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
