Mercenary's Woman (5 page)

34

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

There was a rough
sound from the man beside her.
"What makes you think so?"

"For one thing, because he's the
image of Dallas. But
also because Uncle Hank
and Aunt Jessie were married for
years with no kids, and suddenly she
got pregnant just
before he died
overseas," she replied. "Stevie was like a
miracle."

"In some ways,
I suppose he was. But it led to Hank asking for a combat assignment, and even
though he died
of a heart condition, Jess has had nightmares ever since
out of guilt." He looked down at her.
"You can't tell her
that you know."

"Fair enough. Tell me the rest."

"She and Dallas
were working together on an assign
ment. It was one of those lightning
attractions that over
come the best moral obstacles. They were alone too much
and finally the
inevitable happened. Jess turned up preg
nant. When Dallas found out, he went crazy.
He demanded
that Jess divorce Hank and marry him, but she wouldn't.
She swore that Dallas
wasn't the father of her child. Hank
was, and she had no intention of divorcing her husband."

"Oh, dear."

"Hank knew that she'd been with
another man, of
course, because he'd always been sterile. Dallas didn't
know that. And Hank
hadn't told Jessica until she announced that she was expecting a child."
He shrugged.
"He
wouldn't forgive her. Neither would Dallas. When
Hank died, Dallas didn't even try to get in touch with Jess.
He really believed that Stevie was Hank's child.
Until
about ten minutes ago, that
is," he added with a wry smile.
"It didn't take much guesswork
for him to see the resemblance. I think we won't go back for a couple of
hours. I
don't want to walk into the
firefight he's probably having
with
Jess even as we speak."

She bit her lower lip. "Poor Jess."

"Poor
Dallas," he countered. "After the fight with Jes
sie, he took every
damned dangerous assignment he could
find, the more dangerous the better. Last
year in Africa,
Dallas was shot to pieces. They sent him home with
wounds that would
have killed a lesser man."

"No wonder he looks so bitter."

"He's bitter because he loved
Jess and though she felt
the same, she wasn't willing to hurt Hank by leaving him.
But in
the end, she still hurt him. He couldn't live with
the idea that she
was having some other man's child. It
destroyed their marriage."

She grimaced. "What a tragedy, for all of them."

"Yes."

She looked toward Stevie, smiling.
"He's a great kid," she said. "I'd love him even if he wasn't my
first cousin."

"He's got grit and personality to boot."

"You wouldn't think so at midnight
when you're still
trying to get him to
sleep."

He smiled as he studied her. "You
love kids, don't
you?"

"Oh, yes," she said fervently. "I love teaching."

"Don't you want
some of your own?" he asked with a
quizzical smile.

She flushed and wouldn't look at him. "Sure. One day."

"Why not now?"

"Because I've already got more responsibilities than I
can manage. Pregnancy would be a
complication I couldn't
handle, especially now."

"You sound as if you're planning to do it all alone."

She shrugged.
"There is such a thing as artificial insem
ination."

He turned her toward him, looking very solemn and

36
                             
MERCENARY'S
WOMAN

adult. "How would it feel, carrying the child of a man you
didn't even know,
having it grow inside your body?"

She bit her lower
lip. She hadn't considered the intimacy of what he was suggesting. She felt,
and looked, confused.

"A baby should be made out of love,
the natural way,
not in a test tube,"
he said very softly, searching her
shocked
eyes. "Well, not unless it's the only way two
people can have a child," he added. "But
that's an entirely
different
circumstance."

Her lips parted on
the surge of emotion that made her
heart race. "I don't know...that I want
to get that close to
anyone,
ever."

He seemed even more
remote. "Sally, you can't let the past lock you into solitude forever. I
frightened you be
cause I
wanted to keep you at bay. If I didn't discourage
you somehow I was afraid that the temptation might prove
too much for me. You were such a baby." He
scowled bitterly. "What happened wouldn't have been so devas
tating if you'd had even a little experience with
men. For
God's sake, didn't they ever
let you date anyone?"

She shook her head,
her teeth clenched tightly together.
"My mother was certain that I'd get
pregnant or catch
some horrible disease. She talked about it all the time. She
made boys who came to
the house so uncomfortable that
they never came back."

"I didn't know that," he said tautly.

"Would it have
made any difference?" she asked mis
erably.

He touched her face
with cool, firm fingers. "Yes. I
wouldn't have gone nearly as far as I did, if
I'd known."

"You wanted to get rid of me..."

He put his thumb over
her soft mouth. "I wanted you,"
he whispered huskily. "But a
seventeen-year-old isn't ma
ture enough for a love affair. And that would have been

DIANA
PALMER

impossible in Jacobsville, even if I'd been
crazy enough
to go all the way with you that day. You were almost
thirteen years my
junior."

She was beginning to
see things from his point of view.
She hadn't tried before. There had been so
much resent
ment, so much bitterness, so much hurt. She looked at him
and saw, for the
first time, the pain of the memory in his f
ace.

"I was
desperate," she said, speaking softly. "They told
me out of the blue that they were
divorcing each other.
They were selling the
house and moving out of town. Dad
was
going to marry Beverly, this girl he'd met at the col
lege where he taught. Mom couldn't live in the
same town with everybody knowing that Dad had thrown her over for
someone younger. She married a man she hardly
knew
shortly afterward, just to save
her pride." She stared at his
mouth
with more hunger than she realized. "I knew that
I'd never see you again. I only wanted you to kiss
me." She swallowed, averting her eyes. "I must have been
crazy."

"We both
were." He cupped her face in his hands and
lifted it to his quiet eyes. "For
what it's worth, I never
meant
it to go further than a kiss. A very chaste kiss, at
that." His eyes drifted down involuntarily to the soft thrust
of her breasts almost touching his shirt. He
raised an eye
brow at the obvious
points. "That's why it wasn't chaste."

