Mercenary's Woman ; Outlawed!

by Diana Palmer

  She pondered that. “A colleague?”

  “That’s right. He still works with Micah Steele,” he said. “He’s a demolitions expert.”

  “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Very,” he replied. “His wife died four years ago. Committed suicide,” he added shockingly. “He never got over it.”

  “Why did she do something so drastic?” she asked.

  “Because he was working for the FBI when they married and he got shot a few months after the wedding. She hadn’t realized his work would be so dangerous. He was in the hospital for weeks and she went haywire. He wouldn’t give up a job he loved, and she found that she couldn’t live with the knowledge that he might end up dead. She couldn’t give him up, either, so she took what she considered the easy way out.” His face set grimly. “Easy for her. Hell on him.”

  She drew in a sharp breath. “I suppose he felt guilty.”

  “Yes. That was about the time Maggie broke up with me,” he added. “She said she didn’t want to end up like Patricia.”

  “She knew Cord’s wife?”

  “They were best friends,” he said shortly. “And something happened between Cord and Maggie just after Mrs. Barton’s funeral. I never knew what, but it ended in Maggie’s sudden marriage to a man old enough to be her father. I don’t know why, but I think it had something to do with Cord.”

  “He’s unique.”

  He glared at her. “Yes. He’s a hardened mercenary now. He gave up law enforcement when Patricia died and took a job with an ex-special forces unit that went into freelance work. He started doing demolition work and now it’s all he does.”

  Her eyes softened. “He wants to die.”

  “You’re perceptive,” he mused. “That’s what I think, too. Hell of a pity that he and Maggie don’t see each other. They’re a lot alike.”

  She looked at her purse. “You aren’t still carrying a torch for her?”

  He chuckled. “No. She’s a kind, sweet woman and I probably would have married her if things had been different. But I don’t think she could have lived with me. She takes things too much to heart.”

  “Don’t I?” she fished.

  He smiled. “At times. But you’re spunky, Miss Johnson, and despite the scare you had with your two neighbors, you don’t balk at fighting back. I like your spirit. When I lose my temper, and I do occasionally, you won’t be looking for a closet to hide in.”

  “That might be true,” she confessed. “But if you were into demolition work, I think I’d run in the opposite direction when I saw you coming.”

  He nodded. “Which is exactly what Maggie did,” he replied. “She ran from Cord and got engaged to me.”

  That was heartening. If the woman was carrying a torch for another man, it might stop Eb from falling back into his old relationship with her.

  “Jealous?” he murmured with a sensuous glance.

  Her heart raced. She moved one shoulder a little and avoided his eyes. Then she sighed and said, “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “Now that really is flattering,” he said. “Maggie is part of the past. I have no hidden desire to rekindle old flames. Except the one you and I shared,” he qualified.

  Sally turned her head and met his searching gaze. Her breath caught in her throat as she stared back at him hungrily.

  “Watch it,” he said, not quite jokingly. “When we drive up in your yard, we’ll be under surveillance. I don’t want an audience for what we were doing in the parking lot at that restaurant.”

  She laughed delightedly. “Okay.”

  “On the other hand,” he added, “we could find a deserted road.”

  She hesitated. It was one thing for it to happen spontaneously, but quite another to plan such a sensual interlude. And she wasn’t sure of her own protective instincts. Around Eb, she didn’t seem to have any.

  “Don’t make such heavy weather of it,” he said after a minute. “There’s no hurry. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “Have we?” she wondered, remembering Lopez and his threats.

  “Don’t gulp down your life, Sally,” he said. “Take it one minute at a time. I’m not going to let anything happen to you or Jessica or Stevie. Okay?”

  She swallowed. “Sorry. I panic when I think about how dangerous it is.”

  “I’ve been handling danger for a long time,” he reminded her. “I have a state-of-the-art surveillance system. Nothing is going to get past it.”

  She managed a weak smile. “He’s very ruthless.”

