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“Natasha…?” Frisco moved as quickly as he could down the tiny hallway toward the bedrooms and bathroom. He looked, and then he looked again, even glancing underneath his bed and in both closets.
The kid was gone.
His knee twinged as he used a skittering sort of hop and skip to propel himself back into the living room and out the screen door.
She wasn’t on the second-floor landing, or anywhere in immediate view in the condo courtyard. Frisco could see Mia Summerton still working, crouched down among the explosion of flowers that were her garden, a rather silly-looking floppy straw hat covering the top of her head.
“Hey!”
She looked up, startled and uncertain as to where his voice had come from.
“Up here.”
She was too far away for him to see exactly which shade of green or brown her eyes were right now. They were wide though. Her surprise quickly changed to wariness.
He could see a dark vee of perspiration along the collar and down the front of her T-shirt. Her face glistened in the morning heat, and she reached up and wiped her forehead with the back of one arm. It left a smudge of dirt behind.
“Have you seen Natasha—you know, the little girl with red hair? Did she come down this way?”
Mia rinsed her hands in a bucket of water and stood up. “No—and I’ve been out here since you went upstairs.”
Frisco swore and started down past his condo door, toward the stairs at the other side of the complex.
“What happened?” Mia came up the stairs and caught up with him easily.
“I got out of the shower and she was gone,” he told her curtly, trying to move as quickly as he could. Damn, he didn’t want to deal with this. The morning sun had moved high into the sky and the brightness still made his head throb—as did every jarring step he took. It was true that living with him wasn’t going to be any kind of party, but the kid didn’t have to run away, for God’s sake.
But then he saw it.
Sparkling and deceptively pure looking, the alluring blue Pacific Ocean glimmered and danced, beckoning in the distance. The beach was several blocks away. Maybe the kid was like him and had saltwater running through her veins. Maybe she caught one look at the water and headed for the beach. Maybe she wasn’t running away. Maybe she was just exploring. Or maybe she was pushing the edge of the obedience envelope, testing him to see just what she could get away with.
“Do you think she went far? Do you want me to get my car?” Mia asked.
Frisco turned to look at her and realized she was keeping pace with him. He didn’t want her help, but dammit, he needed it. If he was going to find Tasha quickly, four eyes were definitely better than two. And a car was far better than a bum knee and a cane when it came to getting someplace fast.
“Yeah, get your car,” he said gruffly. “I want to check down at the beach.”
Mia nodded once then ran ahead. She’d pulled her car up at the stairs that led to the parking lot before he’d even arrived at the bottom of them. She reached across the seat, unlocking the passenger’s side door of her little subcompact.
Frisco knew he wasn’t going to fit inside. He got in anyway, forcing his right knee to bend more than it comfortably could. Pain and its accompanying nausea washed over him, and he swore sharply—a repetitive, staccato chant, a profane mantra designed to bring him back from the edge.
He looked up to find Mia watching him, her face carefully expressionless.
“Drive,” he told her, his voice sounding harsh to his own ears. “Come on—I don’t even know if this kid can swim.”
She put the car into first gear and it lurched forward. She took the route the child might well have taken if she was, indeed, heading for the beach. Frisco scanned the crowded sidewalks. What exactly had the kid been wearing? Some kind of white shirt with a pattern on it…balloons? Or maybe flowers? And a bright-colored pair of shorts. Or was she wearing a skirt? Was it green or blue? He couldn’t remember, so he watched for her flaming red hair instead.
“Any sign of her?” Mia asked. “Do you want me to slow down?”
“No,” Frisco said. “Let’s get down to the water and make sure she’s not there first. We can work our way back more slowly.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Mia stepped on the gas, risking a glance at Alan Francisco. He didn’t seem to notice her military-style affirmative. He was gripping the handle up above the passenger window so tightly that his knuckles were white. The muscles in his jaw were just as tight, and he kept watching out the window, searching for any sign of his tiny niece in the summertime crowd.
He’d shaved, she noticed, glancing at him again. He looked slightly less dangerous without the stubble—but only slightly.
He’d hurt his knee getting into her car, and Mia knew from the paleness of his face underneath his tan that it hurt him still. But he didn’t complain. Other than his initial explosion of profanity, he hadn’t said a word about it. Finding his niece took priority over his pain. Obviously it took priority, since finding Natasha was important enough for him to call a temporary truce with Mia and accept her offer of help.
