Fredo's Dream
Date: 2016-11-15 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Military; Romance; Suspense; SEALs
Description: New merged book content containing Fredo's Secret and Fredo's Dream (two novellas in one!) Mia Guzman has come a long way from wild child girlfriend of San Diego drug dealers to devoted mother and now dutiful wife of the man she now knows was always there for her, and always will be. She yearns to have a child with Fredo, to honor him with her body in every way she can, perhaps making up for the years she discounted his devotion. Navy SEAL Alphonso Manuel Esquidido "Fredo" Chavez has the heart of a lion and would do anything to protect and honor his beautiful bride, Mia. He'd fought for her lo
Rights: Copyright © 2015 All Rights Reserved

Fredo’s Secret

A Novella

Sharon Hamilton

Copyright © 2015 by Sharon Hamilton

Kindle Edition

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. In many cases, liberties and intentional inaccuracies have been taken with rank, description of duties, locations and aspects of the SEAL community.

License Notes

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work.

Author’s Note and Dedication

Ever since I wrote the character Fredo into my Accidental SEAL, Book 1 of the SEAL Brotherhood Series, fans have loved him. I’ve probably gotten more emails asking when Fredo would have his own book, than any other character.

I generally know what next book I’m going to write as I’m finishing the one before. But today, because it’s approaching Christmas, I decided to write something you readers have been wanting. So, it is my gift to you this holiday season.

Christmas is about sharing, and caring for others, about your heart being fully open. This is the miracle of the season. It’s more about the giving, than the getting.

Fredo demonstrates the power of his unrelenting belief in true love, probably more so than any other SEAL hero I’ve written. As I’ve said many times, it’s what’s on the inside of a person that counts more than the outside.

So this, then, is from my heart, to yours this time of year. Let’s make it last forever, because the miracle of a romance novel is that it truly does live forever.

Christmas, 2015

I’d also like to point out that I support two main charities: Navy SEAL/UDT Museum in Ft. Pierce, Florida. Please learn about this wonderful museum, all run by active and former SEALs and their friends and families, and who rely on public support, not that of the U.S. Government.

www.navysealmuseum.org

I also support Wounded Warriors, who tirelessly bring together the warrior as well as the family members who are just learning to deal with their soldier’s condition and have nowhere to turn. It is a long path to becoming well, but I’ve seen first-hand what this organization does for its warriors and the families who love them. Please give what your heart tells you is right. If you cannot give, volunteer at one of the many service centers all over the United States. Get involved. Do something meaningful for someone who gave so much of themselves, to families who have paid the price for your freedom. You’ll find a family there unlike any other on the planet.

www.woundedwarriorproject.org

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Author’s Note and Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

About the Author

The SEAL Brotherhood Series

Other Books by Sharon Hamilton

Chapter 1

‡

Fredo was not sure how Mia would take the results of his doctor visit, but his training taught him to just be direct with it, tell her that he could not father children. They had little Ricardo, who was not his biological son, but the son of a lowlife now in prison. Fredo and some of his team buddies had rescued Mia from this evil man and his gang. So, Fredo told himself he already had a son. Ricardo would grow up thinking of Fredo as his father in every important sense of the word. But he wanted to give Mia more sons, and perhaps a daughter or two.

God had other plans.

An inner city kid growing up, Fredo had been like a lucky penny, associating with both street kids and gang members, as well as the pretty girls who played volleyball and went out for cheerleading in high school. After high school, he escaped being caught, unlike some of his friends; not for doing bad things, but for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the custom that once a youth got into the system, they rarely escaped. Fredo was sharp and lucky enough to never get into the system in the first place.

He thought Cooper would have some solid advice on his parenting situation since he and Coop were still two of the tightest buddies on SEAL Team 3. Cooper now had two children, a boy and a girl.

The Scupper was nearly empty, but that was probably because it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon.

He found his old friend sitting at a long table, as if they were expecting their usual cadre of regulars from Kyle’s Team. Fredo hoped Coop hadn’t invited anyone today.

“How’s it hanging, Fredo?” Coop asked as they fist-bumped.

“Not complaining.” Fredo motioned to their usual waitress, and she acknowledged his need for a beer. Cooper sat behind his mineral water, chewing on ice, and making his usual noise.

“You know, Coop, I’m not sure your dentist is very happy with you. You gonna crack all your teeth.”

“Nothin’ wrong with my teeth, Fredo. My great-grandfather was a horse. We got great teeth.”

“I’m not talking about how well you are endowed. I was talking—”

“Well, that, too, if you must know. But then you seen me in the shower, so this should be no surprise. So you wanna tell me why we’re talking about my dick?”

Fredo adjusted his defense mechanism. He was going to spout off something offensive in response to Coop’s remark, as was their pattern, but he reeled himself in. Part of him was so angry, he wanted to punch something. If Cooper got in the way, it wouldn’t be good.

“Okay, well, I just came from the doctor, and he told me I’m sterile. I’m fuckin’ shootin’ blanks. No little zarapes or baby sombreros in my future, Coop. No father of the bride walking down the aisle shit for me.”

“Borrow one.”

“Borrow a sperm? You mean let Mia get a sperm from someone else?”

“No, asshole, that wouldn’t be borrowing one. That would be making one a part of your family.” Cooper’s half smile and partial frown were hard to read. “Borrow a kid,” he said, nodding.

“Just how the fuck do I borrow a kid? Besides, Mia wants her own kid. She wants my kid.”

“No, she doesn’t. She wants you, and if she doesn’t, she’s hopelessly crazy.”

“I think I know my Mia.”

“Sure you do. What I’m sayin’ is you adopt. Nothing wrong with that. Hell, I’d have done that if it happened to us.”

“But I want my own.”

“You honestly think you could tell which fuckin’ sperm was yours if you looked at them under a microscope? What the hell difference does it make? That’s like saying you could never love a woman because some other man got there first. That makes no sense at all.”

Cooper did have a point. “I think, in this case, I would be able to tell mine from others. Mine would be with dented heads and wouldn’t move.”

“Dented heads, huh? What kind of a doctor showed you what your sperm looked like? That does no fuckin’ good. I’d have nightmares if they showed me that shit. Like a science fiction freak show or something.”

“I wanted him to prove it to me.”

“Oh. Well, then, that explains it. You dumb shit. You didn’t need to see that.”

Cooper nearly finished his mineral water, sucked on the lime until his cheeks caved in, and then chewed on ice. He looked at Fredo like a cow chewing hay, watching the cars go by and not keeping up with the movement. “I don’t care what mine look like.”

“Yeah, well, yours swim.”

“Apparently.” Cooper swallowed and went for the last gulp of ice. Before he could set his plastic glass down, the waitress brought him another mineral water and lime with tons of ice.

“I don’t know what to say to Mia.” Fredo wanted to be honest with his best friend. He was still trying to reconcile the fact that beautiful Mia, who could have been a model or a beauty queen if she’d chosen that path, and was the most stunning of all the SEAL wives, had chosen him. And Fredo knew he was generally thought of as the least handsome of the bunch. He’d had to work long and hard to win her love. He worried that perhaps this would disappoint her. Ever at the back of his mind was the concern that she would one day leave him.

“I can hear all that Mariachi music rolling around in your head, Fredo. Don’t get your cart before the horse. You’re worrying about something that might not exist.”

“But what if it does? What if she’s angry? Coop, what if she thinks I’m not right for her?”

“Fredo, you dumb shit. How can you say that? You think she’s that shallow? Mia’s a strong and beautiful woman, inside and out. She loves you, Fredo. When she finally got it, she was hooked, man.” Cooper nodded to a couple of young tadpoles who had entered the bar. “God almighty, they make ’em younger every year. Did we ever look like that?” He nodded to the new recruits.

“I think I was born with hair all over my body. Someone who knew my mom said she called me a little gorilla. Not sure I ever looked like a little boy.”

Cooper was laughing. “That’s a visual I need eye bleach to get rid of, Fredo. Why did you have to go tell me that? Now I won’t be able to think, seeing this little gorilla boy running around the streets of LA.”

Fredo began to get steamed. “Okay, asshole. I can see this was a big mistake. I come to you with something serious, and you get me all talking about my childhood and sperm and stuff.” Fredo knew it was an unfair argument, but he couldn’t hold it back.

“Okay. Calm down. Seriously, Fredo. You just tell her the truth. You ask her what she wants to do, okay? And then you do whatever she wants. If she wants to adopt, you adopt. If not, you stay good with that. If she needs to think it over, you give her space, let her know you’re here to discuss it if she wants. But let her decide. We don’t make those decisions, they do.”

Fredo figured it was probably the best advice he’d get tonight, or any night. He did dangerous things every day, especially when he was overseas. But today, this sitting down and talking to Mia about the doctor visit was the hardest thing he’d have done in over a year.

“You guys have plans for Christmas?” Coop asked.

“Getting together with her mom and Mayfield. What about you?”

“We’re going up for a couple of days to Libby’s folks’ cabin at Big Bear. You should come up.”

“I’ll ask her.”

On the way home, Fredo stopped to buy Mia’s mother some items he knew she’d want for her Puerto Rican traditional Thanksgiving feast. The little supermercado was in a seedy part of town where every bar, restaurant, house, and school had bars on the windows. Even the windows at the public park were barred and locked at night with large iron grates.

Fredo only knew the shop owner as Jose, since that’s what Mia’s mother called him. Recently, Mayfield had insisted on accompanying her. Fredo knew some of the gangs in the area were not opposed to robbing an older military type, even a retired cop, which Mayfield was. So, Fredo tried to do the shopping for her mother as much as he could. Mia almost never cooked. Mama Guzman insisted on doing all of it, so there was no arguing with that. Ever.

He picked up some corn husks and specialty tomatillo sauce, the hot sauce she liked that was made in her hometown in Puerto Rico, and some good rum that Felicia loved to mix with her coconut milk to celebrate anything that required alcohol.

Outside the mercado, he found a couple of pre-teen boys looking for someone to buy them liquor.

“Jefe, you maybe wanna help us out some?” the kid with the blue eyes said. Fredo remembered seeing him before, since it was so rare to see a Mexican kid with blue eyes.

“I told you boys I wouldn’t do it last time, but what the hell. It’s nearly Christmas. You tell me what good deeds you done this week and I’ll think about it.”

His two friends swore and snuck around the lamppost, walking in the opposite direction, disgusted. But blue eyes stayed behind.

“Punched a kid at school who was being rough on a girl,” the boy blurted out. “That good enough for you, frog-man?”

“Where’d you get that name, son?” Fredo asked.

“Because that’s what you are. You got webbed feet. You got tats, and you’re a fuckin’ swaggering asshole frog-man.”

“Asshole? This the guy you expect to buy you some booze and you call me an asshole?”

The kid grinned. Fredo saw something different about him. It was either something dangerous or dangerous for the environment. He was eager. Maybe too eager. Fredo adjusted his stance, moving his package to his left arm so he could retrieve his gun from the holster in the small of his back with his right.

The boy’s eyes half-lidded. That made Fredo even more nervous.

“I hate you frogs.” He ran off.

Fredo stood for a moment and surveyed the alarmingly calm street. It was always like that overseas, too. When it was quiet, that’s when you had to worry about getting picked off. That’s when the shit hit.

Or maybe he was getting paranoid. Fredo rolled his shoulder, checked both sides of the street again, squinting into the sun and still not seeing anything that gave him a reason for all the hair on the back of his neck to be stuck at full attention.

But something was definitely wrong. He couldn’t find any of the three boys he’d seen. He began getting into his beater four-door truck. He heard the ping of the windshield before he felt the shot to his chest. He was surprised it didn’t hurt more than it did. But he couldn’t breathe. He felt the blackness all around his eyes as he began to lose consciousness. It was fuckin’ hard to breathe. That meant the shot hit a lung, and he was not going to survive if the blood was fast.

The street was a tunnel when he felt the tug at his pants. His wallet was taken. He did hear swearing, an altercation, and some choice words in Spanish. He wanted to get up and stop the fight, but couldn’t move for some reason. Someone was still upset. Then a lady screamed. He slumped over in the front seat, trying to stay on his back so he wouldn’t expose the gun he had at his waist. Just before he passed out, he saw a pair of blue eyes and focused on them until everything was black.

Chapter 2

‡

Fredo awoke and thought he was in heaven. The beautiful angel hovered above him, light all around her, just like the pictures he’d seen at Sunday school when he was a kid. Her long brown hair fell around her face and over her shoulders. Then he realized the angel he was staring at was his wife, Mia.

“Mmm—” He tried to say her name.

“Shhh, Fredo. My love, oh, I’m so hoppy to see you’re awake.”

His eyes must have looked wild.

“You were shot, Fredo. Do you remember who shot you? You were shot doing Mama’s shopping. I’m so sorry. They robbed you, but thank God, they did not rob you of your life.”

She smelled clean, from fresh soap. Her large almond-shaped eyes were framed with worry lines on her otherwise flawless smooth forehead. He used to think he could see his soul in those eyes when he first fell in love with her, before he heard it in her breath, in the way she talked to him. Her full lips were ripe and did wonderful things to his body. Right now, she was talking to him, and he was only hearing every other word.

