Mercenary's Woman (16 page)

120

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

"What a coincidence to find you here, at
one of our fa
vorite night spots,"

Without another word being spoken,
Sally knew the
identity of the newcomer. It couldn't be anyone except
Eb's ex-fiancee.

Chapter Eight

"Hello,
Maggie," Eb said, standing up to greet the
pretty green-eyed brunette who took
possession of his arm
and smiled up at him.

"It's good to see
you again so soon!" she said with
obvious pleasure. "You remember Cord
Romero, don't
you?" She indicated a tall, dark-haired, dark-eyed man
beside her without
meeting his eyes. "He and I were fos
tered together by Mrs. Amy Barton, the
Houston social
ite."

"Sure. How are you, Cord?" Eb asked.

The other man, his
equal in height and build, nodded.
Sally was curious about Maggie's obvious
uneasiness
around the other man.

"Sally, this is
Maggie Barton and Cord Romero. Sally
Johnson." They all acknowledged the
introductions, and
Eb added, "Won't you join us?"

Sally's heart
plummeted as she saw Maggie's eyes light
up at the invitation and knew she wouldn't
refuse.

"We may be
intruding," Cord said with a pointed look
at Sally.

122

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

123

"Oh, not at all," Sally said at once.

"I thought Sally
needed a night out," Eb said easily
and with a warm smile in Sally's direction.
"She's an elementary schoolteacher."

The man, Cord, studied
her with open curiosity while
Eb seated Maggie.

"Allow me,"
Cord said smoothly, standing behind
Sally's chair.

Sally smiled at the old-world courtesy. "Thank you."

Eb glanced at them
with unreadable eyes before he
turned back to Maggie, who was flushed and avoided look
ing at the other
couple. "Quite a coincidence, running into
you here," he said in a neutral
tone.

"It was Cord's
idea," Maggie said. "He felt like a night
on the town and he
doesn't date these days. Better your
foster sister than nobody, right, Cord?"
she added with a
nervous laugh and a smile that didn't touch her eyes.

Cord shrugged broad
shoulders indolently and didn't say
a word, but his distaste for her reference
was there, in those
unblinking dark eyes.

Sally was curious
about him. She wondered what he did
for a living. He was very fit for a man his
age, which she
judged to be about the same as Eb's. His hands were rough
and callused, as if
he worked physically rather than sat behind a desk. He had the same odd stare
that she'd no
ticed in Eb and Dallas and even Cy Parks, a probing but
unfocused distant stare that held a
strange hollowness.

"How are things
going at the ranch?" Maggie asked
gently. "I heard that you had Dallas out
there with you."

"Yes," he
replied, "He's doing some consulting work
for me."

"Shot to
pieces, wasn't he?" Cord asked abruptly, his
eyes on Sally's face.

"That happens when a man doesn't keep his mind on

his work," Eb said with a pointed glance at Cord, who
averted his eyes.

"One of my friends is hosting a huge
party down in
Cancun for Christmas,"
Maggie murmured, drawing a lazy
polished
nail across the back of Eb's hand. "Why don't you take some time off and
go with me?''

"No time,"
Eb said with a smile to soften the words.
"I'm not a man of leisure."

"Baloney,"
she replied. "You could retire on what
you've got squirreled away."

"And do what?"
came the dry response. "Do I look
like a lounge lizard to you?"

"I didn't mean
that," she said, and her eyes searched
his face for a long moment. "I meant that you could give
up walking into danger if you wanted to."

"That's an old
argument and you know what the answer
is," Eb told her bluntly.

She withdrew her hand
from his with a sad little sigh.
"Yes, I know," she said wearily.
"It's in your blood and
you can't stop." Involuntarily she glanced at Cord.

Eb frowned a little
as he watched her wilt. Sally saw it
and knew at once that he and Maggie had gone
through
that
very argument years ago when she'd broken their en
gagement. It wasn't
their emotions that had split them up.
It was his job that he wouldn't quit, not
even for a woman
he'd loved
enough to marry.

She felt helpless.
She'd known at some level that he
was carrying a torch for Maggie. She stared at her own
short, unpolished nails and compared them with
Maggie's
long, red-stained,
beautiful ones. The difference was like
the women themselves—one colorful and flamboyant and
drawing attention, the other reclusive and
practical
and...dull. No wonder Eb
hadn't wanted her all those
years
ago. Beside the exotic Maggie, she was insignificant.

124

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

125

"What subject is
your specialty, Miss Johnson?" Cord asked curiously.

"History,
actually," she said. "But I teach second
grade, so I'm not
really using it."

"No ambition to teach higher grades?" he persisted.

She shook her head and
smiled wryly. "I tried it when I did my practice-teaching," she
confessed. "And by the
end of the day, my classroom was more like a zoo than a
regimented place of
learning. I'm afraid I don't have the
facility to handle discipline at a higher
level."

Cord's lean face
lightened just a little as he studied her.
"I had the facility, but the principal
and the school board
didn't like my methods," he replied.

"You teach?"
she asked, enthused to find a colleague
in such an unlikely place.

"I taught high
school science for a year after I got out
of college," he said. "But it
wasn't a profession I could
love enough to continue." He shrugged. "I found
I had
an
aptitude in a totally unrelated area."

Maggie's hand
clenched on her water glass and she took
a quick sip.

