Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(6)

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 could 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.

His stance protective when he ordered, “Don’t move.”





4





Ollie





Bitch.

It was spray painted in red across her door, and pieces of wood were splintered where a sharp object had been rammed against the door.