Everyday, Average Jones. Suzanne Brockmann
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their fingers touched, he felt an instant connection, a flood of electricity. And he knew damn well she felt it, too.
She was covered with dust from the road, smeared with shoe polish and utterly bone weary. Yet at the same time, she managed to be the most beautiful woman Cowboy could ever remember seeing. Damn, he shouldn’t be feeling this way. After this was over, he would have to go in for a psychological review, work with the unit shrink and try to pinpoint what it was, exactly, that he’d done wrong. Find out when it was that he’d let her get under his skin…
Harvard nodded. “We’re going for the ocean.” He glanced at Cowboy. They hadn’t had much time to discuss their route. “I thought it would be easier to leave the country by boat.”
“Or plane, Senior Chief,” Cowboy interjected. “Get us home a whole hell of a lot faster.”
Harvard caught and held his gaze, and Cowboy knew the older man was thinking the same thing he was. They’d both studied a map of this country during the briefing. There was a major city directly between their current position and the ocean. According to the map, that city had an airfield. Maybe instead of skirting the city, they should get close enough to check it out.
“With any luck, it’ll be a military base,” Cowboy said aloud. “We’re the last people they’ll be expecting to show up there.”
Harvard nodded. “The best defense is a strong offense.”
“Do you two always communicate through non sequiturs?” Melody asked.
Harvard stood up. “Junior thinks we should steal a plane tonight, and crazy as it sounds, I agree. But right now I’ve got a combat nap scheduled.” He paused before going into the cave, turning back to Melody. “You’ve got dibs on whatever soft ground is in there, milady,” he said.
But she shook her head. “Thanks, but…I want to get warm first,” she told him. She glanced at Cowboy and a faint blush spread along her cheeks as if she realized how transparent she was. No one was fooled. It was clear she wanted to be out here with her own personal hero.
Cowboy felt it again. That hot rush of emotion.
Harvard paused just inside the cave. “Don’t let her fall asleep out here,” he instructed Cowboy. “And make sure you get your Texan butt in the shade before too long, too. I don’t want you two pigment-challenged types unable to move come dusk because of a sunburn.”
“Yes, Mother,” Cowboy droned.
“And wake me in four.” Harvard headed toward the back of the cave. “No more, no less.”
Cowboy looked at Melody and smiled. “Hell, I thought he’d never leave.”
She blushed again.
“You okay?” he asked, both wishing she wasn’t sitting quite so far away and glad as hell for the distance between them. God help him if he actually got her into his arms when it wasn’t a life-and-death situation.
“I wish I could wash my face,” she told him.
Cowboy shook his head in apology. “We’ve got to save the water I’ve got for drinking,” he told her.
“I know,” she said. “I just wish it, that’s all.”
The sun was warming the air considerably, and Cowboy loosened his robe and even unfastened the black combat vest he wore underneath.
Her next words surprised him. “I thought we’d be dead by now.”
“Tomorrow at this time, we’ll be on America-friendly soil.”
She shifted her legs and winced slightly, then pulled her feet closer to untie her sneakers. “You say that with such conviction.”
“Have I been wrong yet?” he countered.
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