"What do you do?" she asked, fascinated.

He glanced at Eb, who
was openly glaring at him. "Ask Eb," he said on a brief, deep laugh,
with a cold glance in
Maggie's direction. "Can we order now?" he
asked, lift
ing the menu. "I haven't even had lunch today."

Eb signaled a waiter
and brought Sally's conversation
with Cord to an end.

It was the longest
and most tense meal Sally could remember having sat through. Maggie and Eb
talked about places and people that they shared in memory while Sally
concentrated on her
food.

Cord was polite, but
he made no further attempt at con
versation. At the end of the evening, as the
two couples

parted outside the restaurant, Maggie
held on to Eb's hand
until he had to forcibly draw it away from her.

"Can't you come
up and have dinner with us again one
evening?" Maggie asked plaintively.

"Perhaps,"
Eb said with a careless smile. He glanced
at Cord. "Good to see you."

Cord nodded. He
glanced down at Sally. "Nice to have
met you, Miss Johnson."

"Same here," she said with a smile.

Maggie hesitated and looked uneasy as
Cord deliberately took her arm and propelled her away. She went with him,
but her back was arrow-straight and she
looked as if she
was walking on hot coals
and on the way to her own ex
ecution.

Eb stared after them for a long moment
before he put
Sally into the sleek Jaguar
and climbed in under the wheel.
He
gave her a look that could have curdled milk.

"Don't encourage him," he said at once.

Her mouth fell open. "W...what?"

"You heard
me." He started the car, and turned toward
Sally. His eyes went over her like
sensual fingers, brushing
her throat, her bare shoulders under the coat, the
shadowy
hollow in her breasts
revealed by the low-cut dress. "He
has a
weakness for blondes. He was ravishing you with his eyes."

She didn't know how
to respond. While Sally was trying
to come up with a response, he moved closer and slid a
hand under her nape, under the heavy coil of hair,
and
pulled her face up toward his.

"So was I,"
he whispered roughly, and his mouth went down on her lips, burrowing beneath
them, pressing them
apart, devouring them. At the same time, his free hand
slid
right
down into the low bodice of her dress and curved around her warm, bare breast.

MERCENARY'S
WOMAN

"Eb!" she choked, stiffening.

He was undeterred.
He groaned, overcome with desire,
and his fingers contracted in a slow, heated,
sensual rhythm
that brought Sally's mouth open in a tiny gasp. His tongue
found the unprotected
heat of it and moved inside, in lazy,
teasing motions that made her whole body clench.

He felt her nervous
fingers fumble against the front of
his dress shirt. Impatiently, he unfastened
three buttons and
dragged her hand inside the shirt, over hair-roughened
muscles down to a
nipple as hard as the one pressing fe
verishly into the palm of his hand.

She was devastated
by the passion that had kindled so
unexpectedly. She couldn't find the strength or the voice
to protest the liberties he was taking, or to care
that they
were in a public parking lot. She didn't care about any
thing except making sure that he didn't stop. He
couldn't
stop. He mustn't stop, he
mustn't...!

But he did,
suddenly. He held her hands together tightly
as he moved a little away from her, painfully aware that
she was trying to get back into his arms.

"No," he said curtly, and shook her clenched hands.

She stared into his
blazing eyes, her breath rustling in
her throat, her heartbeat visible at the twin
points so bla
tantly obvious
against the bodice of her dress.

He glanced down at
her and his jaw clenched. His own
body was in agony, and this would only get
worse if he didn't stop them now. She was too responsive, too tempt
ing. He was going to
have to make sure that he didn't
touch her that way when they were completely
alone. The
consequences could be devastating. It was the wrong time
for a torrid
relationship. If he let himself lose his head over
Sally right now, it
could cost all of them their lives.

Forcefully, he put
her back into her own seat and fas
tened the seat belt around her.

DIANA
PALMER

She just stared at
him with those huge, soulful gray eyes that made him feel hungry and
guilt-ridden all at the same
time.

"I have to get you home," he said tersely.

She nodded. Her throat was too tight for
words to get out She clutched her small purse in her hands and stared
out the window as he put the car into gear and
pulled out
into traffic.

It was a long, and very silent, drive back
to her house. He was preoccupied, as distant as she remembered him
from her teens. She wondered if he was thinking
about
Maggie and regretting the
decision he'd made that put her out of his life. She was mature now, but
beautiful as well, and it didn't take a mind reader to know that she was still
attracted
to Eb. How he felt was less obvious. He was a
man
who knew how to hide what he felt, and that skill
was working overtime tonight.

"Why did Maggie
introduce Cord as a foster child at
first and then refer to him as her brother? Are they re
lated?" she asked.

"They are not," he returned
flatly. "His parents died in
a fire,
and she came from a severely disfunctional family.
Mrs. Barton adopted both of them. Maggie took her
name,
but Cord kept his own. His
father was a rather famous matador in Spain until his death. Maggie does
usually try
to present Cord as her
brother. She's scared to death of
him, despite the fact that they've
kept in close touch all these years."

That was a surprise. "But why is she scared of him?"

He chuckled.
"Because she wants him, although she's
apparently never realized it," he
returned with a quick glance. "He's been a colleague of mine for a long
time,
and
I always thought that Maggie got engaged to me to
put Cord out of the
reach of temptation."