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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 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 back onto some soft hotel bed with her 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 fence 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 something 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.
He’d also given her his sandals.
He must’ve spent most of the time he’d been on watch cutting down the soles and reworking the leather straps to fit her much smaller feet. At first she refused them, but he’d pointed out that they wouldn’t fit him now anyway.
Jones was barefoot at this very moment. Barefoot and somewhere on that air base with God only knows how many terrorists—
“Where are you from, Miss Melody Evans?” Harvard’s rich voice interrupted her grim thoughts.
“Massachusetts,” she told him.
“Oh yeah? Me, too. Where exactly?”
“Appleton. It’s west of Boston. West and a little north.”
“I grew up in Hingham,” Harvard told her. “South shore. My family’s still there.” He smiled. “Actually, there’s not much of my family left. Everyone’s gone off to college, with the exception of my littlest sister. And even she heads out this September.”
“I don’t even know your real name,” Melody admitted.
“Becker,” he told her. “Senior Chief Daryl Becker.”
“Did you really go to Harvard?”
He nodded. “Yes, I did. How about you? Where’d you go to school?”
Melody shook her head. “This isn’t working. I know you’re trying to distract me, but I’m sorry, it’s just not working.”
Harvard’s brown eyes were sympathetic. “You want me to be quiet?”
“I want Jones to come back.”
Silence. It surrounded her, suffocated her, made her want to jump out of her skin.
“Please don’t stop talking,” she finally blurted.
“First time I worked with the junior Harlan Jones was during a hostage rescue,” Harvard told her, “back, oh, I don’t know, about six years ago.”
Melody nearly choked. “You’ve been doing this sort of thing for six years?”
“More than that.”
She gazed into his eyes searchingly, looking for an explanation. Why? “Risking your life for a living this way is not normal.”
Harvard laughed. “Well, none of us ever claimed to be that.”
“Are you married?” she asked. “How does your wife stand it?”
“I’m not,” he told her. “But some of the guys are. Joe Cat is. And Blue McCoy.”
“They’re somewhere out in the countryside tonight, hiding from the terrorists, the way we are,” she realized. “Their wives must love that.”
“Their wives don’t know where they are.”
Melody snorted. “Even better.”
“It takes a strong man to become a SEAL,” Harvard told her quietly. “And it takes an even stronger woman to love that man.”
Love. Who said anything about love?
“Does SEAL stand for something, or is it just supposed to be cute?” she asked, trying to get the subject back to safer ground.
“It stands for Sea, Air and Land. We learn to operate effectively in all of those environments.” He laughed. “Cute’s not a word that comes to mind when I think about the SEAL units.”
“Sea, air and land,” she repeated. “It sounds kind of like the military equivalent of a triathlon.”
Harvard’s head went up and he held out a hand, motioning for her to be silent.
In a matter of an instant, he had changed from a man casually sitting in the basement entrance of a burned-out building to a warrior, every cell in his body on alert, every muscle tensed to fight. He held his gun aimed at the door, raising it slightly as the door was pushed open and…
It was Jones.
Melody forced herself not to move toward him. She forced herself to sit precisely where she was, forced herself not to say a word. But she couldn’t keep her relief from showing in her eyes.
“Let’s move,” he said to Harvard.
There was blood on his robe—even Harvard noticed it. “Are you all right?” he asked.
Jones nodded dismissively. “I’m fine. Let’s do it. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Melody didn’t want to think about whose blood that was on his robe. She didn’t want to think about what he’d been through, what he’d had to do tonight to guarantee her safety.
There was blood on his bare feet, too.
“Are we going to do this by stealth or by force?” Harvard asked.
“By stealth,” Jones answered. His smile was long gone. “Unless they see us. Then we’ll use force. And we’ll send ’em straight to hell.”
He looked directly at her, and in the moonlight his eyes looked tired and old. “Come on, Melody. I want to take you home.”
* * *
They were halfway to the plane before they were spotted.
Cowboy knew it was really only a question of when—not if—they were seen. It had to happen sooner or later. There was no way they could take a plane from an airfield without someone noticing.
He’d just hoped they wouldn’t be noticed until they were taxiing down the runway.
