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 firearm 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 came from 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.
“Hey,” Frisco said. “What the h…uh… What’s going on, Tash?”
The kid didn’t answer. She just kept on crying.
Frisco sat down next to her, but all she did was cry.
“You want a hug or something?” he asked, and she shook her head no and kept on crying.
“Um,” Frisco said, uncertain of what to do, or what to say.
There was a tap on the door.
“You want to get that?” Frisco asked Natasha.
She didn’t respond.
“I guess I’ll get it then,” he said, unlocking the bolt and opening the heavy wooden door.
Mia stood on the other side of the screen. She was wearing a white bathrobe and her hair was down loose around her shoulders. “Is everything all right?”
“No, I’m not murdering or torturing my niece,” Frisco said flatly and closed the door. But he opened it again right away and pushed open the screen. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Tash’s On/Off switch is, would you?”
“It’s dark in here,” Mia said, stepping inside. “Maybe you should turn on all the lights so that she can see where she is.”
Frisco turned on the bright overhead light—and realized he was standing in front of his neighbor and his niece in nothing but the new, tight-fitting, utilitarian white briefs he’d bought during yesterday’s second trip to the grocery store. Good thing he’d bought them, or he quite possibly would have been standing there buck naked.
Whether it was the sudden light or the sight of him in his underwear, Frisco didn’t know, but Natasha stopped crying, just like that. She still sniffled, and tears still flooded her eyes, but her sirenlike wail was silenced.
Mia was clearly thrown by the sight of him—and determined to act as if visiting with a neighbor who was in his underwear was the most normal thing in the world. She sat down on the couch next to Tasha and gave her a hug. Frisco excused himself and headed down the hall toward his bedroom and a pair of shorts.
It wasn’t really that big a deal—Lucky O’Donlon, Frisco’s swim buddy and best friend in the SEAL unit, had bought Frisco a tan-through French