She didn't
understand. "What is?"

He looked absolutely
exasperated. "How can you be
that old and know nothing?" he asked. He
glanced over
her shoulder at Stevie, who was facing the other way and
giving the punching
bag hell. He took Sally's own finger
and drew it across her taut breast. He looked
straight into
her eyes as he said softly, "That's why."

She realized that it must have something to do with

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

being aroused, but no one had ever told her blatantly that
it was a visible sign of desire. She went scarlet.

"You
greenhorn," he murmured indulgently. "What a
babe in arms."

"I don't read those sort of books," she said haughtily.

"You should. In fact, I'll buy you a
set of them. Maybe
a few videos, too,"
he murmured absently, watching the
expressions come and go on her face.

"You varmint...!"

He caught her top lip
in both of his and ran his tongue
lazily under it. She stiffened, but her
hands were clinging
to him,
not pushing.

"You remember
that, don't you, Sally?" he murmured
with a smile. "Do you remember what
comes next?''

She jerked back from
him, staggering. Her eyes found
Stevie, still oblivious to the adults.

Eb's eyes were blatant on the thrust of
her breasts and he was smiling.

She crossed her arms
over her chest and glared up at
him. "You just stop that," she
gritted. "I'll bet you
weren't born knowing everything!"

He chuckled. "No, I wasn't. But I
didn't have a mother
to keep my nose clean,
either," he said. "My old man was
military down to his toenails, and he didn't believe in gen
tle handling or delicacy. He used women until the
day he
died." He laughed
coldly. "He told me that there was no
such thing as a good woman, that they were to be enjoyed
and put aside."

She was appalled. "Didn't he love your mother?"

"He wanted her,
and she wouldn't be with him until
they got married," he said simply. "So they got married.
She died having me. They were living in a small town
outside the military base where he was stationed. He was
overseas on assignment and she lived alone,
isolated. She

went into labor and there were complications.
There was nothing that could have been done for her by the time she
was found. If a
neighbor hadn't come to look in on us, I'd
have died with her."

"It must have been a shock for your father," she said.

"If it was, it
never showed. He left me with a cousin
until I was old enough to obey orders, then
I went to live
with him. I learned a lot from him, but he wasn't a loving man."
His eyes narrowed on her soft face. "I followed his
example and joined the army. I was lucky
enough to get
into the Green Berets. Then
when I was due for discharge,
a man
approached me about a top secret assignment and
told me what it would pay." He shrugged. "Money is a
great temptation for a young man with a
domineering fa
ther. I said yes and he never spoke to me again. He said
that what I was doing was a perversion of the
military,
and that I wasn't fit to be any officer's son. He disowned
me on the spot. I didn't hear from him again. A
few years
later, I got a letter from
his post commander, stating that
he'd
died in combat. He had a military funeral with full
honors."

The pain of those
years was in his lean, hard face. Im
pulsively she put a hand on his arm.
"I'm sorry," she told
him quietly. "He must have been the sort
of man who
only sees one side of any argument."

He was surprised by
her compassion. "Don't you think mercenaries are evil, Miss Purity?"
he asked sarcastically.

DIANA
PALMER

41

Chapter Three

Sally looked up into pain-laced green
eyes and without
thinking, she lifted her hand from his arm and raised it
toward his hard
cheek. But when she realized what she was doing, she drew it back at once.

"No, I don't
think mercenaries are evil," she said
quickly, embarrassed by the impulsive
gesture that, thank
fully, he
didn't seem to notice. "There are a lot of coun
tries where atrocities are committed, whose governments
don't have the manpower or resources to protect
their peo
ple. So, someone else gets hired to do it. I don't think it's
a bad thing, when there's a legitimate cause."

He was surprised by
her matter-of-fact manner. He'd
wondered for years how she might react when
she learned
about what he did for a living. He'd expected everything
from revulsion to
shock, especially when he remembered how his former fiancee had reacted to the
news. But Sally
wasn't squeamish or judgmental.

He'd seen
her hand jerk back and it had wounded him.

But now, on hearing her opinion of his work, his heart
lifted. "I didn't expect you to
credit me with noble mo
tives."

"They are, though, aren't they?" she asked confidently.

"As a matter of
fact, in my case, they are," he replied.
"Even in my green days, I never
did it just for the money.
I had to believe in what I was risking my life for."

She grinned. "I
thought maybe it was like on televi
sion," she confessed. "But Jess
said it was nothing like
fiction."

He cocked an
eyebrow. "Oh, I wouldn't say that," he
mused. "Parts of it are."

"Such as?"

"We had a guy
like 'B.A. Barrabas' in one unit I led,"
he said. "We really did have to knock him out to get
him
on a plane. But he quit the group
before we got inventive."

She laughed. "Too bad. You'd have had
plenty of sto
ries to tell about him."

He was
quiet for a moment, studying her.

"Do I have a zit on my nose?" she asked pleasantly.

He reached out and
caught the hand she'd started to lift toward him earlier and kissed its soft
palm. "Let's get to
work,"
he said, pulling her along to the mat. "I'll change
into my sweats and we'll cover the basics. We
won't have a lot of time," he added dryly. "I expect Jess to call
very
soon with an ultimatum about Dallas."

Jess and Dallas had squared off, in
fact, the minute they
heard the truck crank and pull out of the yard.

Dallas glared at her from his
superior height, leaning
heavily on his cane. He wished she could see him,
because
his eyes were full of
anger and bitterness.

"Did you think
I wouldn't see that Stevie is the living
image of me? My son," he growled at her.
"You had my