Page 10 of Up in Smoke
Her hair. She’d dyed it back to blond this morning, having sneaked out of Connor’s apartment early to make a drugstore run. Gone were the hot-pink tresses that had acted as a warning to all who approached her that they weren’t in for a normal conversation. She’d stared at herself for too long in the mirror, torn between hating how normal she looked now and wondering if wearing her natural color for the first time in ages wouldforceher into normalcy.
Nothing could. She knew that. Maybe that was the real issue. This job, this new hair color, it signaled a step away from how she’d been living her life since age sixteen, when she’d finally taken off on her own. Leaving the past behind in a dancing whirlwind of flames. It had followed her, that whirlwind, heaving its smoky breath down her neck, watching and waiting for her to falter. Waiting for its chance to devour her. She wasn’t scared of the flames, only the too-familiar face that stood behind them.
Now that this job had given her a function, now that she’d caved and gotten a more professional look, her barriers were gone. Her excuses. She couldn’t sayfuck the mananymore and leave them eating her dust. She’d signed on for this squad because the face behind the whirlwind was closing in. Her twenty-fifth birthday had finally come to pass and she had something it wanted. Money. Money she had never asked for and didn’t know what to do with. An unexpected blessing, but an even bigger curse. Her plan had been to hunker down and prepare for the storm, but now that she was here, it felt permanent. Like a cellblock or her bedroom. She’d traded one prison for another. Even more confusing, she knew that once she got inside and saw Connor it would be okay.
She lit another match and tossed it toward the gutter. A mixture of gutter water and God-only-knew-what put it out with a sizzle. Connor. Had she conjured him out of some secret place in her mind? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d done something like that, but it would be the first time it felt sogood. On the way out of his apartment this morning, she’d stopped to watch him sleeping on the couch. His big body hung partly over the side, one hand resting on the floor, far too large for the piece of furniture he’d slept on. For her. So she could have a bed near a window. Accepting favors from others sat squarely at the top of her no-no list. Being beholden to anyone made her nervous.
She didn’t feel that way with Connor. It only made her want to reciprocate. Do something to help him, make him happy, too. Yet she had no way of doing that.
He likely thought she’d been abused. She had. But not in the way he might imagine. When she’d tried to explain her fear of being touched to the prison shrink, he’d kept digging, kept pushing for therealreason. It hadn’t been enough for him that, to her, touch came before being restrained. There hadn’t been many instances in her childhood, maybenone, where touch had led to anything else. Hugs, pats on the back, encouragement. No. Touch had been a means of putting her somewhere. Keeping her there. Locking her in her bedroom so adults could argue in peace, dragging her into the closet, cuffing her and shoving her into the back of a parked car.
Then came the closeness. Air compressing in on her, like thousands of sticky hands. Cutting off her oxygen, bathing her skin in clammy sweat. Before she’d learned how to get free, the space confining her had become a representation of touch. It closed in on her and held her still, made her scared to move, paralyzed her. Her first time in prison had been torture. The guards, the other inmates, had learned her weakness early and exploited it. Touching, pulling, pinching.
Erin gasped when the lit match she held in her hand burned her fingers. It jolted her into action. No more stalling. No more thinking about the past. She wouldn’t explore this odd assurance that once she laid eyes on Connor, the emotional teeter-totter tilting inside her would stabilize. For now, she would go with it. And make sure she always had a path leading out.
She breezed into the closed-down community center with a loose-hipped gait, a small smile playing around her mouth at the sound of her boots’ bells tinkling. They couldn’t silence her completely.
This morning, she’d woken up with a text message from Derek on her phone explaining that there had been a last-minute change of plans as to where they would be meeting. Yeah, sure. Like that guy didn’t have everything planned down to the tiniest detail. This recently abandoned building would be where they would meet from now on, and it suited her down to the ground. The fewer cops she had to deal with, the better. But when she heard voices coming from the basement, she stopped cold.
God, her Achilles’ heel hadn’t been tested this frequently in a good, long while. They had to meet in a goddamnbasement? Erin took a deep breath and eased down the stairs. As long as she kept the staircase to her back, she could get through twenty minutes. If it got to be too much, she would make an excuse to leave.
And if they refused, she’d simply burn the place to the ground.
Although the thought of Connor being trapped in a burning building made her sick. She wouldn’t let herself acknowledge the pull of knowing he stood just beyond the door. What was it about this guy that fought off the noise, the flames? She shouldn’t be craving his presence so soon.