She was signaling to make the left into the beach parking lot when the man finally spoke.
“There she is! With some kid. At two o’clock—”
“Where?” Mia slowed, uncertain.
“Just stop the car!”
Francisco opened the door, and Mia slammed on the brakes, afraid he would jump out while the car was still moving. And then she saw Natasha. The little girl was at the edge of the parking lot, sitting on the top of a picnic table, paying solemn attention to a tall African-American teenage boy who was standing in front of her. Something about the way he wore his low-riding, baggy jeans was familiar. The kid turned, and Mia saw his face.
“That’s Thomas King,” she said. “That boy who’s with Natasha—I know him.”
But Francisco was already out of the car, moving as fast as he could with his limp and his cane toward the little girl.
There was nowhere to park. Mia watched through the windshield as the former Navy lieutenant descended upon his niece, pulling her none-too-gently from the table and setting her down on the ground behind him. She couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she could tell that it wasn’t a friendly greeting. She saw Thomas bristle and turn belligerently toward Francisco, and she threw on her hazard lights and left the car right where it was in the middle of the lot as she jumped out and ran toward them.
She arrived just in time to hear Thomas say, “You raise one hand to that girl and I’ll clean the street with your face.”
Alan Francisco’s blue eyes had looked deadly and cold when Mia first ran up, but now they changed. Something shifted. “What are you talking about? I’m not going to hit her.” He sounded incredulous, as if such a thing would never have occurred to him.
“Then why are you shouting at her as if you are?” Thomas King was nearly Francisco’s height, but the former SEAL had at least fifty pounds of muscle over him. Still, the teenager stood his ground, his dark eyes flashing and narrowed, his lips tight.
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are,” Thomas persisted. He mimicked the older man. “‘What the hell are you doing here? Who the hell gave you permission to leave…’ I thought you were going to slam her—and she did, too.”
Frisco turned to look at Natasha. She had scurried underneath the picnic table, and she looked back at him, her eyes wide. “Tash, you didn’t think…”
But she had thought that. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she was cowering. Man, he felt sick.
He crouched down next to the table as best he could. “Natasha, did your mom hit you when she was angry?” He couldn’t believe softhearted Sharon would hurt a defenseless child, but liquor did funny things to even the gentlest of souls.
The little girl shook her head no. “Mommy didn’t,” she told him softly, “but Dwayne did once and I got a bloody lip. Mommy cried, and then we moved out.”
Thank God Sharon had had that much sense. Damn Dwayne to hell, whoever he was. What kind of monster would strike a five-year-old child?
What kind of monster would scare her to death by shouting at her the way he just had?
Frisco sat down heavily on the picnic table bench, glancing up at Mia. Her eyes were soft, as if she could somehow read his mind.
“Tash, I’m sorry,” he said, rubbing his aching, bleary eyes. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“This some kind of friend of yours?” the black kid said to Mia, his tone implying she might want to be more selective in her choice of friends in the future.
“He’s in 2C,” Mia told the boy. “The mystery neighbor—Lieutenant Alan Francisco.” She directed her next words to Frisco. “This is Thomas King. He’s a former student of mine. He lives in 1N with his sister and her kids.”
A former…student? That meant that Mia Summerton was a teacher. Damn, if he had had teachers who looked like her, he might’ve actually gone to high school.
She was watching him now with wariness in her eyes, as if he were a bomb on a trick timer, ready to blow at any given moment.
“Lieutenant,” Thomas repeated. “Are you the badge?”
“No, I’m not a cop,” Frisco said, tearing his eyes away from Mia to glance at the kid. “I’m in the Navy….” He caught himself, and shook his head, closing his eyes briefly. “I was in the Navy.”
Thomas had purposely crossed his arms and tucked both hands underneath them to make sure Frisco knew he had no intention of shaking hands.
“The lieutenant was a SEAL,” Mia told Thomas. “That’s a branch of special operations—”
“I know what a SEAL is,” the kid interrupted. He turned to run a bored, cynical eye over Frisco. “One of those crazy freaks that ride the surf and crash their little rubber boats into the rocks down by the hotel in Coronado. Did you ever do that?”
