Still, the girl trusted him. He saw it in her eyes every time he looked at her. He knew without a doubt that in the course of a few short hours, he had become the most important person in her world.
He’d spent quite a bit of time studying the psychology of hostages and the emotions and fears involved in a rescue mission such as this one. He’d spent twice as much time learning what to expect from himself—his own behavior and psychological reactions when faced with life-and-death situations.
And what worried him most about Melody Evans’s smile was not the fact that he’d become the center of her universe. No, what worried him most was that she had somehow managed to become the center of his.
He knew it could happen. The danger added to the tremendous responsibility of preserving another’s life and multiplied by a very natural and honest sexual attraction sometimes resulted in an emotional response above and beyond the norm.
He’d first been aware of his inappropriate response to this girl when they’d hidden from the city’s patrols. She’d huddled close and he’d put his arm around her—nothing wrong with that. She’d rested her head against his chest—and there was nothing wrong with her drawing strength and support from him that way, either.
But then, beneath the pungent odor of the shoe polish she wore on her hair, beneath the more subtle yet no less sharp odor of fear that surrounded all of the former hostages, he’d smelled something sweet, something distinctly female.
And then, right then, when the curfew patrol was inches away from them, when they were nanoseconds away from being discovered and killed, he’d felt Melody relax. The tension among the other hostages and the SEALs could’ve been cut with a knife, but Melody had damn near fallen asleep in his arms.
He knew in that instant that she trusted him more completely than anyone had ever trusted him before. Her faith in him was strong enough to conquer her fear. Her life was in his hands, and she’d placed it there willingly, trusting that if she died it would be because there was no other way out.
And just like that, as they hid behind trash in one of the city’s back alleys, Cowboy’s entire life changed. He felt his pulse rate accelerate out of control, felt his body respond to her nearness.
He might’ve been able to dismiss it as mere sexual desire except that it happened over and over again—even when she wasn’t touching him. All this girl had to do was smile at him, and he got that same hot, possessive rush.
Cowboy knew he should have mentioned the way he was feeling to Joe Cat before they split into three smaller groups. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to risk Cat’s pulling him away from Melody. He wanted to make damn sure she got out of this armpit of a country alive. As much as he trusted his teammates, he knew the only way he’d be certain of that was to stay close, to take care of her himself.
With Harvard’s help.
As the sun climbed above the horizon, they sat for a moment in the growing warmth outside a shallow cave Harvard had found cut into a desolate outcropping of rocks.
Once they warmed up, they’d spend the daylight hours here, out of the sun and out of sight of anyone wandering the foothills. Come nightfall, they would set out again, heading steadily north.
“I’ll take the first watch,” Cowboy told Harvard.
Melody was sitting next to him, near the entrance to the cave, her head back, eyes closed, face lifted toward the warmth of the sun. He touched her arm lightly, ready to pass her his canteen, but she didn’t move. She was exhausted, but she hadn’t complained once, all night long.
“Maybe you should get her settled first,” Harvard said in a low voice.
“Am I suddenly not here?” Melody asked, opening her eyes and surprising them both.
Harvard laughed, a low, rich chuckle. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought you were asleep.”
“Where are we heading?” she asked. Her eyes were nearly the same shade of blue as the cloudless sky. “Up to the coast?” They flashed in Cowboy’s direction as he handed her the canteen.
As their fingers touched, he felt an instant connection, a flood of electricity. And he knew damn well she felt it, too.
She was covered with dust from the road, smeared with shoe polish and utterly bone weary. Yet at the same time, she managed to be the most beautiful woman Cowboy could ever remember seeing. Damn, he shouldn’t be feeling this way. After this was over, he would have to go in for a psychological review, work with the unit shrink and try to pinpoint what it was, exactly, that he’d done wrong. Find out when it was that he’d let her get under his skin…
Harvard nodded. “We’re going for the ocean.” He glanced at Cowboy. They hadn’t had much time to discuss their route. “I thought it would be easier to leave the country by boat.”
