With her head down, she walked toward the exterior stairs of her apartment. She didn’t even notice me since she had her attention all wrapped up in her phone that she was staring at in her hand.
Didn’t know which was worse.
That, or her other hand being clutched around the handles of this huge-ass bag, just swinging it along at her side like she was begging for it to be stolen.
My chest clenched.
Reckless girl.
Reckless girl who was wearing these tight red pants and some flowery, flowy blouse that I’d expect to see some grandma wear.
How the hell it still managed to get me hard, I didn’t know, but there I was, shifting in my damned seat.
Light brown, honeyed locks tumbled a few inches below her shoulders, her hair messy and wild and untamed.
Just like her personality.
As eager as her heart and as bright as her spirit.
Motherfucking sunshine.
The girl was tall and so goddammed skinny. All sharp edges and waif-thin lines. I had to remind myself I liked curves and big tits and handfuls of ass.
Nikki. Fucking. Walters.
The bane of my existence.
Hands gripping the steering wheel, I angled my car right behind her. The spray of my headlights struck her like a spotlight, making her jump about two feet off the ground. She spun around, hand with her phone going up to cover her heart.
Her mouth gaped open in shock.
Well, at least she noticed me.
I rammed the gear of my old Mustang into park and threw open the door, feeling all kinds of pissed off that this girl didn’t seem to have a defensive bone in her body.
Self-preservation nonexistent.
She just stood there like a deer caught in the headlights, two seconds from being run down and unable to move to do anything about it.
Hankering for a confrontation, I jumped out.
The fear in her expression transformed the second she realized it was me.
Her eyes were an indigo-blue, like a cracked-open amethyst crystal.
Her own brand of indignant anger burned through the center of them.
Hurt and a fucked-up sense of loyalty.
God damn it . . . I knew better than this.
But with her, I didn’t know how to stop myself.
3
Nikki
“Ollie.” I rasped his name, trying to steady my wobbling knees. To steady my feet. “You scared the crap out of me.”
He’d almost gotten himself a face-full of mace, which would not have been pretty.
And man, oh man, was the boy pretty.
It really would have sucked to muck up that view, even if he would have deserved it. Especially after the note I’d found tonight.
“You should be scared,” he gritted.
Beneath the hazy glow of the streetlamps, my heart drummed an erratic beat, and I struggled to slow my ragged breaths that jetted from my lungs. Panic and angered surprise was a blaze that beat through my veins.
My nerves were already set to high-alert, every faint sound enough to have me looking over my shoulder, worried that little asshole would follow me. Threaten me as if I’d just give up and send Brenna back to him. Or maybe he’d go as far to hurt me the way he’d hurt her. Or worse.
“And what exactly am I supposed to be scared of, Oliver?”
He scoffed. “I could have been any asshole out hunting for prey. Some disgusting prick looking for an easy target.”
The thing with Ollie? He did make me afraid. But not for my physical wellbeing. When it came to him, the only thing in danger was my heart.
He was always sneaking into my life when I didn’t have the mental fortitude to resist him. Tonight, I was feeling fragile, and the sight of him just about dropped me to my knees.
I thought I’d made it plenty clear he wasn’t welcome. Not anymore. Not after that night a year ago.
Giving comfort did not mean making myself a doormat.
And that was what he’d made me.
Nothing but a place to stomp the dirt off his big shoe.
My head shook. “Yet, you’re the only asshole standing there.”
A harsh breath of air left his gorgeous mouth. I tried to pretend I didn’t notice. “Call me an asshole. Fine. I deserve it. But that doesn’t change the fact that you were out here alone. Vulnerable. Someone could hurt you.”
With the last, I saw the worry flash across his magnificent features. Maybe the hardest part was how genuine it was.
Which was precisely the reason I couldn’t tell him what had happened tonight.
He’d demand I quit. He’d insist I was putting myself in danger and what I was doing was stupid.
Careless.
When I’d never been so full of care in all my life.
He stared me down.
Attraction trembled around us like a magnified force. As if the world still spun while we stood still.
The two of us no longer in orbit, and instead, we were strung up in an endless oblivion.
Shivers rolled, and it didn’t have a thing to do with the tremble of fear I’d felt a few moments ago.
It was the potent energy that was this man blasting across my flesh like the warmth from a furnace on a cold winter’s day.
My attraction to him was so intense I wondered how he didn’t taste it in the air.
Bristling and brimming and begging.
Chemistry.
As much as I didn’t want it to, it banged between us.
Painfully.
I didn’t mean for my smile to come across as sad. There were just some things a person couldn’t help. Not when we’d planned for things to turn out so differently between us.
“I don’t exactly have someone I’m coming home to who can watch out for me, now, do I?”
He lifted his chin in some sort of defense, and a flash of severity and regret and things I didn’t want to read struck through his eyes. “Why do you think I’m here, Nikki. To look after you.”
