Her Kind of Hero: The Last Mercenary

Praise for the reigning queen of romance

DIANA PALMER!

“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

Diana Palmer

Her Kind of Hero

Contents

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

1

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.

She stopped at a crossroads, her eyes darting from one stop sign to another, looking for oncoming traffic. While she was engrossed in that activity, the car following her on the deserted road suddenly shot ahead and cut across in front of her, narrowly missing her front bumper.

She gasped and hit the brake, forgetting to depress the clutch at the same time. The engine died. She reached over frantically to lock the passenger door, and at the same time, three slim, dark, formidable-looking men surrounded her car. The taller of the three jerked open the driver’s door and pulled her roughly out of the car.

She fought, but a hand with a handkerchief was clapped over her nose and mouth and she moaned as the chloroform hit her nostrils and knocked her out flat. As she was placed quickly into the backseat of the other car, another man climbed into her little car and moved it onto the side of the road. He joined his colleagues. The dark car turned around and accelerated back the way it had come, with Callie unconscious in the backseat.

Micah Steele roared away from the scene of his latest disagreement with Callie, his chiseled mouth a thin line above his square jaw. His big hands gripped the steering wheel with cold precision as he cursed his own lack of communication skills. He’d put her back up almost at once by being disparaging about the neat beige suit she was wearing with a plain white blouse. She never dressed to be noticed, only to be efficient. She was that, he had to admit. She was so unlike him. He seemed conservative in his dress and manner. It was a deception. He was unconventional to the core, while Callie could have written the book on proper behavior.

She hadn’t believed him, about the danger she and her stepfather—his father—could find themselves in. Manuel Lopez wasn’t the man to cross, and he wanted blood. He was going to go to the easiest target for that. He grimaced, thinking how vulnerable Callie would be in a desperate situation. She hated snakes, but he’d seen her go out of her way not to injure one. She was like that about everything. She was a sucker for a hard-luck story, an easy mark for a con artist. Her heart was as soft as wool, and she was sensitive; overly sensitive. He didn’t like remembering how he’d hurt her in the past.

He did remember that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast. He stopped to have a sandwich at a local fast-food joint. Then he drove himself back to the motel he was staying at. He’d been helping Eb Scott and Cy Parks get rid of Lopez’s fledgling drug distribution center. Just nights ago, they’d shut down the whole operation and sent most of Lopez’s people to jail. Lopez’s high-tech equipment, all his vehicles, even the expensive tract of land they sat on, had been confiscated under the Rico statutes. And that didn’t even include the massive shipment of marijuana that had also been taken away. Micah himself had tipped off the authorities to the largest shipment of cocaine in the history of south Texas, which the Coast Guard, with DEA support, had appropriated before it even got to the Mexican coast. Lopez wouldn’t have to dig too deeply to know that Micah had cost him not only the multimillion-dollar shipment, but the respect of the cartel in Colombia, as well. Lopez was in big trouble with his bosses. Micah Steele was the reason for that. Lopez couldn’t get to Micah, but he could get to Micah’s family because they were vulnerable. The knowledge of that scared him to death.

He took a shower and stretched out on the bed in a towel, his hands under his dampblond hair while he stared at the ceiling and wondered how he could keep an eye on Callie Kirby and Jack Steele without their knowing. A private bodyguard would stick out like a sore thumb in a small Texas community like Jacobsville. On the other hand, Micah couldn’t do it himself without drawing Lopez’s immediate retaliation. It was a difficult determination. He couldn’t make himself go back to the Bahamas while he knew his father and Callie were in danger. On the other hand, he couldn’t stay here. Living in a small town would drive him nuts, even if he had done it in the past, before he went off to medical school.

While he was worrying about what to do next, the telephone rang.

“Steele,” he said on a yawn. He was tired.

“It’s Eb,” came the reply. “I just had a phone call from Rodrigo,” he added, mentioning a Mexican national who’d gone undercover for them in Lopez’s organization. He’d since been discovered and was now hiding out in Aruba.

“What’s happened?” Micah asked with a feeling of dread knotting his stomach.

“He had some news from a friend of his cousin, a woman who knows Lopez. Have you seen Callie Kirby today?” Eb asked hesitantly.

“Yes,” Micah said. “About two hours ago, just as she was leaving her office. Why?”

“Rodrigo said Lopez was going to snatch her. He sounded as if they meant to do it pretty soon. You might want to check on her.”

“I went to see her. I warned her…!”

“You know Lopez,” Eb reminded him somberly. “It won’t do her any good even if she’s armed. Lopez’s men are professionals.”

