by Lora Leigh
It was a whisper, and even she recognized the husky need in her own voice.
Her heart began to race at an almost brutal pace, thumping against her breasts erratically as she took a shaky breath.
“Stranded?” His head tilted to the side as he stood before her, a heavy duffel hanging from his hand as though it weighed nothing.
He hadn’t changed. Other than the maturity in his face, the experience in his expression, and the male hunger that gleamed in his sapphire eyes.
He was dressed in street clothes. Jeans and T-shirt, leather coat and boots. His broad shoulders looked a mile wide. His thighs powerful, his legs long and strong.
The moment her gaze traveled over him she could feel her pussy creaming, her clit throbbing, her nipples tightening and hardening, and her entire body sensitizing.
She knew arousal. She had been thirteen the first time she’d felt that breathlessness. At fourteen she’d become aware of her body when she saw him. Rafer, Logan, and Crowe had come home for a week because of yet another lawsuit the Corbins, Raffertys, and Robertses had lodged against their inheritances. When he had, he’d made sure to find a few moments to say hello.
The summer she turned fifteen, they were back again. That year, Rafe had danced with her at the Spring Fling Social. He had entered the festivities, walked straight to her in his black evening suit, and asked her to dance.
He’d asked her how she was doing, how school was. He’d asked her about her parents, about her aunt and uncle. He’d asked her if she needed anything and she’d wanted to cry because all she could think of was how much she had missed him and the fact that it felt so nice to be in his arms. She wanted to be there forever.
The next four years were variations of the same theme, except with each year, with each phase of her own sexual maturity, Cami had come to recognize the signs of arousal, of need, of awakening sensuality whenever she saw him. Over the years she’d seen him several times, and as she matured, those meetings had become even more heated, then explosive, until it had finally flamed out of control.
Until he had stood on the other side of the table at an airport that had nearly been deserted, for once, chance working in the favor of the travelers to provide the majority with accommodations in the nearby hotels. Unfortunately she hadn’t been part of the majority.
“Stranded, Cami?” he repeated the question, his gaze somber but lit with an inner glow of hunger. That glow had been there since the summer she had turned eighteen and slipped out to a street dance in Denver the night she and her aunt had stayed over.
It was there between them, like a live current, pulsing beneath their flesh. He kissed her that night and nothing had been the same since.
“Yes,” she whispered, breathless. She was always breathless around him. Always filled with anticipation and need.
He held out his hand.
A strong, broad palm, his fingers looking powerful, capable, and God help her all she could think about was how it would feel if they were stroking between her thighs, parting the lips of her pussy, rimming the juice-saturated slit of her entrance.
The need for it was so strong, so striking, she was forced to press her thighs together, wishing there was some way to ease the sudden, unbidden throbbing of her clit.
But nothing could have kept her from taking his hand and letting him pull her from the hard plastic stool she had been sitting on.
Their gazes locked, hunger rushing through her body, the need to touch him clamoring through her senses. The feel of his palm, calloused and warm surrounding hers, sent a spike of sensation shooting straight to her womb.
A sensitivity she had never felt before, a need, rose inside her, dark and so sexual, so overriding she could barely keep from begging him to take her at that moment.
“Such hungry eyes,” he whispered. “Every year they’re darker, more mysterious, and always filled with that hunger. Tell me, Cami, how much darker and hungrier could they get?”
Like a switch flipping on, a breaker sending electricity surging through her body, Cami felt the arousal heightening uncontrollably.
She could barely breathe. Getting enough oxygen simply wasn’t going to happen. She had waited so long for the intensity of the hunger she saw in his eyes now. She had endured three years, three hard kisses that had grown in intensity. The awareness that his control was stronger than his need for her, and the knowledge that her body refused to accept any other man.
“Have you made me wait long enough?” she asked him then, realizing in that moment the delicate dance they had been weaving with each other since the summer she turned eighteen was now beginning to whirl out of control.
His gaze slid slowly to her lips as he took a single step to her. As he held her hand with one of his, the other slid into her hair, all the while his eyes holding hers captive, mesmerizing her, drawing her into a vortex of sensation that laid waste to any objections she could have thought of. Not that she had intentions of thinking of any.
His head lowered as he cupped her cheek, held her still, then brushed his lips over hers.
She was a virgin, but she wasn’t completely ignorant of her own body, her needs, or the arousal that just the thought of Rafe could inspire inside her.
There, in the middle of a nearly deserted coffee shop, his lips slowly pressed against hers, his tongue parting her lips licking against them. He must have dropped the duffel bag, because she felt his arm curve around her hips and pull her closer as the kiss began to deepen.
It was exploratory and knowing. It was rife with demand and acquisition. Rafer demanded and Cami had no choice but to submit. The effect he had on her wouldn’t have allowed her to turn away. The pleasure he gave her, the heat that rushed through her senses and swept over her body, was simply too addictive to deny.
It seemed more a dream than reality.
On the drive from the airport to Rafer’s hotel in the four-wheel drive he’d had waiting for him, the blizzard raged around them, at times so heavy it seemed to surround them in their own little world.
