Diana Palmer - Her Kind of Hero - The Last Mercenary

“Palmer’s talent for character development and ability to fuse heartwarming romance with nail-biting suspense shine in Outsider.”

—Booklist

“A gentle escape mixed with real-life menace for fans of Palmer’s more than 100 novels.”

—Publishers Weekly on Night Fever

“The ever-popular and prolific Palmer has penned another sure hit.”

—Booklist on Before Sunrise

“Nobody does it better.”

—New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

“Palmer knows how to make sparks fly…heartwarming.”

—Publishers Weekly on Renegade

“Sensual and suspenseful.”

—Booklist on Lawless

“Diana Palmer is a mesmerizing storyteller who captures the essence of what a romance should be.”

—Affaire de Coeur

“Nobody tops Diana Palmer when it comes to delivering pure, undiluted romance. I love her stories.”

—New York Times bestselling author Jayne Ann Krentz

THE LAST MERCENARY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

MATT CALDWELL: TEXAS TYCOON

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

It had been a jarring encounter.

Callie Kirby felt chilled, and it wasn’t just because it was November in south Texas. She watched the stepbrother she worshiped walk away from her as casually as if he’d moved around an obstacle in his path. In many ways, that was what Callie was to Micah Steele. He hated her. Of course, he hated her mother more. The two Kirby women had alienated him from the father he adored. Jack Steele had found his only son wrapped up in the arms of his young wife—Callie’s mother—and an ugly scene had followed. Callie’s mother, Anna, was sent packing. So was Micah, living mostly at his father’s home while he finished his last year of residency.

That had been six years ago, and the breach still hadn’t healed. Jack Steele rarely spoke of his son. That suited Callie. The very sound of his name was painful to her. Speaking to him took nerve, too. He’d once called her a gold digger like her mother, among other insults. Words could hurt. His always had. But she was twenty-two now, and she could hold her own with him. That didn’t mean that her knees didn’t shake and her heartbeat didn’t do a tango while she was holding her own.

She stood beside her little second-hand yellow VW and watched Micah bend his formidable height to open the door of the black convertible Porsche he drove. His thick, short blond hair caught the sunlight and gleamed like gold. He had eyes so dark they looked black, and he rarely smiled. She didn’t understand why he’d come home to Jacobsville, Texas, in the first place. He lived somewhere in the Bahamas. Jack had said that Micah inherited a trust fund from his late mother, but he’d sounded curious about his son’s luxurious lifestyle. The trust, he told Callie privately, wasn’t nearly enough to keep Micah in the Armani suits he wore and the exotic sports cars he bought new every year.

Perhaps Micah had finished his residency somewhere else and was in private practice somewhere. He’d gone to medical school, but she remembered that there had been some trouble in his last year of his residency over a lawsuit, stemming from a surgical procedure he refused to do. Neither she nor his father knew the details. Even when he’d been living with his father, Micah was a clam. After he left, the silence about his life was complete.

He glanced back at Callie. Even at a distance he looked worried. Her heart jumped in spite of her best efforts to control it. He’d had that effect on her from the beginning, from the first time she’d ever seen him. She’d only been in his arms once, from too much alcohol. He’d been furious, throwing her away from him before she could drag his beautiful, hard mouth down onto hers. The aftermath of her uncharacteristic boldness had been humiliating and painful. It wasn’t a pleasant memory. She wondered why he was so concerned about her. It was probably that he was concerned for his father, and she was his primary caretaker. That had to be it. She turned her attention back to her own car.

With a jerk of his hand, he opened the door of the Porsche, climbed in and shot off like a teenager with his first car. The police would get him for that, she thought, if they saw it. For a few seconds, she smiled at the image of big, tall, sexy Micah being put in a jail cell with a man twice his size who liked blondes. Micah was so immaculate, so sophisticated, that she couldn’t imagine him ruffled nor intimidated. For all his size, he didn’t seem to be a physical man. But he was highly intelligent. He spoke five languages fluently and was a gourmet cook.

She sighed sadly and got into her own little car and started the engine. She didn’t know why Micah was worried that she and his father might be in danger from that drug lord everyone locally was talking about. She knew that Cy Parks and Eb Scott had been instrumental in closing down a big drug distribution center, and that the drug lord, Manuel Lopez, had reputedly targeted them for revenge. But that didn’t explain Micah’s connection. He’d told her that he tipped law enforcement officials to a big drug cargo of Lopez’s that had subsequently been captured, and Lopez was out for blood. She couldn’t picture her so-straitlaced stepbrother doing something so dangerous. Micah wasn’t the sort of man who got involved in violence of any sort. Certainly, he was a far cry from the two mercenaries who’d shut down Lopez’s operation. Maybe he’d given the information to the feds for Cy and Eb. Yes, that could have happened, somehow. She remembered what he’d said about the danger to his family and she felt chilled all over again. She’d load that shotgun when she and Jack got home, she told herself firmly, and she’d shoot it if she had to. She would protect her stepfather with her last breath.

As she turned down the street and drove out of town, toward the adult day care center where Jack Steele stayed following his stroke, she wondered where Micah was going in such a hurry. He didn’t spend a lot of time in the States. He hadn’t for years. He must have been visiting Eb Scott or Cy Parks. She knew they were friends. Odd friends for a tame man like Micah, she pondered. Even if they ran cattle now, they’d been professional mercenaries in the past. She wondered what Micah could possibly have in common with such men.

She was so lost in thought that she didn’t notice that she was being followed by a dark, late model car. It didn’t really occur to her that anyone would think of harming her, despite her brief argument with Micah just now. She was a nonentity. She had short, dark hair and pale blue eyes, and a nice but unremarkable figure. She was simply ordinary. She never attracted attention from men, and Micah had found her totally resistible from the day they met. Why not? He could have any woman he wanted. She’d seen him with really beautiful women when she and her mother had first come to live with Jack Steele. Besides, there was the age thing. Callie was barely twenty-two. Micah was thirty-six. He didn’t like adolescents. He’d said that to Callie, just after that disastrous encounter—among other things. Some of the things he’d said still made her blush. He’d compared her to her mother, and he hadn’t been kind. Afterward, she’d been convinced that he was having an affair with her mother, who didn’t deny it when Callie asked. It had tarnished him in her eyes and made her hostile. She still was. It was something she couldn’t help. She’d idolized Micah until she saw him kissing her mother. It had killed something inside her, made her cold. She wondered if he’d been telling the truth when he said he hadn’t seen her mother recently. It hurt to think of him with Anna.