She wasn't certain herself what it was about. Friendship, maybe. Or comfort. Comfort and friendship with a healthy dose of attraction. Yeah, when it came to Cowboy Jones, her intense attraction to him was always a part of the equation.
Brittany was looking at her with one eyebrow elevated skeptically. "Friends?"
Melody blushed, remembering how he'd kissed her, right there in front of everyone, remembering the way she'd clung to him—returning all of his passion and then some. But whatever she'd been thinking, whatever she'd been feeling, the moment had passed. Her sanity has returned.
She hoped. "I'd like Jones to be my friend. Of course, based on our history, it's bound to be a little confusing as we iron things out..."
Brittany didn't look convinced. "Whatever. I'm going in to work—try to keep my mind off Andy. I have the afternoon shift. You and your 'friend' will have the house to yourselves."
Melody sighed. "Britt, I'm not going to..."
But her sister was already gone.
The crowd had moved off, too, leaving Jones and Harvard to stow their diving gear and strip out of their bulky dry suits.
For the first time since Melody had met him, Jones actually looked cold. The water had been icy, and he'd been submerged in it an endlessly long time. He was shivering despite a blanket someone had put around him.
His fingers fumbled on the zipper, and she moved toward him. "Do you want me to get that?"
He smiled tightly. "The irony here is incredible. It's only after I screw up beyond belief that you want to undress me."
"I was...I thought..." She blushed. The truth was that she'd wanted to undress him from the moment she saw him again. But God help her if he ever realized that.
His smile faded with the last of his anger, and he looked dreadfully tired and impossibly unhappy. "I'm not sure exactly what's happening here between us, honey, but I've got to tell you—I sure as hell don't deserve any kind of consolation prize today."
"I didn't hear any of that," Harvard singsonged, peeling his own dry suit off his well-muscled body and nearly jumping into his jeans, pulling them on directly over the long woollen underwear he'd worn underneath. "I am so not listening. Got water in my ears, can't hear a damn thing." In his haste, he didn't bother with his shirt. He just yanked his winter coat over his undershirt. "In fact, I'm so outta here, I've already been gone for ten minutes. I've got all the gear except for your suit, Junior. You get that dried out, and I'll get the tanks filled for tomorrow."
"Thanks, H."
"Melody, girl, you don't need my admonishment to be careful around this man. Clearly, you two have already taken the concept of being careful, packed it in a box and tied a big red ribbon around it." Harvard took one look at Jones's face and backed away. "Like I said, though, I'm gone. I'll be back in the morning."
And then he was gone, leaving Jones and Melody alone.
"Jones, I didn't mean to imply..." she started lamely. She took a deep breath. "When I said that about us going home, I'm not sure I really meant to make it sound as if—"
"Okay," he said. "That's okay. I misinterpreted. I'm sorry. That kiss was my mistake."
No, it wasn't. And he hadn't misinterpreted. At the time, Melody had meant what she'd said. She was just too cowardly to admit it now. Obviously, she'd been swept along by the rush of high emotions. Now that she was thinking clearly again, the thought of taking him home and bringing him up to her room scared her to death.
She could not let herself fall in love with him. She absolutely couldn't.
"One step forward, two steps back," Jones added softly, almost as if he was talking to himself, almost as if he was able to read her mind. "This is your game, honey. You make up the rules and I'll follow them."
He had managed to unzip his diving suit and he pushed it off his body. Like Harvard, he had long underwear on underneath. He pulled that off, too, covering himself rather halfheartedly with the blanket, uncaring of who might be watching.
Melody quickly turned away and picked up his jeans from the rock he'd left them on. But when she started to hold them out to him, still carefully averting her eyes, she realized that they were at least six sizes too small.
She knew what must have happened even before Jones spoke. She was holding Andy's jeans.
"Someone must've put those over here by mistake," he said.
Andy's jeans and Andy's sweatshirt. The clothes Andy had been wearing before he'd jumped into the quarry. The clothes he had taken off just moments before he'd drowned.
