Melody was sitting, bent practically in half, her head between her knees. The position was awkward—her belly made it difficult to execute.
“Sometimes this helps if I feel as if I’m going to faint,” she told him without even looking up.
Cowboy crouched next to her. “Do you feel like you’re gonna faint?”
“I think it was the thought of you climbing all the way up to that third-floor window,” she admitted. “I figured that’s how you got into the house.” She turned to look at him through a veil of golden hair, her eyes wide and her lips questioningly pursed. “Am I right?”
“It was no big deal.” Cowboy wanted to kiss her, but he opened the can of soda instead.
She sat up, pulling her hair back from her face. “Except if you slipped and fell. Then it would be a very big deal.”
He had to laugh, handing her the can. “There’s no way I would slip. It just wasn’t that tough a climb.”
Her eyebrow went up into a delicate, quizzical arch as she took a sip of the ginger ale. “No? What exactly is a tough climb?”
Cowboy found himself looking at the freckles that were sprinkled liberally across her cheeks and nose. Her skin looked so soft and smooth, and he could smell the sweet freshness of her clean hair. Great big God, he wanted to kiss her. But she’d asked him a question.
“Let’s see….” He cleared his throat. “Tough is going up the side of an oil rig in freezing weather, coming out of a forty-five degree ocean, carrying more than a hundred pounds of wet gear on my back. Compared to that, this was nothing. Piece a cake.” He looked down at his uniform. “I didn’t even get dirty.”
She took another sip of her soda, gazing at him pensively. “Well, you’ve certainly proved my point.”
Cowboy didn’t follow. “Your point…?”
“Climbing three stories up the outside of a house isn’t a ‘piece a cake.’ It’s dangerous. And it’s on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum from average and normal.”
He laughed. “Oh, come on. Are you saying I should have just let you lie here and feel sick even though I knew it wouldn’t take me more than three minutes tops to get inside the house and get you the ginger ale and crackers?”
Melody pressed the cold can against the side of her face. “Yes. No. I don’t know!”
“So what? So I can do some things that other guys can’t do,” he countered.
She stood up. “That’s like Superman saying, ‘So what—I can leap tall buildings in a single bound.’”
She was preparing to go inside. He should have locked the door behind him when he came outside. “Melody, please. You’ve got to give me a chance—”
“A chance?” Her laughter was tinged with hysteria. “Asking someone to fly to Vegas to marry you isn’t exactly what I’d call a chance!”
He straightened up. “I can’t believe you don’t even want to try.”
“What’s to try? Your leave is up tomorrow morning. God only knows where you’ll be going and for how long! If I marry you tonight, I could be a…” She stopped herself, closing her eyes and shaking her head. “No,” she said, “forget it. Forget I said that. That doesn’t matter, because I’m not going to marry you.” She opened the screen door. “Not now, not ever. It’s as simple as that, Jones. And there’s nothing you can do to make me change my mind, short of mutating into a nearsighted accountant or a balding computer programmer.”
Cowboy stopped himself from taking a step toward her, afraid to push her farther into the house. “I’ll make arrangements to get more leave.”
“No,” she said, and she actually had tears in her eyes. “Don’t. I’m sorry, Jones, but please don’t. The next time I need rescuing, I’ll call you, all right? But until then, do us both a favor and stay away.”
“Mel, wait—”
She closed the door firmly in his face and he resisted the urge to swear and kick it down.
Now what?
Short of going inside after her, Cowboy was stuck waiting for her to come back out. And something told him that she wasn’t likely to do that again today.
He needed more time. Lots more time.
And he knew exactly the man who could help him.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“WILL SOMEBODY SPEND the damn hundred bucks to get me more memory for this thing? It’s like trying to surf the net on one of those kiddie kickboards. I swear to my sweet Lord above, if this takes much longer, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!” Wes was giving the computer screen his best psychotic-killer glare when Cowboy tapped him on the shoulder.
“Have you seen the senior chief?”
