Lead Me Home (Fight for Me #3)(90)

“I don’t want to be your sin.”

Draining the rest of his third scotch, he looked away from me and out over the city.

Turmoil rolled through him.

A blackout.

He turned that sapphire gaze back on me. “I saw the look on your face today.”

I blinked, unsure of what he was getting at.

His tongue darted out to wet his lips. “When you were holding Penelope.”

My spirit thrashed in its confines.

“You still want that? A family? Three kids and a husband and a little house?” His voice cracked when he said it.

Pain breaking free.

My eyes could no longer hold back. A tear slipped down my cheek. “I do. Someday, if I get lucky enough, I want that.”

I wouldn’t lie.

Not to him.

His forehead dropped to mine, and I reached out and held him by both sides of the face, my voice a quiet whisper, “But I would never push that on you.”

His breaths came shorter, panted into my mouth. “I . . . don’t know if I can give you that, Nikki. I don’t know what kind of father I would be. If I could be trusted to be the kind of man that a kid would deserve.”

My heart broke a little more, overflowing from the crack.

This man.

I pressed my lips to his.

Gently.

“You are the best man I know.”

His head shook against my forehead. “Not even close, but I’m going to try. I’m going to try to be right. To protect you and take care of you. I want to be enough.”

“All I want is for you to love me.”

He didn’t tell me that he did.

I knew he wasn’t ready for that.

All of this would take time.

I wasn’t fool enough to think that gulf that had roiled between us for years would suddenly evaporate.

He needed to learn to trust himself before he could fully give himself to me.

He pulled me to straddle his lap.

Energy flashed.

A bright light through the swimming darkness.

My heart raced, a thudding drum, drum, drum, a match to his.

He watched me in the shadows, as if I might disappear. He pulled the bottle of scotch from the table and chugged from it, that stare never leaving mine.

His gaze hot.

Feral.

Verging on wild.

So different from when he’d been so carefree earlier today. As if him seeing me with Penelope had unlocked something inside him.

Slammed him directly into our reality.

I guess I’d felt a little of that shift, too.

Holding my niece with him looking at me, my sister there with her secret that had brimmed so fiercely between us I could taste it.

Riding on her tongue.

Desperate to be set free and held back by her shame.

I could only pray she would open up to me so she could heal.

The way I wanted Ollie to heal.

Not to forget.

But to live whole and free in the middle of it.

Right then, he seemed compelled to live in this moment.

Those sapphire eyes intense. Staring at me as if he were racing through time to meet with me.

A shiver rolled through my body.

He tipped the bottle up to me, and I drank from it.

The amber fluid lit a path down my throat and landed directly in that pit of desire that lapped in my belly.

A few droplets trickled out the side of my lips.

Ollie leaned in and licked them clean.

“Ollie,” I moaned, the man my seduction.

“What do you need, Sunshine?”

“You . . . I always need you.”

Hot hands landed on my bottom, and he squeezed and tucked me against his hard cock.

He nipped at my bottom lip, dragging it between his teeth in a pleasured sort of pain. From the look that took over his expression, I knew he was gonna make good on his warning.

Tonight, I was in so much trouble.

I knew it the second his tongue stroked into my mouth, deep and demanding and desperate.

I fell in, consumed by his presence.

My senses filled with him, the man washing me through, claiming every crevice.

Toasted almonds.

Barrels of oak.

Liquor kisses.

They were dizzying.

Drugging.

Maddening as the intensity increased.

Our energy flared.

Licking out to touch me everywhere.

His fingers sank into my sides as he pushed to his feet, taking me with him. He didn’t go far. He settled me on my feet behind the couch that overlooked the city.

I gasped when he planted my hands on the back of the couch.

“Hold on, Sunshine.” It was a whisper of warning in my ear, and my knees went weak when those hands were gliding up my thighs, dragging the silky material up and over my bottom.

“Little Tease,” he muttered.

Words grit.

He squeezed my bottom in both hands.

“Do you have any idea what you did to me when I came through the door and saw you dressed in this?”

I pressed back into his hold. “I want you to look at me and never forget it.”

He groaned a needy sound. “You think that’s even possible? Forgetting you?”

His hands swept up my sides, taking the material with them, making me shiver as he ripped it over my head.

He left me bare, save for the scrap of my underwear.