Beyond the Rules (6 page)

At midafternoon, the area’s surfeit of farmers and grape
growers were at work, but few of them took to the road and Kimmer had command of it to travel south in record time. She pulled past the lot of the old barn converted to a visitor’s center and around behind to the addition and modern outbuildings where working areas of the fully functioning winery were located. The double-level cellar started beneath the business offices and ran under the barn. Kimmer liked to walk it in the hottest part of summer and absorb the stringent smells of tannin and crushed grape and wine and damp concrete.

Not far from the parking lot sat the Hunter family home, a surprisingly modest structure. And snuggled away behind the winery’s business section, buffered by discreet security measures, the Hunter Agency maintained its own entrance to its offices, one that was, without fanfare, labeled Viniculture Development.

Kimmer reached it and flipped up the weather cover over the security pad next to a steel door that gleamed even in the darkness, pressing her thumb against the glass. It gave a brief blue glow and then issued an invitation with the quiet
thunk
of disengaging locks.

As she pushed through the door she considered this abrupt change of plans. Hunter maintained an extensive string of operatives, from part-timers to those who lived undercover, and although they all had specialties, they were also widely cross-trained. Kimmer herself fell in the middle of the spectrum—a full-time operative who went from job to job, usually undercover. “Chimera,” they called her, because she was so adept at reading people that she could live up to their expectations, going undetected. She could be all things to all people.

Hunter made good use of her knack to suss out people and
situations, using her where their background intel had failed, inserting her into quickly developing situations to assess personalities and even clients. Often their game plan developed around Kimmer’s reports.

Kimmer went down the curving, carpeted concrete stairs. They spit her out at the end of a long hallway, where she had to navigate another security feature, this one a chamber of bulletproof glass that let her in but only let her out when it was satisfied about her identity. The whole handprint this time.

Gadgets. You gotta love ’em
. Personally she trusted her own judgment over any gadget, and she was just waiting for the time one of their own became stuck in this flytrap.

With a pneumatic hiss, the door slid aside and released her into the Hunter Agency proper, a place of no-nonsense but quality furnishings, never metal where warm oak would do, everything oiled and polished. No doors squeaked; no dust dared settle or fingerprints linger. She went straight to Owen’s office, through the small area occupied by his secretary during “normal” working hours, and rapped lightly on his door before opening it and inviting herself in.

He looked up from his desk, expectation on his craggy features. He raised a heavy, dark brow at her. “What took you so long?”

Since she’d basically taken no time at all, Kimmer ignored him. She cared more about the fact that he was annoyed and trying to hide it. “I see you,” she told him, sitting in the chair across from his desk. They both knew she wasn’t talking about his mere physical presence.
I see your hidden stress and anger
.

Owen sighed, acknowledging the annoyance as he shuffled the papers he’d been studying aside. “Bad timing,” he said.

“Is there ever a good time to blow up a propane tank and a couple of bad guys with it?”

That got a wry smile out of him as he leaned back in his chair. “Point well taken. And I do realize you did what you could to contain the situation.”

“Given that I had zero notice.” Kimmer scowled at the thought of Hank’s arrival, and then again at the way he’d rabbited from the hilltop. “If he’d just stayed on the damned hill where I put him…”

Owen shrugged. “I’m not sure I blame him. I think your brother was in way over his head.”

Kimmer thought back over the events of the previous day. “He came here hoping I would kill them. He thinks I’m the kind of person who’ll just…do that. And damned if I didn’t turn them both into toast. Never even had a chance to talk to them.” She frowned at the situation a moment. “There’s no telling if they’ll ever be able to ID the guys. You can bet Hank’s not telling.”

Silence fell between them, until Owen said, “And how’s your brother strike you?”

Kimmer blinked. “What do you mean? You know I can’t read him. A fact for which I’m almost grateful, I should say.”

“I’m not sure it adds up, that’s all,” Owen said. “If Hank saw someone killed, why is it safe to go back?”