“Or plane, Senior Chief,” Cowboy interjected. “Get us home a whole hell of a lot faster.”
Harvard caught and held his gaze, and Cowboy knew the older man was thinking the same thing he was. They’d both studied a map of this country during the briefing. There was a major city directly between their current position and the ocean. According to the map, that city had an airfield. Maybe instead of skirting the city, they should get close enough to check out that airfield.
“With any luck, it’ll be a military base,” Cowboy said aloud. “We’re the last people they’ll be expecting to show up there.”
Harvard nodded. “The best defense is a strong offense.”
“Do you two always communicate through non sequiturs?” Melody asked.
Harvard stood up. “Junior thinks we should steal a plane tonight, and crazy as it sounds, I agree. But right now I’ve got a combat nap scheduled.” He paused before going into the cave, turning back to Melody. “You’ve got dibs on whatever soft ground is in there, milady,” he said.
But she shook her head. “Thanks, but…I want to get warm first,” she told him. She glanced at Cowboy and a faint blush spread along her cheeks as if she realized how transparent she was. No one was fooled. It was clear she wanted to be out here with her own personal hero.
Cowboy felt it again. That hot rush of emotion.
Harvard paused just inside the cave. “Don’t let her fall asleep out here,” he instructed Cowboy. “And make sure you get your Texan butt in the shade before too long, too. I don’t want you two pigment-challenged types unable to move come dusk because of a sunburn.”
“Yes, Mother,” Cowboy droned.
“And wake me in four.” Harvard headed toward the back of the cave. “No more, no less.”
Cowboy looked at Melody and smiled. “Hell, I thought he’d never leave.”
She blushed again.
“You okay?” he asked, both wishing she wasn’t sitting quite so far away and glad as hell for the distance between them. God help him if he actually got her into his arms when it wasn’t a life-and-death situation.
“I wish I could wash my face,” she told him.
Cowboy shook his head in apology. “We’ve got to save the water I’ve got for drinking,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “I just wish it, that’s all.”
The sun was warming the air considerably, and Cowboy loosened his robe and even unfastened the black combat vest he wore underneath.
Her next words surprised him. “I thought we’d be dead by now.”
“Tomorrow at this time, we’ll be on America-friendly soil.”
She shifted her legs and winced slightly, then pulled her feet closer to untie her sneakers. “You say that with such conviction.”
“Have I been wrong yet?” he countered.
She looked up at him, and her eyes were so wide, Cowboy felt as if he might fall into them and drown. “No,” she said.
She turned away from him then, looking down as she started to slip off her sneakers.
That was when Cowboy saw the blood on her socks. The entire backs of her socks were stained. She saw it, too, and stopped trying to take off her sneakers. She pulled her feet underneath her as if she intended to hide the blood f
rom him.
“Are you really from Texas?” she asked.
Cowboy was shocked. She was. She was planning to not tell him that her new sneakers had rubbed her heels raw. She wasn’t going to mention that her feet were bleeding, for God’s sake. Every step she’d taken last night had to have been sheer agony, but she hadn’t said a word.
“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Fort Worth.”
She smiled. “You’re kidding. How did someone from Fort Worth end up in the navy?”
Cowboy looked her squarely in the eye. “I know that your feet are bleeding,” he said bluntly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about that, like twelve hours ago?” His voice came out sounding harsher, sharper than he’d intended.
And although her smile faded and her face went a shade paler, she lifted her chin and met his gaze just as steadily. “Because it wasn’t important.”
“I have a medical kit. I could have wrapped ’em. All you had to do was say something!”
“I didn’t want to slow us down,” she said quietly.
Cowboy took his medikit from his combat vest as he stood up. “Are you going to take those sneakers off, or do you want me to do it for you?”
As he knelt in front of Melody, he could see her pain reflected in her face as she silently slid her feet out of her sneakers. Her eyes welled with tears, but she fought them, blinking them back, once again refusing to cry.
