Bound by Honor: Mercenary's WomanThe Winter Soldier

by Diana Palmer

  “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 around 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.”

  “Do you think he’ll ever marry?” she fished.

  “When he’s ready,” Jess replied. “But I don’t think it will be Maggie. Just in case you wondered,” she teased.

  Sally pushed back a wisp of hair from her eyes. “Jess, do you know where your informant is now, the one that Lopez wants you to name?”

  She shook her head. “We lost touch just after Lopez was arrested. I understand that my informant went back to Mexico. I haven’t tried to contact…the person.”

  “What if the informant betrays himself?”

  “You’re clutching at straws, dear,” Jessica said gently. “That isn’t going to happen. And I’m not giving a witness up to the executioner in cold blood even to save myself and my family.”

  Sally smiled. “No. I know you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t, either. But it’s scary to be in this situation.”

  “It is. But it will be over one day, and we’ll get back to normal. Whatever happens, happens.” Jess reminded her niece, “It’s like that old saying, when your time’s up, it’s up. We may not know what we’re doing, but God always does. And He doesn’t have tunnel vision.”

  “Point taken. I’ll try to stop worrying.”

  “You should. Eb is one of the best in the world at what he does. Lopez knows it, too. He won’t rush in headfirst, despite his threat.”

  “What if he has a missile launcher?” Sally asked with sudden fear.

  Miles away in a communications hot room, a man with green eyes nodded his head and shot an order to a subordinate. It wouldn’t hurt one bit to check out the intelligence for that possibility. Sally might be nervous, but she had good instincts. And a guardian angel in cowboy boots.

  MANUEL LOPEZ WAS A SMALL man with big ambition. He was nearing forty, balding, cynical and mercenary to the soles of his feet. He stared out the top floor picture window of his four-story mansion at the Gulf of Mexico and cursed. One of his subordinates, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, had just brought him some unwelcome news and he was livid.

  “There are only a handful of men,” the subordinate said in quiet Spanish. “Not a problem if we send a large force against them.”

  Lopez turned and glared at the man from yellow-brown eyes. “Yes, and if we send a large force, the FBI and the DEA will also send a large force!”

  “It would be too late by then,” the man replied with a shrug.

  “I have enough federal problems in the United States as it is,” Lopez growled. “I do not anticipate giving them an even better reason to send an undercover unit after me here! Scott has influence with his government. I want the name of the informant, not to wade in and kill the woman and her protectors.”

  The other man stared at the spotless white carpet. “She will never give up the name of her informant,” he said simply. “Not even for the sake of her child.”

  Lopez turned fully to look at the man. “Because now it is only words, the threat. We must make it very real, you understand? At midnight tonight in Jacobsville, precisely at midnight, you will have a helicopter fly over the house and drop a smoke bomb. A big one.” His eyes narrowed and he smiled. “This will be the attack they anticipate. But not the real one, you understand?”

  “They will probably have missiles,” the man said quietly.

  “And they are far too soft to use them,” came the sneering reply. “This is why we will ultimately win. I have no scruples. Now, listen. I will want a man to remove one of the elementary school janitors. He can be drugged or threatened, I have no interest in the method, just get him out of the way for one day. Then you will have one of our men take his place. The substitute must know what the child looks like and which class he is in. He is to be taken very covertly, so that nothing out of the way is projected until it is too late and we have him. You understand?”

  “Yes,” the man replied respectfully. “Where is he to be held?”

  Lopez smiled coldly. “At the rental house near the Johnson home,” he said. “Will th
at not be an irony to end all ironies?” His eyes darkened. “But he is not to be harmed. That must be made very clear,” he added in tones that chilled. “You remember what happened to the man who went against my orders and set fire to my enemy’s house in Wyoming without waiting for the man to be alone, and a five-year-old boy was killed?”

  The other man swallowed and nodded quickly.

  “If one hair on this boy’s head is harmed,” he added, “I will see to it that the man responsible fares even worse than his predecessor. I am a violent man, but I do not kill children. It is, perhaps, my only virtue.” He waved his hand. “Let me know when my orders have been carried out.”

  “Yes. At once.”

  He watched the man go and his odd yellow-brown eyes narrowed. He had watched his mother and siblings die at the hands of a guerrilla leader at the age of four. His father had been a poor laborer who could barely earn enough to provide one meal a day for the two of them, so his childhood had been spent scavenging for food like an animal, hiding in the shadows to avoid being tortured by the invaders. His father had not been as fortunate, but the two of them had managed to work their way to the States, to Victoria, Texas, when he was ten. He watched his father scrape and bow as a janitor and hated the sight. He had vowed that when he was a man, he would never know poverty again, regardless of what it cost him. And despite his father’s anguish, he had embarked very quickly on a path to easy money.

  He looked down at the white carpet, a dream of his from youth, and at the wealth with which he surrounded himself. He dealt in drugs and death. He was wealthy and immensely powerful. A word from him could topple heads of state. But it was an empty, cold, bitter existence. He had lived at first only for vengeance, for the ability and the means to avenge his mother and his baby brother and sister. That accomplished, he wanted wealth and power. One step led to another, until he was in over his head, first as a murderer, then as a thief, and finally, as a drug lord. He was ruthless and he knew that one day his sins would catch up with him, but first he was going to know who had sold him out to the authorities two years before. What irony that vengeance had led him to power, and now it was vengeance that had almost brought him down. He cursed the woman Jessica for refusing to give him the name. He had only discovered her part in his arrest six months before. She would pay now. He would have the name of his betrayer, whatever the cost!