Next to Die (36 page)

To her amazement, he pulled a velvet-covered box from his jean jacket and sank down on one knee. In front of God and everyone, he grabbed her left hand.

Penny tottered. A hush stole over those bystanders close enough to take note of the proposal under way. The girl with the camera grinned as she held it to her eyes.

Joe opened the box and looked up at Penny. A cluster of diamonds glittered in the morning sun, but it was the love blazing in Joe’s eyes that made Penny’s heart stop.

“Copper Penny,” he said, in a voice thick with emotion, “You’d make me the luckiest man alive, if you’d agree to marry me.”

“Aaww,” sighed several women in the crowd.

“Check out the sign he made,” pointed out a man.

“Come on, ma’am!” shouted a petty officer who’d sat beside her on the plane. “You can’t disappoint him now.”

“Forever?” Penny whispered.

“Forever,” Joe confirmed as the nearby camera continued to flash at a fast pace.

Penny’s knees jittered. Tears flooded her eyes as she leaned forward to ask, “Am I on
Candid Camera
?”

“What? No, that’s Mallory, Gabe’s kid. She insisted on coming along.”

“Oh, well, in that case,” Penny flashed Mallory a grin and then said to Joe, her voice wavering with emotion, “You had me all along, Joe. I’d be honored to marry you.”

“What’d she say?” asked a bystander. “Did you hear her?”

“I think she said yes.”

“Hell, she’d better say yes, or I’ll take him home,” cackled an elderly woman.

With a click of her camera, Mallory caught on film the world’s most perfect kiss.

About the Author

Marliss Melton enjoyed an exotic childhood growing up overseas where entertainment meant riding on elephants in Laos, Sunday visits to museums in Paris, and tracking tigers in northern Thailand. With the world her home, Marliss excelled in language, music, and story-telling. She has taught various aspects of language in high schools and colleges, including the College of William and Mary, her alma mater. She has written eight books since becoming published in 2002, branching into two subgenres of romance, medieval historical and romantic suspense featuring Navy SEALs. Marliss lives in Virginia with her navy veteran husband and their five children.

Enjoy a sneak peek at Marliss Melton’s new novel of passion and suspense!

Please turn this page for a preview of

DON’T LET GO

available in paperback in Spring 2008.

Prologue

Five Years Ago

Despite the heat blowing out of the vents near the old Volkswagen’s floorboards, Chief Petty Officer Solomon McGuire shivered in his woolen peacoat. He’d grown up in Camden, Maine, where the winters were ruthless. The milder weather in Virginia Beach seldom troubled him, but the memories of the mission he’d just come from sat in his chest like a block of ice, freezing him from the inside out.

Petty Officer Blaine Koontz from Kentucky had been one of those younger guys that made older SEALs feel tired and used up. He was five and half feet of boundless energy. His freckled face and grinning countenance made every deadly objective seem like kids’ play.

Hooyah! We get to parachute with a low open into enemy territory; run four miles with sixty-pound rucksacks over the dunes; set a perimeter around the oil well guarded by Iraqi National Guards and take it. No problem! We can do it!

And they had. Only, as they’d scurried across the open sand toward the oil well, a bullet had caught Koontz in the side of the head. It hadn’t killed him right away. He was still alive and rambling when Solomon held him still so the corpsman could tape his fractured skull.

After sixteen years of being a SEAL, Solomon thought he’d heard and seen everything. He was wrong. The exclamations tumbling out of Koontz’s mouth had raised the hairs on the back of his neck. It seemed that Koontz hadn’t been so happy-go-lucky, after all. The twenty-two-year-old had flirted boldly with the Grim Reaper for a reason: Death couldn’t be a fate any worse than Koontz’s sadistic father.

