Blowing out a breath, I pushed to standing.
Through the faint light that bled into my darkened room, my gaze moved to the corkboard against the far wall. Like all of a sudden it might be pointing to the answer of a twisted, intricate mystery.
Revealing a secret.
Directing me to the missing piece.
All these years, that was what I’d done.
Dug.
Watched.
Waited.
Searching for . . . something.
Someday . . . someday I would find it.
Pushing out a strained breath, I shook off the memories.
Nothing but decay, eating away at my insides. Wondered when there would be nothing left.
I trudged for the door, needing to get out of this room where the nightmares always reigned.
Throat dry and desperate for something to cool the hell living in my belly, I stepped out of my room and headed down the hall.
At the end of it, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Motherfucker.
Motherfucker.
I scrubbed both hands over my face, wondering if I was hallucinating. If I’d thought my throat was dry before, I’d just landed myself in Death Valley.
All the lights in my place were off except for the one inside the refrigerator. The door was wide open, the stark, white light illuminating the tight, round ass that peeked out.
White underwear covered only half of her cheeks, and those long, long legs were bare.
Greed tumbled through me like a landslide.
I fisted my hands. “What in God’s name are you doing up?” I grated. My voice was so hoarse from sleep, making the words little more than a grunt. It wasn’t like I’d forgotten Nikki had slept in the guest room at the very end of the hall.
Just hadn’t anticipated finding her like this.
Gasping, she whirled around. Big, shocked eyes met mine like she hadn’t expected me any more than I’d expected her.
“Ollie, you scared the crap out of me,” she rasped.
That seemed to be the theme.
Her trembling hand flew to her throat like she was trying to ward off the shock. To reassure herself she wasn’t in any danger.
Standing there, I wondered if that was actually true. Because right then, I was feeling dangerous.
Volatile.
Liable to make all kinds of stupid decisions. Like that night close to a year ago, a night I could barely even remember. All I remembered was pulling that bottle from the shelf and trying to drown the grief.
Then I’d woken in her bed.
Her naked body against mine, the smell of her on my skin.
So fucking perfect in my arms.
It was etched and seared and woven with the faint flashes and taunts of memories.
Her sweet, sweet touch, and my desperate greed.
A permanent scar to remind me I couldn’t be trusted.
Especially with her.
The only thing she’d paired with those underwear was a thin, white tank top, her tiny tits exposed by the skin-tight fabric, nipples just barely peeking through.
My damned mouth watered.
Those stunning eyes sparked. Purple flames in my kitchen, burning me through as they went skating down my chest and abdomen.
The girl was drinking me in like she was just as thirsty as I was.
Not helping things, Sunshine. Not fucking helping things.
Clenching my fists, I did my best to convince my dick this girl was nothing but a skinny, bony stick and so not my type. Hardest part was convincing my traitor heart I hadn’t wanted her for my whole life.
No matter how much shit was piled on top of why I couldn’t have her, there was no way I could ever forget her touch. Her smile and her laugh and the way she made me feel like I was a damn king.
Her guardian and shield.
I doubted there’d ever be a time when I looked at her and didn’t think she was the best damned thing I’d ever seen.
“Not sure what you expect when you’re sneaking around my place in the middle of the night,” I finally managed to say, breaking from the spell the girl had me under.
Magic in her fingertips.
And there I was, imagining sucking every single one of them into my mouth.
One by one.
Wondering if she’d groan and go wild or if she’d melt. Didn’t know which way I wanted her most.
Sucking in a deep breath, she seemed to gather herself. Her brow lifted in speculation as she set the carton of milk on the island like she’d rummaged through my kitchen a million times before.
Guess there was no need to invite her to make herself at home.
“Middle of night?”
She spun away and hiked up onto her toes to grab a bowl from the cabinet, giving me another flash of that sweet ass.
Little tease.
She spun back around, and there were those tits.
Didn’t know which view I liked better.
She really was trying to kill me.
“I have to be to work in thirty minutes.”
My attention immediately shot to the huge, curved bay of windows that overlooked the city. Darkness still hugged the buildings, but the promise of something to come was baited in the sky.
“Just because you sleep half the day away, it doesn’t mean I get to,” she started to ramble, moving to dig through my pantry and my selection of cereals. “Early bird gets the worm—or rather, the breakfast pastry pie. Whatever you want to call it. And I have to be the one to make sure those pies are ready.”
Right.
Work.
At an ungodly hour.
“And do you have to do it half naked?”
Couldn’t help but bring attention to her state.
It was like only then the girl noticed what she was wearing.
Or lack thereof.
Her full, pink lips stretched into a lust-inducing O, and the shock was punctuated by a tiny sound.
A rash of fantasies rapid-fired through my brain.
Closing the distance.
Taking that mouth.
Devouring that body.
Olive skin and slender curves and cupid mouth.
