Exception to the Rule (15 page)

“But you do,” he noted.

“I do,” she said—and then she put out a hand to stop his progress, shifting in a way that made him think she was checking the scope. “Movement,” she said shortly, quietly. “Not with any true purpose. I’d say they don’t know how close they are.”

“I’d like to know how they found this place at all.”
He touched her arm and she understood instantly, handing him the scope and keeping it aimed away from the nurse’s station, out toward the woods.

Rio maintained the angle as he brought to scope to his eye, and caught a bare glimpse of movement in the monocular blue-green field of view.
We’ve been found
. His gloved hand clenched around the scope, the cold night closing in around him even as danger closed in around Carolyne. For all Kimmer was an unknown, at the moment he was just as glad to have her at his side. She was a dynamo with plenty of bite, and Caro was lucky to have those teeth looking out for her.

“We’ve got to reach her before they do,” he said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. Panic had no place in this situation, no place at all. But the last time he’d been in a sticky situation, he’d lost good friends. This time it was Carolyne in that building, Carolyne at stake. He inhaled sharply, too loudly, hunting the laid-back calm that had served him so well overseas. Laid-back…until the moment was right.

Then he headed on down the path, keeping track of Kimmer through her steady breathing, and squelching the cynical voice that insisted Kimmer was at Rio’s side merely to reach Carolyne’s side.

Trust
. Had to be earned. She’d had that right.

Another hundred yards, across the clearing, and they’d be there. They’d grab Caro and run. A minute away at this pace, less if they traded a little noise for speed.

Just beside the nurse’s station, a branch thwacked back into place with the whoosh of whipping leaves and slender wood. The astonished cry of surprise pinpointed the encroaching man with perfect accuracy.
They’re already here
. Here and closing in, but not quite there yet—

But when a companion called back to the noise maker, low and commanding, his voice came from right beside the door.

Already here
.

T
he nurse’s station curtains hid no more than before. Even from here Kimmer could see as Carolyne reacted to the noise outside the building, rising to her feet to give a worried glance out the window. Rio quietly groaned. No doubt he’d told her if she heard something she should turn out the lights, hole up and give him a chance to crash the scene before the goonboys actually got their hands on her. Instead she’d given them a juicy look at the room layout and identified her position exactly.

Only a moment later, the door—never meant to be a security barrier—crashed open, creating a rectangle of light around the men who entered. Carolyne’s scream of fear carried clearly across the small clearing. Rio stiffened, ready to move.

Words weren’t fast enough, strong enough. Kimmer grabbed Rio’s vest between his shoulder blades, yank
ing him back far enough to throw him off balance. He turned on her, not quite swinging but definitely going for a grab. Ducking under his guard, she came in close, gathering up his vest in both hands to give him a little shake. “You can’t do that!”

He glared, his angular features going hard in the scant light.

She swallowed a sudden awareness of his size, and of just how much willful power she held in her grip. They hung in a precarious balance of wills, and when she spoke it was with as much quiet conviction as she could muster. “We can’t move in until we’re prepared to take them down. And I mean
prepared
—right now we don’t even know their numbers.”

“I know enough,” he said, and she felt the growl of it through her hands. In the roadside store he’d seemed almost amiable as he fended off the goonboy; at the picnic he’d been downright easygoing. Now Kimmer saw none of that—not the laid-back nature and not the thoughtfulness that came with it. Now he was nothing more than trouble with a go switch.

“If you go in, I’ll have to fall back,” she said, not backing off in the least. “They’ll beat this brush. They’ll trigger all your trip lines, and then if anything happens to you it’ll be all that much harder for me to do anything about it.”

He took hold of her vest, a mirror of her own grip, and he jerked his head toward the nurse’s station. “That’s my cousin,” he said, and Kimmer’s vest tightened under her arms as her feet got light on the ground. Holy Moly, he was taking her right off the ground, and she wasn’t even sure he knew it. “My
family
. It might
not mean anything to you, but it sure as hell means something to me. Caro came to me for help, and I’m
not going to let this happen to her
.”