Once they reached his room—
Cami’s breath caught in sharp remembrance. Sensation tore through her, clenching in the depths of her newly awakened flesh, her clit throbbing.
Tearing herself away from him had been all but impossible. As she flagged down a cab and stepped inside, she still couldn’t believe she had actually managed to do it.
He had to have been exhausted.
No, that wasn’t it.
With a heavy heart she admitted the truth.
He’d pretended to sleep and he’d allowed her to slip away.
And she was too big a coward to even guess why.
* * *
Rafe watched Cami slide into the cab, saw her gaze lift to the window where he stood carefully behind the curtain and narrowed his eyes on her thoughtfully.
He’d let her leave. Everything inside his soul had demanded he hold on to her, that he tighten his arms around her and fuck her until she was too damned tired to try to slip from him while she thought he slept.
But what was the point? If not now, she would have slipped out later. While he showered. Perhaps while he met with Logan and Crowe at the lawyer’s office. There was no way to hold Cami if she didn’t want to be held, and Rafe knew it.
And she was simply too damned scared of what had happened between them not to run.
Blowing out a hard breath, he looked around the hotel room, then finally focused on the incriminating stain on the sheets.
Cami had been a virgin.
His throat tightened at the proof of her innocence, at the knowledge that he had been the first to touch her so intimately. That he had been first to possess the liquid heat and fist-tight depths of her pussy.
The first to hear her cries of completion.
Instantly, furiously, his dick was spike hard, the head throbbing in renewed hunger. Perhaps it was a good thing she had slipped out so early, because fucking her into complete screaming submission had been all he cou
ld have thought of. Logan and Crowe would have had to drag him from the room.
All these years, along with his cousins, he had fought to hold on to what was his. Not just the property their parents had left to them but also the cash that had been frozen in their accounts since the day the Callahan brothers and their wives had been killed.
Fourteen years. He and his cousins had been fighting for their inheritance for twelve years and there were times he swore it was a battle that wouldn’t be won until the Corbins, Robertses, and Raffertys were dead.
But, as imperative as this appointment was, as crucial to their case as it was, still, he didn’t know if he could have forced himself away from Cami long enough to have made it on time. She did something to his brain. He couldn’t help it. She managed to get under his skin and made it damned impossible to think of anything but touching her once she had stood up from that table and he’d seen all the hunger filling her eyes.
He’d fought it. God knew, he’d been fighting it at least for the past three years. Each time he’d seen her since she had turned eighteen, once a year, it had ended in a kiss. A kiss that had nearly flamed out of control last year. She was like this fire he couldn’t resist because when he was with her, he found the cold that usually encased him becoming heated and warm.
Admitting to it now was a moot point. It was there like a fire in the night, like a temptation no man could be expected to resist. That was Cami. His own personal temptation. The one woman he couldn’t turn away from no matter how hard he tried.
Rafe was being driven insane by the need to have her again already. She hadn’t been gone five minutes and the need throbbing through his body was like a vicious hunger, impossible to deny.
Pushing his fingers through his hair, Rafe blew out a hard breath before heading toward the shower.
He had things to do. Things that didn’t include pacing the floors because Cami had slipped out of his bed.
And it sure as hell didn’t include chasing after her, no matter how desperately he wanted to.
Two months later
Fate conspired against her. It laughed at her. The playful bitch did its best to destroy her, Cami thought as she stared out the window of the apartment her sister had once lived in. The one Cami now lived in herself.
She couldn’t seem to stop crying, sobbing actually. It had been two months, eight weeks to the day since she had run into Rafe while in Denver for educational training. It was the third year they had run into each other and shared a night of passion.
Her palm was pressed flat against her abdomen, the realization of the emptiness that existed there tearing through her again as her breathing hitched and she cried with all the rage and lost hope that filled her.
She was aware of her aunt in the kitchen behind her. Ella had brought Cami from the hospital that morning and had stayed with her throughout the day. She had listened to Cami’s sobs silently, and a few times she thought she had caught her aunt crying as well.
Cami’s mother wasn’t here.
Margaret Flannigan hadn’t come to the hospital. She hadn’t called or come to the apartment. Cami’s father had answered the phone when she had called, though.
“Your mother’s busy,” he’d informed her when she asked to speak with Margaret.
“Please, Dad,” Cami remembered whispering tearfully. “Please let her know I need to talk to her.”
“So you can cry over losing that little bastard he gave you?” Cami’s father had rasped furiously. “Your sister is turning over in her grave, Cami. Your mother’s heart is broken. How could you allow the monster that stole your sister from us to touch you? Are you so desperate to take everything your sister had that you have to take the lover that killed her? The child she couldn’t have? Maybe we’ll all get lucky and he’ll kill you next rather than some innocent, helpless girl.”
Then he’d hung up on her.
Cami had listened numbly to the dial tone in her ear for long moments before placing the phone back in its cradle slowly.
At least, for a while, he had made her stop crying. Shock had driven every emotion she could have felt so deep inside her that it had taken hours for her to make sense of what he had said, what he had meant.
