Breaking the Rules

BY SUZANNE BROCKMANN

TROUBLESHOOTERS SERIES

The Unsung Hero

The Defiant Hero

Over the Edge

Out of Control

Into the Night

Gone Too Far

Flashpoint

Hot Target

Breaking Point

Into the Storm

Force of Nature

All Through the Night

Into the Fire

Dark of Night

Hot Pursuit

Breaking the Rules

SUNRISE KEY SERIES

Kiss and Tell

The Kissing Game

Otherwise Engaged

OTHER BOOKS

Heartthrob

Forbidden

Freedom’s Price

Body Language

Stand-In Groom

Time Enough for Love

Infamous

Ladies’ Man

Bodyguard

Thanks, as always, to the usual suspects—the team at Ballantine, including my editor, Shauna Summers; my agent, Steve Axelrod; and my patient family: Ed and Jason Gaffney; Melanie, Dawson, and Aidan; and my parents Fred & Lee Brockmann.

A special shout-out to Scott Lutz for being an early-draft reader.

A huge thank-you to both the real Kathy Gordon and the real Nicola Chick. Your generous donations to The First Amendment Project are deeply and sincerely appreciated!

Thank you to the fabulous team at Advanced Physical Therapy in Sarasota: Casey, Lijah, Molly, Pam, and their fearless leader, Kitty Devine. Thanks for getting me back on my feet—and for enduring an author on deadline in the process!

Big thanks to
New York Times
Bestselling Author Brenda Novak for all her hard work raising money for diabetes research. For several years, I’ve participated in Brenda’s enormous annual online charity auction. It’s personal for Brenda, and now, after bringing Ben Gillman to life, it’s become personal for me, too. Visit
www.brendanovak.auctionanything.com
and help make a difference.

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank
you
, my readers, who trust me enough to follow wherever I will take you, and who continue to give me permission to write the stories of my heart.

As always, any mistakes I’ve made or liberties I’ve taken are completely my own.

I
t happened so fast.

The IED—a car bomb, had to be—went off in the middle of the busy neighborhood.

One minute Izzy Zanella was letting Mark Jenkins use him as a sounding board for the pros and cons of putting in an offer on a house before he and his wife, Lindsey, sold their condo—which was ridiculous, because Izzy had never owned property in his thirty years of life and wasn’t likely to change from being a renter anytime soon. But that was probably why Jenk was bouncing his thoughts off Izzy—because said thoughts would, absolutely, bounce.

Of course, their Navy SEAL teammate and resident pain in the ass Danny-Danny-bo-banny Gillman had never owned property either, but he had an Opinion with a capital
O
on the subject—and that
O
stood for boring. Dan had spent most of the morning dourly warning Jenkie to not even
think
about buying anything in this craphell market—not until they had a buyer for the condo locked in.

Jenk, however, was in love—and not just with his adorable yet kick-ass wife. He was in love with his entire life, including Lindsey’s whoopsie-daisy pregnancy. It had just happened, or rather, they’d just found out about it. And even though they had nearly eight full months before Baby Day, Jenk really,
really
wanted to buy what was, without a doubt, his idea of
the
perfect house, particularly since it sat three
perfect houses down from the equally perfect home of SEAL Team Sixteen’s former CO, Tommy Paoletti, whom Markie-Mark still loved nearly as much as Lindsey and their fabulous life.

And Izzy had to admit that living down the street from Tommy, who had a more-the-merrier policy to his almost-weekly cookouts, would be pretty flipping great.

Jenkins didn’t want to hear any more of Gillman’s doom and gloom, which was why he was walking next to Izzy and saying, “If it turns out we can’t sell the condo, we can always go to Plan B—”

Which was when the world went
boom
.

Izzy went from nodding his agreement to soul-kissing the street and inhaling rancid water from a puddle that was part yak piss, part toxic sludge.

He rolled over to do a quick head count of his teammates and encountered Dan Gillman, who was doing the exact same thing, his hand on Izzy’s leg—the better to shake him with.

“Zanella, Christ, are you all right?” Gillman asked, far more urgently than Izzy would have expected, considering that Izzy’s main reason for finding Dan such a royal pain in the ass was the fact that Dan thought
Izzy
was the world’s biggest load. And he’d come to his opinion about
that
long before Izzy had gone and married Danny’s little sister, Eden, which had, inarguably, made things even more awkward.