Kimmer let her voice grow cruel, as if she weren’t currently defying gravity. “Get it together, spy boy. If you want to help her, get it together
now
.” And then, as her weight quite suddenly returned to her feet and he removed his hands as if suddenly realizing how close he’d come to flinging her away or possibly even at a goonboy, she added matter-of-factly, “Besides, they aren’t going to hurt her. Not yet. Not unless we scare them into it.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Well,” Kimmer said, slowly releasing her hold on him and smoothing the crumpled material flat. She rested her palms on his chest partly because she wanted him to remember she was right there and would damn well grab him again, and partly so she could sense every shift of his body, and would know just
when
to damn well grab him again. “As it happens, I can. I have this knack with body language. Or did you think Hunter plucked me off the street on the strength of my charming personality?” He gave a short, hard laugh; she ignored it, aside from automatically gauging its volume and carrying power. “I can just about tell you what the goonboys are thinking, and right now they’re just so relieved to have found her that they haven’t even gone to the next step of trying to get information from her.”

“You can read people that well. From this distance. In this light.”

“The distance actually helps. I get the big picture that way. Except with yo—”

Except with you
. She hadn’t meant to say that. He didn’t need to know it.

But he heard it. He offered the slightest of hesitations, the slightest narrowing of his eyes. And then he seemed to store it away somewhere, out of touch for now. She was glad enough of it; they had plenty else to think about. She had plenty else to think about. For while Rio obsessed about saving his cousin, Kimmer couldn’t avoid awareness of her grim secondary assignment: don’t let these men walk away with Carolyne’s secrets. She gave the besieged building an uneasy glance. From here the situation inside had become less discernible; two men blocked the window, and the third, barely visible behind them, seemed to have pushed Carolyne down in the desk chair.

She had to stop this. One way or another, she had to stop it. And she’d have to work with Rio to do it—or if stopping the goonboys meant exposing Carolyne, she’d have to work against him.

He seemed to be the one with the knack when it came to the byplay between them. He narrowed those dark eyes so much they became only angled shadows, and he said, “Tell me you’re not hanging back so if things look bad, you can stop this from going further. Whatever it takes.”

Kimmer kept herself very quiet, clamping down on her resentment against Owen. No sudden moves, not with Rio’s voice so hard and the distance between them so close. And she didn’t answer directly, knowing that he would quite accurately take her evasion to be as meaningful as words. “We need to check the area,” she said. “We need to know if they’re all inside, and how
freely we can move around out here. And then I need to get in place by that window—”

“You?”

“Which of us do you think is harder to spot?” Kimmer asked pointedly. She nodded at the window in question. “Which of us might fit under that crawl space if the need comes up? Besides, if I get caught, it just relieves you of having to deal with me, doesn’t it?”

He stared at her a moment. “I have the feeling,” he muttered, still staring, making her wish she could see those shadowed eyes, “that you’re either going to be the worst thing that could have happened to us…or the best.”

Floundering, unable to see anything but the directness of his gaze and the building tension in his body, Kimmer said bluntly, “I guess you know which I’d choose.”

He gave a short shake of his head. “No. I’m not sure I do.”

And while Kimmer knew which she wanted, she didn’t know which she’d actually turn out to be.

Kimmer had been right, and Rio knew it. Scouting the area came before the rescue attempt.

Rio eased around the clearing, but didn’t get far before he had to stop, fade into the woods and lean himself against a handy tree. Partly for the camouflage of it, but partly…just because it was sturdy and solid, and Rio himself still reeled from recent events. Caro, in the hands of the very people she’d so feared. Bonnie Miller, not who she’d seemed at all—

No. Take that back. She was just as she’d seemed. Edgy, more than capable of taking care of herself,
and still with that hint of lingering uncertainty underlying all her hard words. Not much of it, and damn hard to see at that, but behind anger such as hers always lay more than a little dose of hurt. Early hurt, hard hurt.

He wasn’t sure which part of her had intrigued him—that which he knew with relief would never be one more person calling on him for help and leaning on his strength, or that which peeked out from beneath if you knew just where to look.

But he didn’t trust her with Caro’s safety, not for a moment—and not at all because he thought Kimmer Reed incapable of handling the situation, whatever arose.

Just because he wasn’t sure which situation she would choose to create.

He’d have to go in, and he needed to do it soon. Too long and the bad guys would get impatient; they’d start pressuring Caro, although if they had even a whit of sense they’d see right away they’d get nowhere that way. Not that Caro would resist. He knew well enough how close to hysteria she’d been these past few days. No, if they pushed her, she’d simply lose it.

And then they might simply give up on her. Kill her, cut their losses and set someone else to uncover whatever exact crucial bit she’d discovered without worrying about the possibility that she’d cook up a solution for it in the meantime. Someone from her think tank, perhaps, maybe that someone who’d already talked.

