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that Hank would actually hear them. “Boom, the end of all his troubles. He never lifted a tire iron, never touched the trigger. Just a victim.”
    “I never expected anything else,” Kimmer said, and traced Rio’s collarbone through the fabric of his T-shirt in a way that made him want to rip it off. Okay, that , Hank might notice.
    Too damn bad they’d both decided the unpredictable man was best kept close to home—a decision Owen had emphatically endorsed. For although the Hunter Agency had taken only a generation to expand from a small missing-persons agency to the current elite collection of international undercover operatives, it remained more than discreet on its wine-country home turf. It was invisible.
    And Owen wanted to keep it that way.
    “We’ll be okay,” she added. “The cops aren’t happy, but they know what Owen does for this town—that his operatives go out of their way to keep the area safe. We’ve pitched in on plenty of their difficult cases.”
    “They owe you? That’s not exactly how the law is supposed to work. Turn the other cheek is more of a civilian option.”
    “Trust me, we’ll earn it when we go in for our little discussion at the station tomorrow. They’ll pry every detail from us, write it all down and look it over as carefully as theywould anyone’s. They’ll know Hank isn’t telling the whole story about why those guys were after him, but they don’t have anything on him here. And when there are legitimate choices to be made, they’ll give us the benefit of the doubt. Nothing happened out there today that wasn’t self-defense. And they know I tried to draw the action away from anyone else. Tried being the operative word. And come on, there were so many other things the goonboys could have hit besides that propane tank. That wasn’t fair.”
    “Probably the very last things that went through their minds.”
    “Yuck.”
    Hank’s voice rose above the sound of his television program. “Hey, Kimmer, bring some coffee this way.”
    Kimmer stiffened. In that moment she stopped being the woman who showed him glimpses of a gentler, playful self, and returned to being the woman he’d first met. Hard. A woman with edges. A woman who had no intention of being ruled by her past, in whatever form it came. She no longer fit perfectly into his lap; she just happened to be sitting there. And she said, “You want I should make up some sammitches, too? Call up some girlfriends to keep you company? And I got a little bell you can ring anytime you need something, how about that?”
    Rio winced.
    She knew it; she felt it. For all the ways her knack of reading people failed her when it came to Rio—when it came to anyone close to her, for good or bad—she’d learned to compensate. To observe and know him. She withdrew, sliding off his lap to stand before him. “It’s not the same and you know it.”
    Rio’s grandmother had ruled her Danish-Japanese children, and then her grandchildren. His sobo had instilled her courteous, often ritualized ways through the entire family—and those who had married into it soon found themselves murmuring courteous phrases, taking off their shoes at the door, providing slippers to guests…and going out of their way to make guests feel at home. In Sobo’s household, failure to anticipate a guest’s needs—so much as a cup of coffee—was a profound failure indeed. Those in Rio’s generation were more relaxed about such things, but still respectful, still attentive. And though during the years away from home—the CIA years, as Rio thought of them—Rio had adjusted to myriad cultures, he’d easily returned to most of his old ways once he’d come home.
    Well, his old ways if you didn’t count the constant adjustments he made for that spot where his kidney used to be, and all the not-so-well-adjusted muscle and tendon that had also been in the way of that bullet.
    Rio looked up at Kimmer, found her defiant and hard—that same demeanor that