Mercenary's Woman

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 bordello 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 Dallas’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 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, wishing 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 assignments 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 awkwardly from the chair with the help of the cane. “Lopez won’t get you. We aren’t going to let anything happen to 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.

“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 my 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!”