Her knuckles were white, hands clasped tightly in her lap, as he pulled off one sock and then the other as gently as he could.
“Actually,” he said quietly, hoping to distract her with his words, “I didn’t move to Fort Worth until I was about twelve. Before that, I lived damn near everywhere in the world. My old man’s career Navy, and wherever he was stationed, that’s where we lived.”
She had extremely nice feet—long and slender, with straight toes. She had remnants of green polish on her toenails, as if she’d tried hastily to remove it but hadn’t gotten it all off. He liked the idea of green nail polish. It was different. Intriguing.
Sexy.
Cowboy pulled his attention back to the task at hand. He rested her feet on his thigh as he opened his canteen and used some of their precious water to clean off the blood. He felt her stiffen as he touched her, and his stomach twisted as he tried his best to be gentle.
“He just made full admiral,” he continued, telling her about his father. “He’s stationed up in D.C. these days. But Mom still lives in Fort Worth, which just about says it all, considering that Fort Worth is about as landlocked a city as you can get.”
He gave her a quick smile to offset the depressing undertones of his story. Yeah, his home life had sucked. His father had been by-the-book Navy. The old man was a perfectionist—harsh and demanding and cold. He’d run his family the same way he’d commanded his ships, which, to both his young son and his wife, left much to be desired.
“So what made you join the Navy?” she asked, bracing herself for the antibiotic ointment he was about to spread on her raw and broken skin.
“Actually, the old guy manipulated me into it,” Cowboy told her with a grin, applying the ointment as quickly as he could. “You don’t make admiral without having some kind of smarts, and old Harlan the first is nobody’s fool.”
He wiped the ointment off his hands on the bottom edge of his robe, then dug in his kit for bandages. “After I graduated from high school, my old man wanted me to go to college and then into the U.S. Navy’s officer’s program. I flipped him the bird and set off for my own glowing future—which I was sure I’d find on the rodeo circuit. I spent about a year doing that—during which time the old man squirmed with embarrassment. Even in retrospect, that makes it damn well worth it.”
He smiled up into Melody’s eyes. “He started sending me letters, telling me about the problems he was having with ‘those blasted Navy SEALs.’ I knew when he was much younger, before I was born, he’d gotten into the BUD/S program and went through the training to become a SEAL. But he was one of the eighty-five percent who couldn’t cut it. He was flushed out of the program—he wasn’t tough enough. So every time he wrote to me, I could see that he was carrying around this great big grudge against the SEAL units.”
“So you joined the SEALs to tick him off,” Melody guessed.
Cowboy nodded, his grin widening. “And to show him that I could do something better than him—to succeed where he’d failed.” He chuckled. “The crafty old son of a bitch broke down and cried tears of joy and pride the day I got my budweiser—my SEAL pin. I was floored—I’d rarely seen the old guy smile, let alone weep. Turns out that by joining the SEALs, I’d put myself exactly where he wanted me to be. He didn’t hate the SEAL units the way he’d let me believe. He admired and respected them—and he wanted me to know what it felt like to achieve my potential, to be one of ’em. Turns out dear old Dad loved me after all.”
She was looking at him as if he was some kind of hero. “You’re amazing,” she said softly. “For you to realize all that and come to terms with him that way…”
“One of my specialties is psychology,” he told her with a shrug. “It’s really not that big a deal.”
All he had to do was to lean forward and he could kiss those soft, sweet lips. She wouldn’t object. In fact, he could tell from the sudden spark of heat in her eyes that she would welcome the sensation of his mouth on hers.
Instead, he looked away, bandaging her feet in silence. Yes, one of his specialties was psychology, and he knew exactly the kind of problems even just one kiss could cause. But maybe, just maybe, after he’d brought her to safety…
“You should get some sleep,” he told her quietly.
Melody glanced toward the cave. “Can I stay here, up near the entrance?”
