Breaking Protocol

by Michelle Witvliet

  She heaved a weary sigh. She was so tired—tired of fighting, tired of running, tired of pretending none of this mattered. Somewhere along the way something happened to make her want this to matter very much. She wanted this all to go away, to wipe her slate clean and start fresh. She wanted to start over with Riggs—without his honorable sense of duty or her traumatic past getting in their way.

  “Look, Riggs, I’ve been thinking, even if I’m cleared of these ridiculous charges my career is over. I’ve accepted that. I was planning on getting out anyway. What I won’t accept is you destroying your career over this, too.”

  “I’ve told you before, and I’m going to keep telling you, we’re in this together.”

  “Aiding and abetting an accused traitor isn’t something you’re going to want to put on your résumé, Riggs.”

  She thought he’d lost his mind when he grinned and plucked a blade of dried grass from her hair. “Are you saying you wouldn’t give me a good reference?”

  She didn’t find any of this the least bit funny and cast him a withering glare. “Will you be serious? I’ve been giving this a lot of thought. I think the best way to handle this if for you to turn me over to the authorities when we get to Washington.”

  “No way,” he adamantly opposed. “I’d sooner tell them you escaped my custody. But handing you over to Pritchard and his thugs isn’t going to happen as long as there’s a breath in my body. I can’t turn you in. I won’t.”

  An angry scowl distorted her features. “You are such a stubborn man, Carter Riggs!”

  “And you’re just realizing this now?”

  “How can you do this? There’s no logical reason for you to put yourself in this position. You shouldn’t be here. You said yourself how important rules are to you, that you can’t exist without them. You’re breaking some big ones now, Riggs, and for what?”

  Anguish filled his heart. A few years ago he would have moved heaven and earth for this chance to tell her his reasons, but to do so now would be cruel and pointless. He couldn’t change what was behind them, and his future was precarious at best and predictable as its worst. All he had to give her was the here and now and the chance to give her the time to clear her name, which was why he was determined to do whatever necessary to guarantee her future, with or without him.

  “You’re right, I shouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m glad to hear you’re ready to accept the reality of our situation. Turning me in is the only possible way for you to get out of this mess with your reputation still intact.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I don’t give a damn about saving my reputation or my career. A helicopter crash eleven months ago took care of that, but this last week has made me feel alive for the first time in months, years.”

  “Then what did you mean?”

  “What I meant was I shouldn’t be in the field at all.”

  Piper stared at him as comprehension gave way to absolute clarity. “You weren’t cleared by the department doctor, were you?”

  “I wasn’t cleared for anything but desk duty.”

  “What? I don’t understand.” She’d seen every inch of him, touched and explored just about as much, and experienced his amazing stamina firsthand. Aside from the scars, he acted and appeared pretty doggone fit to her.

  “During my recovery the doctors discovered a medical condition that precludes my ever returning to active duty.”

  “What’s that? Hypertension? Diabetes? Epilepsy?” Several agents she knew had their field careers ended prematurely from those. One had taken an early retirement and the other two now held low-risk desk jobs to finish out their careers.

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s nothing that commonplace.”

  “Then what?”

  “I have a brain aneurysm,” he stated. “How’s that for irony at its finest—handed a death sentence by the very people who pulled me from the wreckage and put me back together in the first place.”

  The reality of what he told her struck like a thunderbolt, and her reaction wasn’t typical, but it was straight from the heart. “Bastard!” she screamed as she shoved him.

  Caught off guard, Carter stumbled back, twisted his foot in a rabbit hole and went down, landing on his butt with his hands braced behind him. Confusion didn’t begin to describe the way he felt. He decided to stay down in case she wasn’t through with her attack, and he rested his forearms across up-drawn knees, then looked to her for further explanation.

  “That sure wasn’t the reaction I expected.”

  “Oh really? What did you expect?” She jabbed her toe into the weedy dirt and kicked a divot in his direction. “I always find kicking and hitting the perfect outlet for when I’m this pissed.” Then she picked up a fist-sized rock and hurled it high over his head. He never flinched, because he knew if she’d been aiming at him, she wouldn’t have missed from where she stood.

  Carter wasn’t sure how to interpret her behavior. She was never an easy person to read, but this was the first time he was this far off the mark. This most recent tirade had him stumped. Why was she was so angry? Was it because he was dying, or was she just pissed because he told her about his condition at all? Some people didn’t like to be burdened with the knowledge of other people’s problems unless there was a way to fix them. He was betting on the latter. Piper had always been a problem solver, and the more hopeless the situation, the harder she fought to fix it.

  With a great deal more outward composure than he felt, Carter climbed to his feet and brushed away bits of dried grass and dirt from his khakis. “Now, how about explaining to me what this is all about? And I would appreciate you doing it with a little less enthusiasm and none of the hitting.”

