Mercenary's Woman (12 page)

Chapter Six

Sally found the workouts easier to do
as they progressed from falls to defensive moves. Not only was it exciting to
learn such skills,
but the constant physical contact with Eb was delightful. She couldn't really
hide that from him. He
saw right through her diversionary tactics, grinning when
she asked for short breaks.

Stevie was also taking to the
exercise with enthusiasm.
It wasn't hard to teach him that such things had no place
at
school, either. Even at his young age, he seemed to
understand that
martial arts were for recreation after school
and never for the playground.

"It goes with
the discipline," Eb informed her when
she told him about it. "Most people who
watch martial
arts films automatically assume that we teach children to
hurt each other. It's not like that. What
we teach is a way
to raise self-esteem and
self-confidence. If you know you
can
handle yourself in a bad situation, you're less likely
to go out and try to beat somebody up to prove it.
It's lack

DIANA
PALMER

of self-confidence, lack of self-esteem, that drives a lot of
kids to violence."

"That, and a very sad lack of
attention by the adults
around them,"
Sally said quietly. "It takes two incomes
to run a household these days, but it's the kids who are
suffering for it. Any gang member will tell you
the reason
he joined a gang was
because he wanted to be part of a
family.
But how do we change things so that parents can earn a living and still have
enough free time to raise their children?"

He put both hands on
his narrow hips and studied her closely. "If I could answer that question,
I'd run for public
office."

She grinned at him. "I can see you
now, mopping the floor with the criminal element on the streets."

He shrugged.
"Piece of cake compared to what I used
to do for a living."

Her pale eyes
searched his lean, scarred face while
Stevie fell from one side of the mat to
another practicing
his technique. "I rented one of those old mercenary films
and watched it. Do
you guys really throw grenades and
use rocket launchers?"

A dark, odd look
came into his pale eyes. "Among other
things," he said.

"Such as?"
she prompted.

"High-tech
equipment like the stuff you saw in my of
fice. Plastic explosive charges, small arms,
whatever we
had. But most of what we do now is intelligence-gathering
and tactics. And
intelligence gathering," he told her dryly,
"is about as exciting as
two-hour-old cereal in milk."

She was surprised, "I thought it was like war."

He shrugged.
"Only if you get caught gathering intel
ligence," he replied on a laugh.
"We were good at what
we did."

MERCENARY'S
WOMAN

"Dallas was one of your guys, wasn't he?"

He nodded.
"Dallas, Cy Parks and Callie Kirby's step
brother Micah Steele, among others."

Her mouth fell open. "Cy Parks was a mercenary?!"

His eyebrows levered
up. "You didn't notice that he
has a hard time interacting with other
people?"

"It's hard to miss. But in the condition he's in..."

"I know. That's one reason that he
isn't in our line of
work anymore. He was
one of the group that helped put Lopez's organization away a little over two
years ago—so
was I. It was Jess who
got to the man himself. But Lopez
appealed
the verdict and only went to prison six months
ago. As you can see, he's out now," he added dryly.

"Two years
ago—that was about the time Cy came to
Jacobsville," she recalled.

"Yes. After one
of Lopez's goons torched his house in
Wyoming. The idea was to kill all three of
them, not just
Cy's wife and
child," he added, seeing the horror in her
eyes. "But Cy wasn't asleep, as they'd assumed. He got
out."

She grimaced.
"But why would Lopez burn his house
down?"

"That's how he
gets even with people who cross him,"
he said simply. "He doesn't take out
just the person responsible, but the whole family, if he can get to it. There
have been slaughters like you wouldn't believe down in
Mexico when anyone
tried to stand against him. He does
usually stop short of children, however; his one virtue."

"I never knew
people like him existed," she said sor
rowfully.

"I wish I could
say the same," he told her. "We don't
live in a perfect world. That's why I
want you to learn
how to defend yourself."

"Fat lot of good it would have done me the night I had

DIANA
PALMER
                                      
91

the flat tire," she pointed out.
"If you hadn't come along
when you did..." She shuddered.

"But I did. Don't look back. It's unproductive."

Her soft, worried eyes searched his scarred face quietly.

"What are you thinking?" he asked with a faint smile.

She shrugged. "I
was thinking what a false picture I
had of you all those years ago," she
admitted. "I suppose
I was living in a dream world."

"And I was
living in a nightmare," he replied. "That unforgettable spring day
six years ago, I'd just come home
from a bloodbath in Africa, trying to help
an incumbent
government fight off a military coup by a very nasty native
communist general. I
lost most of my unit, including sev
eral friends, and the incumbent president's
office was
blown up, with him in it. It wasn't a good time."

She named the
country, to his surprise. "We were study
ing that in a political science class at the time,"
she said.
"I had no idea what you did
for a living, or that you were
involved.
But we all thought it was an idealistic resis
tance," she added with a smile.

"Idealistic,"
he agreed. "And very costly, as most ideas
are when you try to put them into
practice." His eyes were
very old as they met hers. "After that, I began to
concentrate on intelligence and tactics. War isn't noble. Only the
resolution of it is
that."

She recalled the fresh scars on his face
that day, scars
that she'd attributed to
ranch work. She studied him with obvious interest, smiling sheepishly when one
of his eye
brows levered up.

"Sorry," she murmured.

He moved a step closer to her, forcing her
to raise her
chin so that she could see his
face. The contact, barely perceptible, made her heart race. It wasn't so much
the
proximity as the way he was
looking at her, as if he'd like

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

to press her against him and kiss her
until she couldn't
stand up.

She moved a step
back, her gaze going involuntarily to her cousin, who was giving the punching
bag a hard time.