“Someone did some quick medical attention on you, Fredo, or you would have died. Oh, God, I couldn’t have taken that!” She threw herself onto his chest, her hair tickling his chin and neck. He looked to the ceiling of what he assumed was the hospital, as if God was leaving him a message in clouds that weren’t there. Her moist tears stained his chest. The vibrations from her sobs gently rocked him. He tried pulling his right arm up and couldn’t, so bent his left arm at the elbow and placed his palm gently at the small of her back. Immediately, her sobbing stopped. She arched up to him, just the way she did when she made love to him, her beautiful face bordered by her wild natural curls. He could never look at her, even after two years of marriage, and not be stunned.

“Mia, I’m glad I didn’t die, too.” It was stupid, and it wasn’t what he really wanted to say, but his words were sparse.

“Oh, my love. You have to promise me you will never go to that supermarket again.”

He smiled. “I promise.” He was rewarded with a relieved smile on her face, just about the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen in his life.

Then he remembered his doctor visit that morning, and sadness fell upon him.

“What’s wrong? Are you in pain?”

“No,” he said, but he avoided eye contact.

She insisted he look at her, holding his jowls between her red fingernails. Her fingernails were always red, and her hands always smelled like the vanilla hand cream she used, just like today. She adjusted his head and peered down at him. “Tell me, Fredo. Tell me.”

She was hard to lie to. She was hard to do anything but love as often as he was allowed to love her, any way he could love her. She was hard not to do any little thing for. Even taking out the trash was an homage to this beautiful woman who owned him more than he ever thought possible. But today, he would lie.

“It makes me ache to see you so worried, Mia, my love.” Then he thought of something he could say that would be plausible. “Did they get my gun?”

“No.” She arched back, the top of her cotton vee-neck shirt revealing her soft breasts. Her forearms were on his torso. It was his favorite way to watch her, when she was naked, resting her body against his, her legs between his, feet and sheets entangled. This was coming close. “Your gun was still on you when the paramedics arrived. They got there in just a minute. Happened to be nearby. Otherwise, Fredo,” her lower lip began to quiver again, “you would have died. And I would have died alongside you.”

That made him laugh. Always so high strung and over-the-top dramatic, Mia was like the ancient Mayan women who used to throw themselves on their dead husband’s funeral pyre. His laughing made him begin coughing.

Mia was off him, dashing out the door. Fredo still smelled her beautiful body and felt the moistness and warmth of her even after she was gone. He was left aching.

A very homely nurse with a reddish horse face was the next person he saw. She had a wide nose, nearly Fredo’s width. No unibrow, but her eyes were small, and her jaw was prominent, like a man’s. Seeing her made him inhale, and he stopped coughing.

“Glad to see you’re awake, Mr. Chavez. How do you feel?” Mia stood behind her.

He wanted to say something like, ‘Can she stay with me tonight?’ but he knew that wouldn’t fly.

“Hurts when I cough.”

“Yes, well, you’ve got a tube in there, for drainage, and to keep your lung inflated. They’ll probably take it out tomorrow, if everything goes well. You were in surgery for nearly three hours. You’ll be sore for a while, but you were lucky it was a small caliber bullet.”

“I want to go home.”

“No, I’m sorry. You’re spending Thanksgiving here in the hospital, I’m afraid. You’re not cleared to discharge until the Navy doctor gives the okay.”

“Can he have food? My mother will be so disappointed—” Mia was chirping like a little bird at the woman’s side, her hands flying everywhere.

“Nope, I’m sorry. You’re going to be on clear liquids for twenty-four hours. Closest thing I can get you is perhaps some turkey or chicken broth. That’s it, I’m afraid.” She checked his IVs and made some notes to his chart with a computer at the side of his bed. “I’ve alerted the doctor that you’re awake. Not sure what his plans are, but I think he’ll be in to see you later. Are you in any pain?”

“Just when I cough.”

“Let’s see what he says first. Be thankful you don’t need a ventilator. Welcome back. We’re all glad you made it alive, Mr. Chavez.”

Fredo realized that, for all the times he’d been overseas, he’d never been shot before. He’d been stabbed, butted with a rifle, partially blown up, thrown from a second-story roof that collapsed under him, pushed off a third-story balcony, and nearly poisoned by one of Coop’s health drinks, but never shot.

Kyle, Cooper, and T.J. stopped by late that evening.

“You get a good look at who shot you?” Kyle asked.

“Nah. I was coming out of the market, and these three thugs were there. But they all left before I got shot. Then I saw one of them before I lost consciousness, but not shooting me. No. I got shot through the windshield, which was the opposite direction they’d run off to.”

“What did they want? Did they say anything?” Kyle asked.

“Looking for someone to buy them beer or something.” He hesitated, but decided he needed to tell Kyle about the blue-eyed kid. “I said no.”

“That was smart, doing that in this neighborhood,” added Coop.

Fredo considered his comment carefully. Something about the timing seemed off to him. “There was this one kid I recognized. I’ve seen him before, I think hanging around. But they were never violent looking, you know?”

“You’re gonna have to talk to the police now that they know you’re awake,” T.J. said. “You think they did it, though?”

“I don’t think so, but that’s just a gut reaction.”

“Maybe he’s the one who did the first aid,” added Coop.

“First aid?”

“Yeah, someone stopped the bleeding. Found a rag and duct taped it to your chest at the entrance wound. I think it saved your life.” Coop began examining his IV drip and the monitor on the computer screen at Fredo’s bedside.

“You’re kidding. So that’s what hurts like a son of a gun.” Fredo scratched his chest, moving aside his gown and finding a large band of hairless skin cutting him in half at the level of the bandage and drain. “Holy shit, I’ve been waxed.”

Kyle, Cooper, and T.J. chuckled.

“Thank God you always carry that shit around everywhere.”

“Duct tape is the bomb.” Fredo didn’t try to hide the reverence he felt for the stuff in his voice. He worshiped it.

“Too bad they didn’t put a piece between your eyes. You’d have gotten your unibrow fixed finally.” T.J. could hardly get the words out.

The SEALs laughed again, and Fredo delivered T.J. the finger.

Even Mia had begged him to have his eyebrows tweezed, but he’d always told everyone it was unmanly to alter his physical appearance, even if it wasn’t a handsome one. “I’d rather get cut.”

What he’d meant to imply was that he’d get his manhood cut, a vasectomy, but that had already been done for him without the surgery. The pain of his doctor visit came back. He glanced up at Cooper, who, thank God, didn’t say a word. Instead, Cooper grabbed his hand, and they clasped. He hoped Coop hadn’t told anyone, and the handshake was acknowledgement of that, Fredo thought.

“Okay, well, you look like you’ll pull through. But you were damn lucky, Fredo. You don’t try to go do anything heroic, you hear? Just stay in bed, try to watch some T.V., and get yourself right. We need you back.” Kyle squeezed his shoulder, and then gave him a swat to the side of his face. “Won’t be by tomorrow, with Thanksgiving and all. I have to help Christy mind the hellions so she can do her cooking thing. But Mia will take good care of you.”

“Thanks,” Fredo said. He said goodbye to the three SEALs and as he watched their backs exit the doorway of the hospital room, knew they were going home to wives and the sounds of babies and toddlers at home.

It was something he wouldn’t be hearing much longer in his own household. He never knew he missed it until the possibility was taken from him.

Chapter 3

‡

Something about the boy’s blue eyes kept haunting Fredo. He tried to push it out of his head when Mia came by late the next morning to hand feed him turkey soup that Felicia Guzman had made special for him. She’d gotten approval from the nurse’s station. The way his wife’s delicate and smooth arm rose and fell with each spoonful, her mouth opening and closing with her tongue licking her lips, was giving him a hard-on. He’d sit there forever if he had to. If she’d just keep feeding him, fussing over him, he could stay there for the rest of his life.

Her small talk, the way her deep brown eyes sparked up at him, sometimes hiding behind her shiny black hair charmed him today just like every time she did it. The, woman would be beautiful at eighty, he just knew it. She’d cause accidents everywhere she went. She’d cause a riot in any nursing home she’d wind up in.

But he kept seeing the boy’s blue eyes, which triggered something deep and painful. And then again, he’d remember the secret he could not tell her. He did not want to tell her he was less of a man. He didn’t want to admit sometimes he felt like nothing without her. Was it wise to love someone so much that you were so afraid her life would be snuffed out and you’d not be able to survive? The world was a dangerous place. He couldn’t be everywhere to protect her or little Ricardo, whom she doted on even more than she did Fredo. She was the best mother he’d ever seen.

“So, mi amore, you are feeling better now?” Her warm smile bathed him in the glow he felt all the way to his toes.

“Yes, mi amore. I feel much better now that you have revived me, as no other woman ever could.” He puckered his lips. It hurt to lean forward, yet he tried.

She answered him by mating her lips with his, carefully, so as not to cause him pain. His finger found the vee of her opening in front, so he could stroke the top of her left breast there. His tongue slipped past hers as he drew her deeper into his mouth. He felt her little giggle, the gentle way she told him she liked him touching her there, liked that he was needing her.

“If they’d let me stay over, I’d probably get you in trouble, mi amore,” she said, as she let his hand slip under her skirt, over her pantyhose.

“I’d like that very much. Sneak in. I won’t tell a soul, Mia.”

“You’re so cute, Fredo, my love.” She pulled away. He was mesmerized by the flowery scent of her, mixed with what he knew to be her natural pheromones. Her eyes sparkled as his hand was prevented from finding flesh under her skirt because of the pantyhose.

“Ah, these things. I don’t like these things. This guy who invented them never knew how smooth and beautiful your legs are without them.”

She arched back, looking at him with half-lidded eyes. “I am swelling inside for you, mi amore. I am needing release. Would we be able to do this before your next nurse examination?”

“My God, Mia. Lock the door. Be quick about it.”

She ran to the hallway, searched both directions, and then closed the door, locking it behind her, leaning against it, and showing him she’d placed her hand under her skirt. She removed her pantyhose in one quick, sexy peel. Fredo was instantly so hard he forgot he was in the hospital and nearly tried to climb out of bed.

She left her dress on, but hopped up on the hospital bed, turned around, and presented her rear end to him.

“God, it is such a sacrilege what you do to me. Jesus himself would have never been able to resist the temptation of your beautiful body,” he whispered. His hands pushed her skirt up over her tanned smooth ass, and although it hurt like a son of a gun, he leaned forward, tongue out for a drop of her golden juices.

Mia looked at him around the side, her hair covering half her face, and widened her knees at the sides of Fredo’s prone frame covered in tape, tubing, and blankets. The bottles hanging at the sides of his bed began to rattle as she inched her pussy closer and closer to his mouth. She was nearly an inch away, and taking her time, when Fredo reached forward, grabbed her around the waist, and smashed her warm lips to his face, where he drank, making no effort to stop while loud slurping noises bounced off the walls.

“Mia, you make me want you more each day. This is so unfair, being here. I want to fuck you all night long.”

“Let’s do it. How long before you think they’ll call security? I’m so hot; I might come twice before they break the door down. Satisfy me, mi amore. I am in need of your brand of satisfaction. I ache…”

The green light she gave him as he sucked and lapped had him confused. Once again, he forgot he was in the hospital and tried to get to his knees so he could properly mount her, but he was held back by IVs he was close to tearing out of his arm.

She pulled the blankets back over his engorged dick, as it bobbed and glistened with precum. She spread her butt cheeks wide as she angled herself so her opening covered the crown of his shaft. She sucked in her belly, tightening her muscles and drawing him inside her. Fredo felt like she could pull his whole body inside her.

“Fuck, Mia. I cannot fuck you proper.”

“Oh, Fredo, you are doing it; my love, you know I like you deep.” She clutched and spread her butt cheeks farther apart, grinding herself down on him and pressing him hard against her cervix; then she moaned with the contact. “More, mi amore.”

He tried, but he was limited.

“Fuck it.” At last he decided he’d had enough. He pulled the IVs out, removed the heart monitor that instantly started sending off little alarm signals. He got himself up on his knees, and covered her from behind, ramming himself inside, lifting her body with his thighs, and the thrusting of his cock. He held her chest down into the bed, one hand at the back of her neck, with her rear in the air as he pumped her. The bed shook, the equipment over the bed started to fall down, tubing began to slap against the sides, and then the IV fell over with a loud crash. The plastic bottle bounced on the floor several times before landing at a stop. Again, a big thrust in as they both heard pounding on the door. Someone was shouting, but Fredo needed to spill inside her as if it was the last act of his young life.

Mia was trying to thrash, grabbing the sides of the bed as he kept thrusting and lifting her. He pulled her back against him, one arm under her waist. Finally, after several long strokes, he began to come. He felt her begin to shudder. He let loose of her neck as she rose up, squeezing her own breasts through the cotton fabric of the dress.

The pounding on the door got louder and louder until he heard some keys clanging.

“They’re coming,” Mia said.

“Oh My God! So am I, Mia. So am I.”

Chapter 4

‡

The boy’s blue eyes came to Fredo in the dream he was having. For some reason, he kept seeing the boy in an ill-fitting suit, the top being black and the pants a dark brown. He saw blue clouds in the sky, and a couple of sea birds flew above them. There was the sound of something else, cadence calls. Someone was softly crying. The boy in blue stared him down, his eyes scarred with anger, looking so out of place on a young boy. Behind him, a diminutive gray-haired woman was accepting a folded flag.

Fredo was jolted to attention and nearly fell out of the hospital bed as the sounds of a gun salute cracked the easy afternoon in San Diego and made the sea birds scream for cover and disappear. The boy didn’t flinch, but Fredo could feel the sweat dripping down his own spine right now as he sat staring at the black screen of the sleeping TV that was mounted on the wall in front of him.

