Breaking Protocol

by Michelle Witvliet

  “Goodness sakes, let me look at you.” Shannon held Piper at arm’s length and cast a critical eye up and down her lanky frame. “You’re thinner than I remember, and I can’t believe your hair! I haven’t seen it this long since you hacked off your braids in a fit of preteen defiance.” Shannon shook her head at the memory. “Where have you been? What have you been doing with yourself?”

  “I’ve been out of the country.”

  Shannon’s expression grew serious. “I gathered that from the postmark on the last package you sent.”

  “I was hoping it’d arrived.”

  Shannon grabbed a ring bearing a solitary brass key from a pegged rack near the front door and handed it to Piper. “I put it in your locker, just like you asked.”

  “I knew I could count on you.” Piper palmed the key and stuffed it into the front pocket of her jeans.

  “What on earth were you doing in South America, honey?” Shannon asked solemnly.

  “I’m going to pretend like you never asked me that.”

  “For God’s sake, Piper! Colombia? I sure hope you’re not getting yourself into a situation you can’t handle.”

  Piper cast a cursory glance over her shoulder to where Riggs sat patiently watching her from the black Denali parked at the curb. “I can take care of myself.”

  “Your brother probably thought the same thing, and look how well that turned out. You’ve got to let it go and move on.”

  Piper looked around the room again. “I can’t.”

  Shannon sighed, looking almost apologetic. “Life goes on, Pip. It’s time you realized that. Even your stepdad’s concerned about you.”

  “Ken?” Piper sounded far more skeptical than surprised. She imagined Ken Jordan to be overjoyed if he never heard from her again. “I doubt that Ken’s concerned about anything to do with me. As you might recall, we were barely civil to one another when we lived under the same roof.”

  “Oh, but it’s true,” Shannon gushed. “He calls here every few weeks asking if I’ve heard from you.”

  “When did this start?”

  “Oh, six, seven months ago. He uses your mom as an excuse for calling, but I get the feeling he’s really the one who wants to know.”

  “Yeah, well, since my mother hasn’t been able to put two lucid thoughts together in years, I’d say that’s probably a pretty good instinct on your part.” It did, however, make Piper wonder if maybe her mother had taken a turn for the better. God knows, her mother’s mental illness had had its share of highs and lows. It was assuredly something she would look into just as soon as she was out from under these accusations.

  “I hate to interrupt, but we really need to get going, Piper.”

  She whirled around and found Riggs standing on the porch with only the screen door separating them. Her first thought when seeing him was how long he’d been standing there.

  “Goodness sakes, Piper,” Shannon drawled excitedly. “Where are your manners? Move aside and give your friend room to come in.”

  Carter none-too-gently nudged Piper out of the way with a steady push on the screen door until there was enough room for him to slip in behind her. She felt his breath on the back of her neck as he placed a possessive hand on her waist.

  “Piper, aren’t you going to introduce me to your gentleman friend?”

  Piper rolled her eyes at Shannon’s socially charming exuberance. Although born and raised in Texas, Shannon had resided in Georgia long enough to turn her once-biting twang into a sweeter Southern drawl.

  Piper waved her hand begrudgingly between the two as she wiggled free of his claim. “Shannon Kramer, Carter Riggs.”

  “It’s a real pleasure, Mr. Riggs,” Shannon positively gushed as she extended her hand. “We never get the chance to meet any of our Pippie’s friends.”

  “Pippie?” he questioned with amusement, for which he received a sharp elbow jab in the gut.

  “Riggs is right, Shannon. We really do have to be going. We’re expected in D.C.”

  “At least stay for dinner? The kids will be heartbroken if they miss you.”

  Piper shook her head. “We really can’t. Not this visit. We’re on a pretty tight schedule, but you tell them I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

  Piper turned to Carter. “Would you give us a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said, turning to leave. “I’ll be in the car.”

  Piper waited until Carter was halfway down the front walk before she spoke.

  “Did Ken say anything else about my mother?”

  “No, not really. He’s still a man of few words. Once I told him I had nothing new to tell him about you, he didn’t stay on the line for long.”

  “Has anyone else called asking about me?”

  “No, but I did receive an odd email yesterday.” She went to a desk on the far side of the living room and shuffled through a stack of papers. When she found what she was looking for, she returned and handed it to Piper. “That website address was in the body of the message.”

  Piper glanced at the scrap of notebook paper. “Military Mysteries dot com?” It didn’t mean anything to her, and she looked to Shannon for further clarification.

  “You’ll understand when you go to the site.”

  “Who sent it? What was the return addy?”

  Shannon drew a breath and rattled the address, “Soldier_of_misfortune2 at anonaddy dot com,” stressing every idiosyncrasy of the address. “Maybe you can back-trace it to its source.”

  Piper shook her head against the possibility of that suggestion. “I’m afraid anonaddy means exactly that.”