  “You want to know what this is all about...” she shrieked. “I’ll tell you what this is all about... It’s about...” Then she did exactly as he’d requested. She slumped in defeat, every shred of enthusiasm vanished as the fight went out of her, and she stopped to draw a wheezing breath. She hung her head, shaking it slowly to and fro, and said softly, “This explains everything.” Then she let loose with a short, self-deprecating laugh. “Any port in a storm, eh, Riggs?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “No wonder you gave in to my advances without much of a fight. Once you had nothing to lose, I guess I looked pretty good under the circumstances.”

  Carter was appalled. “You can’t possibly believe that.”

  “I’m not sure what to believe right now. I really thought you were the one man I could always trust, the one person I could count on no matter what.”

  “I am. You know that. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t—”

  She interrupted before he could say more. “I just wish you would have been aboveboard with me about your agenda from the beginning, that’s all. Just be sure to check me off your bucket list.”

  No other person, man or woman, could stretch his emotions to such extremes in so short a time. With fists clenched at his side, he took a threatening step toward her then stopped himself just as quickly. Seeing her standing there looking so overwhelmingly defeated under the weight of her misconceptions, he realized he wanted to take her into his arms and console her. That impulse was much more dominant than the desire to lash out, but an even greater need to clear her misunderstanding urged him to speak.

  “What happened between us in that storm shelter happened not because I had an agenda, as you call it, or because I didn’t have anything better to do to pass the time, but because we both wanted it.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah...” She dismissed his explanation with a stiff wave. “Save it for someone who cares.” Then she paused, as if something more pressing came to her. “Speaking of which, have you told your mother yet?”

  “No,” he said emphatically. “And I’d ap
preciate your discretion to not tell her, either. This isn’t something she needs to know.”

  “Why’d you think it was something I needed to know?” In spite of the bitterness in her tone, he detected a great deal of hurt and despair in her posture. Seeing her standing there, her shoulders slumped under the weight of his decision, he realized what a mistake he’d made in telling her about his condition. She was absolutely right—she hadn’t needed to know, and it made him question what underlying motives had made him tell her.

  “Well, for one, I didn’t want you thinking you were the one destroying my career. This thing in my head is solely responsible for that.”

  “And the other reason?”

  “Other reason?” he echoed. “There is no other reason.”

  “When someone starts a statement the way you did, there’s usually another to follow.”

  There were plenty more to follow, but none he cared to verbalize. “No, there’s nothing else,” he said.

  Piper sighed with resignation. “Well, for whatever it’s worth, I won’t fight you anymore, Riggs. You win. We’ll do this your way.” On that, she started across the field toward the car.

  Then why, he wondered, did it feel like he’d just lost more than he gained?

  Chapter Seventeen

  They drove in absolute silence for another couple of hours—Piper with her nose in her laptop, and Carter staring straight ahead with a death grip on the steering wheel—before he stopped for the night. By the time he pulled into a roadside motel, his neck and shoulders were a mass of writhing knots and there was a headache brewing that promised to be a whopper if he didn’t get his hands on some Advil first.

  He could have driven straight through, but he wanted a little more time with Piper before he turned her over to a friend of his at Quantico for safekeeping while he did the things he had to do. Pritchard’s behavior was questionable, but so far it wasn’t necessarily illegal. He needed hard evidence to prove Jackson was dirty and trying to frame Piper. Her tagging along could compromise any evidence he uncovered.

  Carter specifically asked the desk clerk for a room with two beds just because he wasn’t assuming anything at the moment. He’d delivered a staggering blow. He couldn’t be sure if she wanted to continue with what they’d started on the island, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t blame her if she wanted to end it here and now. The next move had to be hers.

  When she entered the room and saw the pair of double beds, she briefly paused then swung her backpack on the one closest to the door. Without a word, she opened the laptop and made herself comfortable on the bed. Within seconds her fingers moved across the touch pad as she focused all her attention on the world she could control.

  “I noticed one of those Southern-fried-everything restaurants you like so much around the corner. How about I go get us some dinner?” Carter didn’t know what else to do to cajole her out of her silence, but he figured for sure that suggesting they eat from a place he’d never willingly go to in a million years would have at the very least triggered a smart-ass remark since he’d been adamantly avoiding her requests to stop every time she spotted one on the highway. As usual, he got nothing he’d expected out of her.

  “Fine. Whatever,” she answered, never taking her eyes off the computer screen.

  When he found himself grateful that she responded at all, he decided to go for the daily double. “Any special requests, like an order of fried pickles with some double batter-dipped extra-crispy Twinkies on the side?” It never ceased to amaze him how she stayed so slim and fit when she ate so dreadfully every chance she got. He felt his arteries clogging at just the mere mention of the restaurant’s billboard-advertised specialties.

  She picked at a muddy splotch smeared across her forearm. “I need to shower,” was all she said as she set the computer aside and headed for the bathroom. The resounding click of the lock was about as clear a message as she could have sent.

  Carter pocketed the room key and left. If she needed some time alone, then he’d use that time to stretch and clear his head. Walking the block and a half to the restaurant was a good way to do both. He was beginning to think there weren’t enough fried pickles in the country to fix the damage he’d caused.

