Free Beyond the Rules by Doranna Durgin

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 thebasement, 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