"I hadn't
forgotten he was there," Eb said in a velvety
tone. His pale eyes
fell to her mouth and lingered. Even
without makeup and with her long hair
disheveled, she was
pretty, "One night soon I'm going to take you out to
din
ner.
Dallas can keep an eye on Jess and Stevie while you're away."

Until he said that,
she'd actually forgotten the danger
for a few delightful minutes. It all came rushing back.

He smoothed out the
frown between her thin eyebrows.
"Don't brood. I've got everything under
control."

"I hope
so," she said uneasily. "Does Mr. Parks know
that Lopez is out of
prison?"

"He knows,"
Eb replied. He ran a hand through his
thick hair. "He's the one loose cannon
I'm going to have
to watch. Even in the old days, Cy never had much pa
tience. He and his
wife weren't much of a pair, but he
loved that boy to death. He won't rest until
Lopez is
caught,
and if he gets to him first, we can forget about a
trial. You can't ever
afford to act in anger," he added quietly. "Anger clouds reason. It
can get you killed."

"You can't
really blame him for the way he feels. Poor
man," she sympathized.

"Pity would be
wasted on him," he murmured with a
smile. "Even crippled, he's more man than
most."

"I don't think
of him as crippled," she said genuinely.
"He's very attractive."

He glared down at her. "You're off limits."

Her eyes widened. "What?"

"You heard me."

"I'm not property," she began.

"Neither am I,
but don't start thinking about Cy, nev
ertheless. You can concentrate on me." He
took one of
her hands in his and looked at it, turning it over gently to
study it. "Nice
hands," he said. "Short nails, well-kept.
No rings."

"I have several
of them, mostly silver and turquoise, but I don't wear them very much."

His lean fingers
rubbed gently over her ring finger and
he looked thoughtful, absorbed.

Her own fingers went
to the onyx-and-gold signet ring
on the little finger of his left hand with
the letter
S
in
gold
script embossed in the onyx.

"It was my
father's," Eb told her solemnly. "He was
a hell of a soldier,
even if he wasn't the best father in the
world."

"Do you miss him?" she asked gently,

He nodded. "I suppose I do, from time
to time." He
touched the ring.
"This will go to my son, if I ever have
one."

The thought of having children with Eb
made Sally's
knees weak, but she didn't
speak. Eb seemed about to,
when they
were interrupted.

"Hey, Sally,
look what I can do!" Stevie called, and
executed a kick that sent the bag reeling.

"Very
nice!" Eb said, grinning. "You're a quick study,
young man."

"I got to learn
to do it real fast," he murmured, sending
another kick at the bag.

"Why?" Eb asked curiously.

"So I can hit
that big blond man who makes my mama
cry," he said, oblivious to the shocked
and then amused
looks on the
faces of the adults near him.

"Dallas?" Sally asked.

"That's him," Stevie agreed, and his dark eyes glim-

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

95

mered. "Mama was crying last
night and I asked her why,
and she said that man hates her."

Eb joined the young
boy at the bag and went on one
knee beside him, his eyes very solemn. "Your mother
and
Dallas
knew each other a long time ago," he told him in
an adult way.
"They had a fight, and they never made up.
That's why she cried. They're both
good people, Stevie,
but
sometimes even good people have arguments."

"Why are they mad at each other?"

"I don't know," Eb replied not
quite factually. "That's for them to say, if they want you to know. Dallas
isn't a
bad man, though."

"He's all banged up," Stevie replied solemnly.

"Yes, he is. He was shot."

"Shot?
Really?" Stevie moved closer to Eb and put a
small hand on his
shoulder. "Who shot him?"

"Some very bad
men," Eb told him. "He almost died.
That's why he has to use a walking
stick now. It's why
he has all those scars."

Stevie touched Eb's face. "You got scars, too."

"Yes, I have."

"You ever been shot?" he wanted to know,

"Several
times," Eb replied honestly. "Guns can be
very dangerous. I
suppose you know that."

"I know
it," Stevie said. "One of my friends shot him
self with his dad's
pistol playing war out in the yard. He
was hurt pretty bad, but he's okay now. Mama
told me
that
children should
never
touch a gun, even if they think
it's not
loaded."

"Good for your mom!"

"That man
doesn't like my mama," he continued wor
riedly. "He frowns and frowns at
her. She can't see it, but
I see it."

"He wouldn't ever hurt her," Eb said firmly. "He's

there to protect her when you're away
from home," he
added wryly.

"That's right, I
protect her at home. I'm very strong.
See what I did to the bag?"

"I sure
did!" Eb grinned at him. "Those were nice
kicks, but you need to
snap them out from the knee.
Here—" he got to his feet "—let me show
you."

Sally watched them with lazy pleasure,
smiling at the
born rapport between them.
It was a pity that Stevie didn't
like
Dallas. That would matter one day. But she had
enough problems of her own to worry about.

Eb stopped by the
local sandwich shop and bought frozen yogurt cones for all three of them, a
reward for the
physical punishment, he told them dryly.

While the two adults
sat at a table and ate their yogurt cones, Stevie became engrossed in some
knickknacks on
sale in the same store.

"He's a natural at this," Eb remarked.

"I'll bet I'm
not," she mused, having had to repeat
several of the moves quite a number of times before she did them
well enough to suit her companion.

"You're not his
age, either," he pointed out. "Most
children learn things faster than
adults. That's why they
teach
foreign languages so early these days."

"Do you speak
any other languages?" she asked sud
denly.

"Only a
handful," he replied. "The romance languages,
several dialects of African languages, and
Russian."

"My goodness."

"Languages will
get you far in intelligence work these
days," he told her. "If you're
going to work in foreign countries, it's stupid not to speak the language. It
can get you killed."