Beyond the Rules

by Doranna Durgin

  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.

  For a wistful moment, Kimmer wished they could simply lock the door and exchange frantic Kool-Aid flavored kisses. Forget Hank, forget family…just Rio and Kimmer, warming up the house on a beautiful spring day.

  But Hank was on the way. They had no more than minutes. In fact, he should have been here by now. Kimmer strongly suspected he’d gotten lost. She wished she could take credit for the missing street sign between her street and the main road
…it was enough that she’d neglected to mention it to Hank. She sighed heavily and reached for the cold glass.

  The sigh got his attention. He turned to look at her, tossing the hand towel back into haphazard place over the stove handle, his mouth already open to say something, but abruptly hesitating on the words. He stared; she raised her eyebrows. He cleared his throat. “I like that sweater.”

  Kimmer smoothed down the hem. “It’s unexpectedly easy to remove,” she informed him.

  “That’s not fair.” He seemed to have forgotten he held his drink.

  She shrugged at his ruefulness over Hank’s impending arrival. “You’re the one who wanted me to give Hank his say.”

  That brought him back down to earth. “But—” He narrowed his eyes at her, accenting the angle of them “—you told me you couldn’t use your knack on me.”

  “I can’t,” she said, sipping the drink. It wasn’t what she’d have chosen, but it was cold and felt good on her throat.

  “Ah.” His expression turned more rueful yet. “That obvious, am I?”

  “Oh, yeah.” She gave him a moment to digest the notion, then nodded at the front door. “Let’s wait on the porch. I don’t want to invite him in.”

  He followed her outside, latching the screen door against the cat she seemed to have acquired when Rio moved in—an old white marina cat with black blotches, half an ear and half a front leg missing. Rio had seemed almost as surprised as Kimmer when it showed up along with him, muttering some lame-ass explanation about how it was too old to survive alone at the dock. OldCat, he called it.

  Big softie. That was Rio, deep down. Too intensely affected by the lives of those he cared about, even the life of a used-up cat.

  Though the cat did look comfortable on her front window sill.

  Kimmer helped herself to a corner of the porch swing and sat cross-legged, shuffling off her Skechers. Rio took up the rest of the seat and stretched his legs out before him, taking up the duty of nudging the thing back and forth ever so slightly. Down by the barely visible stop sign, a blotchy green-on-green Suburban traveled slowly down the main road, passing by her unidentified street.

  Rio settled his glass on the arm of the swing. “You may have to go get him.”

  Kimmer didn’t think so.

  After a moment, she said, “When I was little, my mother used to rock with me.”

  “I thought—”

  “Before she died,” Kimmer said dryly. “Sometimes my father would be out with my brothers—some sports event, usually. It was the only time we had together. And she spent it rocking me, trying to pretend she wasn’t crying. It was too late for her, she said, but not for me. So she spent that time whispering her rules to me. How to survive. Making damn sure I wouldn’t end up like she did.”

  He frowned, hitched his leg up and shifted his back into the corner pillow. They’d been a long time sitting this day; no doubt it was starting to ache. If so, he didn’t pay it any close attention. “You’ve never really said—”

  “No. I haven’t. Who’d want to?” She felt herself grow smaller, drawn in to be as inconspicuous as a child hiding desperately in an attic. Except as soon as she realized it, she shook herself out of it, deliberately relaxed her legs to more of an open lotus position. “I don’t want to go into it right now. I can’t. I’ve got Hank to deal with. But I wanted you to know at least that much, before you watch how I handle this. Every time I say or do something you wouldn’t even consider saying or doing to your family, think about the fact that my mother used her most precious private time making sure I knew no one would take care of me but me. Making sure I always knew to have a way out. That I always knew what the people around me were doing. That I always saw them first.”

  “You’re talking in halves.” He prodded her with a sock-enclosed toe, gently, and then withdrew. “There’s so much you’re leaving out.”

  She heard the sounds before she even reached the house. Flesh against flesh. Chairs overturning. A muffled cry.

  When she was younger, she wouldn’t let herself believe it. But she was eight now, and she had her world figured out. She flung her school papers to the ground, gold stars and all. She charged up the porch stairs and through the creaky screen door and all the way to the kitchen, and she was only an instant away from launching herself onto her father’s back, right where the sweat seeped through his shirt from the effort of hitting her mama, when Mama looked up from the floor and cried out for her to stop.

  Startled, her father turned around to glare at her. “You’d better think twice, little girl.”

  She’d looked at her mama, pleading. Let me help. Her mama shook her head, right there where she’d fallen against the cupboard, her lip bleeding and her eye swelling, the kitchen chairs tumbled around her. She lifted her chin and she said, “Remember what I told you, Kimmer. Stay out of this.”

  And her father closed the door.

  “Yeah,” Kimmer told Rio. “There’s so much I’m leaving out.”