  “He’s been getting away with murder,” he said simply. “He doesn’t think the justice system can touch him. We’re going to prove to him that it can.”

  “How do you bring a man to justice when he’s rich enough to buy a country?”

  “You cut off the source of his wealth,” he said simply. “Without its head, the snake can’t go far.”

  “Good point.”

  “Now stop worrying.”

  “I’ll try.”

  He reached across the seat for her hand and locked it into his big, warm one. “I enjoyed tonight.”

  “So did I,” she said gently.

  “Maggie isn’t my future, in case you were wondering,” he added in a soft tone.

  Sally hoped fervently that it was true. She wanted Eb with all her heart.

  His fingers tightened on hers. “I think it might be a good idea if I start driving you and Stevie to school and picking you up in the afternoons.”

  Her heart leaped. “Why?”

  He glanced at her. “Because Lopez wouldn’t hesitate to kidnap either or both of you to further his own ends. Even two miles is a long distance when you don’t have any sort of protection.”

  She stared at him worriedly. “Why didn’t Jess leave well enough alone?” she asked miserably. “If she hadn’t gotten that person to talk...”

  “Hindsight is wonderful,” he told her. “But try to remember that Lopez’s operation supplies about a quarter of all narcotics sold in the States. That’s a lot of addicted kids and a fair number of dead ones.”

  She grimaced. “Sorry. I was being selfish.”

  “It isn’t selfish to be concerned for the welfare of people you love,” he told her. “But getting Lopez behind bars, and cutting his connections, will help make the world a better place. A little worry isn’t such a bad trade-off, considering.”

  “I guess not.”

  He brought the back of her hand to his mouth and kissed it warmly. “You looked lovely tonight,” he said. “I was proud of you.”

  Her face flushed at the rare compliment. “I’m always proud of you,” she replied softly.

  He chuckled. “You’re good for my ego.”

  “You’re good for mine.”

  He kept his eyes on the road with an effort. He wanted to pull the car onto a side road and make passionate love to her, but that was impractical, given the circumstances. All Lopez’s men needed was an opportunity. He wasn’t going to give them one, despite his teasing comment to Sally about it.

  When they pulled up in her driveway, the lights were all on in the house and Dallas was sitting in the front porch swing, smoking like a furnace.

  “Have a nice time?” he asked as Eb and Sally came up the steps.

  “Very nice,” Eb replied. “I ran into Cord Romero.”

  “I thought he was overseas, helping detonate unexploded land mines?”

  “Not now,” Eb told him. “He’s in Houston. Between jobs, maybe. Why are you sitting out here?”

  Dallas stared at the red tip of his cigarette. “Jessica has a cough,” he replied. “I didn’t want to aggravate it.”

  “Are the two of you speaking?” Eb drawled.

  Dallas laughed softly. “Well, she’s stopped trying to throw things at me, at least.”

  Sally�
��s eyes went enormous. That didn’t sound like her staid aunt.

  “What was she throwing?” Eb asked.

  “Anything within reach that felt expendable,” came the dry reply. “Stevie thought it was great fun, but she wouldn’t let him play. He’s gone to bed. She’s pretending to watch television.”

  “You might talk to her,” Eb suggested.

  “Chance,” Dallas replied, “would be a fine thing. She doesn’t want to talk, thank you.” He finished the cigarette. “I’ll be out in the woods with Smith.”

  “Watch where you walk,” Eb cautioned.

  “Mined the forest, did we?” Dallas murmured wickedly.

  Eb grinned. “Not with explosives, at least.”

  Dallas shook his head and went down the steps, to vanish in the direction of the woods at the edge of the yard.

  Sally rubbed her arms through the coat, shivering, and it wasn’t even that cold. She felt the danger of her predicament keenly and wished that she could have done something to prevent the desperate situation.

  “You’re doing it again,” Eb murmured, drawing her against him. “You have to trust me. I won’t let anything happen to any of you.”