  With a couple of sacks of food and a six-pack of cold sodas from the convenience store next to the motel, he let himself into the room looking forward to finding Piper curled on the bed with her hair in wet tendrils blindly channel-surfing.

  What he heard was the shower still running and Piper nowhere to be found. It looked like she needed more time to herself than he first thought. As he leveled his gaze on the closed bathroom door, watching tendrils of steam waft out from under it, he grew concerned.

  Then he started to get angry. Her compliance had once again made him drop his guard. Now he could only wonder if she’d given him the slip.

  He angrily tossed the food bags on the bed Piper had claimed. In doing so one of the bags nudged the laptop and jostled it out of its sleep mode. When the screen jumped to life, Carter stared at it for a long moment, reading the bold-faced headers and the neat, colored blocks of medical text. She hadn’t wasted any time in researching brain aneurysms, and not on any general info laymen’s sites either. In a matter of minutes she’d managed to hack her way into password-protected sites available only to registered medical personnel. While he scanned the computer screen, he seriously wondered whether her being armed with that kind of knowledge was a good thing or not.

  Carter jiggled the bathroom doorknob and knocked. “P.J., you just about done in there? Your dinner’s getting cold.”

  When she didn’t respond, he didn’t waste a single second more with proprieties. He stepped back and with one well-placed kick, the door popped open. A thick cloud of steam billowed out in greeting.

  The shower curtain was drawn and he heard the gurgling, slurping sound of water running down a sluggish drain. Still no clue as to whether she was there or not.

  He ripped back the curtain, expecting to find nothing but an empty bathtub. What he found broke his heart. Still fully dressed, she sat crouched into a tight ball with her forehead pressed against her knees and her arms wrapped around her shins. She swayed back and forth as water poured down.

  She stopped rocking and looked up, her eyes wide and glistening through the steady stream. “You’re back already?”

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  She shrugged like her odd behavior was nothing out of the ordinary. “It’s not working and I don’t know what else to do,” she told him with an abundance of water flowing down her face, making it impossible to know what was water and what might be tears, and maybe that was her intention all along. He’d often thought she needed this catharsis, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  When he flipped on the overhead exhaust fan, it started up with a tinny rattle until it reached its maximum speed where it settled into a grinding hum with only an occasional metallic hiccup to break the monotonous drone. In spite of the obvious, and overall successful, attempts to modernize the building throughout the decades, the motel was still vintage sixties. Carter was relieved to see that the fan served its purpose in spite of its sound when the air began to clear, and he returned his attention to help Piper.

  He turned off the water and pulled her to her feet. Although she didn’t fight against his efforts, she wasn’t exactly helpful either until he started to peel off her drippy wet shirt.

  “Stop that,” she said, slapping his hands away. “I’m perfectly capable of undressing myself.”

  Carter was relieved to see this familiar spark of defiance. He held up his hands in capitulation and backed off. “I just wanted to get you out of these wet things before you catch your death.” As soon as he said the phrase he realized how silly it sounded coming from him. He knew well enough that it took more than a wet chill to catch a cold. But his mothe
r had said those same words to him since he was a little boy and they popped out of his mouth as easily as if Hannah had placed them there and pushed them out.

  Piper toed off her shoes and unbuttoned her jeans. As she started to strip the misshapen shirt over her head she paused, her eyes wide and unblinking over the soggy fabric as she bore a hole straight through him. “A little privacy, if you don’t mind.”

  This from a woman who wore naked as easily as others wore Dior. Wearing an expression that clearly conveyed his confusion at her sudden modesty, he threw up his hands in abject surrender and backed out of the tiny bathroom.

  “Would you mind getting me a dry shirt?”

  He knew without asking she meant one of his shirts and went straight to his carryall to pull out his second-to-last remaining clean T-shirt. Of course, he could probably go to her bag and find just as many shirts that had once belonged to him. Even before they’d become involved, she’d used his suitcase like an Eddie Bauer outlet. Every time he turned around, she’d pilfered another one when they were on the island. At least four that he could remember offhand. He’d always hated whenever a woman considered his closet her personal hunting ground and took whatever she snagged like it was some proprietary trophy. He couldn’t count the number of women in Washington who possessed a piece of his wardrobe.

  He glanced at the wad of black cotton knit in his hand and he had to smile, realizing he’d more than likely never see it in his possession again. He wasn’t sure why it didn’t bother him more, but it didn’t. In fact, he found it more amusing than anything else, and he actually found himself anxious to see the tee hanging loosely around Piper’s slender curves. The only thing better would be her naked in his arms, but for now he’d settle for this.

  He passed the shirt through a crack in the doorway and returned his attention to the laptop screen, which to his relief had reverted to sleep once more. In spite of finding what she’d been researching by accident, he still didn’t want her thinking he’d been snooping for even the time it would take to explain his unfortunate discovery. If she found anything she deemed important, he was certain she’d share it with him. She absorbed data like a Miracle Sponge and had probably learned more in her short time of surf-searching than he’d bothered to find out since he’d been handed the diagnosis.