Diana Palmer Collected 1-6: Soldier of Fortune / Tender Stranger / Enamored / Mystery Man / Rawhide and Lace / Unlikely Lover

She shrugged. “It’s still a little sore, but I can’t complain.” She clasped the pad tightly against her breasts. She studied his impassive face quietly. “By the way, do you need written notice, or is a verbal one satisfactory?”

His eyes came up. “Wait,” he said quietly.

“I have to get another job. I can’t do that if I’m obligated to you for more than two weeks,” she said with remarkable calm.

His jaw clenched. “You don’t have to quit.”

“Like hell I don’t!” she returned.

“Things will get back to normal!” he roared. “Is it too much to ask you to give it a chance? We got along well enough before!”

“Yes, we did, before you treated me like a streetwalker!” she burst out.

He saw the hatred in her eyes, in her rigid posture. His gaze fell to the pencil again. “You won’t be easy to replace,” he said in an odd tone.

“Sure I will,” she said venomously. “All you have to do is call the agency and ask for somebody stupid and naïve who won’t get too close and loves being shot at!”

His face paled. “Gabby…”

“What’s going on?” Richard asked from the open door. He looked aghast. He’d never heard Gabby raise her voice in the two years he’d known her, and here she stood yelling at J.D. at the top of her lungs.

“None of your business,” they chimed in together, glaring at him.

He hunched his thin shoulders and grinned sheepishly. “Excuse me, I feel a sudden urge to eat lunch. Goodbye!”

They didn’t even notice his leaving. J.D. glared at Gabby, and she glared back.

“I’m too set in my ways to break in somebody new,” he said finally. “And you’d be bored to death working for anybody else and you know it.”

“It’s my life,” she reminded him.

He got up from the desk and she backed away, her eyes wide and angry and afraid. The fear was what stopped him in his tracks.

“I wasn’t going to make a grab for you, Miss Darwin.”

“Shall I drop to my knees and give thanks?” she asked, glaring back. “You’ll never make the list of the ten top lovers, that’s for sure.”

“No, I don’t imagine so,” he said quietly. “But I didn’t realize how much I’d frightened you.” He studied her closely. “Gabby, I never meant to go that far.”

“I wasn’t going to try to drag you in front of a minister,” she said, lowering her voice. “I was curious about you, just as you were curious about me. It’s over now. I don’t want ties, either.”

“Don’t leave,” he said quietly. “I’ll never touch you again.”

“That isn’t the point,” she told him, shifting restlessly from one foot to the other. “I…I don’t want to work for you anymore.”

His dark eyes searched hers slowly, quietly. “Why?”

That was rich. Was she going to tell him that her heart would break if she had to work with him day in and day out, loving him hopelessly, eating her heart out for him? That was what would happen, too. She’d go on mooning over him and never be able to date anybody else. Worse, she’d sit cringing as the days went by, wondering when he would throw it all in and rush back to First Shirt and Apollo. Now that he’d gotten a taste of the old, free life again, she had to expect that it would happen.

“There’s no job security here,” she said finally, putting her nameless fears into mundane words that couldn’t possibly express her real feelings.

“You’re guessing that I’ll go back to the old life?” he asked coldly.

She shook her head. “No, J.D.—anticipating. Shirt said that you had the bug again,” she confided. “I want a dull, routine employer who won’t go rushing off to save the world at a minute’s notice.”

His jaw tightened. “It’s my life. How I live it is my business.”

“But of course,” she said with a sickeningly sweet smile. “That’s exactly what I meant. Out of sight, out of mind.”

That made him angry. His dark eyes glittered as he scowled at her. “After what we shared in that room at Laremos’s house?” he asked bluntly.

Her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps we’re thinking of different things,” she retorted. “I have a very vivid memory of being treated like the worst kind of Saturday-night pickup!”

He turned away and went to the window, his back rigid. “There were reasons.”

“Of course there were!” she shot back. “You wanted to make sure that I didn’t get any ideas about you just because you made a pass at me. Okay! I got the message and I’m going, just as fast as I can!” she said. “Do you really think I could forget what happened in Guatemala and go on working for you?”

He studied his fingers. “Maybe I’ll settle down,” he said after a minute.

“Maybe you will, but what concern is that of mine?” she asked. “You’re my employer, not my lover.”

He turned just as the phone on her desk rang. She rushed to answer it, grateful for the diversion. Fortunately, it was an angry, long-winded client. She smiled wickedly as she transferred the call to J.D.’s phone. While he was talking, she escaped to lunch, leaving him listening helplessly to the venomous divorcée on the other end of the line.

But once she was out of the office and eating a hamburger at a local fast-food restaurant, the smile vanished and gloom set in. She’d read about men who couldn’t marry, who were too freedom-loving for marriage. But until J.D. came along, she hadn’t known what anguish there could be in loving someone like that. Now she did, and her nights would be plagued with nightmares about hearing someday he’d died in combat. Or worse, that he was serving time in some filthy foreign jail for interfering in the internal politics of another nation.

If Martina had known the truth, maybe she could have helped talk some sense into him. But Gabby hadn’t dared to tell her. J.D. would never forgive Gabby if she did.

An hour later, she dragged herself back into the office, only to find J.D. gone. There was a terse note on her desk, informing her that he’d gone to meet a client and that she was to cancel his appointments; he wouldn’t be in until the next day.

She picked up the phone and started dialing. Was he really seeing a client? The thought tormented her, even after she left the office. Perhaps he’d already packed his bag and gone off in search of the sun. She cried herself to sleep, hating herself for worrying. If this was any indication of the future, she’d do well to hurry about finding another job.

The next day she forced herself to search the want ads for positions in between answering the phone, using the copier and running the computer. J.D. still hadn’t come in, and she was grateful for Dick’s dictation and the hectic rush of the office. It kept her from thinking about J.D.

When he walked in the door just before lunch, it was all she could do not to jump up and throw herself into his arms. But she remembered that he didn’t want ties so she forced herself to greet him calmly and hand him his messages.

“Worried about me?” he asked with apparent carelessness, but his eyes were watchful.

She looked up with hard-won composure, her eyebrows arched behind her reading glasses. “Worried? Why?”

He drew in a slow breath and turned on his heel to walk into his office. He slammed the door behind him.

She stuck out her tongue at it and picked up her purse. “Going to lunch,” she said into the intercom and started out the door.

“Gabby.”

She turned. He was standing in his office doorway, looking lonely and hesitant.

“Have lunch with me,” he said.