But nothing else had gone right tonight, starting with his surprising four terrorists in the hangar. He’d had some luck, though—only one of them had had an automatic weapon, and it had jammed. If it hadn’t, he wouldn’t be running toward the plane now. He wouldn’t be doing much of anything. Instead, he was racing across the sun-cracked concrete. He was both pulling Melody Evans along and trying to shield her with his body from the bullets he knew were sure to accompany the distant cries to halt.
He’d dispatched the four men in the hangar efficiently and silently. As a SEAL, he was good at many things, and taking out the enemy was something he never shied from. But he didn’t like it. He’d never liked it.
“You want to clue me in as to where we’re going?” Harvard shouted.
“Twelve o’clock,” Cowboy responded. And then there it was—a tiny Cessna, a mere mosquito compared to the bigger planes on the field.
Harvard’s voice went up an octave. “Junior, what the hell…? I thought you were going to swipe us the biggest, meanest, fastest—”
“Did you want to take the 727?” Cowboy asked as he grabbed for the handle of the door, swung it open and gave Melody a boost inside. “It was this or the 727, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be a sitting duck out on the runway, waiting for those jet engines to warm up.”
He’d run the checklist when he’d been out here earlier, so he merely pulled the blocks and started the engine. “This way, I figured we’d be a smaller target in the air, too, in case the tangos want to give their antiaircraft toys a test run.”
But Harvard wasn’t listening. He was standing, legs spread, feet braced against the ground, firing his AK-47 in a sweeping pattern, keeping the wolves at bay.
“Do you know how to fly a plane?” Melody shouted over the din.
“Between me and H., there’s nothing we can’t pilot.” Cowboy reached back behind him, pushing her head down as a bullet broke the back window. “Stay down!”
He gunned the engine, using the flaps to swing the plane in a tight, quick circle so that the passenger door was within Harvard’s grasp.
He took off before H. even had the door fully open, let alone had climbed in. They headed down toward the edge of the field at a speed much too fast to make the necessary U-turn to get onto the main runway.
“I assume you’ve got another plan in mind,” Harvard said, fastening his seat belt. He was a stickler for things like personal safety. It seemed almost absurd. Forty men were shooting at them, and H. was making sure his seat belt was on correctly.
“We’re not using the runway,” Cowboy shouted, pushing the engine harder, faster. “We’re going to take off…right…now!”
He pulled back the stick and the engine screamed as they climbed at an impossibly steep angle to avoid hitting the rooftops of nearby buildings.
Cowboy heard Harvard shout, and then, by God, they were up. They were in the air.
He couldn’t contain his own whoops of excitement and success. “Melody, honey, I told you we were going to get you home!”
Melody cautiously raised her head. “Can I sit up now?”
“No, it’s not over yet.” Harvard was much too grim as he looked over his shoulder, back at the rapidly disappearing airfield. “They’re going to send someone after us—try to force us down.”
“No, they’re not,” Cowboy said, turning to grin at him. God, for the first time in hours, he could smile again.
They were flying without lights, heading due east. This godforsaken country was so tiny that at this rate of speed, with the wind behind them, they’d be in friendly airspace in a matter of minutes. It was true they’d covered a great deal of the distance last night. But this was by far the easiest way of crossing the border.
“Aren’t we flying awfully low?” Melody asked.
“We’re underneath their radar,” Cowboy told her. “As soon as we’re across the border, I’ll bring ’er up to a higher altitude.”
Harvard was still watching their six, waiting for another plane to appear behind them. “I don’t know how you can be so convinced they’re not going to follow, Jones.”
“I am convinced,” Cowboy told him. “What do you think took me so long earlier tonight? I didn’t stop for a sandwich in the food commissary, that’s for damn sure.”
Harvard’s eyes narrowed. “Did you…?”
“I did.”
Harvard started to laugh.
“What?” Melody asked. “What did you do?”
“How many were there?” Harvard asked.
Cowboy grinned. “About a dozen. Including the 727.”
Melody turned to Harvard. “What did he do?”
He swung around in his seat to face her. “Junior here disabled every other plane on that field. Including the 727. There are a whole bunch of grounded tangos down there right now, hopping mad.”