  Piper stuffed the paper into her back pocket and hugged the woman who should have been her sister-in-law. Then she was out the door and running toward the Jeep’s replacement, and the man she hoped would help her catch a killer.

  She climbed into the SUV and rattled off directions to the storage facility.

  Carter followed her instructions that led them out of the Atlanta suburb and back to the expressway.

  * * *

  Piper wasted no time in firing up the recovered laptop. She had the computer unpacked from its neoprene case and up and running with a car charger before Carter passed through the storage facility’s exit gate.

  Carter’s impatience reared its head in a most unattractive manner. It was going on an hour and she hadn’t uttered two words to him since she entered cyberspace. He wanted to know what she’d found on Pritchard, but all he heard for the last fifty-one minutes was the stop and start tap dance of her fingers across the keyboard.

  Ten minutes, he told himself. Ten minutes was all the more time he’d give her before he broke the silence and demanded to know what she’d been doing.

  Four minutes into his final countdown, Piper punched one last key and announced, “There! That ought to do it.”

  “What? Tell me...have you found any useful info against Pritchard?”

  “Uh,” she stammered. “No. Not yet.”

  His facial scar pinched against his frown. “What have you been doing all this time, catching up with your Facebook friends?”

  “I wouldn’t call it catching up, exactly,” she answered evenly. “More like getting ahead of them.”

  “What have you done?” He slid a quick sideward glance at her that was anything but amiable, then returned his focus to the road. Sometimes it was better not to know what she was up to, but this time her self-satisfied expression was enough to convince him that knowing was more important than not.

  “Consider it giving karma a nudge in the right direction.”

  This cryptic behavior of hers was really beginning to annoy him. Why did she insist on doing things like this when they were tearing down the highway and he couldn’t watch her close enough to get a good handle on her behavior? “I ask again—wh
at have you done?”

  “I just pulled a Copperfield on all those millions in my account.”

  “You made them disappear?”

  “Sure did,” she affirmed. “Seems like small compensation for all the trouble they’re putting me through.”

  The scar ached from holding in a frowning pattern for so long, and he rubbed it absently. “I really wish you would have discussed this with me first.”

  “Why?”

  He shot her another quick glance. “Because moving that money makes you look guilty.”

  “Not if they can’t find it, or prove that I took it.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I’ve diverted it to a worthy cause.”

  “Worthy cause?” Intrigue was counterbalancing his annoyance. He should have known there was more to her plan than just the obvious.

  “I donated it to a national organization that offers support and therapy to the survivors of violent crimes and their families. Kevin wasn’t the only victim of that attack, you know. His whole family suffered devastating effects from it. Maybe if I’d been given a chance to talk about my brother, I wouldn’t be so obsessed with his murder twenty years later, and maybe my father would still be alive if he’d been counseled on how to cope with the tragedy, which in turn might have kept my mother’s depression from overwhelming her...” Like a windup toy that needed a couple more turns of the key, Piper ran out of energy and she fell silent.

  Filled with a need to comfort her somehow, Carter reached across the console and took her hand. Bringing it to his lips, he kissed her fingers. Anything more than that would have to wait until he wasn’t pushing seventy down a four-lane highway.

  “That’s an awful lot of mights and maybes, baby.” The second the endearment popped out, he held a brief, hopeful moment when he thought she’d let it pass without comment.

  Her knuckles brushed against his cheek as she pulled out of his grasp. “Did you just call me baby?”

  “Yes, I did,” he said, refusing to apologize for the heartfelt utterance. “You got a problem with it?” He calmly adjusted his grip around the steering wheel.

  “No, no. No problem at all,” she said with an amused lilt and a hasty shake of her head. “Just checking.”

  “Good,” he said with a quick nod and a final glance in her direction before giving the road in front of him his full attention. His thoughts, however, weren’t so sure if his endearing utterance was good or not. The less emotional entanglement there was, the better it would be for them both, at least that’s what he’d been telling himself since the major shift in their relationship. His heart seemed to have a whole different agenda.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “So what’s our first move when we get to D.C.?” Piper reached into the backseat, fished around in the little blue soft-sided cooler and pulled out two bottles of water, offering him one. He shook his head and she placed it in the center console for later.

  “For when I get to D.C.,” he corrected. “You,” he stated emphatically, “are not going anywhere near the place.”

  “You can’t mean that.” She twisted the cap off the bottle and tossed back half the contents with a single swig. It was cold enough to give her a momentary sharp ache in her throat on its way down.

  “You heard me.” Carter never took his eyes off the road, though he felt the boring intensity of her gaze without visual confirmation. He had no doubt that if looks could kill, all of his problems would be over.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Sure you do. You’re a smart girl.”

  “No, I don’t. Explain it to me.”

  “We both know Pritchard is up to something. I don’t know what yet, but I don’t trust him, which translates into I can’t predict what his next move is going to be. Until I figure that out, I want you out of his crosshairs.”

  “What happened to ‘we’re in this together’?”