Koontz hadn’t died until a NightStalker dropped into hostile airspace, dodging rocket-propelled grenades to pick him up and whisk him away. Although his death had shaken Solomon, time for grief was a luxury he and his men could ill afford, so they had pressed on to finish the mission—a mission that had lasted seventy-two sleepless hours. Not only had the SEALs commandeered the oil well, but they’d had to defend it from counterattack, until the Army’s Seventh Infantry Battalion arrived to relieve them.

Solomon, known for his relentless pursuit of an objective, was beyond exhausted. The memory of hearing Koontz’s childhood horrors abraded his frayed nerves as he increased his speed through the suburban sprawl under a cold January moon.

The entrance to his neighborhood came abruptly into view, and he downshifted, turning the corner without touching the brakes. He ached for relief. Relief that would come the instant he scooped his infant son into his arms and gazed down at the innocent contours of his cherubic face. Relief that would be complete once he found release in his wife’s soft arms.

His son was Silas. And he was Solomon’s joy.

His wife was Candace. At one time, he’d fancied her the center of his universe, and his every thought had revolved around her. But that was before he came to realize that her beauty was as shallow as her conscience. She was the mother of his son, however. It had been his choice to marry her, and he stood stubbornly by his decision.

His brick two-story home stood at the end of a cul-de-sac. Every month, the mortgage sucked away half of his paycheck, but Candace had wanted it, so he’d bought it for her. The windows were dark at this late hour, his little family sleeping. Solomon cut the engine and glided into the driveway.

Dragging his rucksack behind him, he got out and followed the granite walkway that cut across the frost-covered lawn. With stiff fingers, he unlocked his front door, his heart beating faster to know that one-year-old Silas was upstairs, tucked into his crib. He could almost feel the warmth of the boy’s sturdy little frame against his chest, smell his sweet, baby scent.

As he pushed his way inside, the warmth he anticipated failed to greet him. The air inside was cold and undisturbed, the silence tomblike, the smells faded.

With a stab of fear, Solomon flicked the light switch. Glaring light confirmed what his other senses were telling him. “Candace!” His anxious voice echoed off the empty walls and high ceilings. “No!” he breathed, dropping his rucksack.

He took the stairs three at a time, raced down the wide hall, and threw open the door to the nursery. The relentless moon displayed a room as empty as the rest of the house. There wasn’t any need to turn on the lights. The bear-on-the-rocking-chair wallpaper border was all that remained.

“Oh, God,” he groaned, lurching back into the hallway and stalking to the master bedroom. He barreled through the double doors and stared. Gone. Everything was gone.

With a shiver, he pivoted, going to back to the nursery. “Silas,” he moaned, feeling as if his very bowels had been ripped from him. He fell onto his knees where the baby’s crib had stood, bowed his face into his hands, and wept.

Chapter One

Las Amazonas, Venezuela

The double doors of the chapel at La Misión de la Paz slammed open, startling the occupants within. The interloper raced out of the hazy sunlight, his brown limbs coated in sweat, breath coming in gasps that punctuated his announcement.
“Guerillas se acercan. Hay por lo menos cincuenta y llevan armas!”

Guerillas are coming. There are at least fifty of them and they’re carrying weapons.
Translating the message, Jordan Bliss straightened from the pupil she was instructing and looked at Father Benedict to gauge his response.

The priest’s benign countenance paled with consternation. “You should have left two weeks ago,” he said to her, catching her eye. “Now you’ll have to hide with us.”

“My choice, Father,” she gently reminded him, her gaze sliding toward the reason for her stay, four-year-old Miguel, who sat clutching his slate. She could not have left him, regardless of the political turmoil in Venezuela and the growing threat toward Americans.

“Come,” urged Father Benedict, who was British and only slightly less at risk. “Bring the children. We’ll all hide in the wine cellar. Pedro, run and fetch Sister Madeline,” he added in Spanish. “Hurry.”

Jordan gathered the children, instructing them to leave their slates beneath the pews. She scooped Miguel into her arms. Thin as a rail, he scarcely weighed her down, especially when he coiled his limbs around her.

