s just as likely you were robbed by someone passing through.”

  “Lots of visitors right now, with the regatta coming up,” Mark volunteered from over by the bar.

  “Are you done with her?” Aleksy asked abruptly. “Can I take her home now?”

  Jarek nodded. “Unless you’d like to stop by the hospital.”

  Faye blinked. “What? Oh, no.” She flexed her wrist experimentally. It hurt, but she was used to that. And she wanted to go home, back to the cottage that had been her escape and her refuge. She wanted to crawl in her hole and pull it in after her, like in the cartoons.

  “About your purse.” Jarek cleared his throat. “There’s a good chance we’ll get it back for you. The thief probably dumped it somewhere. After he took your cash and credit cards.”

  “My credit cards.” She sat upright on the bar’s hard wooden chair. “I have to—”

  “We will.” Aleksy’s hand, hard and reassuring, closed on her shoulder. “After we get you home.”

  He was as good as his word. He loaded Faye, Jamal and the ice bag into his TransAm. He gave them a choice between Chinese and fast food and then picked up dinner at the drive through window of the local Burger Barn. While Faye made phone calls canceling her credit cards, Aleksy nudged Jamal into the shower and off to bed. Shaky from a combination of excitement and drug withdrawal, Jamal crashed with only a token protest.

  Faye frowned thoughtfully as Aleksy gathered the teenager’s clothes and dumped them into her aunt’s old washing machine.