Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(4)
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.”