  Hank’s Suburban crawled into her driveway only a few moments later, as Rio did what only Rio could do—establish a connection between himself and Kimmer solely with the honest, thoughtful intensity of his gaze. He’d done so even before he really knew her, baffling Kimmer into temporary retreat. Always it was about trying to understand what lay beneath the surface—and though he usually did a spooky job of uncovering just that, this time Kimmer could see the struggle. He couldn’t quite fathom how it had truly been, or how resolutely it had shaped her. “You don’t have to understand right this minute,” she told him, a quiet murmur as Hank slammed the reluctant door of the old Suburban and made his way up to the porch with misplaced confidence. “Just keep it in mind.”

  And Rio nodded, going quiet in that way that would leave her free to deal with Hank.

  Hank jammed his hands in his back pockets and settled into the arrogance of his hipshot stance. “I get the feeling you’re not going to invite me in.”

  “It’s a pleasant afternoon.” Kimmer looked out over the yard, where daffodils and forsythia still bloomed. “Why waste it?”

  “Kimmer. That was Mama’s nickname, once. And you’re just like her. She didn’t know how to take care of family, either. She died to get away from us…you just ran.”

  She gave a little laugh. “What makes you madder? That I escaped, or that I’ve done well?”

  “Is that what you call this?” He glanced at the little house behind her, the modest yard before her. The Morrows on one side, the Flints on the other.

  “Ah.” She looked over the yard in bloom, that in which she found such peace. “If this is your strategy to keep me listening, it’s not working very well so far.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a meeting to attend, so if you’ve got something to say, best say it. Otherwise, go away.”

  Rio knew better than to give her a puzzled glance, even though he knew she had nothing planned for the afternoon, that Hunter had her on call but not on assignment. That she was expected to visit and confer on some upcoming operations, but had no set time for doing so. No, Hunter wasn’t what she had in mind. Not with those long legs of his stretched out beside her—not to mention the smudge of Kool-Aid blue at the corner of his mouth. Quite clearly, it needed to be kissed off. Maybe Raspberry Reaction was her favorite flavor after all.

  And then Hank blurted, “I need your help.”

  For an instant, words eluded her. When she found them, they were blunt. “You must be kidding.”

  “You think I came all the way up here to kid you?” Hank threw his arms up, a helpless gesture. “You think I want to be here talking to you and your—”

  “Ryobe Carlsen,” Rio said in the most neutral of tones. “Konnichiwa. We can shake hands another time.”

  Hank’s eyes narrowed, and suddenly Kimmer thought they looked nothing like hers at all. “You were there,” he said to Rio. “Leo said there was a man involved.”

  “There were several, in fact. But I was one of them. I was certainly there
when Leo mentioned how you planned to hand Kimmer over to him.”

  Relief washed through Kimmer. Rio might not truly understand what Kimmer’s family did—or more to the point, didn’t—mean to her, but he knew Hank had a lot to prove. She should have known, should have trusted Rio.

  Of course, that wasn’t something that came easily. Emotional trust was against the rules.

  She took a deep breath, suddenly aware of just how much this encounter was taking from her. Tough Kimmer, keeping up her tough front when all she wanted to do was ease across the swing into Rio’s arms. Except—

  It was her own job to take care of herself. Her very first lesson.

  So at the end of that deep breath, she made herself sound bored. “I can’t imagine how you think I can help you at all.”

  “Leo said…well, hell, you made an impression on Leo. He says you took down the Murty brothers when you were in Mill Springs. And he came back to Munroville spouting stories about terrorists. He said you’d taken them out.”

  Kimmer flicked her gaze at Rio. “I wasn’t alone.”

  “He said they shot you, and you didn’t even flinch.”

  She touched her side, where the scar was fading. It had only been a crease at that. She shrugged. “I was mad.”

  “He said,” Hank continued doggedly, “that you were connected. That your people came into Mill Springs and did such a cleanup job that the cops never had anything to follow through on. Even those two guys you sent to the hospital—Homeland Security walked away with them.”

  “Leo talks a lot,” Kimmer said. But she suppressed a smile. Damned if Hank didn’t actually sound impressed. “And you still haven’t gotten to the point.”

  “The point,” Hank told her, “is that that’s the kind of help I need.”

  “You want me to get shot for you?” Kimmer shook her head. “Not gonna happen.”

  “You gotta make this hard, don’t you?” Hank shifted his weight impatiently, coming precariously close to Kimmer’s freshly blooming irises.

  Yes. But she had the restraint to remain silent, and he barged right on through. “Look, I’m in over my head. I let some people use a storage building for…something. They turned out to be a rough crew, more’n I wanted to deal with. An’ I’ve got a wife and kids—bet you didn’t even know I had kids—and I wanted out. Except I saw a murder, damned bad luck. They know I want out, and they don’t trust me to keep my mouth shut.” He looked at her with a defiant jut to his jaw, daring her to react to the story. To judge him.