Jones found his own jeans and pulled them on as Melody slowly sat down on the rock.
The woods around the quarry had been searched for quite some distance. If Andy had managed somehow to crawl out of the quarry and collapse in the bushes, he would have been found. And if he'd crawled out of the quarry and hadn't collapsed—well, it was hard to imagine him running around the woods in only his underwear.
Andy had drowned. He'd gone into the water and he hadn't come back out. As she sat holding his clothes, the reality hit her hard. Andy Marshall was dead.
Melody had been hanging pretty tough all day, but now the realization hit her, and she couldn't hold back her tears. Try as she might, she couldn't keep them from escaping. One after another, they rolled down her face.
Jones sat down next to her, close but not quite touching. He'd put on his T-shirt and pulled on his cowboy boots. He still had that blanket wrapped around his shoulders for warmth, and without a word, he drew it around her shoulders, too.
They sat for a moment, watching the noonday sun reflecting off the surface of the flooded quarry.
"I feel like I'm never going to be warm again," he admitted
Melody wiped ineffectively at her tears. She couldn't stop them—they just kept on coming. "We should go home, get you something warm to drink."
It was as if he hadn't heard her. "Melody, I'm so sorry." He turned to her, and she saw that he had tears in his eyes, too. "If I hadn't come to town, this never would've happened."
She took his hand underneath the blanket. His fingers were icy. "You don't know that for certain."
"I thought I could help him," Jones told her. His eyes were luminous as he held her hand tightly. "I thought all he really needed was someone who cared enough to help get him in line. Someone to set some limits, and at the same time, make some demands that were above and beyond what he'd been asked to do in the past." He stared back out at the water, his jaw muscles jumping. "I remembered what joining the Navy—joining the SEALs—had done for me, and I thought I could give him a taste of that. I thought..."
He trailed off, and Melody finished for him. "Piece of cake?"
Jones looked at her and laughed, half in disbelief, half in despair. He wiped at his eyes with the back of his free hand. "Sweet Lord, was I ever wrong about that." He shook his head. "I can't believe he lied to me about breaking into that house on Looking Glass Road."
"He wasn't lying," Melody told him. "At least Britt doesn't think so. She thinks she can prove that he was using her computer that night. She claims he was at our house, surfing the Net on the night the vandalism took place."
"If he didn't do it, how did his fingerprints get all over the place?"
Melody shook her head. "I don't know. But I do know that he stuck to his story. He insisted he didn't do it. What I'd like to know is why he called Alex Parks. And why would Alex agree to meet Andy out here after midnight?"
"I should've believed the kid. Why didn't I?" The muscles in Jones's jaw were clenching again. "He said he didn't do it. I asked, and he answered me. I should've stuck by him. I should have trusted him unconditionally."
Now it was Melody's turn to gaze out at the water. "It's hard to trust someone unconditionally," she told him. "Even the most powerful trust has its limits. I should know." She forced herself to look at him, to meet his eyes. "I would—and I did—trust you with my life. But I found myself unable to trust you with my heart. I expected you to hurt me and I couldn't get past that."
Melody nodded. "Not intentionally, but yeah."
"That's why you didn't want to see me again. That's why you didn't give what we had going a chance."
"Yes," she admitted.
"I probably would've," he admitted, too. "Hurt you, I mean. Like you said, not intentionally, but..."
She didn't want to talk about this. Nodding again, she pushed on, hoping he would follow. "In the same way, you expected Andy to mess up. So when it seemed as if he was lying, you went with your expectations."
"God, I really blew it." The tears were back in Jones's eyes. "I thought I knew what I was doing, but the truth is, I was really unprepared to deal with this kid. I did everything wrong."
"That's just not true."
But he wasn't listening. "When we hit 175 feet, we weren't quite on target and had to search for the object that the sonar picked up." He was talking about the dive he'd made in the quarry with Harvard. "It took us so long to get down there with all the stopping and waiting, but once we were there, I was scared to death. I just wanted to close my eyes and sink to the bottom myself. I didn't want to look, I didn't want to know. And then my light hit something, and it reflected back at me, and for one split second, Mel, I saw him. My eyes played a nasty trick on me, and I saw Andy's face down there."
