Midnight Sins

by Lora Leigh

  “You’re being targeted, Rafe,” Archer snapped back at him. “The calls were a warning over you, and the attack was for the same reason, I believe. This isn’t something we can keep under our hats while we search for him. And it’s damned sure not because of whatever the hell you did in the military. This goes straight back to twelve years before.”

  “I’m a fucking Marine, Archer; what the hell do you think I did?” he snarled. “For God’s sake, would you just pick up some speed here so I can get to her? Sometime this year would be exceptionally nice. You can question me later.”

  If he didn’t get there soon, if he didn’t see for himself that Cami was safe and breathing on her own, then he was going to end up losing his sanity.

  Rage was like an animal inside him, twisting and clawing in its desperation for freedom.

  He shouldn’t have left her, he thought again. He should have heeded that warning itch at his back as he drove back to the ranch. The urge to turn back and slip into her house and into her bed had been nearly overwhelming.

  He’d not ignore it again. Never again would he ignore that instinctive voice and blame it on his lust rather than that kernel of knowledge that something wasn’t just right. That his instincts had picked up something his conscious mind had missed.

  Better yet, she was coming to the ranch, where he could make certain she was protected, ensure that no one ever got to her again, ever harmed her again.

  “You were just a Marine, huh?” Archer snorted as Rafe flicked him a brooding look. “You know, Rafe, for ‘just a Marine’ your records are all but inaccessible.”

  “And why would you want them to be accessible, Archer?” he asked smoothly.

  “Let’s say there was a time or two the mayor was curious about your whereabouts,” Archer sighed. “I checked and all I could get was that you were a Marine. After that, forget it.”

  The mayor was curious, his ass. Most likely, there was another crime they’d wanted to pin on Crowe and his cousins and they wanted to be certain where the cousins were.

  “And you can forget it now,” Rafe assured the sheriff as he gripped the armrest of the door and all but tore it off in frustration. “Can’t you drive any faster?”

  Rafe could have driven these mountain roads faster with a blindfold for a handicap.

  “Rafe, I’m going to tell you now, you, Logan, and Crowe stay out of this,” Archer warned him as they neared the city limits and the hospital where Cami had been taken. “Take care of Cami and let me handle the rest.”

  Yeah, that was what Archer’s father, Randal, had warned them of twelve years before, as the sheriff, when the first girl had been found in Corbin County at the base of Crowe Mountain.

  Rafe, Logan, and Crowe had just so happened to have been in Denver with Ryan Calvert that week meeting several recruiting officers and staying on the military base there with Ryan’s family. If they hadn’t been, they would have been arrested then and they would have never been able to clear themselves.

  Archer wasn’t stupid, though. The Callahan cousins weren’t little more than boys anymore. They were adult men, military trained, and they didn’t take orders worth shit from civilians.

  It was one of their best traits, Crowe liked to say.

  But even more, they knew how to protect themselves.

  “Do you hear me, Rafe?” Archer snapped.

  Rafe turned his head and stared back at Archer as determination flowed through him.

  The determination to kill whoever had dared to touch Cami. Whoever had dared to bruise her, frighten her, or target her because of who her lover was.

  Whoever did this would pay for it.

  The bastard was a dead man walking; the Callahan cousins would see to it.

  CHAPTER 16

  Cami listened from her hospital bed, dry-eyed, resigned, to the sound of her father’s high, shrill voice on the other end of her aunt’s phone.

  She’d warned Ella, Eddy’s wife, not to call. Cami had warned Ella that Mark could be nasty and that since moving to Aspen he had rarely wanted to speak to his daughter, let alone see her. Unless he needed her for some reason, as he had the month before, to help get her mother settled in the nursing home.

  That, or to pay her mother’s bills.

  She stared up at the pristine white ceiling and wondered why that searing pain was no longer there. Once, it had broken her heart that he hadn’t cared, that he refused to allow her mother to care.

  But perhaps, even more painful was the fact that her mother would opt to medicate rather than stand up for the child who needed her.

  “I’ll not have that damned Callahan trash dirtying my home or endangering her mother. Poor Jaymi, she’d be turning over in her grave to know the sister she thought so much of was still fucking the man that raped and murdered her.”

  Cami flinched.

  There was such hatred, such bitterness in his voice. Did he truly hate her so desperately for not being the child that died? For surviving when his favorite hadn’t?