My eyes squeezed shut, and I tried to pretend I didn’t want to welcome it. His safety and his protection and his care. But it was right there, surging and spinning like a tease.
It was all compounded by the tight ball of hatred I held for him. He’d used me, and I’d let him.
“You’re here to look out for me?” My words were incredulous.
“Yup.”
Ollie, who was all rigid anger and glowering scowl where he clung to the top of the doorframe of the black muscle car that was almost as pretty as he was.
He looked like a savage beast with the long pieces of his dark, sandy hair pushed back on his head, the sides cropped short, beard on his face trimmed but full.
The man was this hulking tower of muscle and brawn and intricately drawn ink.
A haunting rendition of the lake had been imprinted on the entirety of his left arm, and a field of the same purple blazing star flowers we’d run through as children swayed from his wrist and up his forearm on the right, those massive, bulging muscles flexed in restraint as he gripped the door.
The position harshly exposed the words etched on his knuckles.
Lost on the left and Soul on the right.
It was as if they’d been purposefully tattooed there to punch me in the gut every time I saw them, the permanent reminder of what he’d lost.
Of what we’d lost.
My lips pursed. “Maybe I don’t want you here.”
“Too bad.”
Cocky bastard.
I pointed at my apartment behind me. “I don’t need this right now, Ollie. It’s been a long night, and I just want to go upstairs, pour myself a glass of wine, and crawl into bed.”
He stepped away from his car and slammed the door shut.
“Where were you tonight?” he demanded. As if I’d done something wrong.
Every inch of him was rugged and rough and commanding, his body dripping sex from behind a closed-off exterior.
It was all mixed up with this
troubled kindness that weighed heavily in the depths of his sapphire eyes, his soft lips always quick to tip into a gentle smile.
He was an enigma.
A veiled mystery.
A cliffhanger waiting to be written.
Who was I kidding?
He was a goddamned mindfuck, that was what he was.
And he’d broken my heart one too many times for me to fall into that trap again.
A resigned sigh pilfered free. “I was at the women’s support group. Remember? The internship I have. You know . . . to finish my courses to graduate?”
I didn’t mean for the sarcasm to drip out with it, but it did. Ollie had this way of getting under my skin.
“Of course, I remember. I just didn’t think that’d mean you’d be running around at all hours of the night.” His return came out just as harsh.
“People have lives, Ollie. Jobs and families. It only makes sense for these types of meetings to happen after normal work hours, don’t you think?”
“Suppose so. Guess that just means I’ll have to drive you.” He said it as if it made perfect sense.
Why did he have to constantly do this to me? Pulling and pulling and pulling me closer.
And every time we collided, I only crashed into a brick wall.
“No, thank you.”
“I wasn’t asking.” His voice was gruff.
Hard and demanding.
An extension of the man.
I exhaled heavily. “You have a bar to run. And I’m not a little girl, in case you hadn’t noticed. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“You know that’s impossible.”
The jab of a knife.
That was what it felt like when he said things like that. A million little cuts over the years that left me continuously bleeding out.
“You haven’t shown up here for a year. Why now?”
He flinched, a streak of vulnerability flashing through his face. “Lillith came into Olive’s earlier. She said you bailed on her for drinks the other night, and you haven’t been to the bar for, like, a week. Texted you to check up, and you didn’t text back. Like I said, I got worried.”
Shit.
The last thing I needed was this man melting me.
“I rescheduled on Lily because I had a test I needed to study for. She knew that. I turn my phone off during the meetings so it doesn’t cause a distraction, and I barely just turned it back on in the car. And it’s been three days since I’ve been in the bar. Three days.”
Exasperation filled the last.
And there he was showing up as if he missed me.
But the way that he was looking at me had me wondering if he might. And those were dangerous thoughts I had no business entertaining.
“I’m a big girl, Ollie. I’m home. Safe. You can go on your way.”
That intense gaze flashed, and his mouth pinched into some kind of unfound resentment.
“Yeah. You’re safe. This time. Thank God, considering you were walking around at this time of night with your face buried in your phone, paying zero attention to your surroundings. You should know better than that. Which is why I will drive you next week.”
Annoyance blew out on my breath. He was impossible. “I was paying attention. I already had my phone programmed to 9-1-1 and mace in my hand. You think I didn’t notice someone driving like a creeper into the lot?”
“Paying attention? Hardly. You could have been gagged and shoved in my trunk before you even realized what was happening.”
I cocked my head. “The gagging I might be up for . . . not so sure about the trunk.”
Sometimes I couldn’t help but toss his nonsense right back.
Ollie growled. Actually freaking growled, and chills were flashing across my flesh, a whirlwind of energy that skated my skin like a rough, demanding caress.
“Not a joking matter, Nikki,” he grated, taking a jolting step forward and getting right in my face.
No.
He was right.
It wasn’t. Not after Sydney had gone missing fourteen years ago.
She’d left a chasm right in the center of us.
A black hole in our bright, shining sky.
Gaping and bleeding and pleading.
