Harvard had come to stand beside them, and she could feel his curious eyes on her, but she didn’t look away from Jones. She couldn’t look away. He truly blamed himself for this tragedy. “It is my fault. I told him about swim buddies—about how SEALs never swim or dive without another team member, but I know he saw me breaking the rules by swimming alone in the quarry.”
“Junior, we should probably make that dive,” Harvard said quietly. “If we’ve got to go down to 175 feet, it’s going to take awhile.” When Melody finally glanced at him, he nodded. “How are you, Melody? You’re looking very…healthy.”
“Will you tell him, please, that this is not his fault?”
“The lady says it’s not your fault, Jones.”
Jones’s expression didn’t change as he turned away. “Yeah, right. Let’s get this over with.”
Melody couldn’t stand it a second longer. She reached for him, catching his hand in hers. “Harlan—”
There was a flash of surprise in his eyes, surprise that she’d actually used his given name, surprise that she’d actually touched him, but that emotion was quickly turned into stone, along with everything else he was feeling. Even his fingers felt cold.
She knew this stony anger was his defense against having to go down into that water and possibly—probably—bring up the lifeless body of the boy they’d all come to love over the past few weeks. But she knew just as well that everything he felt—all the blame and the fear and the awful, paralyzing grief—was there inside him. His anger didn’t cancel his feelings out; it merely covered them.
She knew him quite well, she realized. Over the past few weeks, despite her attempts to keep her distance, she’d come to know this man’s vast repertoire of minutely different smiles—what they meant, how they broadcast exactly how and what he was feeling. She’d come to know his silences, too. And she’d had a firsthand look at his method of dealing with fear.
He hid it behind icy cold anger.
“Be careful,” she whispered. A local diving club had frequented the quarry several years ago—until someone had gotten killed and it had been deemed too dangerous a place to dive.
His eyes told her nothing—nothing but the fact that underneath all that chill, he was hurting. He nodded and even tried to force a smile. “Piece a cake.”
“We’ll be down for a while,” Harvard told her. “Diving at this depth requires regular stops both on the way down and coming back up. It’s time-consuming, and for you, waiting up here on the surface, it’ll seem as if it takes forever. You might want to go home and wait for a phone call.”
“Jones has forgotten how to use the phone,” Melody said, still gazing into his eyes.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call you,” he said quietly, “but all I kept getting was bad news.” Emotion shifted across his face, and for a heartbeat, Melody thought he was about to give in to all of his pain and crumple to the ground just as Brittany had. But he didn’t. “It seemed senseless to make you worry until I knew for sure Andy was dead.” He said the word flatly, bluntly, using it to bring back his anger and put his other emotions in check.
“We still don’t know that for sure.” Melody squeezed his hand. But her words were pure bravado. She could see Jones’s certainty in his eyes.
“Go home,” he told her.
“No,” she said. If he did find Andy down there, he was going to need her to be here—as badly as she was going to need him. “I’ll wait for you to come back up. We can go home together.”
She couldn’t believe the words that were coming out of her mouth. Go home together…
His expression didn’t change. For a moment, he didn’t even move. But then, in one swift movement, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her hard on the mouth. She clung to him, kissing him back just as ferociously, wanting him, needing him—and needing him to know it.
He pulled away, breathing hard. He didn’t say a word about that incredible kiss. He just took off his jacket and handed it to her. “Spread this on the ground so you’ll have something dry to sit on.” His voice was harsh, and his eyes were still so angry, but he gently touched the side of her face with one finger. “I don’t want you catching cold.”
It was almost as if he loved her. It was almost as if they were lovers who had been together for years.
“Be careful,” Melody said again.
As he gazed at her, his eyes suddenly looked bleak. “It’s too late,” he told her quietly. “When it came to dealing with Andy, I wasn’t careful enough, and now it’s too damn late.”
Melody tried not to cry as he turned and walked away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
COWBOY USUALLY LOVED to dive, but this was sheer hell. He and H. were heading nearly straight down, using a marked rope to gauge their distance, stopping at regular intervals to let their bodies adjust to the increasing pressure of the water.
The time spent stopping and waiting dragged on interminably.
It was necessary, though. If they moved too quickly from the surface to a depth below a hundred feet, and then back, they could—and would—get the bends.
Cowboy had seen a guy who hadn’t believed how crippling the bends could actually be. The stupid SOB had gotten brain damage from bubbles of nitrogen expanding in his system. He still couldn’t walk to this day.
Despite the fact that SEALs were known for breaking the rules, this was one rule they never even bent. Even when they were in as big a hurry as he was.