He oriented himself. He was still in the hospital, and it was late morning. He’d had a difficult night, not due to the pain, but his lack of being able to take a deep breath. Mia would be here soon. With any luck, the nurses would let him take a shower. He’d like it if they’d let her do it. Maybe they’d even let him go home. That would be an unimaginably wondrous gift.

He’d seen those eyes at a funeral. For whom? He pushed the grit of confusion from his brain, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head, but it did no good. He’d been there. He’d been to that funeral. This kid was there, too, and hated him. Maybe it was because Fredo lived and someone this boy cared about didn’t.

The nurse came in, busying herself with details that didn’t require they speak, and Fredo was grateful for this. Her lips made a sneer as if she had smelled something unpleasant. He watched the ever-blue sky outside and just waited until he was alone again to think. He really wanted to remember more.

“Can I go home today?”

“Not sure, Mr. Chavez. Maybe another day or two. You just sit back and be comfortable; relax a bit.”

Did she know how fuckin’ stupid she sounded? Sit back and relax? What the fuck was up with that?

“How about a shower? I need one,” he scowled, crossing his arms over his waist, giving her a squint. “My wife can help me.”

That cracked her veneer. Her lips arced up, and she winked at him. Her gruff demeanor melted enough for him to see a kinky side to the greying woman with the man’s voice. “I can only imagine.”

She scurried around the bed to the window.

“I’m not on any real pain meds.”

“You want these drapes pulled a bit? Sun will be coming in here in about an hour.”

“I like the sun. I come from a place where it never sets.” His chin jutted out in defiance. He scratched his arms.

“That so?” She raised her painted eyebrows up, her forehead skin making accordion folds above her considerable unibrow. At the sight of it, he swore to himself and tossed his torso back into the bed.

“I know it’s hard on you guys. You like to be up doing things. No fun lying here in bed, watching the world to go by. Of course, that doesn’t stop all of you from being…creative.”

She gave him a fat-lipped smirk and wiggled her eyebrows up and down, telling him she’d known what he and Mia had done the day before. No doubt, they were the talk of the floor from the looks on everyone’s faces.

Detective Clark Riverton had come by the previous day, on Thanksgiving, which told Fredo the man’s love life hadn’t improved. He’d arrived while the door was locked, and with the flurry of activity going on around him as the staff worked to get Fredo reconnected to all the monitors, Riverton had given up and made the date to come back.

Clark Riverton was one of the good guys. But his lifestyle dictated that he live somewhat in the shadows. Never married, his luck when it came to women was better with professionals; that he could pay to be silent. He made a point to tell Fredo on one occasion that he didn’t pay for sex. He paid for discretion.

Riverton had been known to date an old girlfriend of Coop’s, Daisy, the tattoo artist all the SEALs on Kyle’s team went to. Although she didn’t look the part, she was extremely selective, so that gave Riverton an added dose of respect.

Fredo didn’t think he had many regrets. He wasn’t the kind to stay at home, retired, raising someone else’s kids, either. Fredo wondered if that would be his fate. One big difference between them was that Clark never seemed to covet a family lifestyle; Fredo did.

When Riverton entered the room, he tossed Fredo a chocolate foil-wrapped turkey from one of the famous candy stores.

“Someone dropped a whole basket of these off at the office, so don’t think I went out of my way to shop for you, Fredo.” Riverton rarely smiled. His eyes drew down smaller as he took quick furtive glances at the tubing and equipment, now thankfully at rest.

“Thanks.” Fredo began peeling the foil and taking a bite out of the tail.

“You should probably ask them.” Riverton held his thumb over his right shoulder.

“These things are so sensitive, they’ll start beeping. Then I’ll stop. Chocolate is a food group in Puerto Rico.”

“May I?” Riverton gestured to the straight-backed chair in the corner, removing a newspaper before he sat. He crossed his legs and brought out his small vest pocket spiral notebook and pen. “I wanna ask you about who you saw at the grocery store.”

“Supermercado. They don’t say grocery store in that part of town.”

“Duly noted. So Kyle says there were three of them?”

“Yes. Why did you call Kyle?”

“He called me.” Riverton wasn’t going to reveal anything else until he got his questions answered. “So tell me about those boys. Three? Is that it?”

“Yes, there were three. I know I’ve seen one of them before several times. Even had a dream about him last night.”

Riverton stopped his chicken scratches and looked at Fredo, slightly tilting his head to the side, a worried frown consuming his ruddy face. “We’re dreaming about boys now, are we, Fredo?”

“Shut the fuck up. More like a nightmare.” Fredo couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been to reveal the dream.

“So which guy we gonna talk about now. The one in your dream or the one who accosted you outside the supermercado?” Riverton showed his disdain for the Spanish he was forced to speak in California.

“Funny. I remembered him from somewhere. There was a funeral, I think.”

That made Riverton pensive. Fredo was careful with his words. Most obvious in the room was the fact that there had been way too many of them recently. The Special Forces were experiencing casualties unlike ever before, and for a war that hadn’t escalated in the public’s mind, but one Fredo knew was brutal and deadly and still in its infancy. Fredo knew it would some day be called the hundred-year war. Or it would until someone had the guts to stop it by being more brutal than the enemy. Fredo and his buddies on SEAL Team 3 were the spear of that miniscule fighting force.

“You remember which funeral it was? Someone on Team 3?”

Fredo focused on the birds outside his window, swirling in a small swarm. Starlings or some other small birds that traveled in clouds, pulsing like the beat of a human heart, morphing into different rounded shapes.

Everyone’s connected.

Here he was, sitting in the hospital bed with a gunshot wound to his chest, unable to be over at Mama Guzman’s Thanksgiving feast with Mia and her mother fussing all over him like he was a boy of ten.

And then it hit him. He’d seen this kid a few years ago.

“I know who he is now.”

“Enlighten me.” Riverton’s deadpan was even deader. The only way Fredo knew he was interested was the speed with which he answered.

“We had this kid, came from the projects here. Tried out for the teams and washed out during the underwater phase. He couldn’t swim. Afraid of water and all that.”

“How’d he get a shot at trying out if he couldn’t swim?”

“Well, he’d gotten some training all right. He was a big, physical kid. Family from Mexico. We used to see them bring food and things they weren’t supposed to. Hung around the parking lots, the beaches where we trained.”

“So he washed out. Whose funeral was it, then?”

“His. He begged for a second chance. But the Navy grabbed him, and he was off to the Pacific fleet. Family was devastated when he got shot. He was home on leave. Just a random thing, like this,” Fredo said as he pointed to his chest.

“You guys attended the funeral, I take it?”

“Yeah. We all did. Kyle had taken a liking to him, too. We were going to try to help him. Had a tough life. They were very poor.” Fredo studied Riverton’s face to find a trace of compassion there and found none. “A lot of us came that way.”

Fredo remembered the big kid with the wide smile. In uniform, he could have been a kid from a middle class family in Santa Monica. Fredo had felt the instant bond between them, due to their backgrounds.

“Go on. Was he involved in something he shouldn’t have been?”

“Yeah, there was a girl he knocked up.” Fredo faded to the place where this young man was dead, a man who could father children, and he was very much alive, but not able to add to his own bloodline.

Get yourself away from this pity party you’re having, Fredo. Makes no difference. Makes no difference.

He found Riverton sitting at rapt attention, his pencil poised on the little notepad. He didn’t know how many seconds he had been daydreaming about life and the meaning of life—all very dangerous stuff. Stuff that could get you killed. Or worse, get a buddy killed. Fredo jerked his mind out of the clouds and continued.

“Had a ton of brothers and sisters, too. All of them had moved away. Who could blame them? He came back to help his mom with his younger brother. This kid with the blue eyes. The kid idolized him.”

“And the girl?”

“What girl?”

“The girl he knocked up.”

“Last time I saw her she was as big as a house, but she wasn’t allowed to sit with the family, not that she wanted to. She moved away, and no one ever saw her again. Too bad, too. I think the grandmother would have liked to have her here.”

“Can’t say that I blame her. She gets a way to get out, she takes it. End of story. There’s a different concept for a family here in these streets.”

“Yeah. I grew up knowing that, too. You stick together, and you’re safer than on your own.”

Riverton sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Well, that’s one helluva story, son. Not sure it does me much good. Unless you think the kid, or one of his little buddies, did you.”

“I don’t think so. I’d be surprised.”

“He recognize you at the store?”

“Oh definitely. Most definitely.”

“What makes you say that?”

“His friend asked me to buy alcohol for them. I usually decline. But it was almost Thanksgiving, and, hey, I was a kid their age, too, once.”

“No kidding. We all were.”

“So I messed with them a bit. The two of them ran off to go look for another asshole to buy their booze. This kid played my game.”

“Game?”

“I asked him what kind thing had he done.” Fredo stared directly into Riverton’s eyes to make sure he got the point. “He told me he’d stuck up for a girl. I think I embarrassed the kid, and he had second thoughts.”

Riverton shrugged. “This is leading nowhere. How do you know he knew you?”

“He called me a frog-man. And then he took off before I could figure out who he was. Now that I know, I doubt he was the shooter.”

“You got a name for this kid?”

“His brother had a strange name—Ephron Hernandez. We just called his little brother Blue, Azul, because of his blue eyes. All the kids had brown eyes, and the mother had brown eyes. But this kid had the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen on a Mexican kid.”

Riverton closed his notebook after getting a further description of all three of the boys, especially Blue. “Well, I think this helps. How many blue-eyed Mexican kids from this part of San Diego are there? Can’t be that many.” He stood, shaking Fredo’s hand. “My best to Mia.”

Riverton was clean-shaven today, but his clothes were wrinkled, like they always were. Fredo watched him shuffle out of the room, like he was some ghost of lost souls, dressed in ashen rags. He figured Riverton’s job, studying and solving mysteries involving bad things people did to each other, usually life-ending things, was a calling. But it sure wasn’t one Fredo had any attraction to.

Chapter 5

‡

Three days later, Fredo was released from the hospital. They began shopping for Christmas. Mia took him to an upscale children’s clothing and toy store. He spent most of the time there squinting, examining price tags so small he thought perhaps he might need glasses.

“Geez!” Fredo growled, noticing the price on a pair of little girl’s socks with lace trim around the ankles. “I don’t even pay that much for a hundred percent wool.” He held the tiny pair of pink socks high in the air, between his index finger and thumb.

Mia bestowed a broad smile, following up with a wink. She rescued Fredo from the lethal clothing fashion statement. “You don’t wear lace, do you?”

“Well, I like lace. I like lace very, very, much, Mia. Just not on me.”

She giggled, her warm cadence lightening his heart. Anything was fun with Mia, even shopping for socks for little Ricardo or Mia’s cousin, who was about the same age. As she approached him, she allowed her tits to brush against his chest, and on cue, his dick got hard so fast he nearly doubled over.

“You know, you been filling my belly with come so much, Fredo, I think you gonna give me a little present one of these days. I want a little girl, sweetheart. Can you fill my belly with a little girl, hmm? Please?” She reached into his pants and squeezed his package while Fredo searched the boutique to make sure no one was going to see her actions.

“Oh my God! Fredo. I never knew shopping for baby clothes turned you on so much!” She purred up close and personal to him, her little pink tongue darting out between her red lips as she moaned. “I want you to fuck me until I am big with three children.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Mia,” he could barely say.

“It could. You are the magic man, Fredo. Nothing you cannot do.” She grabbed his hand and shoved it down her considerably tight blue jeans. “Just touching me makes me come.”

Her half-lidded eyes lasted only a few seconds, as they heard the bell of an incoming customer with a string of little ones in tow. Fredo counted three. All boys.

“See, that could be us, my lover. Let’s do this. Isn’t that what you guys say?”

It was what they said all right. It was the doing part that bothered him the most. The practice was fine, but the filling her belly with little ones—that wouldn’t be happening. Fredo thought that by now it would have gotten easier.

Riverton wanted Fredo to take a stroll with him around the neighborhood where he’d gotten shot. Fredo agreed on one condition—that they both wear Kevlar.

He felt like the Michelin Man as he waddled down the nearly non-existent sidewalk overrun with weeds springing up defiantly between concrete cracks. He was used to walking this way, his swagger from side to side usually accentuated by his hands on his H&K, in a walking shooter’s stance: right up top, finger on the trigger, left down on the barrel. If need be, he could swing his weapon up, balancing it on his hip if there wasn’t something else he could use to prop against. Without the gun, he still found himself holding his hands in that position just from force of habit. In a dangerous neighborhood like this one, having a semi-automatic made sense, even though it was illegal as hell.

Riverton was nervous and not used to wearing the heavy Kevlar. It was also due to the fact that someone had underestimated his girth, the detective’s arms exploding out the sides like growing eyes on a potato. But it was the constrictive breathing Fredo could hear that caused him the most worry.

“Clark, you wanna stop breathing through your mouth? You’re making too much noise.”

Riverton rolled his eyes and pulled his neck up and out of the protective vest, resembling a turtle coming out of its shell.

“You want me to loosen it? I can, you know.”

“I’m fine.”

“Breathe through your nose. You won’t scare so many people.”

They came to the little neighborhood store, and Fredo took the lead, striking up a conversation with the clerk, who appeared to be from India. Fredo was going to speak in broken Spanish until he saw the young kid’s dark face and wire-rimmed glasses.

