She looked up at him, and her eyes were so wide, Cowboy felt as if he might fall into them and drown. “No,” she said.
She turned away from him then, looking down as she started to slip off her sneakers.
That was when Cowboy saw the blood on her socks. The entire backs of her socks were stained. She saw it, too, and stopped trying to take off her sneakers. She pulled her feet underneath her as if she intended to hide the blood from him.
“Are you really from Texas?” she asked.
Cowboy was shocked. She was. She was planning to not tell him that her new sneakers had rubbed her heels raw. She wasn’t going to mention that her feet were bleeding, for God’s sake. Every step she’d taken last night had to have been sheer agony, but she hadn’t said a word.
“Yeah,” he managed to say. “Fort Worth.”
She smiled. “You’re kidding. How did someone from Fort Worth end up in the navy?”
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