Wes didn’t even look up. “Yo, Bobby—is H. here?” he shouted across the busy Quonset hut before muttering to the computer, “Don’t you hang on me. Don’t you dare.”
“Nope,” Bobby shouted back.
“Nope.” Wes finally glanced up. “Oh, hey, Cowman! You’re back. Feeling better?” His smile turned knowing. “Finally get some?”
Cowboy swatted the smaller man on the back of the head. “None of your damned business, gutterbrain. And by the way, I could see with my own eyes that Harvard isn’t here. I was wondering if you knew where I could find him.”
“Cowboy didn’t get any,” Wes announced in a mega-phone voice that belied his compact size as Cowboy moved farther into the Quonset hut, searching for a free desk and a telephone. Somebody on this base had to know where Harvard was. “Look out, guys. It’s like the ground-hog seeing his shadow. Cowboy goes on leave and doesn’t score and we’re in for another six months of winter.”
“It’s October,” Blue McCoy pointed out in his slow Southern drawl. “Winter’s coming anyway.”
“Good thing something’s coming.” Lucky cracked himself up.
Cowboy pretended not to hear as he picked up the phone and dialed Joe Cat’s home number.
“Maybe it’s the hair,” Wes suggested. “Maybe she’d go for you if you got it cut.”
“Maybe you need a distraction,” Bobby chimed in. “Wes and I hooked up with some really amazing-looking girls who hang out at the Western Bar. Problem is, there’s three of ’em, so you’d actually be doing us a favor if—”
“No, thanks,” Cowboy said, listening to the phone ring. “I’m not interested.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said, too.” Lucky put his feet up on his desk. “I figured since it was Bobby and Wes, they didn’t mean amazing-looking like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, but amazing-looking like someone from the bar scene in Star Wars.”
Bobby shook his head. “You’re wrong about this one, O’Donlon. I’m talking potential supermodels.”
“Potential. That means either they’re twelve or in need of plastic surgery.” Lucky rolled his eyes.
“One of these days, O’Donlon,” Blue said in his soft voice, “you’re going to come face-to-face with the one woman on this earth who alone has the ability to make your sorry life complete, and you’re going to walk away from her because she’s not an eleven on a scale from one to ten.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. Poor, pitiful me.” Lucky pretended to wipe tears from his eyes. “I’m going to die alone—an old and broken man.”
Over at Joe Cat’s house, an answering machine picked up. “Capt. Joe Catalanotto,” Cat’s New Yawk–accented voice growled into Cowboy’s ear. “I’m not available. Leave a message at the beep.”
“Yeah, Skipper, this is Jones. If you see the senior chief, tell him I’m looking to find him ASAP.”
“This ol’ bar we go to is right up your alley, Texas boy,” Wesley said with an exaggerated Western drawl when Cowboy hung up the phone. “There’s line dancin’ and boot scootin’ and everything short of a rodeo bull.”
“Including Staci, Tiffani and pretty little Savannah Lee,” Bobby said with a sigh. “Course with our luck, Wes, Jones’ll hit the dance floor and walk out with all three of ’em on his arm.”
“I’m not interested,” Cowboy said again. “Really.”
On the other side of the Quonset hut, the door burst open.
Joe Cat entered with Harvard right behind him. Neither of the two men looked very happy. “Pack it all up, guys, we’ve been reassigned. We’re getting the hell out of here.”
Reassigned. Cowboy felt his heart sink. Damn, the last thing he wanted to do was be forced to ask for a transfer away from the Alpha Squad. But if they were being sent overseas…
He had responsibilities now. Responsibilities and different priorities.
Two days ago, his number-one goal would’ve been to stay with Alpha Squad for as long as he possibly could, no matter where they went, no matter what they did.
Today, his number-one goal was very different.
“What the hell, Cat?” Bobby spoke up. “I thought this FinCOM agent training gig was our silver bullet.”
“Yeah, this was the perfect cushy assignment,” Lucky added. “Lots of R & R with the added bonus of a chance to really mess with some Finks’ minds.”