“He told me the dead guys were the only others to know about it. I gather it wasn’t a large organization. Just a few guys running a chop shop under the cover of Hank’s salvage business.”

“Hmm.” Owen gave a thoughtful rub of his chin. “Would have been nice to have talked to those two men.”

“Too bad toast doesn’t talk.” Pieces of toast, to judge by the condition of the sedan after the explosion. “Wildly scat
tered” was an understated way to have put it; identification would be impossible unless they’d been in the DNA database. No wonder Owen felt he needed to appease the local law agencies. “Tell me you’re not sending me away.”

“I’m not sending you away.”

“Because I really can’t—” Oh. She looked at him, realized she’d been about to say she couldn’t leave Rio right now, not again. Not with his grandmother sick. Then she realized she didn’t actually know if that was best. Maybe Rio just needed to do his thing. “Okay, then what’s up?”

“You’re going to put your unique abilities to work right here.”

She tipped her head at him, an unspoken
is that so?

“The governor is making his rounds across the state this spring,” Owen said. “Election year prep. I’ve offered Hunter’s services as backup security. You won’t be the only one. I want you working undercover as he comes through Watkins Glen next week. From arrival to departure, I want you in the background. Watching.”

Because if someone aimed to cause trouble, she’d spot it before anyone else. He didn’t have to say it. Hunter had taken advantage of her knack often enough that such things had been said many times before.

“The others?” she asked.

“Three other agents. Also in the background, but in an obvious security capacity. You won’t have to interface with them. You’ll be reporting straight to the chief of police. You’ll also be blending in to their arrangements, not the other way around. The point is to provide a seamless extra layer of protection without causing them any extra work.”

Kimmer tapped her fingers on her knee. “Are we expecting trouble?”

“Not at all.” Owen smiled at her, the look he got when he was happy at how he’d worked things out. “It was an offer I made to take some of the pressure off the department. A gesture of goodwill, you might say. Or even by way of apology.”

Some gesture. Hunter Agency time didn’t come cheap. Kimmer winced.

Owen raised a hand. “Look at me,” he said. “I want you to know I’m not trying to pull one over on you here. The truth is, it’s good for us to make these gestures now and then. We want the local law to think of us as people who work with them and within their boundaries. We want them to understand that this is our home, too.”

Kimmer looked. She found him unfazed by her scrutiny…possibly even slightly amused. She made a grumbling noise and settled deeper in her chair. “So when—?”

“The end of the week. Give the chief a call first thing tomorrow.” He tossed a business card across the desk—one of his own, but he’d scrawled a phone number on the back. A real high-tech moment.

Kimmer stretched forward to scoop up the card…and then she sat there, deep in the chair, flipping the card back and forth in her fingers.

After a moment, Owen raised his eyebrows. “This isn’t about the new assignment.” When she shot him an annoyed look, he just grinned. “You know, the rest of us are able to make observations and deductions, too. I know you well enough for that. More than well enough, for all you don’t like to hear it. So spit it out—what’s bothering you?”

Kimmer hesitated as something on his flat screen computer monitor caught his attention. He turned to type in a few quick words and then turned back to her, expectant.

Damn. Maybe she should have run while she had the chance.

But she hadn’t, so she took a deep breath. “You have a family…”

“A rather large one.” Owen smiled a compressed and crooked smile.

“Then…when you get bad news about one of you…”

After she’d hesitated long enough, he prompted, “Bad news as in ‘Dave’s breaking away to do his own thing instead of following the family business,’ or bad news as in someone’s dead?”

“Jeez, Owen, you’ve got to let that thing with Dave go,” Kimmer said. “He’s still in the family business. He’s just doing it differently.”

“Excellent use of distraction,” he said. “Two points. And minus two points for evading the question.”

Kimmer gave him a sulky look, just because she knew she could get away with it. “As in bad news, someone’s sick. Someone
old
is sick. Someone who means a lot to the whole family.”

