Mercenary's Woman (6 page)

MERCENARY'S
WOMAN

son! And you lied to me about it and wouldn't ask Hank
for a divorce!"

"I
couldn't!" she exclaimed. "For heaven's sake, he adored me. He'd
never have cheated on me. I couldn't
bring myself to tell him that I'd had an
affair with his best
friend!"

"I could have
told him," he returned furiously. "He
was no angel, Jess, despite the wings
you're trying to paint
on him. Or do you think he never strayed on those
overseas
jaunts?"
he chided.

She stiffened. "That's not true!"

"It is
true!" he replied angrily. "He knew he couldn't
get anybody
pregnant, and he was sure you'd never find
out."

She put a hand to
her head. She'd never dreamed that
Hank had cheated on her. She'd felt so guilty,
when all
the
time, he was doing the same thing—and then judging
her brutally for what
she'd done. "I didn't know," she
said miserably.

"Would it have made a difference?"

"I don't know.
Maybe it would have." She smoothed
the dress over her legs. "You thought
Stevie was yours from the beginning, didn't you?"

"No, I didn't
know Hank was sterile until later on. You
told me the child was Hank's and I believed
you. Hell, by
then, I couldn't even be sure that it was his."

"You didn't think—" She stopped
abruptly. "Oh, dear
God, you thought
you were one in a line?" she exploded,
horrified. "You thought I ran around on Hank with any
man who asked me?"

"I knew very
little about you except that you knocked
me sideways," he said flatly. "I
knew Hank ran around
on you. I assumed you were allowed the same
freedom." He turned away and walked to the window, staring out at

DIANA
PALMER

the flat horizon. "I asked you
to divorce Hank just to see
what you'd say. It was exactly what I expected. You had
it made—a husband
who tolerated your unfaithfulness, and
no danger of falling in love."

"I thought I had
a good marriage until you came
along," she said bitterly.

He turned, his eyes
blazing. "Don't make it sound
cheap, Jess," he said harshly.
"Neither of us could stop
that night. Neither of us tried."

She put her face in
her hands and shivered. The memory
of how it had been could still reduce her to
tears. She'd
been in love for the first time in her life, but not with her
husband. This man
had haunted her ever since. Stevie was
the mirror image of him.

"I was so ashamed," she choked.
"I betrayed Hank. I betrayed everything I believed in about loyalty and
duty
and honor. I felt like a Saturday
night special at the bor
dello afterward."

He scowled. "I
never treated you that way," he said
harshly.

"Of course you didn't!" she said
miserably, wiping at
tears. "But I was
raised to believe that people got married
and never cheated on each other. I was a virgin when I
married Hank, and nobody in my whole family was
ever
divorced until Sally's father,
my brother, was." She shook
her
head, oblivious to the expression that washed over Dal-
las's hard, lean face. "My parents were happily
married
for fifty years before they
died."

"Sometimes it
doesn't work," he said flatly, but in a less hostile tone. "That's
nobody's fault."

She smoothed back her
short hair and quickly wiped
away the tears. "Maybe not."

He moved back toward
her and sat down in a chair
across from hers, putting the cane down on the floor. He

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MERCENARY'S WOMAN

leaned forward with a hard sigh and
looked at Jessica's
pale, wan face with bitterness while he tried to find the
words.

She heard the cane as
he placed it on the floor. "Eb
said you were badly hurt overseas," she
said softly, wish
ing with all her heart that she could see him. "Are you all
right?"

That husky softness
in her tone, that exquisite concern,
was almost too much for him. He grasped her
slender hands in his and held them tightly. "I'm better off than
you seem to be," he said heavily.
"What a hell of a price
we paid for that
night, Jess."

She felt the hot
sting of tears. "It was very high," she
had to admit. She
reached out hesitantly to find his face.
Her fingers traced it gently, finding the
new scars, the new
hardness of its elegant lines. "Stevie looks like you," she
said softly, her unseeing eyes so full of emotion that he
couldn't bear to look
into them.

"Yes."

She searched her
darkness with anguish for a face she
would never see again. "Don't be bitter," she pleaded.
"Please don't hate me."

He pulled her hand
away as if it scalded him. "I've done
little else for the past five years," he
said flatly. "But
maybe you're right. All the rage in the world won't
change the past." He let go of her hand. "We have to pick up the
pieces and go
on."

She hesitated. "Can we at least be friends?"

He laughed coldly. "Is that what you want?"

She nodded. "Eb
says you've given up overseas assign
ments and that you're working for him. I want you to get
to know Stevie," she added quietly. "Just
in case..."