Erin pushed open the door. Derek broke off in midsentence and everyone turned to look at her. Her eyes unerringly sought Connor where he stood in the back of the room…prying plywood off a window? Sera stood a few feet behind him with a sympathetic hand outstretched, as if she could heal him with her Virgin Mother vibes.My job.
Connor held a metal crowbar, but it dropped to his side when he saw her, his gaze running over her as if checking for anything wrong. But she could only stare at the foot-wide space he’d opened up. A window. Obviously the building was on a slope, because through the wood he’d managed to pry free, she could see an empty parking lot, and an avenue lying just beyond. Her body could fit through it easily…from where she stood, there were approximately forty-eight steps between her and freedom. Breath filled her lungs. Had he done this for her?
Connor buried the crowbar into the final plank of wood and ripped it off the window. Then he tossed both of them to the ground with a clatter. “Where were you?”
She didn’t flinch under his barked question. “I had a hair appointment. You like?”
He gave a sharp shake of his head and threw himself down into a metal folding chair. Bowen gave a slow whistle from across the room as Sera returned to him and sat down. “When a woman asks you that question, the answer is always yes, man.”
Erin couldn’t take her eyes off Connor. Deep grooves stood out between his eyes; sweat beaded his forehead even though the basement was decidedly cool. He’d been…worried about her? And he’d used the time to make the space bearable for her. Why? Why would he do that for her? She didn’t know, but it made her feel wonderful. Like she belonged. Like someone had listened to what came out of her mouth and remembered it.
She searched around the room for the closest available chair and found it beside Austin. Challenging anyone to comment with a dark, sweeping look, she grabbed the chair and dragged it over to Connor, the rusted metal scraping a loud protest the entire way.
Connor watched her through narrowed eyes as she approached, obviously still angry with her for showing up half an hour late, or possibly for sneaking out of his apartment that morning without a word. It didn’t matter. She shoved the chair up beside his, close as it would go, and parked her ass right beside him. And just because it felt right, she buried her face in his shoulder.
“Thanks for the window.”
Connor ground his molars together against the adrenaline spiking through his nervous system. Had it really only been last night that he’d worried about his demons coming out to play? Here he was, less than twelve hours later and he felt dizzy with the need to expend energy. And not in a healthy way. This wasn’t good.
When Erin hadn’t walked in at ten o’clock for the meeting, his skull had started to buzz. It had been bad enough waking up this morning to realize she’d sneaked right past him, bad enough that she hadn’t answered the other apartment door when he knocked. She’d confessed to him last night that someone wanted to “trap” her, and the possibility of that happening on his watch had conjured up a feeling he knew too well. Helpless anger. Impotent rage.
If something happened to her…if somebody touched her…
No amount of breathing exercises or happy place visualization had been able to ease the buildup of rampant anxiety. He recognized this part of himself. Thought he’d had a handle on the hereditary violence that had whirred inside him since adolescence. But he hadn’t anticipated Erin blowing in and rearranging everything. If this didn’t send a loud and clear signal to his brain to stay away from her, nothing would. He requiredorderor the careful layers he’d pasted together over his damaged insides would strip away, little by little, and reveal what was hidden beneath. Too bad she was chaos personified. Disorder on two albeit sexy legs. She’d rip those layers off so fast, he’d get whiplash.
Two other times in his life, he’d felt responsible for another person. One was his mother. She’d been through enough in fifty-five years and deserved to finally start over. Find some peace. That peace is why he continually sold his soul. First to the navy, then to his power-hungry cousin. Now, to the Chicago police. Anything to make up for what she’d been through at the hands of his father. Anything to atone for the fact that he’d been too small, too weak as a child to help her. To save her.
The second person he’d felt responsible for had been his one-way ticket out of the SEALs. Coming to Chicago was supposed to mean a clean slate, leaving that shit in the past. He could sense impending disaster ahead when it came to the girl beside him. She was a wild card. An unknown variable. He couldn’t control her. Couldn’t keep her in one place without worrying if she’d vanish. Fuck, he couldn’t eventouchher.
As Derek started talking at the front of the room, Erin smashed her nose against the side of his neck, breathed deeply, and sighed. He tried to ignore her when she pulled back to look at him, but the lure of her gaze was too strong to resist. Christ, she was even more compelling up close. She smelled like hair dye and matches, not exactly the most intoxicating of scents, and yet he couldn’t get it into his lungs quickly enough. A deep satisfaction rolled through him when he saw that the bags under her eyes were gone. She’d slept well in his sheets. Her hair spread out on his pillow. Unbelievable. The storm inside him had ceased with her near. It never happened this quickly, usually taking hours to subside.
“What?” he asked, needing a distraction from the kick of lust the image of her sliding around in his sheets had conjured.