Contrary to what he’d told Melody, this dive was anything but a piece of cake. At this depth, he and Harvard had to breathe from special tanks of mixed gas to prevent nitrogen narcosis—also known as the rapture of the deep. As if that wasn’t dangerous enough, there was a definite time limit to how long they could remain at that depth. And the number and lengths of decompression stops they would have to make on the way back to the surface were intensely complicated.
With the scuba gear on, he and Harvard couldn’t talk. And at this depth beneath the surface, it was very, very cold and very, very dark. He couldn’t even see Harvard next to him. He could only sense his presence.
Out of all the men in Alpha Squad, Cowboy was glad it was the senior chief who’d been just a short drive away, visiting his family in his hometown just outside Boston. Unlike some of the guys, Harvard knew when not to talk.
As they’d pulled on their cold-water diving suits, Harvard had had only a brief comment to make about Melody’s pregnancy. He’d said, “When you told me you had a situation to deal with, you weren’t kidding. You don’t do anything halfway, do you, Junior?”
“No,” Cowboy had replied.
“I assume you’re going to do right by the girl?”
“Yeah,” Cowboy had answered automatically. For so long now, his single-most goal had been to marry Melody and be a real father to their baby. But that was before he’d failed so utterly with Andy. Who was he trying to fool here anyway? He knew less than nothing about parenting. The fact that he was diving in this quarry in hopes of recovering Andy’s drowned body was proof of that.
Cowboy floated in the darkness, uncertain of what to wish for. He hoped they weren’t going to find Andy’s body, but at the same time, if the kid had drowned in this quarry, he hoped that they’d find him right away. It would end the waiting and wondering. And it would be far better than never finding him, never quite knowing for sure.
He shone his flashlight straight down, knowing that the light couldn’t possibly cut through the murky depths to that place where the sonar camera had found an object the approximate size and density of a human body.
Cowboy turned off the light, sending both Harvard and himself back into the deprivation-tanklike darkness. They had to save their flashlight batteries for when they were really needed.
He closed his eyes. He knew he could do anything if he had to. But watching the beam from his light reflect off Andy Marshall’s pale, water-swollen face was going to be one of the hardest things he would ever have to do.
It was
going to be almost as hard as admitting that maybe Melody had been right all along, almost as hard as it would be to walk away from her sweet smile. Cowboy was going to do right by her. Only now that he knew better, he was going to do it by leaving her alone.
“IT WAS ONLY a bundle of trash,” Melody heard Jones report to Tom Beatrice as she inched closer to the group of men. “There was an outcropping of rocks. We searched that area as extensively as possible, given our time limit at that depth.” His mouth was still a grim, straight line. “However, that was only one part of the quarry.”
She had nearly fainted with relief when she’d seen Jones’s and Harvard’s heads break the surface of the water.
Jones must’ve known she’d be watching, worried out of her mind, because he’d turned to search for her, picking her out in the crowd on the shore. As he’d treaded the icy quarry water, he’d looked at her, touching the top of his head with the tips of his fingers, giving her the diver’s signal for okay. He was okay, thank God. And the blip they’d picked up on the sonar wasn’t Andy’s body. It was only a bag of trash.
“How long do you have to wait before you can make another dive?” Tom Beatrice asked.
“The earliest we could do it would be late tonight,” Jones told the police chief.
“But it would be smarter and safer to wait until morning,” Harvard added. He met the other SEAL’s eyes. “You know as well as I do, Jones—a four- or five-hour delay isn’t going to matter one bit to that boy if he’s down there.”
Jones glanced around the somber crowd, at the Romanellas, at Estelle Warner and Brittany. His gaze lingered on Melody before he turned back to the police chief. “I’m sorry, Tom,” he said. “Senior Chief Becker’s right. We’d better wait and continue the search in the morning.”
“That’s fine, son,” Tom told him. “It’s risky enough diving down there in daylight.” He looked around at the men who’d brought the boats. “We’ll meet back here at 8:00 a.m. Let’s get those boats up and out of the water!”
Brittany touched Melody’s arm, pulling her aside. “I’m leaving.”
“I’m waiting for Jones,” Mel told her sister.
“I know,” Brittany said. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she managed a watery smile. “It’s nice to know that something good will come of this.”
Melody shook her head. “Britt, don’t get the wrong idea here. Just because I care about Jones doesn’t mean I intend to marry him. Because I don’t. This isn’t about that. We’re friends.”
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 woolen 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?”
Tall, Dark and Dangerous Vol 1: Tall, Dark and FearlessTall, Dark and Devastating Page 95