Joe Cat was steamed. “Yes, pulling this assignment was supposed to be a reward,” he told them. “But silver bullet or not, our job was to train a team of FinCOM agents in counterterrorist techniques. We can’t possibly train these people effectively if our hands are completely tied—which is the only way the top brass will let us do it.”
“Aw, come on, Cat. So we let the Finks sleep in their fancy hotel and we let them do their twenty-mile run from the backseat of a limo,” Wes urged. “It’s no skin off our noses.”
“Yeah, Captain, we can cope with their rule book.” Lucky pulled his feet down off his desk. “It’s no big deal.”
“It’ll probably make the job that much easier for us,” Bobby argued.
“These agents we were supposed to train,” Harvard countered in his rich bass voice, “are going to be used in the field to back up or work with SEAL units. I sure as hell wouldn’t want to go up against a crazy-assed pack of ‘Brothers of the Light’ terrorists with some badly trained FinCOM team of fools as the only thing preventing Alpha Squad from being shipped home in body bags.”
There was no argument anyone could make against that.
“So where’s Alpha Squad going, Cat?” Cowboy broke the gloomy silence.
The dark-haired captain looked up at his men and exhaled a single burst of extremely nonhumorous laughter. “Barrow,” he enunciated with extra clarity.
“Alaska?” Wesley’s voice cracked. “In the winter?”
“You got it,” Cat said, smiling grimly. “The pencil pushers upstairs are not happy with me right now, and they’re making sure I know it—and you poor bastards pay.”
Alaska. Cowboy closed his eyes and swore.
“Not planning to come with us, Junior?” Harvard never missed a thing, no matter how subtle the comment. And Cowboy had said “Alpha Squad,” not “we.”
Cowboy lowered his voice. “I have a situation, Senior Chief. I was hoping to talk to you privately. I need to take an extended leave. A full thirty days if possible.”
Wesley overheard. “Leave? Hell, yeah, H., I need to take some, too. Anything to get out of going to Alaska.”
“Let’s get this gear packed and stored,” Joe Cat ordered. “Our new assignment has us going wheels up in less than two hours.”
Harvard shook his head. “Sorry, Jones. There’s no time. We’ll have to deal with it after we get to Barrow.”
“Senior Chief, wait.” Cowboy stopped him short. Suddenly, the answer to this top-brass-induced snafu seemed obvious. “Don’t you see? That’s the solution. Leave. For everyone.”
Understanding sparked in Harvard’s dark brown eyes and then he laughed. “Harlan Jones Jr., you have the devious soul of a master chief. Cat, guess what Junior here thought up all by himself? The Answer, with a capital A.”
“We’ve probably all got lots of time coming to us. Hell, I’ve got a full 120 days on the books,” Cowboy continued. “And if we stall long enough, say maybe two or three weeks, they won’t want to ship us up to northern Alaska because of the risk of bad weather. There’s no way they’d send Alpha Squad someplace we could be snowed in—I’ve heard of people going up there and not able to get back until spring. No matter how ticked off they are at the skipper, they won’t do that to SEAL Team Ten’s top counterterrorist squad.”
Everyone else in the room was listening now, too, including Joe Cat.
Blue McCoy laughed softly, shaking his head. “What do you think, Joe?” he said to the captain. “A vacation in the Virgin Islands with your wife and kid, or cold-water exercises for the squad in Barrow, Alaska?”
Joe Cat looked at Cowboy and smiled. “I’m gonna get hammered for this, but…who wants leave?”
THE CURTAINS WERE up and hanging in the nursery windows.
Melody had meant to do that project before she got too large to stand on a chair. She’d put it off for too long, of course, and had been meaning to ask Brittany to help.
It looked as if Britt had beaten her to the punch.
Melody went back into her bedroom and quickly dialed her sister’s number at the hospital. As she waited for Brittany to come to the phone, she sat on her bed and wriggled out of her panty hose. Even with the stretch panel in the front, they were hellish to wear for more than an hour or two.
“Brittany Evans.”
“Hi, it’s me,” Melody said. “I wanted to let you know that I’m home from Ted’s photo op.”