“This way,” indicated the priest, hurrying toward a nave that was separated from the sanctuary by a curtain. Once within, he kicked aside the worn rug that covered the stone floor. A wooden hatch was nestled in the flagging, providing access to the cellar below. He pulled it open, exposing wooden steps that disappeared into darkness and releasing a musty smell.

Jordan’s fear of closed spaces made her balk. The children bunched up behind her, instinctively silent.

“Take these candles,” the priest instructed, thrusting several wax pillars at her. “Matches,” he added. She stuck them into the deep pockets of her cargo shorts. Lifting a cloth off a basket, he withdrew a loaf of bread meant for services that night. “We’ll need this.”

God knew how long they would be down there. Or whether the guerillas headed in their direction would avidly hunt them down or simply move on.

“Go ahead,” said the priest, with a nod at the steps.

With panic threatening to close off her airways, Jordan instructed her little troop to hold the rickety banister and follow her. She took her first step into the bowels of the earth and then another. A spiderweb brushed her cheek as dank coolness swallowed her. Shivering, she clutched Miguel closer while shaking off her fear—for his sake, and for the others’. Down, down into the black hole they went until they reached a floor of hard-packed dirt.

As she gazed up at the light, tremors rippled through her. What if she never saw the sun again? A scurry of footfalls heralded the approach of Sister Madeline.

“I caught sight of them,” the nun divulged in her no-nonsense voice. “They’re a horde,” she added with typical British understatement.

An angry horde,
Jordan thought, cold sweat matting her shirt to her back.

Madeline bustled down the steps. “Whom do we have with us?” she inquired.

“The orphans,” Jordan murmured.

“We should let them go,” Madeline suggested, glancing up at the priest.

“No,” whispered Jordan, clutching Miguel more fiercely.

“Their cries might betray us,” the nun argued.

“It’s too late to send them up,” Father Benedict pointed out, as he, too, descended. “Besides, who would care for them? They would end up on the streets again. Pedro,” he called to the hovering teen, a youth hoping to join the priesthood, “close the door and lock it. Put the rug over the hatch and hide the key. Tell no one where we are. When the guerillas leave, let us out again.”

“Sí, padre,” answered the boy. With reluctance and apology wreathing his indigenous features, he gently lowered the door. It wasn’t so dark, not with rays of sunlight slipping through the cracks. But then the rug was tossed over the hatch, dousing them in blackness so deep and thick that it paralyzed every muscle in Jordan’s body.

“Let us light a candle and pray,” recommended Father Benedict, his voice swimming out of the darkness. It unlocked Jordan’s frozen joints.

She stiffly put Miguel down, eager to drive back the void. But the task of lighting a candle, given her shaking hands, proved virtually impossible. The flare of her trembling match revealed the pale faces of her adult companions and the gleam of four sets of children’s eyes. They feasted their gazes on the wick, then looked around once it was lit.

Their hiding space was perhaps ten by seven paces, laced in cobwebs and peppered with holes that housed bottles of sacramental wine.
We have plenty to drink,
Jordan thought, swallowing a hysterical giggle.

The priest sat, folding his long limbs to make more space. Jordan hunted for a place to put the candle, out of reach of the children. Finding a crack in the wall, she wedged it in like a torch. “Sit down,” she instructed the children, doing the same.

Miguel scrambled into his customary seat—her lap—and his thick hair tickled her nose. Jordan’s eyes stung with remorse that she couldn’t shield him from harm any better than this.

“Beloved Father,” began the priest, his lank hair falling over his forehead, “look down upon us and cast your mantle of protection over us, we pray you . . .”

As his sonorous voice droned on, Jordan’s thoughts wandered. She hushed Fatima, who whimpered in fear as she burrowed into Jordan’s side. Prayers couldn’t hurt, Jordan acknowledged, but they wouldn’t necessarily help. God knew she’d expended many a prayer to keep from losing her pregnancy and then her marriage.