“Got it. What about it?”

“What’s…someone else supposed to do? Oh, screw it. Me. I. What am
I
supposed to do? I don’t get the whole family thing. I don’t get hanging together through thick and thin. I don’t get how you drop everything and try to make things right even if you know you can’t. I don’t
get
any of it! How am I supposed to do the right thing?”

Owen cleared his throat. “Rio has had some bad news, I take it.”

Kimmer nodded. “I feel like I’m supposed to do something about it. But I can’t fake it. I can’t even truly believe it—that his family could be that close.”

Owen hesitated for a long, long moment, looking at Kimmer until she felt uneasy. He thought she should have this an
swer. And at last, he gave it to her. “What if it were your mother?”

She almost jumped right to her feet. To prevent herself, she froze, stiffening enough that she thought she might even creak. “That’s not fair, Owen. It’s not the same, not the same
at all
.” She and her mother had been bonded by abuse and adversity. They’d never had a normal relationship—just an intense one. “My mother taught me how to survive. But she also married my father in the first place…and then she left me with him. I don’t have a relationship with her, I have a memory
of
her. And I learned the very hard lesson that even the people who might love you still end up leaving you.” A long speech for her, especially when it came to this topic.

Owen shook his head. “You can’t truly believe that. Or why invite Rio down here?”

That was easy. “Because he was willing to take the chance.” She relaxed slightly; it was either that or turn into one giant body cramp. “Don’t get me wrong. What we have is…something I’d never even considered for myself. But that doesn’t mean it’s forever. As soon as he sees an advantage in being elsewhere…” She stopped herself. She hadn’t meant to say that much. Not nearly that much. In fact, she hadn’t even realized she believed it possible of Rio until she heard her own words.

Maybe she was just afraid of it.

Owen regarded her for a good long while—one of the few people comfortable enough with himself that he could do that, knowing of her knack. Most people fidgeted, wondering what she saw. Owen held himself quietly, with the unusual dignity he carried around like an extra jacket. “As to your original question,” he said finally. “Think of your mother in those days when she was the most important to you. When she could still
protect you. And then think what would have made you feel better when you were frightened for her.”

Not to wonder if my damned father would come for me next
. But that was the easy answer, the smart-ass answer that while perfectly truthful, also didn’t plumb the question as deeply as could be done. So she nodded. “You think I don’t have to get the whole family thing in order to…be there…for Rio.”

“I think you don’t,” he agreed, and then, totally unexpectedly, reached into a drawer for a set of keys and tossed them her way. “These belong to Hank’s Suburban.”

“It’s fixed already?” Kimmer eyed the keys in disbelief.

“Consider it a favor,” Owen said dryly.

“I cannot imagine you wanting to do my brother a favor after all of this.”

Owen snorted, as coarse a response as he ever made. “The favor was for you,” he said. “And come to think of it, for me, too. I need your head on straight next week.”

“My make-nice week,” she murmured, and reached for the keys. “Don’t worry, Owen. From the way Hank’s acting, he’s had enough of me, too.”

T
he house clanged with the sound of free-weights landing on the thin, cheap basement carpet over the concrete floor. Kimmer hesitated just inside the doorway, tossing her girly red ostrich tote on the nearest chair and her matching red driving cap on top of it. Otherwise her outfit was demure enough: black stovepipe jeans with elaborate stitching on the calves, a black silk turtleneck and a gauzy vest over it all. Just the red at her wrist—her watchband—and the red detailing on her flat, open-toe sandals.

Just enough to peek out at the world in a sassy way, and to leave her brother in the position of snatching surreptitious looks when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. For his mouth to open as though he might say something as she drove him to Full Cry Winery to pick up the Suburban, and then to close again on those words unspoken.

