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Addy looked at the colorful swirls and rainbows before clutching the drawing close.
No way would she fail this kid.
Even after Roman’s car disappeared at the curve, Addison lingered outside.
Maybe they’d both failed Kyle. In trying to make up for their parents’ lackadaisical lifestyle and Kyle’s childhood accident, they’d somehow created a monster.
A monster she needed to find before it was too late for Netta.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” Oliver’s voice vibrated in the silent evening.
The cool air that had been biting at her skin just seconds earlier now felt soothing against the flush creeping up her neck.
Arms crossed over his broad chest, he watched her from just inside the house with his usual mistrust.
“Nothing.” She retraced her steps to the door.
When she reached him, he didn’t budge. Lifting her hands to her hips, she waited.
“You went out in the middle of the night just because?” His tone dared her to contradict him.
“Yes. Sometimes, it’s nice to get a lungful of fresh air. Now, move.”
“What’re you up to, Yarrow?”
She didn’t answer, but he stepped aside anyway, letting her slip back into the house.
As he shut the door, she unfolded Netta’s drawing and thrust it against his bare chest. “My niece made that. She loves drawing. She can be anything she wants to be when she grows up, and the woman who gave birth to her never wanted her. She’d leave her alone, hungry, in her own filth for days as an infant if Kyle wasn’t home. That’s why he got custody. I know you hate Kyle, but there are other lives at stake. Tell me what you know about my brother… or I’m going to replace every light bulb in this house with fluorescents.”
His hand closed over the drawing, but he didn’t look at it. “Are fluorescents a threat?”
“Yes. I’ll tear down all the curtains. I’ll bring in ring lights. Hell, I’ll bring in those movie set panel lights.”
Did his lips twitch? Was she amusing to him?
This wasn’t funny.
He handed Netta’s drawing back to her. “I’m going back to bed.”
“This place will look wholly different tomorrow,” she threatened. “Then you won’t want to wait around.”
Before she could storm past him, his fingers locked around her upper arm and he brought them nose to nose. “You think this is me just waiting around?”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re doing, but it doesn’t make sense. Why are you here, Oliver? Living in the dark like an ogre? If this is about the way you look, you look fine. You had access to the best doctors, and they fixed you right up. Lots of people don’t get to have that kind of opportunity. Stop feeling sorry for yourself!”
His nostrils flared, but she wasn’t done.
All the anger at being stuck there for the last week, just waiting for him to reveal anything about her brother, spilled out. “It’s clear you’re the baby of your family. Spoiled rotten. Well, guess what? I didn’t get to be babied. I had to pull up my big girl pants and be the adult. My brother did a horrible thing. But you can’t let that be the end of your life. You didn’t die on that road. Sure, you were hurt, and bad. And it tossed you out of your comfortable life, and now you have to start over, and you look different and you feel different, but Oliver, you had done so much for yourself. Why give up now and resign yourself to this—to pretending you’re dead? You’re fine.”
The flash in his hot blue eyes wasn’t anger. It was pain. “I don’t need to take this from a Yarrow. You don’t know what it’s like to wake up blind. To lose your dream job because you can’t focus. To have to nap like a child or have pounding headaches. Do you know what it’s like to forget your words in the middle of a sentence or to be so exhausted when you wake up that you can’t leave your bed? I’m not fine. Yes, I had good doctors, and yes, I can see again, and yes, I know I need to be grateful. But how can I when the life that I loved ended in one fucking night?”
She’d taken it too far. “I—”
The apology died in her throat when he wrapped a hand in her hair, tilting her head back, his lips stopping just short of hers. “Do you know what it’s like to want the sister of the man responsible? I smell your perfume on my sheets and think of all the ways I want you. Do you know what it’s like to sit alone in my room and listen to you hum down here, like some songbird I’ve caught but can’t keep?”
“I—” She tried again. She’d never been at a loss for words.
But he stopped her with the pad of his thumb across her bottom lip. “I picture you bent over me, your red hair spilling over my thighs, and my cock in your mouth. You work me over slowly, until you take all of me, deeper than you’ve taken anyone.”