Near him.
Cowboy nodded. “Sure,” he said quietly, moving out of the sun and back into the shade himself. He found a fairly flat, fairly comfortable rock to lean against as he stretched his legs out in front of him, his HK MP5-K held loosely in his arms.
He kept his eyes on the distant horizon as she wrapped herself in her robe and settled down, right on the ground, not far from him. He wished he had a bedroll or a blanket to give her. Hell, he wished he had dinner reservations at some fancy restaurant and the room key to some four-star hotel to give her. He wished he could fall with her back onto some soft hotel bed and…
He pushed that thought far, far away. This wasn’t the time or place for such distractions.
It wasn’t long before the sound of her breathing turned slow and steady. He glanced at her and his heart clenched.
In sleep, she looked barely more than seventeen, her lashes long and dark against the smoothness of her cheeks. It didn’t take much to imagine what she’d look like with that black shoe polish washed out of her hair. The boyishly short cut she’d given herself to hide her femaleness only served to emphasize her slender neck and pretty face.
Cowboy knew with a grim certainty that seemed to flow through him and out into the timeless antiquity of the moonlike landscape that he was going to bring this girl back home where she belonged. Or he was going to die trying.
Melody was sleeping on her side, curled into a ball with the exception of one arm that was stretched out and reaching toward him. And as he looked closer, he saw that in her tightly clasped fist she was holding on to the very edge of his robe.
“SHOULDN’T HE BE back by now?”
Melody heard the anxiety in her voice, saw a reflection of it in the darkly patient eyes of the man Jones called Harvard.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
“Junior’s doing his job, Melody,” Harvard told her calmly. “This is something he does well—you’re going to have to trust him to do it and return in his own good time.” The this that Ensign Jones was doing was to creep undetected into a terrorist-held air base. It was only a small air base, he’d told her as if that would reassure her, with only a dozen aircraft of any type out on the field. He was going over the barbed-wire fe
nce to make sure that the dilapidated hangars didn’t hold some fancy high-tech machine that could come roaring up into the sky and shoot them down as they made their getaway.
After Jones had checked out the hangar, he was going to sneak out into the airfield and select the biggest, fastest, most powerful plane of all to use for their escape. And after he did that, he was going to meet them here.
Then all three of them would go back over the fence and roar off in a stolen plane into the coming sunrise.
After he came back. If he came back.
“You call him Junior,” she said, desperate for some- thing to talk about besides Jones’s whereabouts. “But that other man, Joe Cat, he called Ensign Jones kid. And everyone else called him Cowboy. Doesn’t anyone call him Harlan?”
Harvard smiled. His straight white teeth flashed, reflecting a beam of moonlight that streamed in through one of the cracks in the boarded-up windows. “His mom does. But that’s about it. He hates being called Harlan. I only call him that when I want to make him really mad. It’s his father’s name, too. His father is Admiral Harlan Jones.”
“I know. He told me.”
Harvard lifted his eyebrows. “No kidding. Told you about his old man. I’m surprised, but…I guess I shouldn’t be—Junior’s always been full of surprises.” He paused. “I worked closely with the senior Jones quite a few years ago. I know the admiral quite well. I guess that’s why I call his son Junior Junior.”
“And the other men call him Cowboy because he’s from Texas?”
“Legend has it he came to BUD/S wearing an enormous rodeo ring and a cowboy hat.” Harvard laughed softly.
“BUD/S,” Melody repeated. “That’s where SEALs go for training?”
“Not necessarily where, but what,” he corrected her. “It’s the training program for SEAL wanna-be’s. Junior walked into this particular session out in California wearing everything but a pair of spurs, and the instructors took one look at him and named him Cowboy. The nickname stuck.”
Melody wished he would come back.
She closed her eyes, remembering the way Jones had gently awakened her as the sun was starting to set. He’d given her a sip of water from his canteen and some kind of high-protein energy bar from a pocket of his vest.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 78