“I’ll do some telephoning and get back to you,” Micah said quickly, cursing his own lack of haste about safeguarding Callie. He hung up and phoned the adult day care center. Callie would surely be there by now. He could warn her…

But the woman who answered the phone said that Callie hadn’t arrived yet. She was two hours late, and her stepfather was becoming anxious. Did Micah know where she was?

He avoided a direct answer and promised to phone her back. Then, with a feeling of utter dread, he climbed into the Porsche and drove past Kemp’s law office, taking the route Callie would have taken to the adult day care center.

His heart skipped a beat when he reached the first intersection outside the city. At this time of day, there was very little traffic. But there, on the side of the road, was Callie’s yellow VW, parked on the grass with the driver’s door wide-open.

He pulled in behind it and got out, cursing as he noted that the keys were still in the ignition, and her purse was lying on the passenger seat. There was no note, no anything.

He stood there, shell-shocked and cold. Lopez had Callie. Lopez had Callie!

After a minute, he phoned Eb on his car phone.

“What do you want me to do?” Eb asked at once, after Micah had finished speaking.

Micah’s head was spinning. He couldn’t think. He ran a hand through his thick hair. “Nothing. You’re newly married, like Cy. I can’t put any more women in the firing line. Let me handle this.”

“What will you do?” Eb asked.

“Bojo’s in Atlanta visiting his brother, but I’ll have him meet me in Belize tomorrow. If you have a number for Rodrigo, call it, and tell him to meet me in Belize, too, at the Seasurfer’s Bar. Meanwhile, I’ll call in the rest of my team.” He was remembering phone numbers and jotting them down even as he spoke. “They’re taking a holiday, but I can round them up. I’ll go in after her.”

Eb suggested calling the chief of police, Chet Blake, because he had contacts everywhere, including relatives in positions of power—one was even a Texas Ranger. Micah couldn’t argue. If Eb wanted to tell the man, let him. He was going to get to Callie while she was still alive.

“Just remember that somebody in law enforcement is feeding information to Lopez, and act accordingly. I’ve got to make arrangements about Dad before I leave.”

“I’m sorry, Micah.”

“It’s my fault,” Micah ground out furiously. “I shouldn’t have left her alone for a minute! I warned her, but what good did that do?”

“Stop that,” Eb said at once. “You’re no good to Callie unless you can think straight. If you need any sort of help, logistical or otherwise, I have contacts of my own in Mexico.”

“I’ll need ordinance,” Micah said at once. “Can you set it up with your man in Belize and arrange to have him meet us at that border café we used to use for a staging ground?”

“I can. Tell me what you want.”

Micah outlined the equipment he wanted, including an old DC-3 to get them into the Yucatán, from which his men would drop with parachutes at night.

“You can fly in under the radar in that,” Eb cautioned, “but the DEA will assume you’re trying to bring in drugs if they spot you. It’ll be tricky.”

“Damn!” Micah was remembering that someone in federal authority was on Lopez’s payroll. “I had a contact near Lopez, but he left the country. Rodrigo’s cousin might help, but he’d be risking his life after this latest tip he fed Rodrigo. So, basically, we’ve got nobody in Lopez’s organization. And if I use my regular contacts, I risk alerting the DEA. Who can I trust?”

“I know someone,” Eb said after a minute. “I’ll take care of that. Phone me when you’re on the ground in Cancún and make sure you’ve got global positioning equipment with you.”

“Will do. Thanks, Eb.”

“What are friends for? I’ll be in touch. Good luck.”

“Thanks.”

“Want me to call Cy?”

“No. I’ll go by his place on my way out of town and catch him up.” He hung up.

He didn’t want to leave Callie’s car with the door open and her purse in it, but he didn’t want to be accused of tampering with evidence later. He compromised by locking it and closing the door. The police would find it eventually, because they patrolled this way. They’d take it from there, but he didn’t want anyone in authority to know he was going after Callie. Someone had warned Lopez about the recent devastating DEA raid on his property. That person was still around, and Micah didn’t want anyone to guess that he knew about Callie’s kidnapping.

It was hard to think clearly, but he had to. He knew that Callie had a cell phone. He didn’t know if she had it with her. Kemp, her boss, had let that slip to Eb Scott during a casual conversation. If Callie had the phone, and Lopez’s people didn’t know, she might be able to get a call out. He didn’t flatter himself that she’d call him. But she might try to call the adult day care center, if she could. It wasn’t much, but it gave him hope.

He drove to the center. For one mad instant he thought about speaking to his father in person. But that would only complicate matters and upset the old man; they hadn’t spoken in years. He couldn’t risk causing his father to have another stroke or a second heart attack by telling him that Callie had been kidnapped.