“Amigo,” he started. “I was here a week ago, before Thanksgiving.”

The lanky teen nodded.

“I got shot, right outside your doors there. This here’s Detective Clark Riverton from the San Diego P.D. We’re looking for a couple of kids. One has real blue eyes, blue like the sky.”

“I’m sorry, haven’t seen them today.”

“Okay, so you know who we’re talking about, then?”

“Sure. Sure. The kid with the blue eyes. I see him just about every day.”

Riverton pushed Fredo to the side. His considerable girth took up most of the counter space. “You know where we can find them? Know where they live?”

“No, sir. They come in, buy stuff, and then leave. They’re no problem.”

“They use a credit card or pay by check?”

The clerk returned a face to Riverton, looking like he was sucking on a mouthful of lemons. “No checks. We never take checks. Cash. We take cash only. Food Stamps. They use Food Stamps.”

“Food Stamps?” Fredo asked.

“Yes. The one with the blue eyes has an older sister with a baby. They buy diapers sometimes. Baby things, cereal.” He drifted off, naming items Fredo didn’t recognize.

“Any idea where they live?” Riverton asked.

“No. I’m sorry, but I don’t pay attention. They pay; they leave. I don’t want to watch or get too curious. This is a terrible neighborhood.”

“Tell me about it,” Fredo mumbled under his breath. He knew his instincts were good in not allowing Mia’s mother to come to shop here anymore. In fact, he’d tried to get Felicia to sell her little bungalow and move some place safer with Mayfield. But if Mayfield couldn’t change her mind, Fredo and Mia, and Mia’s brother, Armando, would never convince the stubborn woman, who had lived in the same house for over twenty years. It was her piece of the American Dream, purchased with the settlement money from her husband’s murder in Puerto Rico.

Fredo took a turn at the clerk. “What does the sister look like? How old?”

“She’s not much older. I think she’s still in school.”

Fredo swore and shook his head. He remembered his first encounters with Mia, who also was a wild child and had run with the wrong crowd. The son he was raising as his own was, in fact, the biological son of a man in prison for gang violence and drug dealing. Mia had nearly cost Armando his life when he tried to defend her.

“Do you know where the kids here hang out?” Riverton asked.

The clerk gave a smirk. “You mean like a library or public pool? A park?” He wrinkled his brow. “If we had a park, it would be filled with druggies. If we had a library, they’d be setting fire to the books or the paper towels in the bathroom.”

“What about sports? Any basketball courts around?” Fredo watched as the clerk suddenly had a bright thought.

“Yes. I’ve seen them before. St. Rose Middle School. It’s abandoned now. Boarded up. But the basketball court still has the rims. No nets, nothing but blacktop and those big poles. No lights, either, so you don’t want to go at night.”

That was a start. The two of them got directions and found the abandoned school, covered in graffiti, some of it rather colorful and well-done. Scenes depicting jaguars, large spotted cats, and panthers hiding in bushes with big eyes made him feel like he was walking through a museum of modern art.

“Shit, this is good,” Fredo remarked.

“No kidding.” Riverton was viewing the landscape of abandoned houses, car hulks, and upturned garbage cans in the middle of the street. The neighborhood was deserted.

“Reminds me of some places in Syria and parts of Iraq.”

“That’s a statement,” answered Riverton. “Come all the way back here and find districts like over there.”

“Oh man, you should see some of the hill country, though. Beautiful. Snow, trees, not hot and dusty like the cities. Baghdad was a beautiful city at one time, was legendary for its beauty. Hard as that is to believe now.”

Fredo caught a glimpse of a pair of teens rounding the corner of the school, heading straight for them. Riverton braced himself and stiffened. But the kids, when they saw Fredo, turned around and ran away.

“That’s him, blue eyes,” barked Fredo as he took off after the pair.

They wound around several alleyways, avoiding loose dogs in fenced yards and lines of laundry, swinging a whole street away from a group of nearly a dozen youths, all with gang colors. Someone in a flat black, lowered, seventies model muscle car with darkened windows and custom paint drove slowly by, trash talking rap music making the insides of Fredo’s chest rattle. Fredo noticed Riverton had pulled out his badge, wearing it on his belt, and he’d unclipped his holster.

“I don’t like this at all, Fredo. This was a bad idea.”

“I thought you was smoking something to even suggest it. We don’t want to stop these guys or mess with them in any way. We should head back.”

Riverton followed behind Fredo, turning every few yards to make sure they weren’t targets. They hung close to trucks and large-trunk trees, and next to wooden fences and the sides of buildings so they weren’t out in plain sight, just like they searched the neighborhoods in Ramadi and Fallujah. What surprised Fredo most was that he felt safer there than he did here, in his own country, only fifty miles from where he grew up.

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and caught a flash glimpse of two teens running around the corner of the abandoned school building. Riverton was going to run after them, and Fredo held him back.

“We don’t want to put too much attention on them. Not in their best interest to be talking to a cop.”

“Just didn’t want them to get away. They’re suspects.”

“No way, Riverton. We take this one slow.” Fredo knew well the damage an angry street gang could do to a kid’s house, his parent’s car, or one of his friends. If blue eyes didn’t want to talk to Fredo, he sure as hell wouldn’t want to talk to Riverton.

Easing along the backside of a wall perpendicular to where the kids had run, Fredo checked the streets, listening for sounds like a safety being released, rounds loaded with a metal clip, a whisper, or a scared dog barking his lungs out. The chopped vehicle was gurgling down away from them, two streets over. Birds were chirping in rhythm to the white noise of a freeway nearby. Fredo led them to the end of the building and then quickly turned the corner without making a sound.

He caught the tail end of a screen door being shut, as if someone had entered hurriedly. He motioned to Riverton, and the two walked across dead lawns, past three abandoned houses with plywood covering non-existent windows, until they found a light pink home that reminded him of his mother-in-law’s place. Flowers in bright colored pots stood to either side of the front door. The front lawn and shrubbery that lined the walkway to the front door were casualties of the California drought. Residents were not allowed to water their front yards, but the half-dozen colorful pots stood in stark defiance of that order.

Fredo was going to knock on the front door, but Riverton barked behind him, “San Diego P.D. Open up!” It made Fredo jump and his ears ring.

“Dammit, Clark. Don’t you do anything quiet?”

Riverton gave him a wolfish grin. “Not a damned thing. I think being quiet is unnatural, don’t you?”

Fredo was ready to make a sharp jab back at the detective when the front door swung open and they were staring into the barrel of a long-nosed Colt. He was just about to say something to himself like “how could anything get worse?” when a shaking thumb cocked the hammer back.

She was a girl, trying to sound like a deep-voiced boy. Trying to sound older than her maybe sixteen or seventeen years. That told Fredo there wasn’t anyone older in authority in the household. He knew Riverton had to be careful, so Fredo made use of his training, quickly grabbing the gun, wresting it up and out of her hands; then he held her arms behind her back with a quick downward jerk, which he knew to be painful. And if she screamed, he’d yank her arms up so quickly he could nearly bust or dislocate her shoulder. He stowed the pistol at his back, out of reach of the girl.

Riverton made a quick entry into the house, leaving Fredo with the girl near the front door.

The girl was struggling to get away, but could not let out a call for help because Fredo’s huge hand covered her mouth and lower cheeks. “Don’t want to hurt you, missy. You behave.”

The girl ignored him. Girls were always ignoring Fredo, though, so he was used to it. She was making growling sounds Fredo found oddly sexy, especially given the circumstances.

What’s up with that?

Fredo dragged her behind him while she struggled without success to get out from under his grip. “Where’s your little brother, Chica?”

“None of your fuckin’ business,” she managed before she bit the palm of his hand.

“Fuck!” Fredo was in serious pain, and her quick action scared him.

Glancing down the hallway of the house, he saw Riverton standing at a bedroom doorway. The detective raised his pistol with both hands on the stubby grip, and kicked the door open. Fredo knew Riverton had already seen one gun, which meant there could be more. He wasn’t taking any chances.

Fredo grabbed the struggling girl, dragging her with him as he tried to follow Riverton. She was showing incredible strength. If he didn’t get a hold of her soon, he’d be forced to do something he didn’t want to do.

“Julio, run!” the girl shouted to the occupant of the bedroom. Fredo didn’t want to, but he gave her a backhanded slap across the chops, and she collapsed, unconscious. He needed to aid Riverton in case the Detective faced hostiles. He laid her down carefully and rushed to Riverton’s side.

The drapes were pulled, making the darkened room impossible to navigate. Riverton tripped over something and was on his knees with a groan. Fredo heard the unmistakable thud of Clark’s gun falling to the wooden floor. Following the sound, he lurched forward, clutching for what seemed like thin air before he felt clothing and a mop of stiff hair. His nostrils scented teenage sweat, and he heard the heavy breathing of a young man not nearly as strong, while Riverton groaned in the background.

He felt the metal of the gun, grabbed it toward his chest, and stiff-armed the youth away from him. He shoved the gun into Riverton’s chest until the detective could grab hold of it then found the front of the kid’s shirt and yanked him to standing position.

Riverton scrambled to stand, gasping.

“I got it,” Fredo barked.

Riverton pulled at the drapes, letting in some light just as they heard a baby wail in the room next door. The kid was still wiggling to get loose from Fredo’s iron grip.

“Quit it. I don’t want to hurt you,” Fredo whispered. “We just want to talk. Cut it out, you little motherfucker!”

It did little to stop the youth. Riverton threw handcuffs on him from behind then pushed him onto the mattress sitting directly on the floor. The bright blue eyes stared back up to Fredo, revealing a cocktail of hatred and fear.

“Anyone else here?” Fredo asked.

The teen shook his head slowly, resigned.

Fredo bent over the girl as she began to regain consciousness. He noted she’d have a bruise over her left eye and cheekbone. He felt awful about hitting a woman, but his overwhelming concern for other occupants of the house who might have weapons caused his quick and violent reaction. It was part of his training that would never leave him alone. He was forever expecting and being prepared for deadly force.

The baby wailed again. Fredo and Riverton shared a look. The unspoken call to action fell on Fredo’s shoulders.

“I’m good with the kids here,” Riverton said.

The bedroom next to the darkened room was also pitch black. He followed the sound, nearly running into a crib in the corner. He leaned over the wooden rails and instinctively picked up the frightened child.

“Shhh. Shhh. You’re okay,” the SEAL said, as he bounced the toddler, pressing him against his chest. To the top of his curly head, he whispered, “Everything’s fine now. Don’t be scared.” Then he kissed the small warm head and heard the huge inhale as the child settled.

Fredo shuffled in the dark over to where he saw a thin crack of sunlight, pulled back the drapes, and let the room flood with light. A single bed was made up in the corner opposite the crib. An old dresser with a cracked mirror was the only other piece of furniture. The top was fashioned with a plastic pad for diaper changing.

The two of them, the warrior and the toddler, took stock of each other briefly before the child’s lower lip began to quiver and he started another series of mournful cries. This time, the bouncing didn’t help, as the boy realized he was being held by a stranger.

Fredo brought the baby into the other bedroom. The girl was sitting next to her brother, unrestrained, so Fredo handed her the child.

Riverton cleared his throat. “We just want to talk. First, I gotta ask you, do you guys live here alone?”

“No,” the girl said. Her face was swelling. Fredo felt horrible about the pain it must cause her. She put the baby to her breast, and it seemed to ease everyone in the room as the unmistakable sounds of feeding began. “Our mother lives here, too. But she’s at work.”

“Okay, so missy, we have some questions we want to ask your brother here. This is your brother?” Riverton asked.

She nodded.

“He’s Julio?”

Again, she nodded.

“And you’re?”

“Lupe. Lupe Hernandez.”

“Okay, thanks. Now, we think he saw something we need to find out about,” Riverton added.

She nodded again and turned to frown at her brother.

“I didn’t do anything. He’s a frog, Lupe. One of those.” The kid was sneering at Fredo.

“Yeah, and I’m a fuckin’ monkey. Don’t get smart. We just want some information, son, and depending on what you tell us, we’ll be on our way.” Riverton checked with Fredo and then continued. “This the man whose life you saved, son?”

Riverton’s thumb curled back in Fredo’s direction.

The boy didn’t want to answer. Fredo changed his stance, placing his fingers on his hips, and it made the boy flinch.

“Yes.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

Traces of an evil smile appeared on the kid’s face. “If you spend much time here, you learn about things like this. And my brother taught me a few things.”

Riverton turned to Fredo, asking for advice to proceed. Fredo took his cue.

“He the one who tried out for the teams?”

Both brother and sister solemnly nodded.

“We’re sorry about that. Your brother was a good man. The Navy lost a good Corpsman.” Fredo could tell the boy didn’t trust him. He looked around the room.

“You kids home alone a lot here? In this neighborhood? Your mother leaves you alone like this?”

“Sometimes we have someone else come in. I work, too. Julio does—”

“I’m a student,” Julio said defiantly, cutting off his sister.

“I take the baby with me to high school. They have an after school program for girls like—me.” She looked down at her baby, her palm smoothing over his curls. “There’s a neighbor lady friend of our mother’s who sometimes looks in on us. Not like we’re children,” she added.

Fredo knew Mia and Armando were both kids raised under similar circumstances. Felicia Guzman had worked cleaning motels and doing laundry. It wasn’t legal, especially with the baby. They were wise to be cautious. Fredo could see the girl didn’t want to give up her baby.

