Page 11 of Smoke

His gaze moved deliberately over Beth, and I stepped forward, but Beth shifted at the same time, turning toward her car as though she had heard enough. The man reached for her arm and got his fingers around her wrist before I caught his forearm before he could tighten his grip and drove him backward against the SUV hard enough to shake the vehicle. His other hand came up, and I hit him once in the throat. He folded forward, choking, which gave me the angle to twist the arm still reaching toward Beth until the joint gave beneath my grip.

His scream carried across the lot as the driver started opening his door. I looked at him with the man's arm still locked behind his back, and he stopped with one foot on the pavement.

Smart asshole. The man beneath my hand tried to move. I increased the pressure until he made another broken sound and leaned close enough that he didn't have to wonder whether I meant what came next.

"You don't fucking touch her."

I released him, and he sagged against the SUV clutching his arm. The driver got out slowly this time, hands visible, and pulled his friend toward the passenger side without looking at Beth again. I memorized the plate before they left, then turned around to find Beth standing a few feet away, breathing hard. Back then, that look might have made me brace for what came next, not because I had hidden what I was from her but because violence landed differently when it happened in front of you for your sake.

I walked toward her slowly, noticing the red mark on her wrist. "You hurt?"

"I'm fine."

I reached for her wrist and stopped before touching it and Beth saw the hesitation. Her expression changed, and then she held out her hand. I took it carefully and turned her wrist over. The marks were red but already fading.

"You broke his arm," she said.

"Looked that way."

"You hit him in the throat too."

I shrugged. "He was still standing, he should be fucking grateful."

A breath left her that sounded closer to disbelief than fear. "You haven't changed that much, have you?"

"Not really."

"Good."

That surprised me and she noticed it.

Beth glanced toward the road where the SUV had disappeared. "He put his hands on me to scare me, and you made sure he won't do it twice. I knew what kind of man you were when I married you, Smoke. This isn't exactly a revelation."

The words settled somewhere deep because she already knew the violence. What mattered now was that five years after our marriage ended, the line around her still existed inside me exactly where it always had.

I loaded the grocery bags into the trunk while Beth stayed beside me. "They're not going to stop, are they?"

"Probably not."

On the drive back, Beth rested her hand in her lap, the faint red marks still visible around her wrist. I kept seeing them and imagining how much worse they could have been if the man had got her into the SUV.

The divorce ended her being my wife on paper. Nothing about that altered what happened inside me when another man put his hands on her, but wanting to protect Beth didn't give me ownership of her choices.

When we reached the house, she got out before I could come around the car and started lifting bags from the trunk.

"I can carry those," I said.

"So can I." I let her because it was easier than arguing with her about it. Beth glanced at me as we walked toward the house, and something in her expression suggested she understood exactly why I hadn't taken them anyway.

The cartel had made her part of this now. I would protect her with everything I had, but I wasn't going to repeat the old mistake of deciding that loving her meant deciding for her.

CHAPTER 5

BETH

The marks around my wrist were almost gone by evening, but I kept looking at them anyway.

The man outside the grocery store had frightened me more than I wanted to admit. A threat on a phone could still be pushed to the edge of your mind if you worked hard enough. But a stranger stepping out of a parked SUV, saying your name and closing his hand around your wrist was harder to dismiss.