Mia was watching him again, too. Damn but she was pretty. And every time she looked at him, every time their eyes met, Frisco felt a very solid slap of mutual sexual awareness. It was almost funny. With the possible exception of her exotic fashion-model face and trim, athletic body, everything about the woman irritated him. He didn’t want a nosy neighbor poking around in his life. He didn’t need a helpful do-gooder getting in his face and reminding him hourly of his limitations. He had no use for a disgustingly cheerful, flower-planting, antimilitary, unintimidatable, fresh-faced girl-next-door type.
But every single time he looked into her hazel eyes, he felt an undeniable surge of physical attraction. Intellectually, he may have wanted little more than to hide from her, but physically… Well, his body apparently had quite a different agenda. One that included moonlight gleaming on smooth, golden tanned skin, long dark hair trailing across his face, across his chest and lower.
Frisco managed a half smile, wondering if she could read his mind now. He couldn’t look away from her, even to answer Thomas’s question. “It’s called rock portage,” he said, “and, yeah. I did that during training.”
She didn’t blush. She didn’t look away from him. She just steadily returned his gaze, slightly lifting one exotic eyebrow. Frisco had the sense that she did, indeed, know exactly what he was thinking. Cold day in hell. She hadn’t said those exact words last night, but they echoed in his mind as clearly as if she had.
It was just as well. He was having a pure, raw-sex reaction to her, but she wasn’t the pure, raw type. He couldn’t picture her climbing into his bed and then slipping away before dawn, no words spoken, only intense pleasure shared. No, once she got into his bed, she would never get out. She had “girlfriend” written all over her, and that was the last thing he needed. She would fill his apartment with flowers from her garden and endless conversation and little notes with smiley faces on them. She’d demand tender kisses and a clean bathroom and heart-to-heart revelations and a genuine interest in her life.
How could he begin to be interested in her life, when he couldn’t even muster up the slightest enthusiasm for his own?
But he was getting way ahead of himself here. He was assuming that he’d have no trouble getting her into his bed in the first place. That might’ve been true five years ago, but he wasn’t exactly any kind of prize anymore. There was no way a girl like Mia would want to be saddled with a man who could barely even walk.
Cold day in hell. Frisco looked out at the blinding blueness of the ocean, feeling his eyes burn from the glare.
“What’s a SEAL doing with a kid who can’t swim?” Thomas asked. Most of the anger had left the teenager’s eyes, leaving behind a cynical disdain and a seemingly ancient weariness that made him look far older than his years. He had scars on his face, one bisecting one of his eyebrows, the other marking one of his high, pronounced cheekbones. That, combined with the fact that his nose had been broken more than once, gave him a battle-worn look that erased even more of his youth. But except for a few minor slang expressions, Thomas didn’t speak the language of the street. He had no discernible accent of any kind, and Frisco wondered if the kid had worked as hard to delete that particular tie with his past and his parents as he himself had.
“Natasha is the lieutenant’s niece,” Mia explained. “She’s going to stay with him for a few weeks. She just arrived today.”
“From Mars, right?” Thomas looked under the table and made a face at Natasha.
She giggled. “Thomas thinks I’m from Mars ’cause I didn’t know what that water was.” Natasha slithered on her belly out from underneath the table. The sand stuck to her clothes, and Frisco realized that she was wet.
“A little Martian girl is the only kind of girl I can think of who hasn’t seen the ocean before,” Thomas said. “She didn’t even seem to know kids shouldn’t go into the water alone.”
Mia watched myriad emotions cross Alan Francisco’s face. The lifeguard’s flag was out today, signaling a strong undertow and dangerous currents. She saw him look at Thomas and register the fact that the teenager’s jeans were wet up to his knees.
“You went in after her,” he said, his low voice deceptively even.
Thomas was as nonchalant. “I’ve got a five-year-old niece, too.”
Francisco pulled himself painfully up with his cane. He held out his hand to Thomas. “Thanks, man. I’m sorry about before. I’m…new at this kid thing.”
Mia held her breath. She knew Thomas well, and if he’d decided that Alan Francisco was the enemy, he’d never shake his hand.