“Look, we’re not here to get into all that,” Riverton reassured them.

“You see who shot me?”

Julio looked away immediately. It was just as Fredo suspected. He knew who had shot him.

“You know someone who owns a small caliber gun? Like a woman’s gun. Did I get shot by a woman?”

The kid shrugged. His non-cooperation was pissing Fredo off. Plus, he was getting increasingly uncomfortable in the neighborhood where they were easily outnumbered and outgunned.

“You were a target. I think you popped someone’s cherry.” The kid grinned, enjoying Fredo’s pain.

Riverton was familiar with this scenario and told him so. “They get the kids to go shoot someone, usually kill someone, or someone’s pet, as an initiation to become one of the members. And with all the witnesses, you gotta rely on them not to snitch. Nice family bonding experience.” Riverton’s face reflected the disgust Fredo knew he felt inside.

The kids had no future. It saddened him.

“So who do you run with?”

“I’m clear.”

“I find that impossible to believe.”

“I don’t want to go that way. Trying to stay out of it. I wanna go to school. Maybe work in a hospital.”

“Yes. Ephron was teaching him all kinds of first aid. He’s actually saved some lives already at his young age,” said Lupe.

“You saw him get shot, didn’t you?” Riverton was also losing patience.

“Nah, I didn’t.”

Fredo knew the kid was lying. His heart still ached that the boy had to do this to survive. Patch together some scumbag so he could go terrorize the rest of the neighborhood another day. He decided the kid had less of a future than he initially thought. He prayed no one knew Julio had seen the shooting.

They kept asking questions, and the boy dodged them smartly, being used to dealing with law enforcement. Something became apparent to Fredo the longer they stayed in the home; the kid was brave. His medical skills were helping to keep the family under the protection of someone; but for how long, Fredo wasn’t sure, although he could understand Julio’s thirteen-year-old logic.

Riverton gave both kids his card. Julio looked at Fredo as if he wanted his card, too, which Fredo found touching. “We don’t do that shit. Sorry, man.” Then he had an idea. He grabbed Riverton’s card and wrote his cell on the back, handing it to Julio, and then did the same to Lupe’s card. “You call me if something’s going down.”

Julio gave them a smirk. Fredo decided it was his most common form of expression, those half-lidded eyes telling everyone in the room he didn’t take shit from anyone and he didn’t believe anyone was there to help him, either.

“You think somethin’s funny?” he asked Julio.

“Yeah, the fuckin’ SEALs. Bring in the SEALs. Now that would be something to watch.”

Chapter 6

‡

Fredo thought about the kid’s remarks for the next couple of days as he helped Mia get the house ready for Christmas. He helped Mayfield and Armando string lights around Felicia Guzman’s front porch. He replaced a window for her, fixed her dishwasher, and picked up a new mixer for her holiday cooking.

He bought a miniature plastic tool set for Ricardo that came in an authentic-looking plastic tool case. Felicia made the toddler a carpenter’s apron with numerous pockets, embroidered with the outline of a particular tool. One afternoon, while making repairs, Ricardo followed him around, wearing his apron, the pockets stuffed with Fredo’s plastic tools.

“You do this, Ricardo,” Fredo said as he helped chubby fingers wrap around a red screwdriver, pushing it into the window sill. Ricardo did it several times, and squealed with delight.

“Now, look at this. You’re gonna love this!” he said as he whacked a piece of scrap wooden window trim with his hammer. Ricardo got out his plastic screwdriver and raised his arm over the wood.

“No, no, no! Ricardo, you need to pay attention.” Fredo showed him the hammer, with the flat nose and arched backside that matched his own. “See? This one.”

Ricardo screamed again and hit the wooden piece several times, nearly falling down in the process.

Mia came up behind Fredo, lovingly melting into his back, whispering in his ear, “You are soooo good with him, my lover. He’s going to grow up to be a carpenter because of you. Look how he can use his tools already.”

Fredo chuckled. He was sure Mia didn’t understand the double entendre she’d used. While thinking about tools, he got hard again.

Mia was always easy to be around, so beautiful, making every excuse to touch him, rub against him, and keep him in a state of continual arousal. She’d brought up the subject of getting pregnant, again, and Fredo was close to letting her know the truth about his doctor’s visit. Coop even asked if he’d talked to her yet.

“No, and I’m waiting for the right time. Maybe I should do it after Christmas, Coop.”

“You better tell her.”

“Why, did you go and fuckin’ tell Libby? That what you’re sayin’?”

“No. I wouldn’t do that. Who do you fuckin’ think I am?”

“Oh, I get it. When you get all aroused and you’re pumping her, you feel the need to unload all your burdens, and you tell her about my little tadpoles with the dented heads?”

Coop laughed. “Man, you’re twisting this all out of shape, Fredo. No fuckin’ way I would tell her. I’m just sayin’ Mia will be pissed if she finds out you’ve known for a long time.”

“I’m getting adjusted. I got shot, for Christ’s sake. Give me a fuckin’ break.”

Fredo knew Coop was right. The wives had a circle of communication that was faster than being hard-wired. Almost like they had a hive mentality. If a word was mentioned about his sterility, everyone would know within a matter of hours, perhaps minutes.

He thought about the kids living in that little house. He even drove past it on several occasions when he needed to pick up things for Felicia. He thought about them when he gave money to the bell ringers by the Post Office. He took it upon himself to get a couple of nice thick beef sandwiches to carry around in the truck so he could stop and feed some homeless men. He brought cans of dog food for some of their dogs that probably ate by scrounging garbage.

It was the Christmas spirit, filling his heart. The season was about doing good, taking care of each other. The team took up a collection for a simple wedding for one of their froglets, a new guy on the team. It was uncommon for the SEALs to come from well-to-do families, so collections were always being taken so they could help each other.

One day, he had an idea.

Kyle, T.J., Cooper, Danny, Lucas, and several others were passing time at the Scupper.

“You hear some of the guys on Team 5 are building a brewery?” Kyle asked.

“Well, we got us a winery up in Sonoma County,” said Coop.

The team and several others, including Libby’s parents, had invested in Devon and Nick’s winery a couple of years ago. It wasn’t yet a profitable venture.

“What are they calling it?” someone asked.

“Brotherhood Brewing Company.”

Of course.

Fredo decided the time was right for discussion of his idea. “I’ve been thinking about the kids we met, you know, living in the neighborhood where I got shot. I was thinking, because it’s Christmas, maybe we could take on a family, you know, adopt them?”

“We do that at church,” someone said.

“This is different. I’m talking about doing a community improvement project.”

“What did you have in mind, Fredo?” asked Kyle.

“Well, they basically have a dying neighborhood. Houses boarded up, even the Catholic middle school—” he leaned over and nodded to Armando—“You and Mia went to school there, I think. Right, Armani?”

“Yes. Used to be a decent school.”

“You want to open up a school, Fredo?” asked T.J.

“No. Just a basketball court. A place for the kids to play. Fenced, maybe with some lights so they are protected at night.”

“Basketball? You don’t play basketball, Fredo.”

“Doesn’t matter. What else is there for the kids to do? They have to take a bus to go to any Boys or Girls Club. No one wants to teach there, so the school closed. If they had a place to play, a safe place, maybe some good could come out of it. Maybe we could start something that could grow into something nice.”

Like any task the Team did together, they started making lists of all the things that needed to be done. It took nearly ten napkins to write down the thirty or so important things that would have to happen before the project could be launched.

“What do we call it?” Coop asked him.

Fredo scratched his head. “How about “Operation Freedom: A Place to Play?”

They set up a meeting with the Archdiocese, who agreed to allow them access to the old school so they would have a place to store tools and materials for the project. A donor’s list was started, beginning with a fence company who donated all of the chain-link fencing. One of the wives found a small private school that was going to be demolished. The basketball court lights were donated to the project. The Archdiocese agreed to pay for the water and electricity to run the property, and to have a functioning kitchen, and bathroom facilities.

They found a road grading contractor who agreed to re-blacktop the whole playground. The courts were painted and re-striped. Hoops were replaced.

Fredo and Kyle got on the City Council agenda, in an emergency session, asking for the city’s support for the project; they were given a community block grant of over fifty thousand dollars as seed money, with local banks and other businesses providing matching funds in exchange for promotional rights. A local news station got wind of their project and did a series of stories, which were picked up by crews from Los Angeles. A couple of professional players from the Warriors agreed to donate time, do television spots, and help set up and run basketball clinics.

Christy Lansdowne and several of the realtors from her company donated a work day. Boarded up houses were painted and re-opened. The properties that had been abandoned had reverted back to the City of San Diego, so work crews and several contractor firms took on projects, house by house, donating labor and materials. Julio, Lupe, and their mother were able to move into a newly refurbished rental home run by the San Diego Housing Authority, overlooking the basketball court.

By the time the New Year had started, the old school had been inexpensively converted to a club house that the Archdiocese agreed to run, in partnership with one of the local service clubs. There were plans to install computers and classrooms teaching painting and creative writing, as well as other crafts.

Fredo’s project took on a life of its own. But of all the things he enjoyed, they paled in comparison to the relationship he was building with little Julio, who had learned to be quite the community organizer, and became the “grass roots” unofficial spokesman for the project. Lupe and her mother helped with bookkeeping. In essence, Fredo had created gainful employment for the entire Hernandez family.

“Why you do all this, man?” Julio asked him one day.

“Just because we can. Because someone has to do it.”

“I’m not complaining. Just why doesn’t our government do things like this?” Julio asked.

“Oh, who knows? Probably trying to defend against lawsuits, trying to manage the media, all that shit. This is just simple. We get people to help us because it’s fun, it feels right, and everyone likes to work together. Maybe these sorts of things should never be government-run.”

“You could have a lot more free time with the Mrs.” Julio pointed out. “Can’t imagine you’d want to do anything else, you understand what I’m sayin’?”

Fredo put his arm around Julio. “Oh yes, there are times when a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. I manage to get some time in there for Ricardo and Mia.”

Mia had been reminding him of the same thing, but Fredo didn’t want Julio to know. She’d been fretting a little over not getting pregnant and even went to the doctor about it, without telling Fredo.

“So now you go, Fredo. It’s not me. You go and get checked.”

He started to agree when he got a phone call that completely shattered his day.

Chapter 7

‡

“Calm down, Lupe. Where is he?” Fredo listened as Lupe told him they’d taken Julio to Scripps.

“How bad is it?

“He’s looking like a piece of hamburger. He tried to stop them. Fredo, the school, the club house—everything is destroyed. They even shot out all the lights.”

Fredo was furious, but he knew there would be time for that later. Right now, he wanted to go to Julio’s side and be there when he got out of surgery. Mia watched as he disconnected his phone. He might have thrown it against the wall if Mia hadn’t been standing there.

“Fredo, you go. But please, don’t do anything stupid, my love. You call and let me know what’s happening. You call more than you usually call. No going dark, hear me?” She ducked down to capture his gaze. It was hard to say no to Mia, and it always would be.

“I will,” was all he could muster. She sent him away with a hug that hurt his still-sensitive lung cavity.

Riverton agreed to meet him at the hospital. The detective had a female officer posted over at the Hernandez house. The Department was doing a house-to-house search for a group of armed thugs, kids wearing black sweatshirts and masks, claiming they were “taking back the neighborhood.” Pictures of the partially burning building and twisted piles of chain-link fencing that had been literally ripped from its roots began to surface on the local and national news service wires.

While Fredo waited for Riverton, Mrs. Hernandez arrived. He was glad Lupe and the baby had stayed behind.

“I am just sick, Fredo. I should have never let him go over there by himself. He saw the boys, I think recognized the boys. Actually, he said there were a couple of girls, too.”

Fredo hugged the small woman who reminded him of a younger version of his own mother-in-law, Felicia Guzman.

“This will not go unpunished.” Fredo worked to keep his anger between the lines. Part of him wanted to throw the waiting room furniture.

While they waited together, holding hands, he viewed the news reports, fisting and un-fisting his left hand while seeing live camera shots of the destruction on TV. Materials and contents of the school building were dumped on the blacktop, much of it set on fire. One of the light standards was lying on its side, having been rammed with a large truck of some kind. Several of the houses, even those with occupants living in them, were spray painted “Take It Back” with black letters.

Fredo thought they were nuts.

Riverton joined him. “I’m just racking my brain, wondering who would do this and why?”

“One reporter said someone was disgruntled because they weren’t hired on. Another said they heard the complaints that it was “outsiders” who tried to take over their neighborhood, and they wanted it back.” Fredo shook his head. “But that just makes no sense at all. I mean, ninety days ago, they could care less what went on there.”

“So maybe we disrupted their operation. That’s what I’m thinking.”

They sat in silence. Fredo took it as a personal attack against himself. And he understood now that the Hernandez family, just by virtue of being friends of his, were vulnerable. He’d caused this just by showing kindness and doing the right thing.

Dr. Patterson came out into the waiting room, his weary eyes telegraphing something tragic. Fredo embraced Mrs. Hernandez, and they both inhaled, waiting to be told the news.

“I pulled out five slugs. Small, luckily.” He rubbed his eyes together with the tips of his fingers, forming a tent over the bridge of his nose. “I cannot get the last bullet right now at the base of his skull.”

Fredo felt like he’d been gored.

“Base of his skull? He was shot, like an execution?”

