Beyond the Rules

Because it meant reliving them.

She looked over at him, meeting the almond sweep of his eyes. His Japanese grandmother’s eyes, set in the bones of his otherwise Danish family—a face sculpted by the combination. Rio was nothing if not tied to his family, right down to his appearance. And he didn’t understand.

A flicker of desperation tightened Kimmer’s hands on the steering wheel. “Please,” she said. “This is a choice I made a long time ago.”

He tipped his head back at the hefty SUV. “It can be a different choice now.”

“No,” she said tightly. “It can’t.”

He looked at her for another long heartbeat of time, and then he gave the slightest of shrugs and lowered his tall frame into the low sports car. Kimmer breathed a sigh of relief, thanking him with a glance. They might well talk about this, but Rio had done what Rio did best. He’d let Kimmer be Kimmer, accepting her without trying to change her.

Except this time, just a moment too late. Kimmer’s brother crossed in front of the Miata, came around to the driver’s window. Kimmer still had time to turn the key, to floor the accelerator—and yet somehow she didn’t quite do it. Maybe it was Rio’s trust. Maybe she was just tired of running.

Maybe she wanted to think again about pummeling the crap out of a man who had made her childhood miserable.

He stood on the other side of the closed window—not a tall man, nor a bulky one. Like Kimmer in that way. He settled his weight on one leg and crossed his arms. “You don’t even know which one I am.”

She knew he hadn’t changed much, not if he’d tracked her down only to throw that attitude at her.

Of course, he was also right.

“Should I care?” she asked, not unrolling the window. “You all made my life hell. You were interchangeable in that way. Although if I had to guess, the way your ears stick out, I’d say you were Hank.”

More than ten years had passed since she’d bolted from Munroville in rural western Pennsylvania. She’d been fifteen and her brothers had been in various stages of older adolescence and early adulthood, still unformed men—their bodies awkward, their facial structures still half in hiding. Hers was a family of late bloomers.

Or never-bloomers.

Her brother colored slightly and lifted his chin in a way so instantly familiar that Kimmer knew she’d been right. Hank. A middle brother, particularly fond of finding ways to blame things gone wrong on Kimmer no matter how minuscule her association with them in the first place. He’d seldom been the first to hit her, but it never took him long to join in. Hank, Jeff, Karl, Tim. They all took their turns.

She started slightly as Rio’s hand landed quietly on her leg, only then realizing she’d reached for the club resting beside her at the shift. You don’t know, she wanted to say to him. You can’t possibly understand. His family had supported him, surrounded him, welcomed him back home without question when the life he’d chosen had changed so abruptly. Hers had…

A young girl hid in the attic, hands clasped tightly around her knees, face pale and dripping sweat in the furnace summer had made of the enclosed space. She didn’t know who’d misplaced the phone bill the first time, or even the second. It could have been between here and the tilted mailbox down the lane; it could have been shoved off the table to make way for one of their filthy magazines. She only knew that today she’d brought in an envelope stamped Final Bill, and that its arrival was therefore her fault. Her father and brothers had come home before she’d had the chance to slip out the back of the house to the hidey-hole she’d made beneath the barn.

They didn’t know she’d grown tall enough to pull down the ladder stairs and make her way up here. And now she couldn’t leave until they were gone. If they spotted her they’d harry her like hounds, shouting and slapping and shoving for something she hadn’t done in the first place. She shivered, even in the heat. She could feel their hands, their cruel pinches, blows hard enough to bruise, hidden in places that wouldn’t show. And she remembered her mother lying at her father’s feet and knew her own life would only get worse as she matured.

A grip tightened on her leg. In a flash, Kimmer snatched up the club, turning on—

Rio.

She withdrew with a noise between a gasp and a snarl. Never Rio.

But her brothers had never seen her as anything other than a frightened young girl at their disposal for blaming, controlling and manipulating. A young girl who had highly honed skills of evasion and an uncanny knack for reading the intent of those around her—at least, anyone who wasn’t close to her. The closeness…it blinded her instinctive inner eye, kept her guessing.

She’d never been able to read Rio, not from the moment she’d met him. It had terrified her, but she’d learned to trust him. He’d earned it. So now she looked at him with apology for what they both knew she’d almost done, but she wasn’t surprised when he made no move to withdraw his hand.

Rio didn’t scare easily.

Kimmer took a deep breath and turned back to Hank, the window remaining between them. “I’m not even going to bother to ask why you thought you could or should run me down in a high-speed car chase. Just tell me why the hell you’re here.”

“I need to talk to you,” he said, and his mouth took on that sullen expression she knew too well, a knowing that came flooding back after years of pretending it didn’t exist. “You shouldn’t have run. It would have been a lot easier for both of us if you’d just pulled over when you noticed me.”

“A lot easier for you. I like a good adrenaline hit now and then. Or did you really think I didn’t know this was a dead-end road?”