  “We still are.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “It’s just temporary.”

  She released her seat belt and swiveled around to take a long, hard look at him. “You’re serious about this, aren’t you?”

  “As I’ve ever been about anything.”

  “It galls me to go into hiding.”

  “I know that, but you’ve got to trust me on this one.” A quick glance at her told him that she wasn’t entirely convinced. “And please refasten your seat belt. The last thing we need is to get stopped for a seat belt violation.”

  She did as she was told since she couldn’t find any fault with that part of his logic. “I can take care of myself, you know,” she told him as she dragged the shoulder harness across her body and snapped it shut.

  Carter maintained his composure, keeping his gaze dead ahead and his expression unreadable. “That’s never been in debate.”

  The shoulder harness chafed against her collarbone as she strained against it. “You can’t stop me.”

  “Oh, I think I can,” he said with a tad too much confidence to suit her. He had something up his sleeve.

  “What are you going to do? Tie me up?”

  “Hmmm,” he said with a sly sideward glance. “That’s one option, although my return to D.C. could be delayed considerably if I did that.”

  She snorted her reply. “Get serious.”

  On that cocky note, Riggs decided it was the perfect time to get a few things straight with Miss Too-Independent-for-Her-Own-Good. With a sweeping glance in the side and rearview mirrors, he cut the wheel and brought the Denali to a grinding halt on the state road’s graveled shoulder.

  His unexpected action threw Piper forward against the shoulder harness then back, and the water bottle went flying. It bounced off the dashboard and erupted, slinging its contents right back in her startled face.

  “What the hay-ell?” she sputtered, gripping the dash to right herself. “What’s wrong? Is there a problem with the car?”

  Deliberately turning in his seat, placing one hand on the dash and one on the seat behind her, he faced her and said, “Make no mistakes at the seriousness of my intentions. I’m doing everything I can to keep you out of custody until we get this mess figured out, so I would really appreciate you not fighting me at every turn.”

  “You want to know what I’d appreciate, Riggs? That you don’t act like fucking me senseless gives you the right to treat me like I can’t think for myself anymore.”

  Carter’s fingers dug into the upholstery to keep from doing something he knew he’d regret. He’d never hit a woman before, and he wouldn’t start now, but this was the closest he’d ever been to making an exception. “Is that really what you think? That I’m using sex to control you?”

  She stared him down, her eyes more dark and dangerous than he’d ever seen before. “You wouldn’t be the first man to try.”

  If she weren’t so deadly serious, he would have been tempted to laugh in her face. Control her? Not likely. He considered himself lucky when he occasionally second-guessed her. “You know, P.J., if I’d thought sex with you was all it would take to guarantee your compliance, I wouldn’t have waited so long to put the plan into action. It would have saved me a lot of aggravation over the years.”

  “To hay-ell with you, Riggs,” Piper said as she shoved the car door open and jumped out. For whatever her reasons, she wanted to get as far away from him as possible in the least amount of time.

  The place on the road where they’d stopped was along a vast expanse of wide-open grassy field separated by a steep gully. Sliding on her heels down the embankment that bottomed out into a not entirely dry ditch, Piper slipped through a layer of sucking muck before finding solid ground on the opposite slope. She scrambled up the other side on all fours and stumbled into the open meadow where she broke into a flat-out run.

&n
bsp; She hadn’t gotten more than fifty yards before she was tackled to the ground. The wind exploded from her lungs as she hit the hard earth with a jarring thud. She struggled to catch her breath at the same time attempting to fight him off. He had her pinned facedown with his knee pressed into the center of her back and his palm flattened against the side of her head to effectively restrain her. His weight combined with his expertise and her vulnerable prone position was too much working against her to gain enough leverage to break his hold.

  “Get off me,” she sputtered, spitting dirt and grass.

  “Not until you promise not to run.” He eased up on his knee pressure but not enough for her to push him off.

  She drew a shallow, wheezing breath. “I—can’t—breathe—”

  Keeping her within arm’s length, he lifted his knee and rolled off to sit on the ground next to her.

  She rolled to her back, panting and gasping for air.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I will be, no thanks to your Neanderthal tactics.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to stop you.”

  “What next? Clubbing me over the head and hauling me away by my hair?”

  “If that’s what it takes to get through to you.” Carter pushed to his feet and extended his hand to help her up.

  She waved off his offer, rolled to her hands and knees and climbed up on her own. “What difference does it make to you anyway?”

  “Nobody dies on my watch, Piper.” He jabbed at the air with his hand for emphasis. “You hear me? Nobody!”

  Piper stared at him for a long, tenuous moment, fascinated by the way his facial scar gauged the level of his anger. At the moment it flushed bright crimson and the vein in his neck pulsed dangerously close to the surface. She hadn’t seen him this unsettled and out of control since the boat incident on the island, and she hated how her problems were affecting him. Her eyes flickered and jumped across his tight features until she forced herself to finally look away.