“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 biceps 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 would 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 un-demolished 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