“Cami.” Ella stepped to the window seat as Cami continued to stare onto the street below. “Come to the house, baby. Eddy’s beside himself worrying about you, and I don’t want to leave you here alone.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said.
She was lying. She would never be fine again. As long as she lived, she would never be fine again.
She had lost her baby. The baby she and Rafer had created the night they had come together two months before.
It hadn’t been a blizzard. She told herself it had been a coincidence, nothing more. Just as she told herself every year and managed to convince herself of it. There was no way he could have known where she would be and when. There was no way he could have been heading to the airport on the same day, at the same time, to the same city, every year. It couldn’t be coincidence; that was simply stretching the explanation further than she could believe.
But what else could it be?
The only other explanation was more than she could imagine. That it was by design.
“Are you going to call him, Cami?” Ella asked gently.
Cami shook her head, sobbing again as she turned her head from her aunt.
Cami ached. Inside, out. To the depths of her soul, to the last particle of her spirit, she ached until she wondered if it were possible to die of it.
“He would want to know.”
Ella eased down beside her niece, her heart breaking for the girl. It was all Ella could do to hold back her own tears. To keep from sobbing with Cami.
God, how could her mother leave her alone now? How could Margaret have left this precious, beautiful child to fend for herself against the cruelties her father waged against her?
Did Margaret even know the many, many times Mark had separated them? Had her sister-in-law even realized, in the Valium haze she existed within, that her daughter was being tormented by the man who had sworn to protect her?
“Cami,” Ella whispered as she laid her hand on the girl’s knee. “You don’t have to go through this alone. He would want to know.”
She shook her head again.
“Why?”
Cami turned back to her, the gray of her eyes like storm clouds, swirling with pain, with anger and desperation. “Hasn’t he had enough taken from him?” she asked painfully. “I can’t tell him, Ella. I can’t do that to him.”
No matter how much she needed him.
“Don’t tell him.” Cami suddenly gripped Ella’s arm, as though she knew the thoughts that hadn’t yet fully formed in her mind. “Please, Aunt Ella. Don’t do that to me. Don’t let me be someone else that’s hurt him. Please.” The last was a sob as more tears fell from her eyes, joining those that already had soaked her face.
Ella nodded hesitantly. She didn’t like it. She hated it. But this was Cami’s choice, and she chose to bear the burden alone rather than allow that young man to know that he had lost something so precious as the child he had created with Cami. She clearly remembered how he had come to her after getting out of jail, accused of Jaymi’s murder, his own eyes wet with tears as he comforted Cami then. He would have come for her now as well.
Could she blame her niece? Wouldn’t she have protected Eddy if the situation were the same though? Would she have done anything different? She knew she wouldn’t have.
Ella sighed heavily. “How much more are you going to carry alone, Cami?”
Cami shook her head, those tear-drenched eyes breaking Ella’s heart. “Don’t,” Cami whispered. “Just let it go. Just let me go, Ella. Please. I can’t talk right now.”
Ella let her go and understood the request. Cami had whispered those words to her the first time, nine years ago, when her sister had been laid in the ground.
The funeral had been over and everyone had left. Ella a
nd Eddy had been unable to find Cami until the funeral director had called.
Cami had stayed at the gravesite, and she was silently watching as they buried her sister’s coffin. He was terrified if someone didn’t come for her, then they might be laying her beside Jaymi soon.
Ella had rushed to Cami’s side, trying to convince her to return to the house.
“Let me go, Aunt Ella,” her voice had echoed with such pure, deep agony that even Eddy had grimaced, forced to turn his head away to fight his tears. “Let me go, before I hurt you, too.”
Cami had just drifted away then. Ella had watched her eyes lose emotion, her expression become distant despite the tears that rained down her face. Emotionally and spiritually, Cami had drifted away from them.
That was what she was doing now. Turning back to the window, she stared out onto the street, and Ella wondered what Cami saw there. Where did Cami go when she sat there and stared onto the sun-drenched street that seemed quieter and more peaceful than it ever had, as though the world itself were holding its breath and grieving with her?
Ella wasn’t able to leave Cami. She couldn’t walk away from her. That was exactly what her mother had done. Ella refused to do it.
She stayed in the background, watched until Cami finally fell asleep, her small, fragile body curled into the window seat, her arms wrapped around her self as though there was no other way to feel the warmth of human touch.
And for a moment, for the briefest second, Ella nearly broke her word to Cami and called Rafe. She actually turned to go into the kitchen to retrieve her cell phone.
Because Ella knew he would come to Cami the minute he could, and she knew he would make Cami come back to them. But Cami carried enough guilt. Ella couldn’t imagine heaping more on her delicate shoulders.
Instead, Ella laid her head on the kitchen table and silently allowed her own tears to fall for the girl who deserved so much more.
Three years later, Cami at twenty-four
Coincidence.
Cami simply didn’t believe in it.
At least, not to the extent that it seemed someone wanted everyone in Corbin County, Colorado, to believe in it.