Bound by Honor: Mercenary's Woman. Diana Palmer

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 ago. 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.