Did Kimmer know the stakes? She knew they were high—that was obvious enough. She had orders to stop things regardless of the consequences to Carolyne, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

Then again, he had his own secrets. Kimmer no doubt had a less than complete dossier on him, one that wouldn’t reveal the extent of his paramilitary training—the time he’d spent at the CIA’s Harvey Point and grabbing extra experience with Army Rangers and even a little stint with SAS, inserted to absorb a Brit’s-eye view along with their excellent training. She wouldn’t know about the self-serving foolishness of the ambitious case officer who had disregarded intel, refusing to believe that his prestigious high-level asset was tainted—right up until the evening the man blew his double-agent cover, disappearing into the protective arms of his own government to release all the information he’d gathered by counterrunning his case officer. Information about Rio’s local CIA station—information that compromised the exfiltration Rio was running that very night, with the help of several other case officers. His friends. His family away from family.

All dead now.

So Kimmer wouldn’t know of his stubborn, entrenched refusal to treat people as disposable playing pieces. His team had been his family. Caro was family. Kimmer had no idea how far Rio would go to make sure Caro didn’t turn into a playing piece—not for the bad guys, not for the good guys. Not for
anyone.

Feeling steadier, he pushed away from the tree and continued his circuit around the clearing. Kimmer had been right; she was hard to see. He didn’t know where she’d learned night recon, but she’d apparently absorbed the lesson well. He hadn’t heard any sign of her, and had given up thinking he might; he turned his attention to the potential bad guys on the scene. They’d clustered
around Caro as though their position was unassailable, or as though they thought no one would even try.

Wrong
.

Through the woods he went, slow and careful, his feet skimming the ground just enough to avoid contact, his every next step taking weight slowly enough to assess what lay beneath that foot and adjust his tread if necessary.

No one.

Wrong and stupid
.

Or so he hoped.

He met Kimmer back where they’d started; she waited for him there. No doubt she hadn’t wasted time leaning on any trees, trying to get her head together. She struck him as someone who knew just what she wanted and just how to get it. Now she knelt to contemplate the nurse’s station with an intent gaze he didn’t much like. He crouched beside her. “Meet anyone?”

“No,” she said, her voice more relaxed than it had been. “No sign of outside guards. They probably didn’t want to chance running into any more of your Boy Scout snares.”

“Trust me, I’d have preferred a nice Skorpion laser perimeter system.” He gave his back a subtle stretch, arching into his spine without changing his basic position and then slowly releasing. “But I had no idea how much trouble Caro was in when she called me.”

She gave him a sideways glance, eyebrow raised. It looked like a question, but he wasn’t sure about just what. Finally she said, “And you came running anyway.”

The implication took him back—that he should have known what he was getting into. Realized he was going
to be used. “Damn right I did. You don’t screw around when it’s family.” He settled his knees in the dew-damp ground cover, glad the leaves hadn’t done more than think about falling from their glorious early-November display. “You know, don’t you? The stakes here.”

She lifted one shoulder. “Laser-guided missiles. It seems their guidance system can be hacked…and only Carolyne knows how.”

Only Caro.
At least they were working on the same information. “We can’t leave her in there.”

“No. We can’t. But we can’t go in, either.”

“The hell you say,” he snapped, before he could think to stop himself.

She eased back into the trees, a hand on his arm her only request; he gave her that much, following her in until they were behind cover. “Look,” she said patiently. “They’re not settled yet and they haven’t taken any single part of their situation for granted. They know about you—they’re on the lookout for you. Now’s the worst time you could pick to have a try at her.”

He snorted. “And you figured this out—what, because you have a knack?”

“Not so much.” Her voice came from the darkness. “Common sense and experience come in handy sometimes, too. Yours would be telling you the same if you let it.”

His temper flared, startling him; he wasn’t used to fighting it—had even come to take his coolness under fire for granted. But common sense had nothing against the twist of his fear for Carolyne.

She didn’t wait for a response. “If they’re not country boys, they won’t be used to the noises one hears from
the happy little animals at night. We can give them plenty of things that go bump and rustle in the night—they might just grow a little tired of checking on Bambi. Complacent, even. I’m set up not far from here so we can take shifts. At the least we can keep some of their attention off Carolyne until we see an opportunity to get her out of there.”

For how long?
How long to make Caro wait, wondering where he was? Torn between worry that he’d been injured and hurt that he’d leave her alone with those men? He found that he’d clenched his jaw so tightly he couldn’t speak, and that it took a moment to work through the twisted place in his chest anyway. After that moment, he managed to say, “You don’t have a clue, do you?”

She didn’t pretend she didn’t understand. She couldn’t fail to, given the emotion in his voice. She had her own dark tone back when she said, “Family? No. Not a clue.”