Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(79)

Forcing myself to slow down, I spread my hand out across the side of her face. Wishing I could hold all of her.

Wishing I could tell her I’d love her forever.

Instead, a confession was falling from my mouth. “This date . . . it nearly ruins me every time it comes around. But this . . . this isn’t about Sydney. This is about you. This is about us. This is about finding what we lost.”

My words grew low and fast. “You make everything feel different. Always have, Nikki. Like I’m someone else when I get near you. Like I’m someone better.”

Those indigo eyes moved over my face. Searching and memorizing. Drinking me in. Remembering this moment for what it always should have been.

“When I went to you last year . . . I was so fucked up. But I know now, I couldn’t go anywhere else. Because you made everything right when it was so fucking wrong.”

“Ollie . . .”

I pulled her from the wall, the girl still in my arms, my face buried in her hair. “I need you. I need you in a way I never thought possible,” I muttered, praying she’d get it.

That it was different from when I went to her a year before telling her the same thing.

This was a promise.

This time, when I moved, it wasn’t frenzied or panicked like it’d been when I’d carried her upstairs. It was cautious and slow. Holding her the way she’d always deserved to be.

Tenderly.

The girl precious.

I’d always wanted to wrap her up.

Protect her.

All these years, it’d made me crazy, and I’d wished for a way to scrape it from my psyche, from who I was. It’d taken until tonight to realize she’d only driven me mad because I refused to allow her where she was always meant to be.

With me.

Mine.

I laid her out across my bed. Slowly, I crawled over her. Hovering. Staring down at her through the milky glow of the moon that spread over the room and set her aglow.

Light.

“No more, Nikki. Can’t go on pretending that I don’t want you. That I don’t need you. I want to try to be the kind of guy you deserve.”

Grief fisted my heart.

Thoughts of my sister running rampant.

If I was gonna be with Nikki, it was time I ripped myself open wide. My eyes squeezed closed, and my teeth ground together as I forced out the words. “I’m so lost, and I don’t know if that vacant feeling is ever going to go away. Only thing I know is when I’m with you, it doesn’t feel so vast.”

Hands caressed both sides of my face, and my eyes eased open to see the girl staring up at me. Her breaths short, so much evident in her adoring gaze. Words I wasn’t ready to hear. Really didn’t matter if she said them aloud, anyway, because I felt them when I dipped down and kissed her.

Slow and tender, the softest kind of adoration on her tongue.

Her fingertips slipped through my beard and found their way into our kiss, running over my lips. “I’m right here, Ollie. I’ve always been. Waiting for you. I can’t take it away, but we can hold each other through the middle of it.”

I edged back, sitting up on my knees and bringing her with me. She straddled me where I knelt on the bed, this gorgeous girl wrapped around my lap.

My dick strained, and my muscles ticked.

I wanted to devour her.

Inch by inch.

I held her by the side of the neck, her pulse going wild against my palm. “Want to be right for you. Good for you.”

The hint of a smile played across her lips. The girl so sexy.

Olive skin and honeyed hair and freckled cheeks.

Sunshine.

She slipped down my body until she was resting on her knees. Our bodies swayed. A breadth apart.

Her fingertips fluttered out, running down my shirt.

Need raced my veins.

She gathered the hem and began to drag it up, peeking at my face as she did. “You’ve always been right for me. You just need to accept that you are. That none of us are perfect. That the world is cruel, but it’s also given us the greatest gift.”

She dragged the shirt over my head and dropped it at her side.

A shudder ripped through me.

Lashes of fire.

That feeling again.

Energy.

“It gave us this,” she murmured so softly, hands tender as they pressed to the thunder at my chest. “Us.”

A moan climbed my throat, and that was all I could take, and I was pulling that silky tank over her head.

No bra.

Those tiny tits perky. Nipples pebbled and hard.

God. She would be my undoing.

That moan turned to a growl, and I pushed her onto her back.

She bounced on the bed and a giggle slipped from between her lips.

“Beast,” she teased.

My entire chest squeezed.

Warmth and fire and need.

My mouth went for the flat planes of her belly, kissing across the satiny skin, my hands winding in the hem of her skirt. “Don’t even know if I can bring myself to get you out of this skirt. Do you have any clue what you were doing to me all night? Looking like this?” I grumbled at her stomach.

Vibrations of low laughter shook beneath my lips, and her fingers were winding into my hair. “I thought you told me the way I dressed was ridiculous.”

“It is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous how hard it makes me. Ridiculous how much it makes me want you. Ridiculous how much time I’ve spent fantasizing about peeling you out of those clothes.”