  She looked up at him with wide, soft eyes. “I’ll try not to worry. I’ve never been in such a mess before.”

  “Hopefully you never will again,” he said. He bent and kissed her very gently, nipping her lower lip before he lifted his head. “I’ll be somewhere nearby, or my men will be. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Okay.” She touched her fingers to his mouth and smiled wanly before she turned and walked to the door. “Thanks for supper,” she added. “It was delicious.”

  “It would have been better without the company,” he said, “but that was unavoidable. Next time I’ll plan better.”

  She smiled at him. “That’s a deal.”

  He watched her walk inside the house and lock the door behind her before he turned and got back into his truck. Less than twenty-four hours remained before Lopez would make good his threat. He had to make sure that everyone was prepared for a siege.

  * * *

  SALLY PAUSED IN the doorway of the living room with her eyes wide as she saw the damage Jessica had inflicted with her missiles.

  “Good Lord!” she exclaimed.

  Jess grimaced. “Well, he provoked me,” she muttered. “He said that I’d gotten lazy in my old age, just lying around the house like a garden slug. I do not lie around like a garden slug!”

  “No, of course you don’t,” Sally said, placating her while she bent to pick up pieces of broken pottery and various other objects from the floor.

  “Besides, what does he expect me to do without my eyesight, drive the car?”

  Sally was trying not to smile. She’d never seen her aunt in such a tizzy before.

  “He actually accused me of insanity because I won’t give up the name to Lopez,” she added harshly. “He said that a good mother wouldn’t have withheld a name and put her child in danger. That’s when I threw the flowerpot, dear. I’m sorry. I do hope it hit him.”

  Sally made a clucking sound. “You’re not yourself, Jess.”

  “Yes, I am! I’m the result of all his sarcasm! He can’t find one thing about me that he likes anymore. Everything I do and say is wrong!”

  “He doesn’t seem like a bad man,” Sally ventured.

  “I didn’t say he was bad, I said he was obnoxious and condescending and conceited.” She pushed back a strand of hair. “He was laughing the whole time.”

  Which surely made things worse, Sally mused silently. “I expect it was wails of pain, Jess.”

  “You couldn’t hurt him,” she scoffed. “You’d have to stick a bomb up his shirt.”

  “Drastic surely?”

  Jess sighed and leaned back in the chair, looking drained. “I hate arguments. He seems to thrive on them.” She hesitated. “He taught Stevie how to braid a rope,” she added unexpectedly.

  “That’s odd. I thought Stevie wanted to beat him up.”

  “They had a talk outside the room. I don’t know what was said,” Jess confessed. “But when they came back in here, Dallas had several lengths of rawhide and he taught Stevie how to braid them. He was having the time of his life.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then,” she said, her lips compressing briefly, “he just happened to mention that I could have taught him how to braid rope and a lot of other things if I’d exert myself occasionally instead of vegetating in front of a television that I can’t see anyway.”

  “I see.”

  “Pity I ran out of things to throw,” she muttered. “I was reaching for the lamp when he called a draw and said he was going to sit on the front porch. Then Stevie decided to go to bed.” She gripped the arms of her chair hard. “Everybody ran for cover. You’d think I was a Chinese rocket or something.”

  “In a temper, there is something of a comparison,” Sally chuckled.

  The older woman drew in a long breath. “Anyway, how was your date?”

  “Not bad. We ran into his ex-fiancée at the restaurant.”

  “Maggie?” Jess asked, wide-eyed. “How is she?”

  “She’s very pretty and still crazy about Eb, from all indications. I think she’d have followed us home if her dark and handsome escort hadn’t half dragged her away.”

  “Cord was there?”

  “You know him?” Sally asked curiously.