“I’m afraid so. If they had anything bigger, he’d be dead. Right now I can’t do anything more until some of his brain swelling goes down. Then we’ll worry about the spinal cord injury.”

“Spinal cord injury!” Mrs. Hernandez screamed. “My Julio. Oh my God, Julio!”

Her voice echoed throughout the emergency room and probably beyond.

“I need those rounds,” Riverton whispered to the doctor.

“You got it.”

“So when will we know?”

Dr. Patterson’s long face didn’t look hopeful. “I’d prepare for the worst. He’s already had two seizures. We can do certain things for the swelling or it will cause further injury, both for his ability to be mobile as well as for the health of his brain. My biggest fear is infection. We’ll have to play it out. Good news is that the kid’s healthy and young. Young tissue heals fast and responds to treatment. And thank God he has no drugs in his system.”

“Of course he has no drugs in his system.” Mrs. Hernandez barked her protest to the young doctor.

Patterson shook his head. “We always test. This age group, high percentage of even casual drug users. Affects what we can do. We gotta know, especially with stimulants.”

“Is he conscious?” Fredo asked.

“I’m afraid not, and that’s good. I want him to heal. He needs rest. Not going to wake him up right now. It could risk his life.”

Fredo was numb. All the good he had been creating for the neighborhood wasn’t worth the news about Julio. What was he thinking? He didn’t miscalculate like this usually. Why didn’t he see it coming?

He withdrew from Mrs. Hernandez, who sobbed against the doctor. Dr. Patterson lovingly extricated her from his chest and handed her over to Riverton, who stiffened at first then accepted his role.

“I gotta go. Unfortunately, Julio wasn’t my only GSW tonight.”

Riverton helped Mrs. Hernandez to a seat next to Fredo.

Evil exists when good men do nothing. Fredo wanted to blame himself for this. It was indeed his fault, or at least part of it. But as a SEAL, he was more prepared for paying the price with his life, his health. He hadn’t counted on a youth of thirteen who’d already lost his older brother and a mother who had lost one son to the violence of the neighborhood—hadn’t counted on them having to pay that price, as well.

But pure evil worked that way. Preyed on the innocent. Fredo knew it wasn’t a good idea to plan a counter when he was in the heat of loss and grief. But he knew that somehow he’d get even. He searched his options. None of them were viable, not if he wanted to remain a SEAL.

“Kyle, you see the news reports?”

“Yeah. Knew you were busy with the family. What can I do to help?”

“I’m gonna get these bastards.”

“Roger that, Fredo; and I didn’t hear it, either.”

The pause on the phone between the two warriors was awkward.

“Don’t go taking any of our guys down that hellhole, Fredo. You choose to hang up your career, don’t drag anyone else with you. This isn’t our fight here.”

“I understand, LT. But this is my fight. This is why we’re doing this. No way this should have happened. I was completely shit-faced stupid.”

“Don’t bear that one. You can’t be everywhere. Besides, your job is elsewhere. You do understand your real job, don’t you, Fredo?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And yes, this sucks. But we live in a land where there are laws. I wish the police could do what we do over in the arena. I wish they had the firepower, the training we do. But that’s for another day. Today, you fight to stay sane, Fredo. I don’t want to lose one of my best men.” After a brief pause, when Kyle didn’t hear Fredo’s response, he sighed and said, “I’m sending Coop and Jones, maybe T.J. too. They’re gonna stick like glue to your ass until you get yourself back home. You hear me?”

“Yes.”

Fredo was already trying to figure out how he could give them the slip, do his own reconnaissance, find the guys—or at least the leader of the gang who did the destruction—and do him in; painfully, slowly, with relish. He’d look into the face of the man he was going to kill, and he’d take that life. Perhaps the last time, he’d take a life. And he’d make damn sure he enjoyed every second of it.

His dark thoughts scared him more than some of the dark dangerous streets in Iraq or Syria.

Chapter 8

‡

As word of the destruction of the project spread, the outpouring of sympathy and help from the community in San Diego, especially the SEAL community, kicked in big time like a high-level tactical operation. Just like always happened when they lost someone on their team, the guys got busy. Work always made horrible things seem less horrible. This wasn’t a time for smack talk, play, or joking around. This was as serious as the protection of all of the country. Someone had violated the normal boundaries of their SEAL community, and that wasn’t anything that would be allowed to stand.

The activity did give Fredo minutes here and there when he could get lost in the neighborhood. At first, Coop, T.J., and Jones let him go on short errands, but when he was gone two hours without checking in, they remained one link away from his person.

Taking at least one Team guy with him, Fredo discussed the project with the leaders at the Archdiocese. He talked to several of the volunteers who worked at the center. While no one gave him a name, a pattern developed. Older kids, kids who used the vacant buildings as drug houses, kids who hung out in the dark and dirty regions of the neighborhood, had begun to ask questions. Fredo could see that this had been a planned and coordinated attack designed to fill them with fear so they’d give up.

Well, they didn’t know the half of it.

Because of the high profile nature of the violent event, police and community resources were being used. No one wanted this attack to go unchecked. No one wanted the haters to win.

A couple of non-local news media erroneously reported a terrorist connection. Fredo doubted that, but four days into the rebuild and cleanup, and after canvassing the neighborhood, he still needed to speak to Julio. Fredo knew the kid would be able to tell him who did this. He knew he had to get the mystery solved, or at least help the police get it solved, while everyone’s attention was still there. Once another shooting or event overseas eclipsed the news, the spotlight would be silenced, and then it would be harder to catch those responsible.

Every day, he came by the mercado and asked if the clerk had seen anyone of interest or heard anything. Today, he had Jones with him.

“I’m glad you came by today, Mr. Frodo.”

“Fredo, asshole.”

“Pardon. I overheard something. I didn’t get any names, but several new guys showed up and bought energy drinks, snack foods, and lots of alcohol. They were talking about some big party going on very soon. Some big gang leader was getting out of jail. They were going to celebrate and have a ‘do-over,’ they called it.”

“When is this happening?” Fredo asked.

“Sounded like very soon. Like this guy was pissed they didn’t wait for him.”

“Okay, thanks. You stay safe.”

“I’m going to close up early tonight. I’ve told the owner I’m not well. He doesn’t have anyone to cover me, so I think we’ll be closed.”

“Probably smart. You call me if you see anything.” Fredo wrote his cell on a piece of paper for the clerk.

Fredo called Riverton and let him know what he’d been told. Riverton confirmed what Fredo had been told. “We got fuckin’ Sonny Alvarez getting out of Pelican Bay this afternoon or maybe tomorrow. Got his conviction overturned, and I’m sure there will be a retrial, but the Feds are cooking something up, and he’ll get re-charged, but we don’t know when. He’s a total scumbag, Fredo. He’d gotten twenty-five years to life. He’s not supposed to return to the neighborhood, per conditions of his release, but sounds like he has other plans.”

“Maybe that could tack on additional years, then, if he gets caught.”

“Could be. It’s the catching him that’s the problem. Takes a lot of resources, and we’ve got our hands full with budget cuts.”

Fredo knew it might be a long shot, but this was the connection he needed. He and Jones started asking neighbors if they knew where the Alvarez family lived. He got an answer from an unlikely source the next day.

Mrs. Hernandez told Fredo some of Sonny’s junior lieutenants, boys still in high school with clean records who could move in and out of society without notice, had been harassing Lupe.

“Ephron knew it. I couldn’t be sure, but I wondered if that’s what got him shot,” she mumbled. A fat tear traveled down her cheek.

“You tell the police this?”

“Oh yes. That was almost two years ago. Fredo, the police did nothing, really. Just called it a random shooting. But I know my Ephron. He wasn’t a Navy SEAL, but he was still a corpsman, and he’d have been like you, not willing to let it go.”

“So did the harassment stop after his death?”

“Lupe said so. But by then she was pregnant, and out of school for the summer and then later to go have the baby.”

“Did Julio know these guys?”

“I don’t know. But if I was to guess, I’d say yes.”

On the way over to the hospital, T.J. asked Fredo several questions. “So Jones says some big gang guy is getting out of prison, and he might have a connection to all this? That right, Fredo?”

“Yes. Riverton thinks he gets out today.”

“So you think Julio knows him?”

“No, I don’t. But I’m sure there’s a connection.”

“So why are we going over there?”

“I wanna see if Julio is any closer to waking up or can talk. I need a little bit of something more, T.J.”

“Not sure that’s smart, Fredo.”

“Gotta try. We’re running out of time. If they’re planning on something else, we better be ready.”

“But you just can’t wake up a patient like that. You could cause brain damage.”

“I know that. I won’t do that. But I gotta try. Gotta do what I can.”

A few minutes later, Fredo was arguing with the head nurse, in hushed tones, at the foot of Julio’s bed in intensive care. As if hearing the voices, Julio’s eyes began to trace beneath his closed eyelids.

“Holy shit, Fredo, he’s regaining consciousness,” T.J. said as he grabbed his buddy’s arm, pulling him to the bedside.

“You don’t touch him. I’m going to get the doctor.” The nurse shut off her attitude, turned, and ran to the hallway.

Fredo leaned over Julio. “Hey there. You still at home, little Corpsman?”

Julio’s eyelids fluttered in response to Fredo’s words.

“I don’t got a lot of time. No problem if you need to chill some more. I need to get some intel, but only if you can. Can you help me, buddy?”

T.J. was looking down on the patient with a frown, concern all over his face. “You be careful, Fredo.”

They could hear someone running down the hallway, equipment jiggling.

“Think they’re bringing a cart. You only got a couple seconds, Fredo.”

All of a sudden, Julio mumbled something.

“What?” Fredo put his ear right up to the boy’s lips. “Tell me again, son.”

“Diego Mora. He shot me.”

Fredo squeezed his shoulder, got out his cell, and turned on the voice messaging feature. “One more time, my man.”

Julio repeated the words just as the heavy-set nurse, an orderly with an equipment cart of some kind, and a young intern entered the room.

“Out!” the intern pointed to the door behind him. “You’re not family, and you get the hell away from my patient.”

Fredo slipped the phone in his pocket as he and T.J. exited the room then ran down the hall to the outside.

Chapter 9

‡

Fredo made the quick call to Mia, which was hours overdue.

“You know you’re glad I’m a big girl and got Ricardo and lots of projects to keep me busy, with all this cleanup. And of course I got your other SEAL buddies beside me nearly twenty-four-seven, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

“Yes, dear.”

He rolled his eyes at T.J., who gave him the thumbs-up. Fredo got her caught up on Julio’s near-awakening.

“That’s wonderful. Answer to prayers, I’d say. Better tell my Mama. She’s been prayin’ every hour, holed up in that little house of hers.”

“Mia, we’re gonna have to convince her to get out of that neighborhood. I think the time has come for that fierce talk.”

“Good luck with that. I’m not gonna be anywhere near you when you try to tell her that. Maybe you and Armando and Mayfield can get your heads together, and after all this violence, maybe she’ll finally be ready.”

Next call he made was to Riverton. “Got a name from Julio. Diego Mora.”

“Julio awake now?”

“Barely. Here, I’ll send you the voice clip. He said it clear as day.” He did the phone playback and heard Riverton swear.

“Okay, I’ll pull in the Feds right now. God, I hope it doesn’t take them a week to get their shit together. You got an address for this Mora guy?”

“Nope. But I’m sure someone knows him. We were asking the wrong question. And, Riverton, put a guard on Julio’s door at the hospital. It’s too open there; makes me nervous.”

“I’ll get a uniform on right away. Now Fredo, you stay out of it, you hear? You wait for us to get the plan put into place. In the meantime, just sit tight, and if you get an address, well, I want to be the first one you call, hear me?”

Fredo made screeching noises into the cell phone, rubbing his mouth with his hand, imitating a bad connection, then pushed the red button to disconnect.

T.J. had his hands on his hips. “You dumb shit.”

“You’d do the same, and you know it.”

“Okay, so now there’s another thing I don’t wanna know! Fredo, Kyle told you not to get involved, Riverton just told you the same thing. And yet you’re fuckin’ gonna jump in anyway, aren’t you?”

“What the fuck to you think, T.J.? Wouldn’t you do the same? Come on, you know you would.”

T.J. was about to crack a smile, but stuffed it. Fredo didn’t want his friend to know he’d noticed.

“So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking Kyle asked you and Jones and Coop to keep an eye on me.”

“Yeah. Impossible, but yeah.”

“Let’s go get ’em so you can do your jobs.”

“Unbelievable,” was T.J.’s only response.

By the time Fredo and T.J. gathered their gear and got over to the club house, there were ten SEALs waiting for them. Their team leader, Kyle Lansdowne, was one of them.

“Now that’s what I call boots on the ground,” Fredo said with a big high-five for his LPO. It was the first time Fredo had felt like smiling in four days. “You’re one slimy bastard, Kyle. You played that one really well, asshole.”

“Just makin’ sure enough people heard me and wanted to see if you really had the balls to carry it off. Officially? We’re not here. We get caught, we’re screwed. Way I see it, one of us gets busted, we all do.” Kyle addressed all of the men. “We got two things we gotta do and one thing we most definitely don’t want to do.” He walked in front of the group like they did at their Team building in Coronado, walking that straight imaginary line in the floor. “We find these bastards. And I’m talking about the Mora kid and his cronies. We turn them over to the Feds or San Diego P.D.”

Fredo knew what the one thing was that they weren’t going to do before Kyle had a chance to say it.

