Mine (Blood Ties #1)

She didn’t have a problem with me staying home, didn’t even cause a fuss when I said I wanted to visit dad, just nodded carefully. But she couldn’t hide her relief when I told her Nick was taking me. Instead, she seemed overjoyed, gushing about how the boys were taking care of me.

If only she knew.

I suppressed a shudder

“I’ll just grab my bag and some snacks.” I stepped around him, reaching for my shoulder bag and jacket.

“Snacks,” Nick muttered, and shook his head. “What do you think this is, Ryth, a damn school trip?”

I shot him a glare. “I can’t have you spending all your money on food as well as fuel.”

He looked at me with a deadpan expression, then let out a bark of laughter. “All my money, huh?” He stepped close, capturing my gaze. All I saw was gold in his eyes. “You’d have to eat your bodyweight in food for the next hundred years to come close to tapping me dry, little sister. So, thanks for the concern, but I think I can manage.”

A hundred years?I looked at him, bewildered.

“You think I sit in there playing games all damn day?” He lifted his hand to brush the hair from the side of my face, his gaze boring into mine. “Little sister, I have enough money in Bitcoin to make sure I never have to lift a finger again…and my wife, or my damn kids, for that matter.”

My breath stilled.

Wife…

Kids…

My heart clenched tight with the words as the room around me swayed. I felt myself falling. Falling onto him, and for him…for this sick, hungry need that seemed to control me when I was around them, a need I knew wasn’t right, but that didn’t change what it was.

“You okay, princess? Kinda looking at me strange now.” Nick let his fingers trail down my neck, knowing exactly what kind of force he was exerting on me.

“Fine,” I mumbled, and swallowed.

He smiled, that cockiness rising before he dropped his hand and stepped away. “So that settled it, yeah?” he threw over his shoulder as he strode from my bedroom. “No goddamn snacks in the car.”

I gave a huff. That’s all he cared about, wasn’t it? His precious damn Mustang.

I followed, grumbling the entire away as we walked outside and climbed into the midnight beast. We backed out and were on the road before I knew it, passing the green view of the surrounding forest this side of the city and heading for the highway.

The last time I'd taken this drive, I was with Creed and mom, the day before they…

Before they…

Got together.

I winced and stared out the window. “How long do you think it was going on?”

Nick glanced my way and shifted gears, overtaking other cars at a steady pace. They whipped past us in a blur, or maybe it was the other way around. I was too scared to look.

“Your mom and my dad, you mean?”

I nodded and turned his way.

He clenched his jaw. Maybe he’d never thought about it, or maybe he had and he didn’t like the answer. Either way, it didn’t really matter.

“Long enough, how’s that?” he said finally, shutting the conversation down.

But I wasn’t done with the heavy questions, and now that I had Nick trapped with me for the next few hours at least, I wanted to find out all I could. “What was she like, your mom, I mean?”

“Jesus, Ryth,” he muttered, surging toward the on-ramp that’d take us west. Silence filled the space for a while until he started talking. “You know how a storm can smother the sun, how it can get so dark that you'd swear it was night, and you stand there, waiting for that first clap of thunder and the downpour… then all of a sudden the storm changes. It breaks up and through the cracks of the storm, the sun that’d always been there shines through?” He stilled, then glanced my way, his words trembling. “She was that sun. She was everyone’s sun. That’s who she was.”

Naomi Banks.