But Thomas hesitated only briefly before he clasped the older man’s hand.
Again, a flurry of emotions flickered in Francisco’s eyes, and again he tried to hide it all. Relief. Gratitude. Sorrow. Always sorrow and always shame. But it was all gone almost before it was even there. When Alan Francisco tried to hide his emotions, he succeeded, tucking them neatly behind the ever-present anger that simmered inside of him.
He managed to use that anger to hide everything quite nicely—everything except the seven-thousand-degree nuclear-powered sexual attraction he felt for her. That he put on display, complete with neon signs and million-dollar-a-minute advertising.
Good grief, last night when he’d made that crack about wanting her to share his bed, she’d thought he’d been simply trying to scare her off.
She had been dead wrong. The way he’d looked at her just minutes ago had nearly singed her eyebrows off. And the truly stupid thing was that the thought of having a physical relationship with this man didn’t send her running for her apartment and the heavy-duty dead bolt that she’d had installed on her door. She couldn’t figure out why. Lt. Alan Francisco was a real-life version of G.I. Joe, he was probably a male chauvinist, he drank so much that he still looked like hell at noon on a weekday and he carried a seemingly permanent chip on his shoulder. Yet for some bizarre reason, Mia had no trouble imagining herself pulling him by the hand into her bedroom and melting together with him on her bed.
It had nothing to do with his craggy-featured, handsome face and enticingly hard-muscled body. Well, yes, okay, so she wasn’t being completely honest with herself. It had at least a little bit to do with that. It was true—the fact that the man looked as if he should have his own three-month segment in a hunk-of-the-month calendar was not something she’d failed to notice. And notice, and notice and notice.
But try as she might, it was the softness in his eyes when he spoke to Natasha and his crooked, painful attempts to smile at the little girl that she found hard to resist. She was a sucker for kindness, and she suspected that beneath this man’s outer crust of anger and bitterness, and despite his sometimes crude language and rough behavior, there lurked the kindest of souls.
“Here’s the deal about the beach,” Alan Francisco was saying to his niece. “You never come down here without a grown-up, and you never, ever go into the water alone.”
“That’s what Thomas said,” Tasha told him. “He said I might’ve drownded.”
“Thomas is right,” Francisco told her.
“What’s drownded?”
“Drowned,” he corrected her. “You ever try to breathe underwater?”
Tash shook her head no, and her red curls bounced.
“Well, don’t try it. People can’t breathe underwater. Only fish can. And you don’t look like a fish to me.”
The little girl giggled, but persisted. “What’s drownded?”
Mia crossed her arms, wondering if Francisco would try to sidestep the issue again, or if he would take the plunge and discuss the topic of death with Natasha.
“Well,” he said slowly, “if someone goes into the water, and they can’t swim, or they hurt themselves, or the waves are too high, then the water might go over their head. Then they can’t breathe. Normally, when the water goes over your head it’s no big deal. You hold your breath. And then you just swim to the surface and stick your nose and mouth out and take a breath of air. But like I said, maybe this person doesn’t know how to swim, or maybe their leg got a cramp, or the water’s too rough, so they can’t get up to the air. And if there’s no air for them to breathe…well, they’ll die. They’ll drown. People need to breathe air to live.”
Natasha gazed unblinkingly at her uncle, her head tilted slightly to one side. “I don’t know how to swim,” she finally said.
“Then I’ll teach you,” Francisco said unhesitatingly. “Everyone should know how to swim. But even when you do know how to swim, you still don’t swim alone. That way, if you do get hurt, you got a friend who can save you from drowning. Even in the SEALs we didn’t swim alone. We had something called swim buddies—a friend who looked out for you, and you’d look out for him, too. You and me, Tash, for the next few weeks, we’re going to be swim buddies, okay?”
“I’m outta here, Ms. S. I don’t want to be late for work.”
Mia turned to Thomas, glad he’d broken into her reverie. She’d been standing there like an idiot, gazing at Alan Francisco, enthralled by his conversation with his niece. “Be careful,” she told him.
“Always am.”
Natasha crouched down in the sand and began pushing an old Popsicle stick around as if it were a car. Thomas bent over and ruffled her hair. “See you later, Martian girl.” He nodded to Francisco. “Lieutenant.”