She’d pulled into the employee parking lot near the back
end of the Suburban, and she hesitated without turning off the engine—without even putting the vehicle in Park. “Look, Hank,” she said as he reached for the door handle. “Now you’ve seen me. Now you can go back and tell the others that I’m up here, but I didn’t turn out the way you wanted and I can’t be convinced to change and I don’t want anything to do with you. Any of you. Whatever power you once had over my life is long gone.”

Hank grunted in an unconvinced way. “Maybe not. But you didn’t turn me away.”

“I didn’t have the chance.” Kimmer kept her tone flat. “Don’t make the mistake of bringing trouble to my home twice.”

Hank shook his head. “You’ve got your nice car and your house and you think you’re better’n all of us now, but you still haven’t learned the first thing about what it means to be a family.”

“Wrong.” She smiled at him, showing teeth. “I know what it means to you, and I want none of it.”

With that he’d gotten out of her car, hauling his cheap nylon duffel from the backseat. He threw her a sarcastic, half-assed salute and headed for his own vehicle, and Kimmer laid down a satisfying strip of rubber on the way out.

And now Kimmer stood in the entry of her house, thinking that it seemed like forever since she and Rio had been here alone and not just a handful of days.

“Kimmer?” Rio’s voice filtered up from the floor beneath her.

“Here,” she said. “And alone.”

He muttered something she couldn’t quite catch and didn’t really need to, and there was a final clink of shifting weight before he climbed the old wooden stairs leading from the
basement, creaking on those fourth and seventh steps as usual. He came out of the kitchen with a towel around his neck and one of those T-shirts with the cut-off sleeves that showed his biceps to perfection, and that pair of shorts that hugged his ass just right.

“You’re wearing those on purpose,” she said, narrowing her eyes at him. Worry dogged his eyes, but the tough-guy-I’m-working-out expression let her know he wasn’t interested in talking about it—about his grandmother—just now.

He grinned, convincingly enough. He’d been drinking that Kool-Aid again, leaving a smirch of blue at the corner of his mouth. “Do you think so?” He stalked closer, hands on either end of the towel, an exaggerated prowl. Sweat blotted his shirt here and there, but not so much as to cry out for a shower.

She didn’t answer. She told him, “Hank is gone. And Hunter’s not sending me anywhere.”

That diverted his prowling a moment. “No?”

“I’ve got some local spy-girl duty,” she said. “Maybe I’ll have the chance to throw myself in front of an important political figure in the line of duty.”

“The governor’s visit,” he guessed. “That’s not bad. It’s barely more than a drive-through.”

“As penance goes, I’ll take it. But sooner or later, I’ll go out on assignment again.”

She didn’t have to say any more; he shook his head. “I still haven’t decided if I want to go back to that kind of work,” he said. “I’ve been burned badly enough. I don’t have that need anymore, the drive to go out and take care of the things no one else even knows about. Make the world safe,
blah blah blah
. Been there, done that…and there are others better qualified than I. You, for instance.”

“You were driven enough last fall.”

“That was different. That was family. You know that. And you know I hardly blend into the crowd. I found ways to use that to my advantage with the agency. I was good for drawing attention away from other case officers when they needed it.”

She could well imagine that. At six-three and with that bright blond hair, those striking angles in his features, the natural warmth of his rich brown eyes, he’d drawn her attention quickly enough.

“I can be hidden, but…it’s not what I’m best at. And my back means there’s no way Hunter could use me in their more…active assignments. I’m done with paramilitary. So…” He shrugged. “I can find work with boats here, too. I don’t have any problem with that.”

“It’s less of a commitment,” she guessed, surprised that it hurt to say it. It was common sense, that was all. Dabble your toes in the water before jumping in. If she hadn’t just had that conversation with Owen she wouldn’t think twice about it. That conversation in which she realized that she still fully expected Rio to walk away when it suited him.

Who could blame him? It wasn’t as if Kimmer herself had ever been anything but a loner, using her personal interactions as transactions and trade-offs.

And Rio just shrugged, a gesture that neither confirmed nor denied but simply didn’t get into it.