She’d wandered out into the night and disappeared without a trace.
That night, I’d lost both of them. Sydney was gone and Ollie had all but turned to stone.
Yeah. We still ran in the same circle. A circle that was tight. As close as family, the bonds forged between us just as important. Maybe more so.
The thing was, Ollie and I were on the opposite sides of that circle, keeping each other at arm’s length and a world away.
Yet, somehow, after all this time, he continued to remain possessive of me. Keeping me under his guarded watch. As if I were a child he needed to protect. As if he’d forgotten everything we’d been through together.
What we’d almost been to each other.
I’d made the mistake of falling for him a long, long time ago.
When I was little more than a kid.
The problem was, he would never allow himself to fall for me.
Oliver Preston was armor and stone.
Bitterness and venom.
Broken fragments.
Shrapnel waiting to burst.
What made it harder was that there was no missing that huge, giving heart that he kept stunted. Hidden in the darkest kind of shadows.
That made him dangerous to my sanity. Poison to my heart. Yet, I always found myself back in his bar with my friends as if it didn’t mean a thing, pasting on a smile and a tease while the man was slowly killing me.
But tonight? It all felt like too much.
“Seriously, Ollie. Don’t burden yourself by worrying about me.”
He hesitated, throat bobbing. “But I do. Can’t change that. No matter how hard I try.”
Emotion rushed. So tight. I felt the prickle of the tear blurring my eye before I even realized it was streaking down my cheek.
“Shit,” he whispered. One of those big hands darted for my cheek.
I jerked back. “Don’t touch me.”
His hand dropped like a rock.
“Shit,” he whispered again, this time a hiss of frustration. “I’m sorry.”
My head shook. I searched his expression, my own frustration bleeding out. “You tell me it’s impossible for you not to worry about me, but as far as I’m concerned, I shouldn’t even cross your mind.”
He flinched, and beneath his beard, his thick throat rolled with his swallow. I got the feeling the man was swallowing a torrent of things he couldn’t allow himself to say.
Guard up.
Shields on.
“You’re always on my mind,” he admitted, voice low, scraping with the admission.
It was so unexpected it knocked the breath from me.
“You don’t get to show up here, sayin’ things like that to me. You don’t get to yank me around, Ollie. I won’t let you do that to me. Not anymore.”
He swore quietly under his breath before he slowly brought that penetrating gaze up to meet with mine again.
Eyes tangled.
Spirits tied.
Hostages to the intensity that tightened my chest and filled my lungs.
How the hell was I ever supposed to get over him?
“I won’t apologize for caring about you. For worrying about you. But the last thing I intended was to show up here acting like an overbearing asshole. I just wanted to check on you.”
Tingles raced my throat. Damn him.
I gathered myself and pasted on one of those smiles.
Fake and brittle.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m just fine. See.” I lifted my hands out to my sides. “All in one piece. So you can leave, go on back to whatever or whoever it is you usually do on a Tuesday night.”
Bitterness oozed out with the words.
I didn’t mean for it to. Human emotions were such tricky little things. They coul
d be fleeting and fast.
Forgotten before we gave ourselves time to ponder them.
Or they wiggled their way in, so deep that it was impossible to imagine they hadn’t been part of us all along.
They came and they went.
They skipped out before they took hold or they lasted a lifetime.
Anger. Joy. Hate. Hope. Fear.
Attractions and crushes and obsessions.
The people who knew me best could say I suffered from any one of those emotions when it came to Oliver Preston. Lillith teased me relentlessly, and I let her, played it off as if it really didn’t mean all that much.
He was the one thing I didn’t fully let her in on. She believed my feelings for him amounted to nothing more than a mad crush.
The problem was?
I just . . . loved him.
I did, and I had for too many years, and it hurt too much that he didn’t love me back.
I took a step back. “I need to go.”
I turned on my heel and headed for the exterior steps of my run-down apartment. Even though Gingham Lakes had seen a major rejuvenation over the last decade, this area had not.
I couldn’t afford anything else. I wasn’t exactly raking in the dough managing Pepper’s Pies.
But it was enough.
Enough to get by on until I finished school.
As I mounted the second-floor landing, I peeked over my shoulder.
I shouldn’t have.
My heart stuttered at the sight of him. At the fact he kept looking at me in that way I wished he wouldn’t. In a way that made hope and need glow hot.
His presence solid as he stared up at me from where he stood beside his car.
So thick I couldn’t do anything but breathe him in.
Intoxicating.
The man was a drug.
I jerked my attention away and rushed for my apartment door, only to stumble in my tracks.
A harsh gasp sucked into my lungs.
Shocked.
Stunned.
Then my heart took off racing in a panic of fear.
Horror beating a path through my veins.
Dread took me whole.
My hand went over my mouth, and I choked out, “Oh my God.”
I could feel Ollie pounding up the steps. Two seconds later, he was in front of me and pushing me back.
Lead Me Home: A Fight for Me Stand-Alone Novel Page 2
