Up in Smoke (Crossing the Line, #2)(55)

He followed Erin off the elevator and out of the courthouse, enjoying the sway of her hips, the sultry looks she cast him over her shoulder. The girl wanted to get home just as badly as he did, but she had no idea what she’d unleashed. She sure as hell wouldn’t be walking as gracefully tomorrow. When she came to a dead stop at a few yards from the bus stop, he almost ran into her. Connor started to ask her what was wrong, but her whole body started to tremble.

“Erin?” He circled around her to scan her face. Her terrified expression ruptured something inside him. It called to memory the night she’d broken into his apartment to get near a window. The Erin he’d walked out of the courthouse with was nowhere to be found. Protect her. Heal her. “What’s wrong? Talk to me.”

“He’s here,” she whispered. “The face behind the fire. I see him. Do you see him?”

“The face—” He didn’t understand what she meant by that, but to the best of his knowledge, there was only one “he” who could scare her like this. “Your stepfather?”

She stumbled back a step, her hand coming up to cover her mouth. Her gaze was fixed across the street and Connor followed it. A man stood on the opposite side of the traffic. Smiling. Under his arm was a rolled-up newspaper. He would have looked like everyone else passing by, would have blended right in, if it weren’t for the hatred in his eyes. Centered on Erin.

Rage tried to run loose through his bloodstream, but he fought it back. He needed to handle this calmly. Both of them couldn’t lose their heads at the same time. He needed to be strong for her even though his instincts were calling for him to cross the street at a dead run and mow the son of a bitch down. “Don’t look at him. Look at me. Erin.” She wasn’t hearing him, but he couldn’t touch her to shake her. Frustration dug into his gut like tenterhooks. “I’m going to take care of this. But I won’t leave you until you’re okay.” Until I know you won’t run.

Finally, her glazed eyes focused on him, as if his worry over her running had been spoken out loud. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”

“No.”

Her nod was unsteady. “He found me. I don’t know how he found me.”

Connor shot a look back toward the man. Still there. Still smiling. He needed to get over there and wipe it right off his goddamn face, but he was glued to the sidewalk. She was going to run and he had to stop her. How? How could he stop her when he hurt her by touching her, when she was already having a panic attack and the slightest touch could make it worse? “I need you to come back to me, Erin. Look at me and trust me.”

“I can’t come back. He knows I’m here now.”

She’d misunderstood him, but her response chilled him to the bone. She meant to run and never come back. Leave Chicago. Leave him. Around him, the world contorted, passersby’s voices sounding unnatural. “We’ll go together. Don’t do this. I won’t let him near you, Erin. You have to know I’d die first.”

Her gaze cleared. “Exactly.”

And then she ran. Until that moment, until Connor was chasing her through street vendors and harried locals, he hadn’t fully understood exactly how adept Erin was at escaping. Her slight form weaved in and out of business suits and tourists with maps like an exotic jungle cat, sleek and agile. He could hear the jingling of her boots, taunting him as he followed her path. Back in the SEALs, he’d undergone training that should have made it simple to catch up with a single female, stop her from running. It shouldn’t have been this difficult to track her movements, especially when people were giving them both wide berth, sprinting as they were down the busy sidewalk.

One second, he had sight of her blond hair and the next, she was gone. Disappeared.

Connor spun in a circle in the middle of a crosswalk, scanning the streets frantically. Looking for any sign of which direction she might have taken. Hoping people would turn their heads to indicate she had just run past. Hear the sounds of her bells tinkling. But there was nothing.

Gone. She was gone.

The demons she’d slain inside him regenerated…and roared to life.





Chapter Eighteen


Erin ignored the stabbing pain in her heart as she circled back toward the courthouse. She tried to banish the devastation on Connor’s face when she’d run from him, but it wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t helping. It hurt. She wanted him to go away so she could focus on what she needed to do. Just focus. As she’d booked it down the sidewalk, she’d fought the need to turn around and run straight back to Connor. The farther she’d gotten from her stepfather, the more her head had cleared. She didn’t want to run away. Not permanently. Not when it made her feel like her insides were being shredded with every step.

Which meant she had some work to do.

This, her stepfather, was her cross to bear. No one else’s. She’d left him alive and with a shit-ton of incentive to hunt her back down, although she still had no idea how he’d tracked her to Chicago. She would be finding out soon enough. She’d handle her problem and get back to Chicago and Connor. And f*ck it, her friends. She had friends now. A job. People who were counting on her. If you’d told her a month ago she’d have a live-in boyfriend who slept in her bed, that she’d be witnessing weddings, she would have laughed until she turned blue. Now it was her reality and she liked it. Loved it, even.