Kimmer took a deliberate breath. “Okay,” she said, letting go of the subject quickly enough to surprise him. “Besides, anyone would need time to recover after meeting my very suave brother. Did he leave you any of those fried pork rinds?”

“OldCat loves ’em,” Rio reported.

Kimmer shuddered with exaggeration. She tipped her head back and scrubbed her fingers through her near-black hair—not long enough for the curls to do any more than suggest soft waves along her head and a few wispy, feathery curls at her nape, but still long enough to ruffle under her fingers. She shook like a dog, shoulders all the way down to her fingers, torso down to her hips, making a rolling-
R
noise of a shivery nature. “There,” she said, straightening to find Rio watching her with interest. “All those Hank vibes…gone.”

“Do that again,” he said.

“Do which? The whole—?” and she shook her arms to demonstrate.

“More the part with the hips.”

She gave him a speculative look from beneath half-lidded eyes; his own widened. She had no idea how he’d ever been a spy guy.

Because what he shows you isn’t what he’d ever show anyone else
.

He swallowed visibly. A flicker of tension ran up his arm, a brief clench of muscle. Kimmer murmured, “You goof,” as if it were actually an endearing phrase, and then a moment later it occurred to her that she was kissing him and
had
been kissing him for who knows how long. Pressed up against his slightly damp shirt, fingers pressed into the hard muscle of his arms, hips against his and angled to connect most intimately. She pulled back long enough to tell him in her most serious voice, “You must use this power only for good,” and then to laugh with pleasure at the dazed expression already glazing his eyes.

Somewhere in the back of her head Owen’s words trickled through, and she followed his advice the only way she knew how. A long, slow kiss that said
I’m here for you
. A
lick and nibble at the corner of his jaw,
I care
. A delicate nip at his ear, one that made him groan, made his knees buckle down in the way they sometimes did, made him surge back up again to hold her more tightly, lifting until her toes merely brushed the floor. Slow kisses, her fingers skimming his back beneath the shirt and down, caressing cheeks that clenched under her touch.
I’m here. I care. I love, as best I can
.

A quick hitch-and-lift and he pulled her higher, high enough so she could wrap her legs around him, pressing against him so snugly, so intimately, that they might not have been clothed at all.

Except for one thing. “Damn seam,” Rio panted, his mouth muffled against her neck.

Kimmer threw her head back to laugh, trusting him to hold her, her arms only loosely around his shoulders. He took the opportunity to lick her cleavage right through the silk turtleneck, a whispery caress that sent shivers down her spine and turned the heat up between them. “Stairs,” she told him, suddenly just as breathless as he.

He headed for them, for the bedroom. But the stairs were as far as they got, a tumble of motion and sensation and need. And when Rio finally cried out in completion on the heels of Kimmer’s gasps, his voice held emotional pain as well as physical joy. Afterward he held her for a long time, cuddling on the stairs as though they were the grandest feather bed while dusk crept in around them and made shadows to hide the things they weren’t sure they wanted the other to see.

Worry. Doubt. Vulnerability.

Desperate hope that two people of such wildly disparate backgrounds could somehow maintain their fledgling bonds in spite of it all.

Kimmer stood in the doorway of her guest room and looked in on the bed still rumpled from use, every detail revealed in the cheery morning sunshine slanted across the end of the bed and across the dirty sock hanging from the post of the open footboard. No, the sheets weren’t pulled from the bed and quietly piled for the laundry. No, the guest towels hadn’t been gathered from the tiny guest bathroom. Not a surprise. The bed had waited three days before she’d felt like dealing with it. She’d seen it already. Now she picked up the sock between two fingers and dropped it in the wastebasket.

Upon tackling the bedding she discovered a pair of dirty briefs. Boxers or briefs…
I didn’t really want to know
. Those, too, went into the trash, and then she stuffed the linens down the laundry chute and gave in to the impulse to wash her hands.