Fuck.
I wanted her.
Wanted her propped on my counter and spread out on my bed.
She made an offended sound and angled to the side like that might cover her up. She pointed my direction with one hand while she wrapped her other arm over her tits. “Oh, you think this is funny, do you? Sneaking up on me this way?”
I was about to respond, but she didn’t let me. That gaze narrowed. “Maybe you really were trying to take advantage of me while I’m here. How the hell a mountain of a man like you sneaks up like some kind of ninja is beyond me.”
A chuckle rumbled free, half-pained, half-amused. “This from the girl who decided to parade around my kitchen half naked. Just who is the one who isn’t playing fair?”
“You were just asleep. I heard you.”
Affection and regret pulsed through her expression the second she realized what she said. With what she’d let on.
She’d heard me.
Fuck. She’d heard me calling out for Sydney.
Shame rumbled through my spirit. It was a feeling she only managed to intensify.
The girl’s magic at work again.
Thought she might be the only one who could really understand. Brutal, considering she was the one I couldn’t let see.
My life was devoted to finding my sister. Whatever it took. Whatever the cost.
What made it worse was I couldn’t look at Nikki without seeing Sydney at her side. Without my mind going to what Nikki and I had done.
I couldn’t let her light be dimmed—tainted by that vacant, ugly space that roiled inside of me.
In a moment of weakness, she’d gotten in there once, and look how that’d turned out.
I roughed a palm over my face and down my beard. “You didn’t hear anything,” I told her. Any amusement
in my voice had been extinguished.
That face transformed, and the easy playfulness she normally exuded shifted into some sort of a plea. Because when it was just the two of us together?
The space between us rippled and danced.
Begged to be erased.
That awareness between us became its own, thriving entity.
Rising from the depths.
The girl a crashing wave that was going to take me under.
“Ollie.” Her voice was a petition.
Pure understanding.
Come to me.
Too soft and too kind and too full of all the things she couldn’t make me feel.
Dropping my head, I lifted a hand. “Don’t. Just . . . get dressed. I’ll drop you at work. We’ll pick up your car after you get off so you have it over here. God knows, I don’t need to be getting up before the ass crack of dawn to drive you every day.”
She blinked back at me. “You’re crazy if you think I’m coming back over here.”
“I think we already established that.”
Crazy was my goddamned middle name.
Those lips pursed in that wild, impassioned way.
The girl who saw too much.
Too clearly. “I’m not coming back here after work. I only agreed to one night. You know I can’t stay here, Ollie.”
I didn’t ask why. Both of us knew the answer to that. It still didn’t mean I was relenting.
Hot air puffed from my nostrils, the same anger from last night slithering beneath the surface of my skin. “It’s not safe out there, Nikki.”
Didn’t matter that she was all the way across the room. I could still feel the weight of her eyes searching me.
I itched beneath it. Tried to shield myself from that feeling that slammed and pulsed and moved.
“What are you going to do, Ollie? Keep me here so you can keep me safe from all the horrible things that happen in this world? Why now? What changed?”
“Are you joking? Some asshole broke into your house. That changed.”
“It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Wasn’t it?”
That storm rumbled in the depth of me. A warning. The quake of an omen that ran the length of my spine.
Maybe it was because of the anniversary of Sydney disappearing was inching closer.
But the dreams had become almost unbearable.
Intense.
Vivid.
Every morning, it left me with this gut-deep intuition that something was coming.
Something wicked.
“Just . . . have this bad feeling, okay?” I admitted, nothing but a fool.
I needed to keep my mouth shut.
Put a padlock on what I was feeling.
She took a step forward like she could reach me from across the space. “It’s been fourteen years, Ollie.”
I stepped back.
Away.
Headed for my room because I couldn’t look at her for a second longer without completely losing it. I shouted over my shoulder as I banged into my room, “Be ready in fifteen. This isn’t up for discussion.”
8
Ollie
Ten Years Old
“This is a bad idea,” Ollie whispered.
If their daddy found out about this, he’d have Ollie’s hide.
Sydney grinned. “Are you scared, Ollie Jollie?”
“Course, I’m not scared. This is just stupid.”
A frown pinched his sister’s brow. “What do you mean, stupid? This is a pact. And a pact means forever. There isn’t anything stupid about that.”
Nikki shifted beside him where the three of them sat at the back of their yard, their knees touching where they sat in the moonlight beneath the pour of the moon.
He looked that way.
She smiled. Softly. With a tip of her head.
Something tightened in is chest. Tightened in his stomach. She looked like a fairy with those big purple eyes.
Unreal.
So perfect she had to be fake.
“It’s a pact, Ollie. Forever,” Nikki said, like she was trying to get him to understand.
Forever.
He swallowed hard and picked up the knife Sydney had sneaked out of the kitchen. He turned his hand over to reveal his palm, pushing the tip into his skin.
