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