"Oh, for God's
sake, stop it!" he exploded, rising awk
wardly from the chair with the help of the
cane. "Lopez

you.

She leaned back in
her chair without replying. They both
knew that Lopez had contacts everywhere and
that he
never
gave up. If he wanted her dead, he could get her. She didn't want her child
left alone in the world.

"I'm going to
make some coffee," Dallas said tautly, refusing to think about the
possibility of a world without
her in it. "What do you take in yours?"

"I don't care," she said indifferently.

He didn't say another
word. He went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee while Jessica sat
stiffly in her
own living
room and contemplated the direction her life
had
taken.

"You have
got...to be kidding!" Sally choked as she
dragged herself up from the mat for the twentieth time.
"You mean I'm going to spend two hours falling
down?
I thought you were going to
teach me self-defense!"

"I am," Eb
replied easily. He, too, was wearing sweats
now, and he'd been teaching her side
breakfalls, first left
and then right. "First you learn how to fall
properly, so you don't hurt yourself landing. Then we move on to
stances, hand
positions and kicks. One step at a time."

She swept her arm
past her hip and threw herself down
on her side, falling with a loud thud but
landing neatly. Beside her, Stevie was going at it with a vengeance and
laughing gleefully.

"Am I doing it right?" she
puffed, already perspiring.
She was very
much out of condition, despite the work she
did around the house.

He nodded. "Very
nice. Be careful about falling too close to the edge of the mat, though. The
floor's hard."

She moved further onto the mat and did it again.

46

MERCENARY'S WOMAN

DIANA PALMER

47

"If you think these are fun," he
mused, "wait until we
do forward
breakfalls."

She gaped at him.
"You mean I'm going to have to fall
deliberately on my face? I'll break ray
nose!"

"No, you won't," he said, moving her aside. "Watch."

He executed the
movement to perfection, catching his
weight neatly on his hands and forearms. He
jumped up
again.
"See? Simple."

"For you,"
she agreed, her eyes on the muscular body
that was as fit as that of a man half his
age. "Do you train
all the time?"

"I have to,"
he said. "If I let myself get out of shape,
I won't be of any use to my students. Great job,
Stevie,"
he called to the boy, who
beamed at him.

"Of course he's
doing a great job," she muttered.
"He's so close to the ground already
that he doesn't have
far to fall!"

"Poor old lady," he chided gently.

She glared in his
direction as she swept her arm forward
and threw herself down again. "I'm not
old. I'm just out
of condition."

He looked at her,
sprawled there on the mat, and his
lips pursed as he sketched every inch of her.
"Funny, I'd
have said you were in prime condition. And not just for
karate."

She cleared her
throat and got to her feet again. "When
did you start learning this
stuff?"

"When I was in
grammar school," he said. "My father
taught me."

"No wonder it looks so easy when you do it."

"I train hard. It's saved my life a few times."

She studied his scarred face with
curiosity. She could
see the years in it,
and the hardships. She knew very little
about military operations, except for what she'd seen in

movies and on television. And as Jess had told
her, it
wasn't
like that in real life. She tried to imagine an armed
adversary coming at her and she stiffened.

"Something wrong?" he asked gently.

"I was trying to imagine being
attacked," she said. "It makes me nervous."

"It won't, when
you gain a little confidence. Stand up
straight," he said. "Never walk
with your head down in
a
slumped posture. Always look as if you know where
you're going, even if you don't. And always, always, run
if you can. Never stand and fight unless you're
trapped and your life is in danger."

"Run? You're kidding, of course?"

"No," he
said. "I'll give you an example. A man of
any size and weight on drugs is more
than a match for any
three other men. What I'm going to teach you might work
on an untrained
adversary who's sober. But a man who's
been drinking, or especially a man who's
using drugs can kill you outright, regardless of what I can teach you. Don't
you ever forget that. Overconfidence
kills."

"I'll bet you
don't teach your men to run," she said
accusingly.

His eyes were quiet
and full of bad memories. "Sally,
a recruit in one of my groups emptied the
magazine of his
rifle into an enemy soldier on drugs at point-blank range.
The enemy kept right
on coming. He killed the recruit
before he finally fell dead himself."

Her lower
jaw fell.

"That was my
reaction, too," he informed her. "Absolute disbelief. But it's true.
If anyone high on drugs
comes at you, don't try to reason with him...you can't.
And don't try to
fight him. Run like hell. If a full automatic
clip won't bring a man down, you
certainly can't. Neither
can even a combat-hardened man, alone. In that sort of