He was married and had two daughters, he’d said. She hadn’t asked about the woman, hadn’t asked about the kids. Hadn’t wanted to know. But now she wondered who would possibly marry such an unrepentant, unmitigated male chauvinist, a man who didn’t even hide his abuse behind a public mask of nice.

Then again, her mother had married her father, hadn’t she? She’d told Kimmer that he’d been so sweet to her at first, so solicitous, so caring. Until the caring slowly turned to controlling…and then once he’d hit her, he had to tear her down in order to justify himself. By the time Kimmer came along, it was a way of life—and her mother, who had desperately hoped to avoid bringing a daughter into the situation, finally ran out of luck.

Hank had never been sweet. He’d probably got some girl pregnant and had leveraged his way into marriage. That was his style. Nothing clever, just brute force thinking itself sly.

So what had he really been up to during his time here? He hadn’t truly wanted a family reunion—he’d left as soon as he was able. He hadn’t paid any attention to the undeniably charming countryside, hadn’t availed himself of any winery tours….

Kimmer snorted to herself. If Hank drank wine, it was the kind that came in a gallon carton.

Hank had certainly been in enough trouble upon his arrival, but who would care enough to chase his sorry ass all the way up to the Finger Lakes in person? It seemed to her that if someone had a car-theft ring and chop-shop thing going, there ought to be enough goonboys hanging around to send a couple after Hank.

But according to Hank, they’d cut the head off the monster—ended the threat. He certainly hadn’t seemed worried as he’d driven off in his newly gleaming vehicle, the CD player blasting an old Conway Twitty album. Not even with the potential of more police questioning lingering over his head, and the fainter potential of accessory charges in the goonboy toasting.

Hmm.

Kimmer pulled her nightshirt over her head and tossed it down the laundry chute as well, padding naked through the second floor and wishing she’d find Rio to pounce upon, but he’d gone out early, checking out a sailboat being sold at the dock she’d nearly blown up. Serendipity and all that. Didn’t matter. She was headed south for Watkins Glen. She’d spoken to Chief Harrison several times, checked in with her fellow Hunter agents, and now needed to go scope out the small park in which the governor would make his short speech and appearance. A few trees, a gorgeous smattering of lilacs in bloom, some strategically placed park benches, a bandstand
for the governor himself, and the center of town closed to vehicle traffic. A morning of lurking, an hour of listening and watching, a few staged photo ops, and then the governor would drive away to be someone else’s concern.

Although
concern
was a mighty strong word in relation to the actual threat level here, which was, in Kimmer’s estimation, zero.

Still, she’d play secret weapon for Owen and the chief. Chimera.

Today Chimera was no one special, just a young woman on a walk through the center of town. She might even renew her driver’s license while she was down there. No one had to know she was wearing Pooh Bear underwear beneath the wide-legged tan utility-style cords she’d pulled on, or that the wine-colored top, long sleeves tied off with drawstrings and shoulders shirred at the edge of a wide neckline, hid a multitude of whitened scars, thin and old—except for the still-pink furrow low on her side where saving Carolyne the previous fall had cost her a bullet.

They especially didn’t know that her back pocket held a small, stout toothpick knife, that her abstract leaf necklace unfolded into another blade, or that she had a .38 secured in a SmartCarry holster between Pooh Bear and the cords. A conundrum of contradictions, Rio had called her once—but he’d done it with that smile that meant he liked her that way. She dumped her things into a one-shoulder contoured backpack and made sure to include the handmade miniature war club that had been her first reliable weapon.

She didn’t expect to need any of it today. But they were all old friends, and only completely abandoned at airport security.

To all of that she added her small digital camera, the
latest spiffy FinePix. Focusing on the world through a camera helped her to isolate the important parts, to burn the moments into her memory. She might never print the images, might not even download them to her computer. She certainly never considered anything so trite as an album. Just taking the pictures often did the trick.