Surprise crossed his face; it hadn’t occurred to him. “Anyway,” he said, as if they hadn’t had that part of the conversation, “I had to be sure it was you. Leo told me you’d changed a lot—”

“Leo.” Kimmer rolled her eyes, exchanging a quick, knowing look with Rio. Leo Stark, hometown bully and family friend from way back when. Not her friend. Not then, and not when he’d cropped up again to interfere with her work just six months earlier. “Damn him. It wasn’t enough I gave him a chance to be a hero for Mill Springs last fall? Stop the bad guys, save the country, keep the damsel in distress alive?”

For when Rio had come home to recuperate from CIA disaster, he’d slipped seamlessly back into civilian life, applying a fine hand to custom boat repairs and paint jobs—but only until his cousin Carolyne drew him back into the world of clandestine ops.

Except Kimmer, too, had been assigned to project Carolyne. Of course they’d collided. Disagreed. Worked it out. And now he’d come to cautiously discuss part-time work with the same Hunter Agency that employed Kimmer. Cautious, because he’d been sacrificed on the job once already. But doing it, because Hunter’s intense, personal approach was so completely different from his experience with the CIA. In the CIA, one field officer’s hubris had nearly killed him, and the chief of station hadn’t prevented it. At Hunter, the loyalty between operatives and staff was a given.

Hunter’s international reputation for effectiveness was why the agency had been tapped to watch Carolyne, a computer programmer extraordinaire who’d been on everyone’s snatch list when she uncovered—and developed the fix for—a security weakness in the current crop of missile laser guidance systems. The bad guys, professionals at the beck and call of those who wanted to exploit that weakness. And Leo Stark’s role had been a desperate ploy on Kimmer’s part to keep him from focusing on her. Because it was Kimmer he’d wanted—Kimmer who’d been promised to him not so much as a wife than as a servant. Leo. Dammit.

“He was right, I guess. Must have cost a pretty penny to fix you up like this.” He lifted an appreciative eyebrow.

She snorted. “Is that your idea of a compliment? It’s supposed to make me stick around long enough to hear what you have to say?”

Hank scowled. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be. I’ve come all this way to find you. That must count for something.”

Yeah. It pissed her off.

But there was Rio sitting next to her, knowing only how upset she was and not quite understanding; the puzzlement showed in the faintest of frowns, the only outward sign of his struggle to comprehend the strength of her reaction. And he’d never understand if she literally left Hank in the dust.

You want to know my family, Rio? Okay then.

She raised an eyebrow at Hank. “Coming all this way doesn’t count for a thing,” she told him. “But let’s just call it your lucky day. I’ll bet you know where I live, too.” She wouldn’t have been hard to find once Leo pointed Hank in the direction of Seneca Lake; she was in the phone book. She’d never made any effort to hide who she really was—she’d never expected them to care enough to come looking.

Whyever Hank had tracked her down, it wasn’t because he cared. He might still want to control her, he might still want to use her, but he didn’t want to renew any kind of family relationship.

Rio would learn that.

Outside the window, Hank nodded. For an instant, she thought he actually looked relieved, but a second glance showed her only the arrogant certainty that she’d see things his way. But whatever had inspired him to invade her world…

It wouldn’t be good enough.

Kimmer had little to say on the way home. Full of glower and resentment and anger, she took the curving roads at satisfying speed, reveling in the way the car clung to the road and how it leaped to the challenge when she accelerated in the last section of each swoop of asphalt. She left the Suburban far, far behind and when she pulled the Miata to an abrupt stop beside Rio’s boxy Honda Element in her sloping driveway, she exited the car with purpose.

Shedding and gathering clothes along the way, she climbed the stairs to the remodeled second floor of the old house—two small bedrooms and a bathroom turned into one giant master suite—and dumped the lunch outfit on the unmade bed. She replaced it with a clean pair of low-rise blue jeans from the shelves in her walk-in closet, and a clingy ribbed cotton sweater with laces dangling from the cross-tie sleeves. Red.

If Hank thought he was here to see his little sister, he had a thing or two coming.

She jammed the war club in her back pocket—Hank would do well to pale if he recognized it, given the events of the night she’d departed—and headed back down the stairs.

Rio puttered in the kitchen, putting away lunch leftovers and the desserts they’d brought home for later. He’d poured them each a glass of bright blue Kool-Aid, his current favorite flavor. Raspberry Reaction. A third glass stood off to the side, filled with ice, waiting to see what Hank preferred. Rio didn’t react as she stood in the kitchen entrance, slipping athletic Skechers over her bare feet, but he knew she was there; he pointed at the glass he’d filled for her.

As usual, he seemed to fill the room—he always filled the room, no matter how large it was, though calling her kitchen roomy went beyond exaggeration and straight to blatant lie. He’d gone to lunch in a tailored sport coat over jeans and a collarless short-sleeved shirt, a look he carried off with much panache. Now he’d dumped the coat and still looked…good.

Oh, yeah.