“It took longer than you thought.”
“It was late getting started.”
“You weren’t standing up that entire time, were you?” Brittany asked.
“No, I wasn’t,” Melody said. She hadn’t been standing, she’d been running. She lay back on the bed, exhausted. “Thank you for hanging the curtains.”
“You’re purposely changing the subject,” Brittany accused her. “It was awful, wasn’t it?” she guessed. “You spent half the time with your ankles swelling and the other half of the time in the ladies’ room, throwing up.”
“Not half the time.”
“Sweetie, you’ve got to give Ted Shepherd your notice. This is crazy.”
“I told him I’d work up to the election. I promised him.” Melody liked the hectic busyness of her job. All day today, she’d only thought about Harlan Jones a few dozen times rather than the few million times she’d caught herself thinking about him yesterday.
She closed her eyes, feeling a familiar surge of regret. Jones had left. He’d actually gotten into his car and driven away. But that was what she’d wanted, she reminded herself. It was for the best.
“Look, I’m bringing home Chinese for dinner tonight,” Brittany told her, “so don’t even think about cooking. I want you to be in bed, napping, when I get home.”
“Believe me, I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’ll be home around six. I’ve got some errands to run.”
“Britt, wait. Thanks—really—for hanging those curtains.”
There was a pause on the other end of the phone. “Yeah, you said that before, didn’t you? What curtains?”
“The ones in the nursery.”
“Mel, I haven’t had the time or energy to even go into the nursery over the past few days, let alone hang up any curtains.”
“But…” Melody sat up. From her vantage point on the bed, she could see up the stairs into the tower room she’d made into a nursery. The bright colored curtains she’d bought to match the animals she’d stenciled on the nursery walls were moving gently in a breeze from an open window.
An open window…?
Melody stood up. “Brittany, my God, I think he’s back!”
“Who’s back?”
“Jones.”
“Oh, thank you, Almighty Father!”
“Hey, whose side are you on here?” Melody asked her sister indignantly. “Yours. The man is to die for, Mel. He’s clearly got his priorities straight when it comes to his responsibilities, he’s impossibly polite, he seems very sweet, he’s got excellent taste in jewelry and he’s
built like a Greek statue. And oh, yeah. As if that wasn’t enough, he just happens to look like Kevin Costner on a good hair day! Marry him. The rest will sort itself out.”
“I’m not marrying him. He doesn’t love me. And I don’t love him.”
“Why not? I’m half in love with him myself already.”
Melody crossed to her bedroom window and looked down into the yard. “Oh, God, Britt, I’ve got to go! There’s a tent in the backyard!”
“A what?”
“A tent.”
“Like a circus tent—?”
“No,” Melody said. “Like a camping tent. Like…”
Jones pushed his way out of the tent and into the yard. The sun glistened off his bare chest and shoulders. He wore only faded jeans, a pair of worn-out cowboy boots and a beat-up baseball cap. His hair was down loose around his tanned shoulders.
“Like an army tent,” she finished weakly.
Melody knew that the Dockers and polo shirt Jones had worn the day he’d arrived in Appleton had been similar to his gleaming white dress uniform. He’d worn both outfits in an attempt to be more formal, more conservative. But these clothes he was wearing now—this was the real Jones.
His message was clear. He was done playing games.
As Melody watched, he bent and made an adjustment to the tent, and the muscles in his back and arms stood out in sharp relief. He looked dangerous and hard and incredibly, mind-blowingly sexy.
Despite his long hair, he looked much more like the man she’d first come face-to-face with in the middle of a terrorist-controlled embassy all those months ago. “A tent?” Brittany was saying. “In our yard?”
“Brittany, look, I have to go. He’s definitely here.” As she watched, Jones straightened up and said something. Said something to whom? But then, Andy Marshall scrambled out from inside the tent, laughing—apparently at whatever Jones had said.
“Sweetie, don’t be too quick to—”
“Goodbye, Britt!”
Melody cut the connection, and taking a deep breath she headed downstairs.
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 87