He sliced a shallow cut into his flesh.
He bit his tongue, trying to pretend it didn’t sting.
“Does it hurt?” Sydney asked, scrambling to get closer to watch the droplets of red bead in his palm, interest and awe in her expression.
“Not much.” He glanced between the two of them. “You sure you want to do this?”
“Yes!” Sydney giggled, biting her bottom lip, always too excited for her own good. She was always racing off, getting them in trouble because she refused to listen.
Never being bad but never following the rules, either.
And Ollie had promised his mom and dad that he would make sure she did.
He was pretty sure this was breaking that promise in a bad way.
Sydney took the knife and held out her hand, counting under her breath, “One, two, three.” She squeezed her eyes shut when she made the slice. Then she giggled wildly. “I did it!”
She held up her hand as proof.
“Your turn,” she said, handing the knife off to Nikki.
Nikki’s teeth grabbed on her bottom lip. Ollie could feel her getting nervous next to him.
He always could.
Knew she was gonna be scared before she even knew it herself.
“You don’t have to do this,” he encouraged her, barely tapping her knobby knee with the pads of his fingers.
“I want to,” she whispered back, but her words shook. She looked at him, a plea on her face. “Do it for me?”
“I won’t know if it hurts.”
“Yes, you will. You’d never hurt me.”
He hesitated before he took the knife. She was right. He’d never hurt her.
Sydney took Nikki’s opposite hand while Ollie took the other, holding the tip of the knife to her palm.
Nikki sucked in a shaky breath, and Sydney squeezed her hand. “Fly, fly dragonfly.”
Nikki’s lips moved silently when she repeated Sydney’s words. “Fly, fly dragonfly.”
Ollie slipped the knife across her palm.
Nikki flinched then smiled, holding up her hand in her own kind of awe as she watched the tiny line of red bubble up.
Sydney pushed her hand out to Nikki. “We are three. Forever and ever, you and me.”
Nikki smashed her palm to Sydney’s. “We are three. Forever and ever, you and me.”
Ollie did the same with Sydney, and his sister beamed at him when they chanted the oath Sydney had made them swear back when he was in second grade.
He didn’t know why his stomach felt different when he turned to Nikki, but something shivered through him when he pressed his palm against hers.
Their eyes met, and they whispered at the same time, “We are three. Forever and ever. You and me.”
Forever.
9
Nikki
He didn’t say a single word to me on the ride to Pepper’s Pies.
The infuriating, brooding, fuming asshole who I wanted to wrap up and hold and keep was completely closed off.
As if I was putting him out.
As if he couldn’t be bothered.
After he’d been the one making all those overbearing demands.
His dumb, gorgeous face was held rigid, and those sexy, muscled arms rippled with tension, making the field of purple blazing stars shiver across his skin.
I thought maybe if I reached out and traced them, they’d be real. That the small touch would take me back to the days when we’d run through their fields.
Free.
Fly, fly, dragonfly.
Old grief tremored deep in my chest. Thrumming and pulsing out. I swore that I could see it clash with that furious, provocative sort of energy held in every inch
of Ollie’s delicious body.
As if he rode a fine line between past and present.
Never fully surviving on one side or the other.
I wanted to reach out.
Be his lifeline. His savior when he’d forever been the one saving me.
Ruining me.
Keeping me.
Alienating me.
Push, pull, taunt, tease, take, leave.
My head spun.
Wanting him so desperately and still praying for a way to finally break free of his chains.
I was beginning to think that was impossible.
Not with the way I’d felt looking at him this morning.
The man standing at the end of his hall.
Wearing nothing but his boxer briefs.
Body big and thick.
Burly and intimidating.
His need evident where his cock had pressed so massively against the fabric.
Almost as evident as the power that had blazed between us.
Electricity that spun in sharp, spindly barbs. Stakes to my skin. A hook in my soul.
My wicked savior.
My beast.
Too bad he had to be such a jerk.
He whipped into an angled parking spot in front of the diner.
I yanked at the handle and pushed open the heavy door, fumbling out from the low car and onto the pavement.
Day was just beginning to dawn on the horizon, a gray glow breaking above the mountains in the distance.
I slammed the door shut, freezing when he finally spoke to me through the open window. “Pick you up at three.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
He whipped his face toward me as fast as he’d whipped his car into the parking spot. “Yeah, it is.”
“You can’t tell me what to do.”
So maybe he had me feeling petulant.
Off-kilter.
Could anyone blame me?
“Ah . . . ten-year-old Nikki. My favorite.” Mischief moved through those glittering eyes. “Feisty and stubborn. Don’t make me throw you over my shoulder the way I used to do.”
I shot him a glare while my tummy did a backflip. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I? Think you’ve forgotten who you’re talking to.”
“You’re impossible.”
Fight for Me: The Complete Collection Page 74