“We don’t, and let me repeat, we don’t suffer any loss of life. I mean if you should run over a small dog or cat, our mission is screwed. Certainly no women or children and abso-fuckin-lutely no bad guys.”

“What about us?” Luke asked.

“That goes without saying. That’s always the rule. No heroics, just get in and get out. So first we find them. It will be your basic fan out and reconnaissance. We go door-to-door. We ask questions, and look for nervous people. They’re gonna think we’re cops anyhow, unless they remember us from the project.”

Lupe appeared in the doorway, holding her baby in her arms, and Kyle nodded to her, which made every one of the SEALs turn. Unlike a mission overseas, they didn’t have their long guns or strange unicorn hats with the scopes for night vision, but they were stowed across the inlet on the island at the Team building if they needed them. Fredo also knew that every one of the SEALs had his own personal shooter, along with a KA-BAR or some other ugly kind of knife, and they were wearing Kevlar. From behind, they might have looked like a bunch of hikers readying themselves for nasty terrain.

“Ma’am?”

“I know where Diego Mora lives, or where he used to live.”

“Holy shit, Lupe. That’s a streak of good luck,” Fredo barked.

“I’ll take you there now.”

“Whoa, just give us the address, and you can stay protected.”

“No. This is what I must do. I hold myself responsible for Ephron. He was trying to help me, and it cost him his life. Besides, you won’t get anywhere close to him without me there.”

“I can’t let you or the baby go with us, Lupe. I just can’t do that. Sorry.” Kyle tenderly put his palm on her shoulder. Her seventeen-plus years of hard living didn’t mask the admiration she showed Kyle as she drank from his gaze.

“If it weren’t for me, Ephron would be one of you. I know he would.”

Fredo could tell from the fidgeting in the room the Team wasn’t in favor of getting Lupe near the kill zone.

Kyle’s voice was low and authoritative, like he was talking to a child of five. “No. I said no, and that’s final.”

“You don’t understand. He doesn’t care anything about any of you, or even me. He wants to see his baby.” She held the toddler up, his dark eyes scanning the faces of the men all around him. His fat pink cheeks and curly dark-brown hair made him look like a real-life cherub. As Lupe bounced him gently, she added, “He has never seen his baby.”

None of them were happy about it. These were the types of situations they’d rehearsed over and over again, the kinds of times when extreme care would be taken to protect the innocent, even if it meant their own personal loss of life. There was background chatter as Kyle finished laying out the plan. Fredo knew, as he watched everyone check their weapons, test their Invisios, tighten their straps, flatten their extra Velcro custom pockets, and double check their extra clips, If he asked any one of them, they would all tell him they’d take a bullet for her and the baby without thinking.

Unlike overseas, they had the added restraint of not being able to shoot first, which was always the safest. Hostage negotiations worked out badly over fifty percent of the time because someone on the other side either got scared or had thought that perhaps they couldn’t trust one of the SEALs, and often it cost them their lives. Adding to the fucked-up situation they were in, some of the local gangs had acquired cop-killer rounds that would slice through their armor like a curling iron through a popsicle. So they could shoot to defend themselves, but only to wound and not to kill.

But none of the bastards deserved to live.

Fredo was beginning to get tired, and realized his stamina hadn’t built up. Breathing hurt a little. He wasn’t getting enough sleep. He’d work on that, after they finished their mission. Until then, he would just have to put it out of his mind.

After they got all their gear together, Kyle called a brief team meeting, going over the strategy and Lupe’s description of the compound Diego lived in one more time, just like they always did. Rehearsing, over-rehearsing was always the plan. It increased the odds they’d have a successful mission.

Fredo called Mia again, this time letting her know they were “doing something,” their code for “don’t ask, I’ll never tell.”

“Fredo, you stop all that playing around and come home. I don’t like you running around with your buddies so soon after you were in the hospital.”

“I’m fine. No need to worry.” He did experience a little shortness of breath. He made sure she didn’t hear it.

“That’s when I worry the most! Oh, Fredo, come home and fuck me, okay? Wouldn’t you rather do that than run around with—you have guns with you?”

Again, he couldn’t lie to her. She’d know it.

“Mia, of course. We have to protect ourselves. Going after the guys who did all this shit. Would be stupid not to go in armed, my love.”

She purred some favorite words to him, and sure as heck, his unit came to full attention.

“Mia, you’re making me hard.”

“Good, then you can just tell Kyle and the boys you gotta come home and service me proper. Fredo, please.”

“I’ll be home. Just hold that thought.” He was grateful for the sexual banter, which took his mind off of the stress and apprehension he was feeling. But all too quickly, he realized if it went bad, this could be the last time he’d talk to her. It was strange, because he’d never felt this way at home before. It was always when he was leaving to go overseas. He decided it might be a good time to tell her what he’d been trying to tell her all this time.

“Mia, just in case, I want you to know—I wanted you to know—how much I love you.”

Mia became unhinged on the other end of the line. Fredo was silently cursing himself for not being more careful to not worry her.

Fuck it.

She didn’t need to know about his little sperm with the dented heads. There was nothing wrong with his equipment. Compared to some of the larger issues at hand, whether or not he could make babies seemed less important.

“Mia, we’ll have a good time when I get home. We can stay in bed all day. Or go somewhere, okay? You like that?”

She settled down. “Be careful, Fredo.”

“Of course. I’m with ten other guys. We got this. This is what we do. All you gotta do is be ready to see me when I get home.”

Lupe was grinning at him when he hung up the phone. She’d caught every implication, and he didn’t feel embarrassed in front of the young mother.

“Lupe, you’ll have this some day. I love being married. We’re gonna help you find a real man, not just a sperm donor.” The word did stick in his mouth, and he nearly stumbled on it.

“Maybe, Mr. Fredo. Maybe someday.” She picked up her diaper bag and jacket.

He didn’t know how Lupe had gotten mixed up with someone like Mora. He could never understand why Mia had run with Caesar and his gang before Fredo was able to convince her of his love. He knew what kind of woman she was, and he loved every part of her, even her flaws. He did not know the woman who had tormented him those first few years they knew each other, making fun of him, teasing him, and driving him wild. It didn’t matter how many times her brother, Armando, tried to talk him out of it, Fredo could not give up on her. He would have gone to his grave loving her, if that’s what it took.

Now he had that life, that perfect life. He tilted his head, smiling down at the toddler, placing a palm on his curly locks, and realized that he could love someone else’s baby like he loved little Ricardo, the child Caesar had fathered. He could die for a child some low-life like Diego had fathered without a thought. It didn’t matter if he or she was his flesh and blood; it was who he was as a man.

So it was time to make sure someone else got a chance, got the time to think about choices and perhaps make different ones, like Mia had eventually done. Without the SEALs, without this project, without all the people who wanted these kids to grow up safe, none of them had a chance.

And that just wasn’t acceptable.

Chapter 10

‡

The house Diego lived in didn’t look anything like a home. It looked like a prison. Razor wire was generously rolled along the top of ten feet cinderblock. The entrance to the compound was heavy and metal, and it rolled to the sides, rather than opening like a normal gate. It could have been stolen from a cell block, just like a guard tower or entrance to a maximum security prison. Behind the walls, Fredo could hear dogs barking as they approached.

“Lupe,” he stopped to talk to her before they approached. “If this goes bad, it will all be over fast. If it goes good, it will all be over fast. These things never linger on for days and days, or even hours, you understand? There will be no hostage situation here, and there will be no hesitation. If I yell down, you go down on top of the baby, okay?”

“You give me the signal, then?”

“No, sweetheart, I’ll just yell. You won’t be confused at what I ask you to do. But pay attention, okay? And watch everyone around us, know where they are and what they’re doing all the time, okay?”

“What if Diego isn’t here today?”

“Well, if he’s not here, he’s dead. I doubt he’d be allowed to have free time when the boss has just come back to town. It wouldn’t be very good for his longevity.”

She nodded, and together, they resumed their walk, heading directly toward the complex. This had all been arranged. The rest of the Team was in hiding at various places. He knew Armando was some place high up so he could get off shots if it came to that. Danny Begay, the Navajo SEAL, was ready with his slingshot and throwing knives. He was the fastest and quietest killer on their team in hand-to-hand combat.

Normally, Fredo would be making little IEDs and small explosive charges or smoke bombs. But they’d decided he was the target once and could be the target again. This time, however, he wore the Kevlar. Lupe wore a vest, as well, and a plate was strapped around the baby’s back, hidden under the blanket she carried him in.

They were damned lucky Lupe knew so much about the complex. Her showing up today was probably the last thing in the world they expected.

The two of them walked down the center of the road, aiming for the gate. Though armed, Fredo held his hands up, indicating he was not packing. It might give him the precious few seconds of safety he’d need if things started to go wrong.

A guard appeared at the top of the gate, holding a semi-automatic. He wasn’t afraid to brandish it, even though it was illegal as hell in California. But with the stiff gun control laws, and those laws becoming more strict by the day, the gap was widening between the bad guys and the people who just wanted to go about their lives without interference.

“We only want to talk to Diego Mora. We’re here to negotiate some kind of a truce,” Fredo shouted with authority.

“Well, asshole, I speak for fuckin’ Diego Mora. And I doubt you have anything I want that you can negotiate with, except that pretty little mama there.”

Fredo understood that he was probably gazing at the fighting form of Sonny Alvarez, looking refreshed and ready for all-out war, having just recently returned from his vacation at Pelican Bay. Fredo guessed Sonny hadn’t been informed Diego had knocked up a local girl.

“Well your man Diego might have something different to say about that. Why don’t you just tell him, and we’ll wait right here?” Fredo felt Lupe shaking next to him.

Alvarez nimbly jumped down off the wall behind the fence. A few seconds later, the gate was rolled back, and out stepped Alvarez and two other lieutenants, armed to the teeth. Clearly, no one was concerned about violating parole, least of all Sonny.

The man was covered in prison tats, faded and milky, caused by unsanitary implements and skin that wasn’t properly attended to during healing. He sported a ring of skulls around the base of his neck. With his ruddy complexion and large craters from acne, he was probably the ugliest man Fredo had ever seen. His skinny chest showed a breastbone that pushed forward, a childhood deformity that was never fixed. Only about half the teeth remained in his mouth. The crowd of three stopped nearly ten feet away. Too far. He had to find some way to get closer.

Fredo saw recognition crest on the face of the young man to Sonny’s right. The man was fixated on the baby.

“Can I hold him?” the man asked Sonny, not Lupe.

“No,” said Fredo as he stepped in front of the girl and the baby. “We got issues to discuss first.”

Sonny searched the surrounding area, as if sensing the rest of the team. “You got a lot of balls, little man, or are your friends out there in hiding?”

“I got one man who will call the cops if something should happen to any of the three of us. We got 911 on speed dial.”

Sonny’s arrogance was his downfall, Fredo surmised. He also guessed the man wasn’t terribly bright. It looked as if thinking actually caused him some pain.

“You’re probably wondering why we’re taking such a risk.” Fredo tried to act casual, but it wasn’t working. And he wished Lupe would stop shaking because it was making him nervous, too.

“I’m a reasonable man. I’ll listen.”

“Way I hear it, you’re not supposed to be hanging around here. You’re required to move off somewhere else, good riddance and all.”

Sonny laughed in Fredo’s face, his guffaws markedly loud.

“I’m not going anywhere. Didn’t you hear? I’m free. Thinking of settling down, finding a nice woman,” he said as he nodded to Lupe. Fredo quickly assessed it wasn’t going so well with Diego, who flinched as if he’d been slapped.

“Well, maybe we can sweeten the pot a bit. We want the center left alone. We want to fix it back up. We don’t want the walls tagged or the windows broken again. The Mayor wants to be able to come down here without fearing for his life.”

“That can happen anywhere, and you know it.”

“How much money would it take for you to leave and never come back?”

Fredo watched as Diego’s eyes grew to be saucer-like.

“How much we talkin’?” Alvarez asked.

“I don’t know. What’s it worth to you?”

“Well, if I’m gone, then you still have to work with these dudes.”

Fredo was running out of options. He saw two other men on a catwalk above the walls to the right of the open gate. He made sure he and Lupe were not an open target. With Sonny and the two others in the way, no one inside was going to start shooting.

He had to get closer. Fredo saw something glint in the sunlight off in the distance to his right and realized Danny had pulled out one of his knives. He hoped Diego or Sonny hadn’t noticed the glare.

“Look,” Fredo said as he took two steps forward. To his surprise, Sonny let him. “We’ve brought the baby as an act of good faith. We want you to relocate your enterprise. Just think what a couple hundred thousand dollars could buy you.”

“Why don’t I just make the same deal with you? You and your buddies leave my town, and I’ll agree not to kill you.” He chuckled slightly, aided by his two helpers.

Fredo judged the distance carefully. Sonny wasn’t used to holding the assault rifle, and he certainly wasn’t ready to fire.

He slowly turned, keeping his peripheral vision tuned to the rifle in Sonny’s hands. That assault rifle could cut him in half if the man knew how to properly use the weapon. He noted Diego was covering the butt of his handgun with his left hand. The other lieutenant looked like he was window dressing, his eyes rheumy and his breathing ragged. “Lupe, honey, show them how cute the baby is.” As he turned toward her, he also took another step closer to Sonny and Diego.