Melody didn't know what to say, so she said nothing. She just kept holding his hand.
"Tomorrow, I'm going to have to go back down there," he continued. "And tomorrow, I probably am going to find him."
He was shaking. Whether it was from the wintry chill of the air or the darkness of his thoughts, Melody wasn't sure. She did know it was time to bring him home, though.
She stood up, tugging him gently to his feet, escaping from the confines of his blanket. "Let's go, Jones." She paused. "Do you still have my car keys?"
"Yeah." He gathered up his diving suit. "They're in my pocket."
Melody folded Andy's jeans, putting them back on the rock. "I wonder if we should try to contact Andy's father. Andy was running some searches on the Internet—he told me he thought he might've located his father at an Army base up in New Hampshire and—"
She realized what she was saying at the exact same moment Jones did.
"What did you just say?" he asked, turning to face her.
"He was looking for his father on the Net."
"And he thought he found him in New Hampshire."
Transfixed, Melody stared into the sudden glaring intensity of Jones's eyes. "Do you think...?" she breathed.
Jones grabbed Andy's jeans, searching quickly through the pockets. "Honey, did you see his watch? Was his watch here with the rest of his clothes?"
"No." Melody was afraid to get too excited. Although Andy never went anywhere without that watch, he certainly wouldn't have worn it into the water. So why wasn't it here? "It's possible Alex Parks took it. I wouldn't trust that kid any farther than I could throw him."
"Yeah, you're right. It's possible Alex has it. But..." Jones ran his hands through his damp hair. "Last week at the library, I talked Andy into checking out a copy of Tom Sawyer. He told me that he liked it—so he must've been reading it."
"Oh, my God." Melody turned to look at the quarry. "He might've set this whole thing up to make it look as if he'd drowned."
Jones grabbed her hand. "Come on."
"Where are we going?"
"You're going home. I'm going to New Hampshire."
Melody's back was killing her.
Cowboy shook his head in disgust, amazed that he'd let her talk him into coming along with him. It was an hour-and-a-half drive up to New Hampshire—each way.
She was careful not to mention her discomfort. Of course not. This was the woman who had walked for eight hours across the desert, the back of her heels raw from blisters, without complaining even once. No, she didn't say a word, but her constant shifting in her seat gave her away.
"We're almost there," she said, looking up from the map into the mid-afternoon glare.
The town was small, clearly built as an afterthought to the neighbouring U.S. Army base. There were a series of bars and pool halls along the main strip, along with a tired-looking supermarket, a cheap motel, a tattoo parlour, a liquor store and a bus station with a sputtering neon sign.
Cowboy did a U-turn, right there in the middle of town.
"What are you doing? The base is in the other direction."
"Just following a hunch."
"But—"
"This whole thing—driving all the way up here without even being able to talk to Private Marshall on the phone—is a long shot, right?" He'd used a contact he had at the Pentagon to locate Andy's father, Pvt. David Marshall, here at the Plainfield, New Hampshire, Army Base.
Plainfield wasn't any kind of cushy silver-bullet assignment. In fact, it was the opposite. Men were assigned to Plainfield as a punishment just short of a jail sentence. And according to Cowboy's Pentagon friend, David Marshall had had plenty of reasons to be reprimanded. He had a rap sheet a mile long, filled with unsavoury charges including sexual harassment and use of excessive violence in dealing with civilians.
When Cowboy had called Plainfield, he was told that Private Marshall was not available. He couldn't even get the unfriendly voice on the other end of the line to verify if the man was still stationed at the base. From the tone of the phone call, though, he suspected the elder Marshall was currently in the middle of a severe dressing-down—or maybe even in the lockup.
If Private Marshall was at Plainfield, assuming Andy had even been able to see him, it wasn't too hard to imagine his reaction as he came face-to-face with the son he'd abandoned twelve years earlier. There weren't going to be many kisses and hugs, that much was for sure.
