tight-cropped curls, or the skin, leathery and damaged by sun and cigarettes. Not so much the scowl carved into his forehead.
The eyes. Round, wide-set, thickly lashed. A deep blue, so deep as to look near black unless the light hit them just right.
Kimmer’s eyes.
She released the man’s hand, slammed the door closed hard enough to rock the vehicle, and turned on her heel, striding back to where the Miata glinted Mahogany Mica in the sun. Maybe, she thought, deliberately taking herself away from this moment, it was time to get that BMW she’d been eyeing. Time to move up.
With the BMW, she could outrun even her past.
Rio came up behind her. In the background, the Suburban’s door opened again. Kimmer walked around to the driver’s door, brushed dust from the side-view mirror, and slid back behind the wheel. On the passenger side, Rio opened the door, but he didn’t get in. He ducked low enough to peer inside. “Hey,” he said, a gentle query. “You know him?”
Kimmer didn’t look at him. She pressed her lips together, bit her top lip, and was then able to say in an astonishingly moderate tone, “My brother. One of them, anyway. Let’s go. We’re through here.”
She should have known he wouldn’t get in. Not with the way he felt about family. He’d never understand her reaction. How could he? For all she’d alluded to her past, she’d never truly explained. He knew she’d turned her life around, remolding herself into the fierce, competent Hunter operative who made her own rules. But she’d never shared the appalling truths of her past.
Because it meant reliving them.
She looked over at him, meeting the almond sweep of his eyes. His Japanese grandmother’s eyes, set in the bones of his otherwise Danish family—a face sculpted by the combination. Rio was nothing if not tied to his family, right down to his appearance. And he didn’t understand.
A flicker of desperation tightened Kimmer’s hands on the steering wheel. “Please,” she said. “This is a choice I made a long time ago.”
He tipped his head back at the hefty SUV. “It can be a different choice now.”
“No,” she said tightly. “It can’t.”
He looked at her for another long heartbeat of time, and then he gave the slightest of shrugs and lowered his tall frame into the low sports car. Kimmer breathed a sigh of relief, thanking him with a glance. They might well talk about this, but Rio had done what Rio did best. He’d let Kimmer be Kimmer, accepting her without trying to change her.
Except this time, just a moment too late. Kimmer’s brother crossed in front of the Miata, came around to the driver’s window. Kimmer still had time to turn the key, to floor the accelerator—and yet somehow she didn’t quite do it. Maybe it was Rio’s trust. Maybe she was just tired of running.
Maybe she wanted to think again about pummeling the crap out of a man who had made her childhood miserable.
He stood on the other side of the closed window—not a tall man, nor a bulky one. Like Kimmer in that way. He settled his weight on one leg and crossed his arms. “You don’t even know which one I am.”
She knew he hadn’t changed much, not if he’d tracked her down only to throw that attitude at her.
Of course, he was also right.
“Should I care?” she asked, not unrolling the window. “You all made my life hell. You were interchangeable in that way. Although if I had to guess, the way your ears stick out, I’d say you were Hank.”
More than ten years had passed since she’d bolted from Munroville in rural western Pennsylvania. She’d been fifteen and her brothers had been in various stages of older adolescence and early adulthood, still unformed men—their bodies awkward, their facial structures still half in hiding. Hers was a family of late bloomers.
Or never-bloomers.
Her brother colored slightly and lifted his chin in a way so instantly familiar that Kimmer knew she’d been right. Hank. A middle brother, particularly fond of finding ways to blame things gone wrong on Kimmer no matter how minuscule her association with them in the first place. He’d seldom been the first to hit her, but it never took him long to join in. Hank, Jeff, Karl, Tim. They all took their turns.
She started slightly as Rio’s hand landed quietly on her leg, only then realizing she’d reached for the club resting beside her at the shift. You don’t know, she wanted to say to him. You can’t possibly understand. His family had supported him, surrounded him, welcomed him back home without question when the life he’d chosen had changed so abruptly. Hers had…
A young girl hid in the attic, hands clasped tightly around her knees, face pale and dripping sweat in the furnace summer had made of the enclosed space. She didn’t know who’d misplaced the phone bill the first time, or even the second. It could have been between here and the tilted mailbox down the lane; it could have been shoved off the table to make way for one of their filthy magazines. She only knew that today she’d brought in an envelope stamped Final Bill, and that its arrival was therefore her fault. Her father and brothers had come home before she’d had the chance to slip out the back of the house to the hidey-hole she’d made beneath the barn.
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