He went to the office of the nursing director of the center instead and took her into his confidence. She agreed with him that it might be best if they kept the news from his father, and they formulated a cover story that was convincing. It was easy enough for him to arrange for a nurse to go home with his father to Callie’s apartment every night and to drive him to the center each day. They decided to tell Jack Steele that one of Callie’s elderly aunts had been hurt in a car wreck and she had to go to Houston to see about her. Callie had no elderly aunts, but Jack wouldn’t know that. It would placate him and keep him from worrying. Then Micah would have to arrange for someone to protect him from any attempts by Lopez on his life.

He went back to his motel and spent the rest of the night and part of the next day making international phone calls. He knew that Chet Blake, the police chief, would call in the FBI once Callie’s disappearance was noted, and that wasn’t a bad idea. They would, of course, try to notify Micah, but they wouldn’t be able to find him. That meant that Lopez’s man in law enforcement would think Micah didn’t know that his stepsister had been kidnapped. And that would work to his benefit.

But if Lopez’s men carried Callie down to the Yucatán, near Cancún, which was where the drug lord lived these days, it was going to become a nightmare of diplomacy for any U. S. agency that tried to get her out of his clutches, despite international law enforcement cooperation. Micah didn’t have that problem. He had Bojo, one of his best mercenaries, with him in the States. It took time to track down the rest of his team, but by dawn he’d managed it and arranged to meet them in Belize that night. He hated waiting that long, and he worried about what Callie was going to endure in the meantime. But any sort of assault took planning, especially on a fortress like Lopez’s home. To approach it by sea was impossible. Lopez had several fast boats and guards patrolling the sea wall night and day. It would have to be a land-based attack, which was where the DC-3 came in. The trusty old planes were practically indestructible.

He couldn’t get Callie’s ordeal out of his mind. He’d kept tabs on her for years without her knowledge. She’d dated one out-of-town auditor and a young deputy sheriff, but nothing came of either relationship. She seemed to balk at close contact with men. That was disturbing to him, because he’d made some nasty allegations about her morals being as loose as her mother’s after she’d come on to him under the mistletoe four years ago.

He didn’t think words would be damaging, but perhaps they were. Callie had a reputation locally for being as pure as fresh snow. In a small town, where everybody knew everything about their neighbors, you couldn’t hide a scandal. That made him feel even more guilty, because Callie had been sweet and uninhibited until he’d gone to work on her. It was a shame that he’d taken out his rage on her, when it was her mother who’d caused all the problems in his family. Callie’s innocence was going to cost her dearly, in Lopez’s grasp. Micah groaned aloud as he began to imagine what might happen to her now. And it would be his fault.

He packed his suitcase and checked out of the motel. On the way to the airport, he went by Cy Parks’s place, to tell him what was going on. Eb was doing enough already; Micah hated the thought of putting more on him. Besides, Cy would have been miffed if he was left out of this. He had his own reasons for wanting Lopez brought down. The vengeful drug lord had endangered the life of Cy’s bride, Lisa, and the taciturn rancher wouldn’t rest easy until Lopez got what was coming to him. He sympathized with Micah about Callie’s kidnapping and Jack Steele’s danger. To Micah’s relief, he also volunteered to have one of his men, a former law enforcement officer, keep a covert eye on his father, just in case. That relieved Micah’s troubled mind. He drove to the airport, left the rented Porsche in the parking lot with the attendant, and boarded the plane to Belize. Then he went to work.

Callie came to in a limousine. She was trussed up like a calf in a bulldogging competition, wrists and ankles bound, and a gag in her mouth. The three men who’d kidnapped her were conversing.

They weren’t speaking Spanish. She heard at least one Arabic word that she understood. At once, she knew that they were Manuel Lopez’s men, and that Micah had told the truth about the danger she and Jack were in. It was too late now, though. She’d been careless and she’d been snatched.

She lowered her eyelids when one of the men glanced toward her, pretending to still be groggy, hoping for a chance to escape. Bound as she was, that seemed impossible. She shifted a little, noticing with comfort the feel of the tiny cell phone she’d slipped into her slacks’ pocket before leaving the office. If they didn’t frisk her, she might get a call out. She remembered what she’d heard about Lopez, and her blood ran cold.

She couldn’t drag her wrists out of the bonds. They felt like ropes, not handcuffs. Her arm was sore—she wondered if perhaps they’d given her a shot, a sedative of some sort. She must have been out a very long time. It had been late afternoon when she’d been kidnapped. Now it was almost dawn. She wished she had a drink of water….