Lupe’s eyes were filled with panic. Fredo motioned for her to come toward him, and as she did, everyone either looked at the baby, or at her lovely face and sensuous low-cut cotton top. Fredo made his move. He grabbed the AK from Sonny’s hands and hit his nose with the butt of the deadly weapon. Immediately, Sonny doubled over as blood began spurting everywhere. Fredo gave red-eyes a swift kick to his kneecap and heard a satisfying crack. Then he heard the dull thud as a throwing knife hurled out of the shadows and hit Diego between the shoulder blades, sinking in nearly to the hilt. Diego screamed and fell off to the side.

“Down,” Fredo yelled as part of their cover was gone. He kicked Sonny again in the face, and this time, the man fell unconscious. Fredo immediately trained the rifle on the two guardsmen. Kyle and T.J. appeared from the opposite side of the opening, both yelling, “Drop it.”

Seeing their friends completely disabled, they quickly made the decision to cooperate and take their chances, rather than starting a gun battle. As their rifles dropped to the ground below, Fredo felt the tension completely leave his body. He was left with a sense of peace and calm he hadn’t felt since that day back at the hospital when Mia had visited him.

And fuck it, yeah. He was rock hard again.

Chapter 11

‡

Riverton was not happy when he and several other detectives, as well as a number of regular uniformed policemen arrived after getting the 911 calls. The huge SWAT Team vehicle completely blocked the entrance to the complex. Two ambulances and a fire truck also converged on the scene. Some news crews had also found the complex, and there was a helicopter overhead broadcasting live shots. Speculation was rampant, some even calling it a terrorist cell broken up by the project organizers. Riverton was busy making communications. The Feds were still on their way, which meant San Diego P.D. was bearing the brunt of the costs.

A handful of gang-affiliated youths were arrested inside, all of them younger than twenty. Sonny Alvarez was taken into custody and escorted to the medical center where Fredo had been just days before. There were mountains of evidence to collect, catalog, and haul away. Neighbors and curious onlookers had to be kept at bay.

Riverton wouldn’t look at Fredo. He wouldn’t say more than two words to anybody. Finally, Fredo asked him.

“You got the bad guys. Caught them with all their stuff,” Fredo reminded him. “The good guys won, for a change, Clark.”

“You’re not to interfere. You’re a fuckin’ SEAL. Stay off my lawn!” Riverton looked like he was going to burst a blood vessel. Fredo didn’t understand the intensity of his fury.

“I don’t get it. Please clue me in.”

“I’m gonna have my ass handed to me. You don’t make the Feds look bad, Fredo. You make nice; you take their resources. Our county now has to pay for all this shit,” he said as he waved his arm over the beehive of activity. “You just couldn’t stop yourselves from interfering.”

“Fuck no, not after what they did to Julio. Not after what they were planning on doing to what was left of the neighborhood.”

“You stupid macho kids. You gonna be around for the trial or will you be half way around the other side of the earth? Some defense attorney’s going to have a field day,” Riverton said, his face beet-red.

Fredo rolled his shoulders and puckered his lip with a frown. “Not what I do. That’s your department, Clark.” He knew they had evidence—too much evidence, in fact. They’d toured the complex and found black hoodies, spray paint, and items stolen from the school.

He figured Riverton just wasn’t going to get to the same page, so Fredo retreated to the company of his brothers on the Team, where the mood was considerably more jovial.

Armando grabbed Fredo’s arm. “You better get hold of Mia. She’s going into full-tilt panic mode. She and my mom have been on the phone non-stop, watching the news and everything.”

“I got it.”

Fredo was able to get signed out, and before he left, he gave a hearty thanks to the guys who had helped him. The rescue and fire crews were enjoying doing some smack talk with the SEALs. Normally, Fredo would kick back and wear some accolades like beads in New Orleans, but now, he had another mission to run.

Her cell phone was going straight to voicemail. Mia was continually forgetting to charge her phone then forgetting where she put it, sometimes going two days without it.

Fredo stopped by his favorite florist and bought some deep red roses. He wanted a shower, but didn’t want to keep her waiting.

He felt himself getting teary-eyed. Maybe he should not even tell her about the testing, but he tossed that idea out the window. She’d see right through him.

He remembered what Coop had told him way back on the day he’d been to the doctor.

Let the woman decide.

Hell, she could do anything she wanted with him. She could put him chained in a holding cell for all he cared. If it made her happy, he was all for it. But this, this one thing she wanted, he couldn’t do for her. He mentally told himself, whatever her reaction, he’d love that too about her. She’d be disappointed; he knew she would, but he’d love her even more for it.

Before he got to the house he got a call from Dr. Patterson.

“Hope this is good news.” Fredo said. He noticed the little soreness in his chest was not present any longer.

“Very good news, and I’m calling you before I call his mom. Julio’s got feeling in one foot. Still not out of the woods, and we have to get that slug, but I’d say this is about the best sign we’ve had. We can work with it.”

Fredo wanted to kiss the doctor through the phone.

“Well, you go enjoy your evening. Just thought you’d like to know.”

“Thanks, doc.”

“And thanks for helping with the cleanup today. It’s all over the news.”

He rang the doorbell instead of using his key and stood to attention with the roses at his chest. The door swung open. Her beautiful face was framed in curls cascading down over her shoulders. He could barely see part of one large golden hoop earring brushing against the fine texture of her long, flawless neck.

The spark and fire that was Mia, even when she was calling him names and insulting him, was there in her eyes, as it always was. But today, she was filled with relief, as well. Her abundant lips colored in red smiled at the sight of him. She looked straight back at him before she acknowledged the roses. Like she knew Fredo by his heart and not by the wrapper he came in.

“Mi amore. Oh, thank God you are safe.” She slammed into his arms, crushing the roses, but he didn’t care. He allowed her to pull him to her, hold him. He found peace in her scent, and the warmth of her soft body. He whispered in her ear how much he loved her. He didn’t want to cry, so he kept holding her until he could compose himself.

Her red fingernails pawed over his back as her breathing grew deep, and he could smell her arousal. It would always be this way, coming home to Mia. Whenever they were apart, there was a celebration of epic proportions when he returned, that almost, but not quite, made the parting worth it.

“You are so bad not to call me.”

“Where is your cell phone, Mia?”

“I lost it about two hours ago.” She pulled herself away from him, slammed the door shut at her back, and grabbed his hand. She flicked her long hair up over her neck and then let it drop.

“How could I have called you? I tried. I really did.”

“You need to try harder, Fredo,” she said over her shoulder.

And, oh baby, yes, he was harder already.

“Punish me, if you like, but I am yours for the next twenty-four hours, Mia. You can do with me whatever you like, and I won’t complain.” He was mesmerized by the sight of her tight ass swaying back and forth. He liked her exaggerated moves for his behalf. She peeled off the cobwebs from his dark brooding nature with the way she manipulated him, and he so willingly took it. She was, and would forever be, his wild child.

“Wait!” She suddenly stopped, and he ran into her backside. “The roses. You brought roses.”

“Yes, my love, but they’re all over the floor by the front door. We smashed them.”

“Then they are the best, all fragrant and moist!” She winked at him and licked her lips, and Fredo nearly came to his knees. She ran back to the living room and picked up the bouquet, with most of the roses hanging their heads, broken at their delicate necks.

Fredo frowned at the ruined bouquet.

“I read in one of my books where the hero and the heroine crashed into each other, and she was carrying a huge bouquet of red roses, and they fell all over them. Their first touch. He fell in love with her right then and there.”

He was all in. “Yes! I’ve fallen in love with you, Mia. I fell in love with you again, just now. These roses are magic,” he said as he stepped to her. He saw in her eyes that she was game for a little foreplay. Although he wanted inside her peach so bad, he could withstand a few moments of play, especially if it heightened her pleasure.

Mia acknowledged his idea silently with a smile, and then a kiss. She pulled away when he went deeper. Shedding their clothes, they frolicked down the hallway to the bedroom. He didn’t feel as graceful as she looked, bending over so he could watch her jeans slide down her smooth ass. Mia removed her bra and pulled her hair up over her head, giving him that sideways sultry look before she licked her lips.

She handed him half of the roses. “Come, we must prepare the bed, yes?”

Well, of course! Absolutely!

Grabbing the bobbing heads of the fragrant roses, she yanked and beheaded each one, throwing the long green stems over the bed and away from them. Her delicate fingers crushed the petals nearly to the point of squeezing liquid from them. She sprinkled the gloriously scented red petals over the mattress. He was standing before her, naked, with a hard-on the size of the Chrysler Building. But he had forgotten to do his part with the roses.

“Fredo, you have a one-track mind. Shame on you.” She put her finger in her mouth and returned a coy expression.

His heart was light. He loved watching her do anything, especially when she got in one of her playful moods like today, welcoming him home to her open arms, and smothering him with her free spirit and lightness of being. He even liked watching her sleep, brushing her hair, and helping her do the dishes in the kitchen sink and getting water everywhere.

How could he have been so lucky? He felt unworthy of the reward of being permanently mated to the one thing he was truly addicted to and could never get enough of: Mia.

She crawled up on the bed, lay on her back, filled her palms with petals, and sprinkled them all over her body.

He dropped the roses at his feet, climbed up on the bed and let his fingers travel up her smooth thigh. Mia arched up, her breasts looking luscious with petals falling from her nipples and into the cavity at her belly button. He explored the pink flesh between her legs. Mia let out the most luscious moan he’d ever heard in his life when she spread her knees and gave him deeper access.

Kneeling before her writhing body, he bent over, lapping her arousal and savoring every drop of her wonderful elixir. He played with her little bud, chasing it around with his tongue, letting it be elusive like the woman who played with his soul every day. He brushed the bunch of petals over her smooth abdomen, around both breasts, and up under her chin and around her neck. He was nearly on top of her now. She gave him the needy look he dreamt about when he was overseas and missing her the most. Her arms were lying against the white cotton pillowcase, her red fingernails toying with her curls.

He kissed her neck below her ear, a place he knew was her favorite spot.

“You bring new meaning to the word homecoming, my love.”

“Ah, Fredo. We will love each other’s bodies forever, won’t we?”

He hesitated, faltering on her words a bit, not quite sure where it was leading.

“Of course. Forever and ever.”

“We are good for each other, Fredo, aren’t we?”

“Yes, my love. We are the best.” He brushed a petal over her cheek, up around the side of her eye, and across her forehead.

She moved her palms to his butt cheeks, bent her knees, and arched herself to receive him. Her fingers deftly encircled his cock as she rubbed his tip over the fleshy petals of her sex and then pressed him inside her.

“This,” she said in a hiss, “is what I live for.”

“Mia. Beautiful Mia. You are everything to me.” The heady aroma of the crushed blossoms filled his nostrils as he pressed his lips against hers and felt her melt into him.

They traded slow kisses and nibbles, tasted each other in a long, slow love-making session that wasn’t urgent. He let her orgasm build, watching her for little signs of things she liked. Having this exquisite creature explore and taste him was nearly more than he could handle. She pushed and pulled him to pick up the rhythm until she was pressed against him, holding herself and then letting herself go. Against her warm insides, he gave her what he could. He filled her with his seed.

And no one needed to know they had dented foreheads and didn’t move. It would remain, as long as it could be, Fredo’s secret.

The End

Sharon Hamilton

NYT and USA Today best-selling author Sharon Hamilton’s award-winning Navy SEAL Brotherhood series have been a fan favorite from the day the first one was released. They’ve earned her the coveted Amazon author ranking of #1 in Romantic Suspense, Military Romance and Contemporary Romance categories, as well as in Gothic Romance for her Vampires of Tuscany and Guardian Angels. Her characters follow a sometimes rocky road to redemption through passion and true love.

Her Golden Vampires of Tuscany are not like any vamps you’ve read about before, since they don’t go to ground and can walk around in the full light of the sun.

Her Guardian Angels struggle with the human charges they are sent to save, often escaping their vanilla world of Heaven for the brief human one. You won’t find any of these beings in any Sunday school class.

She lives in Sonoma County, California with her husband and two Dobermans. A lifelong organic gardener, when she’s not writing, she’s getting verra verra dirty in the mud, or wandering Farmers Markets looking for new Heirloom varieties of vegetables and flowers.

She loves hearing from her fans:

sharonhamilton2001@gmail.com

Her website is:

www.authorsharonhamilton.com

Find out more about Sharon, her upcoming releases, appearances and news from her newsletter.

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Life is one fool thing after another.

Love is two fool things after each other.

The SEAL Brotherhood Series:

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Purchase SEAL My Destiny (Book 6 of the SEAL Brotherhood) here.

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Purchase True Navy Blue (Book 1 of the True Blue SEALs) here.

Available in print and on Audible.

True Blue SEALs: Zak available in Winter 2015.

Nashville SEALs Series

Purchase Nashville SEALs (Book 1 of the Nashville SEALs).

Available in print and on Audible.

Other Books by Sharon Hamilton

Golden Vampires of Tuscany Series

Purchase Honeymoon Bite (Book 1 of the Golden Vampires of Tuscany) here.

Also available in print and on Audible.

Purchase Mortal Bite (Book 2 of the Golden Vampires of Tuscany) here.

Also available in print and on Audible.

The Guardians Series

Purchase Heavenly Lover (Book 1 of The Guardians) here.

Available in print now and on Audible.

Purchase Underworld Lover (Book 2 of The Guardians) here.

Available in print now and on Audible.

Purchase Underworld Queen (Book 3 of The Guardians) here.

Available in print and on Audible.