“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 father. 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. Impulsively 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.
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, thankfully, he didn’t seem to notice. “There are a lot of countries where atrocities are committed, whose governments don’t have the manpower or resources to protect their people. 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 fiancée 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 motives.”
“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 television,” 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 stories 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 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 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 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.”