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, mutated 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 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