  Jess nodded. “He was a handsome devil. I had a yen for him once myself, but he married Patricia instead. She was a little Dresden china doll, blonde and absolutely gorgeous. She worshipped Cord. They’d only been married a few months when he was involved in a shoot-out with a narcotics dealer. She couldn’t take it. When Cord came home from the hospital, she was several days dead, with a suicide note clutched in her fingers. He found her. He was like a madman after that, looking for every dangerous job he could find. I don’t suppose he’s over her yet. He loved her desperately.”

  “Eb says he works with Micah Steele.”

  “He does, and there’s a real coincidence. Micah also has a stepsister, Callie. You know her, she works in Mr. Kemp’s law office.”

  “Yes. We went to school together. But Micah doesn’t have anything to do with her or his father since his father divorced Callie’s mother. They say,” she murmured, “that old Mr. Steele caught Micah with his new wife in a very compromising position and tossed them both out on their ears.”

  “That’s the obvious story,” Jessie said dryly. “But there’s more to it than that.”

  “How does Callie feel about Micah’s work, do you think?”

  “The way any woman would feel,” Jessie replied gently. “Afraid.”

  Sally knew that Jess was talking about Dallas, and how she’d regarded his work as a soldier of fortune. She stared at the darkened window, wondering how she’d feel under the same circumstances. At least Eb wasn’t involved in demolition work or actively working as a mercenary. She knew that she could adjust to Eb’s lifestyle. But the trick was going to be convincing Eb that she could—and that he needed her, as much as she needed him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SALLY FOUND HERSELF jumping at every odd noise all day Saturday. Jessica could feel the tension that she couldn’t see.

  “You have to trust Eb,” she told her niece while Stevie was watching cartoons in the living room. “He knows what he’s doing. Lopez won’t succeed.”

  Sally grimaced over her second cup of coffee. Across the kitchen table from her, Jess looked serene. She wished she could feel the same way.

  “I’m not worried about us,” she pointed out. “It’s Stevie...”

  “Dallas won’t let anything happen to Stevie,” came the quiet reply.

  Sally smiled, remembering the broken objects in the living room the night before. She drew a lazy circle ar
ound the lip of her coffee cup while she searched for the right words. “At least, the two of you are speaking.”

  “Yes. Barely,” her aunt acknowledged wryly. “But Stevie likes him now. They started comparing statistics on wrestlers. They both like wrestling, you see. Dallas knows all sorts of holds. He wrestled on his college team.”

  “Wrestling!” Sally chuckled.

  “Apparently there’s a lot more to the professional matches than just acting ability,” Jessica said dryly. “I’m finding it rather interesting, even if I can’t see what they’re doing. They explained the holds to me.”

  “Common threads,” Sally murmured.

  “And one stitch at a time. What did you think of Cord Romero?”

  “He’s the strangest ex-schoolteacher I’ve ever met,” Sally said flatly.

  “He was never cut out for that line of work,” Jessica said, sipping black coffee. “But demolition work isn’t much of a profession, either. Pity. He’ll be two lines of type on the obituary page one day, and it’s such a waste.”

  “Eb says Maggie’s running from him.”

  “Relentlessly,” Jess said dryly. “I always thought she got engaged to Eb just to shake Cord up, but it didn’t work. He doesn’t see her.”

  “He’s in the same line of work Eb was,” Sally pointed out, “and Eb said that his job was why she called off the wedding.”

  “I think she just came to her senses. If you love a man, you don’t have a lot to say about his profession if it’s a long-standing one. Cord’s wife was never cut out for life on the edge. Maggie, now, once had a serious run-in with a couple of would-be muggers. She had a big flashlight in her purse and she used it like a mace.” She laughed softly. “They both had to have stitches before they went off to jail. Cord laughed about it for weeks afterward. No, she had the strength to marry Eb—she simply didn’t love him.”

  Sally traced the handle of her cup. “Eb says he isn’t carrying a torch for her.”

  “Why should he be?” she asked. “She’s a nice woman, but he never really loved her. He wanted stability and he thought marriage would give it to him. As it turned out, he found his stability after a bloody firefight in Africa, and it was right here in Jacobsville.”