In the best of times, they were frenemies. In the worst, they gave in to their animosity, at which point one of their fists usually ended up in the other’s face.

And it was usually Danny’s fist and Izzy’s face. Although they’d definitely vice versa’d it a time or two in the recent past.

Izzy had to spit out the yak piss before he could do more than nod, but then he remembered that it wasn’t too long ago that Dan had had the unnerving experience of witnessing a Marine who’d been standing a few scant inches away from him get hit by shrapnel from a similar explosion.

The kid had bled out in a matter of minutes, despite Dan’s frantic attempts at first aid.

“I’m fine,” Izzy reassured him. Their SEAL teammates—Jenkins, Tony V., and Lopez—were all fine, too, thank God.

In fact, Lopez was so fine, he was already running toward the smoke and flames. Izzy scrambled to his feet and followed, with Jenk, Tony, and Gillman hot on his heels.

They’d been a mere four blocks away from the former marketplace that was the bomb’s ground zero, and as they approached, the chaos increased.

More than one bus was on its side. Other cars were flipped upside down, one of them burning.

Civilians were everywhere. Crying. Bleeding. Some of them were running away, some not doing much of anything but lying, dazed, where they’d fallen, slapped down by the blast’s giant invisible hand.

The United States Marines, God bless ’em, were already on the scene, a female officer coolly and efficiently taking command of the rescue effort—getting the injured people out of the vehicles, evacuating the surrounding buildings, putting out the fires.

Izzy’s ears were still ringing, but he saw what Lopez was doing with the hot Marine lieutenant’s blessing. He was creating a first-aid station for the injured, right there on the sidewalk.

Sirens were wailing in the distance, emergency vehicles coming from every direction. But the streets were filled not just with people but with rubble and smoke, and holy shit, the front of an entire row of buildings, including his favorite shawarma stand, had been blown to hell. And the crater from the bomb had made the street here beyond the marketplace impassable every way but from the north.

Help was coming, but it wasn’t going to arrive soon enough.

But Lopez was a hospital corpsman—the Navy equivalent of an Army medic—and he was focused on saving the lives that he could. Normally soft-spoken, he was using his outdoor voice to inform any other medical personnel on the scene about his makeshift triage area.

It was then, as Izzy was pointing out Lopez to an ancient woman who was half carrying her bloody and dazed nearly-elderly-himself son, that he noticed Mark Jenkins was looking a little pale. The height-challenged
SEAL was holding his right wrist tight against his side, as if he’d jammed it bad when he’d forcefully come into close personal contact with the street.

“Y’okay?” Izzy stepped closer to ask, exactly as Dan, too, came over and inquired, “Jenkins, are you hurt?”

Jenk shook his head in a mix of both yes and no. “Help me find a piece of wood for a splint.”

“Shit,” Izzy said as he helped Danny sift through the rubble of what used to be that restaurant. “Is it broken?”

The owner had survived, thank God, but he was sitting now among the debris, stunned. “Hang on, Mr. Wahidi,” Izzy called to the man. “I’ll be right over to help you.”

Everything was either too big or too splintered or too full of nasty-ass nails.

“A brace,” Jenkins corrected himself as he bent to pick up a piece of what had once been a sign for tea. “I meant a brace. Son of a
bitch.
”

His wrist was definitely broken.

He turned another more greenish shade of pale, his golly-gee freckles standing out on his nose, because he’d jarred his arm trying to measure it against that piece of wood.

“Maybe you should sit down, bro,” Gillman suggested, which was stupid. No way was Jenkins going to sit down and surrender to a relatively mild injury when there were so many more severely wounded people to assist.

Of course, maybe Dan only meant it, like,
Maybe you should sit down for a sec, bro, because it is going to hurt like a screaming bitch when we belt your arm to that splint
.

But any mention of giving in to the pain would have pissed Izzy off royally were he in Jenk’s tiny boots, so he took charge. “He’s fine where he is,” he told Dan, told Jenkins, too, because the man looked like he needed encouragement, and adding to Dan, “Don’t bother with your belt.”