Bound by Honor: Mercenary's WomanThe Winter Soldier

by Diana Palmer

  “You and the KGB.” He pulled his hat further over his eyes. “We’d better get out of here before they spot us.”

  “I can see people coming.”

  “They can see you coming, too.”

  “That should worry them,” Cy agreed, grinning.

  Eb chuckled. It was rare these days to see a smile on that hard face. He wheeled his horse, leaving Cy to follow.

  THAT AFTERNOON, EB DROVE over to the Johnson place to pick up Sally and Stevie for their self-defense practice.

  Sally’s eyes lit up when she saw him and he felt his heart jump. She made him feel warm inside, as if he finally belonged somewhere. Stevie ran past his aunt to be caught up and swung around in Eb’s muscular arms.

  “How’s Jess?” Eb asked.

  Sally made a face and glanced back toward the house. “Dallas got here just before you did. It’s sort of unarmed combat in there. They aren’t even speaking to each other.”

  “Ah, well,” he mused. “Things will improve eventually.”

  “Do you gamble?” she teased. “I feel a lucky streak coming on.”

  He chuckled as he loaded them into the pickup. No, he wasn’t willing to bet on friendlier relations on that front. Not yet, anyway.

  “How much do you know about surveillance equipment?” Sally asked unexpectedly.

  He gave her a look of exaggerated patience. “With my background, how much do you think I know?”

  She laughed. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Can a microphone really pick up voices inside the house? Jess tried to convince me that they could hear us through the walls and we had to be very careful what we discussed. I mentioned that Lopez man and she shushed me immediately.”

  He glanced at her as he drove. “You’ve got a lot to learn. I suppose now is as good a time as any to teach you.”

  When he parked the truck at the front door, he led her inside, parking Stevie at the kitchen table with Carl, his cook, who dished up some ice cream for the child while Eb led Sally down the long hall and into a huge room literally crammed with electronic equipment.

  He motioned her into a chair and keyed his security camera to a distant view of two cowboys working on a piece of machinery halfway down a rutted path in the meadow.

  He flipped a switch and she heard one cowboy muttering to the other about the sorry state of modern tools and how even rusted files were better than what passed for a file today.

  They weren’t even talking loud, and if there was a microphone, it must be mounted on the barn wall outside. She looked at Eb with wide, frankly disbelieving eyes.

  He flipped the switch and the screen was silent again. “Most modern sound equipment can pick up a whisper several hundred yards away.” He indicated a shelf upon which sat several pairs of odd-looking binoculars. “Night vision. I can see anything on a moonless night with those, and I’ve got others that detect heat patterns in the dark.”

  “You have got to be kidding!”

  “We have cameras hidden in books and cigarette packs, we have weapons that can be broken down and hidden in boots,” he continued. “Not to mention this.”

  He indicated his watch, a quite normal looking one with all sorts of dials. Normal until he adjusted it and a nasty-looking little blade popped out. Her gasp was audible.

  He could see the realization in her eyes as the purpose of the blade registered there. She looked up at him and saw the past. His past.

  His green eyes narrowed as they searched hers. “You hadn’t really thought about exactly what sort of work I did, had you?”

  She shook her head. She was a little paler now.

  “I lived in dangerous places, in dangerous times. It’s only in recent years that I’ve stopped looking over my shoulder and sitting with my back against a wall.” He touched her face. “Lopez’s men can hear you through a wall, with the television on. Don’t ever forget. Say nothing that you don’t want recorded for posterity.”

  “This Lopez man is very dangerous, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “He’s the most dangerous man I know. He hires killers. He has no compassion, no mercy, and he’ll do absolutely anything for profit. If his henchman hadn’t sold him out, he’d never have been taken into custody in this country. It was a fluke.”

  She looked around her curiously. “Could he overhear you in here?”

  He smiled gently. “Not a chance in hell.”

  “It looks like something out of Star Wars,” she mused.

  He grinned. “Speaking of movies, how would you and Stevie like to go see a new science fiction flick with me Saturday?”

  “Could we?” she asked.

  “Sure.” His eyes danced wickedly at the idea of sitting in a darkened theater with her….

  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 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 office. 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 intelligence,” he replied on a laugh. “We were good at what we did.”

  “Dallas was one of your guys, wasn’t he?”

  He nodded. “Dallas, Cy Parks and Callie Kirby’s stepbrother 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 ag
o. 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 sorrowfully.

  “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 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 several 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 studying 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 resistance,” 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 eyebrows 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 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 dinner. 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 patience. 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, nevertheless. 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 glimmered. “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 himself 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 worriedly. “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 suddenly.

  “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.”

  “I had to have a foreign language series as part of my degree,” she said. “I chose Spanish, because that’s pretty necessary around here, with such a large Hispanic population. I hated it at first, and then I learned how to read in it.” Her eyes brightened. “It’s the most exciting thing in the world to read something in the language the author created it in. I never dreamed how delightful it would be to read Don Quixote as Cervantes actually wrote it!”

  “I know what you mean. But the older the novel, the more difficult the translation. Words change meaning. And a good number of the more modern novels are written in the various dialects of Spanish provinces.”