Cowboy glanced back into the shadows, hoping to see her smile. But as far as he could tell, her expression was serious, her eyes subdued.
“We are crossing the border,” Harvard announced. “Boys and girls, it looks as if we are nearly home!”
* * *
Ensign Harlan Cowboy Junior Kid Jones landed the little airplane much more smoothly and easily than he’d taken off.
Melody could see the array of ambulances and Red Cross trucks zooming out across the runways to meet them in the early dawn light. Within moments, they would taxi to a stop and climb out of the plane.
She wanted four tall glasses of water, no ice, lined up in front of her so that she could drink her fill without stopping. She wanted a shower in a hotel with room service. She wanted the fresh linens and soft pillows of a king-size bed. She wanted clean clothes and a hairdresser to make some sense out of the ragged near scalping she’d given herself.
But before she had any of that, she wanted to hold Harlan Jones in her arms. She wanted to hold him tightly, to thank him with the silence of her embrace for all that he had done for her.
He’d done so much for her. He’d given her so much. His kindness. His comforting arms. His morale-bolstering smiles. His encouraging words. His sandals.
And, oh yeah. He’d killed for her, to keep her safe, to deliver her to freedom.
She’d seen the blood on his robe, seen the look in his eyes, on his face. He’d run into trouble out alone on the air base and he’d been forced to take enemy lives. And the key word there was not enemy. It was lives.
Melody was long familiar with the expression “All’s fair in love and war.” And this was a war. The legal government had been overthrown and the country had been invaded by terrorist forces. They’d threatened American lives. She knew full well that it was a clear-cut case of “them” or “us.”
What shook her up the most was that this was what Cowboy Jones did. This was what he did, day in, day out. He’d done it for the past six years and he’d continue to do it until he retired. Or was killed.
Melody thought about that blood on Jones’s robe, thought about the fact that it just as easily could have been his own blood.
All was fair in love and war.
But what were the rules if you were unlucky enough to fall in love with a warrior?
Jones cut the engine, then pushed the door open with his bare feet. But instead of climbing out, he turned around to face Melody, giving her his hand for support as she moved up through the cramped cabin and toward the door.
He slid down out of the plane, then looked up at her.
He’d taken off his blood-streaked robe, but he still wore that black vest with its array of velcroed pockets. It hung open over a black T-shirt that only barely disguised his sweat and grime. His face was streaked with dirt and dust, his hair matted against his head. There was shoe polish underneath his chin and on his neck—from where she’d burrowed against him, stealing strength and comfort from his arms.
But despite his fatigue, his eyes were as green as ever. He smiled at her. “Do I look as…ready for a bath as you do?”
She had to smile. “Tactfully put. Yes, you certainly do. And as for me—I think I’m more than ready to be a blonde again and wash this stuff out of my hair.”
“But before you do, maybe I could send my shoes over to your hotel room for a touch-up…?”
Melody laughed. Until she looked down at his feet. They were still bare. They looked red and sore.
“You and Harvard saved my life,” she whispered, her smile fading.
“I don’t know about H.,” Jones told her, gazing up into her eyes, “but as far as I’m concerned, Miss Evans, it was purely my pleasure.”
Melody had to look away. His eyes were hypnotizing. If she didn’t look away, she’d do something stupid like leap into his arms and kiss him. She glanced out at the line of cars approaching them. Was it possible that Jones had cut the engine and stopped the plane so far away from the terminal in order to let them have these few moments of privacy?
He reached for her, taking her hands to help her down from the plane.
“What’s going to happen next?” she asked.
He pulled just a little too hard, and she fell forward, directly into his arms. He held her close, pressing her against his wide chest, and she held him just as tightly, encircling his waist with her arms and holding on as if she weren’t ever going to let go. His arms engulfed her, and she could feel him rest his cheek against the top of her head.
“Jones, will I see you again?” she asked. She needed to know. “Or will they take you away to be debriefed and then send you back to wherever it was you came from?”
She lifted her head to look up at him. The trucks were skidding to a stop. She was going to have to get into one of those trucks, and they would take her someplace, away from Harlan Jones, maybe forever….