Cowboy pulled into the potholed parking lot next to the bus station.
"You think Andy's father won't want anything to do with him," Melody guessed correctly. "But do you really think Andy would have enough money to buy a bus ticket out of here? He probably spent everything he had getting here from Appleton."
"I think he probably doesn't even have enough to buy himself dinner, but the bus station's warm and dry. He can stay here all night if he needs to. He can even sleep on one of the benches if he pretends he's waiting for an arriving bus."
She was watching him closely in the shadowy dusk as he pulled up the parking brake and turned off the engine. "You sound as if you're speaking from experience."
Cowboy gazed into her eyes. It felt as if it had been a million years since they shared a smile. The trip from Massachusetts had been a quiet one. In fact, this entire day had been the furthest thing from a laughfest he'd ever known. "I think maybe you know me a little too well."
"How many times exactly did you run away when you were a kid?"
"I don't know—I lost count. The dumb thing was, no one ever really missed me. So I finally stopped running. I figured I could tick my parents off more by being around."
Melody shifted in her seat. "But you ran away again when you were sixteen, right? You told me you went to see a rodeo and just never went home."
"That wasn't running away. That was growing up and leaving home." He managed a wan smile. "Well, maybe not growing up. I'm still not sure I've managed to do that yet."
"I think you've done just fine." Her eyes were soft in the rapidly fading light, and Cowboy knew with a sudden certainty that all he had to do was lean forward and she would let him kiss her. Despite everything that she'd said about misinterpretation and mistakes, with very little effort on his part, she would belong to him.
He couldn't figure it out. Certainly if Andy was dead, but even if the kid was alive, Cowboy had proven himself to be irresponsible and incapable of dealing with a child. It didn't make sense. He screws up and now he gets the girl? What he'd done should've made her want to put even more distance between them. He just didn't get it.
Maybe it was only based on com
fort, on shared grief—or hope. Or hell, maybe it was only his imagination. He'd find out soon enough by kissing her again, by lowering his mouth to hers and...
It was funny. All this time, he would've risked damn near anything for a chance to take this woman into his arms and lose himself in her sweet kisses. But now, as badly as he wanted to feel her arms around him, he was going to have to deny himself the pleasure. They'd come here hoping to find Andy. He should be looking for the kid, not kissing Melody.
But God, he wanted to kiss her. He was drowning in the ocean blue of her eyes, wondering just how much comfort she'd be willing to give him, how much comfort she'd be willing to take in return....
"We're stalling," she told him, breaking the spell. "We should go inside."
Cowboy nodded, realizing he was gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles had turned white. He pried his fingers free. "I know." He was stalling. Truth was, he was afraid of going into that bus station and finding out his hunch was wrong. He was afraid this entire trip was just the result of wishful thinking and that Andy really was down at the bottom of that quarry.
Melody unfastened her seat belt. "I'll go. You stay here."
Cowboy snorted at that. "I don't think so."
He helped her out of the car, and as he closed the door behind her, she held on to his hand. He'd been on quite a few difficult missions since he'd become a SEAL, but this was the first time he'd had a hand to hold as he took the point. And odd as it was, he was glad for it, glad she was there.
"Please, God, let him be here," she murmured as they started toward the door.
"If he is here," Cowboy told her, "do me a favour. Don't let me kill him."
She squeezed his hand. "I won't."
He took a deep breath, pushed open the door and together they went inside.
It was vintage run-down bus station. The odour of cigarette smoke and urine wasn't completely masked by the cloyingly sweet chemical scent of air freshener. The bleak walls were a hopeless shade of beige, and the industrial-bland floor tiles were cracked and chipped in some places, revealing triangles of the dirty grey concrete beneath. The men's room had a sign on the door saying Out Of Order—Use Facilities Near Ticket Agents. The snack bar had been permanently shut down, replaced by vending machines. The cheery orange and yellow of the hard plastic chairs had long since been dulled by thousands of grimy fingers.
Everyday, Average Jones Page 20