  Parents weren’t supposed to acknowledge favorites. If they preferred one child over the other, it was supposed to be a carefully hidden secret.

  Mark had no remorse at all showing his preference for the child that died, and his belief that the wrong child had died. That he believed Cami didn’t deserve to live when Jaymi had been taken away from him.

  “Mark, you’re a bastard,” Ella snapped at that point. “How Margaret ever managed to stay with you all these years I don’t know.”

  She flipped the phone closed.

  Cami didn’t lift her head; she couldn’t. If she had to look at the pity in her aunt’s gaze then she might not be able to bear it.

  “He always was a fool, Cami-girl.”

  Her head did lift then. Eddy stood a few feet from the bed, his gaze gentle. She’d rarely seen Eddy with that expression. That was his funeral face and his new-baby face. And now, it was his feel-sorry-for-Cami face.

  “Rafer didn’t hurt Jaymi,” Cami said, feeling numb, wooden. “He wouldn’t have called her and warned her against himself. Just like the calls I’m getting.”

  Eddy sighed heavily as he shoved his large, scarred, and beaten hands into his pant pockets. “Well, a man gets suspicious and he gets paranoid,” he said. “I’m not going to say he did do it anymore. But I won’t say he didn’t. You’re our girl, Cam. Nothin’ ain’t gonna change that and nothin’ ain’t gonna make us stop worryin’ ’bout you. Especially now.” Somber and filled with brusque emotion, Eddy sniffed uncomfortably before glancing away from her.

  “A benefit of a doubt then?” she asked wearily.

  He nodded slowly. “For you, girl. I know you. I know you’re damned smart, and you’re a damned good girl. That’s how Jaymi raised you but I ain’t never called you a fool. And I never called Jaymi one. And she always defended those Callahan boys. I’m not going to turn on my second-best girl just because no one else wants to agree with her.”

  His second-best girl. She glanced to her aunt, dressed in her nursing scrubs, her expression somber but her gaze loving as she watched her husband. Ella was his best girl, he always said, and bemoaned often the fact that she hadn’t been able to conceive the daughter he wanted. A baby girl who looked just like his best girl.

  Cami swallowed tightly. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to end up crying. No, she wouldn’t just cry, she would be sobbing, and she couldn’t afford to sob. She hated crying. It pissed her off and made her eyes sore. And her head was sore enough. She felt overwhelmed by Eddy and Ella’s anger at Mark, and the way they glanced at her, their sorrow for her aching inside them. She couldn’t seem to make them understand that it really didn’t matter anymore. She was used to her father’s disregard, as well as his judgmental hatred where her past with Rafer was concerned.

  She had actually needed him when she had lost her child. Him and her mother, but that had been years before. She had learned a long time ago not to let it hurt, not to let it bother her. That was just the way it w
as.

  “It’s okay, Uncle Eddy,” she assured him, trying to smile, but her head just hurt too bad to attempt it.

  At least her face wasn’t too bruised. Thankfully, the bastard hadn’t managed to hit her but once in the face. He’d split her lip, turned one side of her face a lovely shade of blue and red. No, the majority of the damage had been the bruises caused by those heavy fists at the side of the head and the concussion the doctor had diagnosed.

  Her temple was so tender that any tug at the skin there sent pulses of pain radiating through her head.

  “It’s not okay.” He shook his head. “But there’s no changing him anyway.”

  “Has he ever been a father to you?” Ella asked knowing he hadn’t been, as she turned away to secure the blood she had taken earlier in the small tote she carried.

  Cami really didn’t want to talk about this now, and she definitely didn’t want to deal with it. She just shrugged.

  “Cami knows he never was.”

  Cami’s head jerked up, a whimper almost escaping as the movement sent a lance of agony twisting through her skull.

  Rafe moved around her uncle, his leanly muscled, long-legged stride covering the distance until he was standing beside her, his fingers beneath her chin to lift her face.

  She didn’t fight him. She didn’t have the strength. She just stared up at him, miserably aware of what he was seeing.

  Her makeup was smeared, the right side of her head swollen, her face darkened with the bruise, and her lip split. She looked like she boxed for a living.

  “School board contacted Archer as we drove into the hospital parking lot,” Rafe told her. “Until this is resolved, and your attacker caught, you’re on a medical leave of absence.”

  In other words, they didn’t want the gossip or the small chance of danger that came with her attack.

  She understood the concern, somewhat. But she hadn’t been attacked at school. She knew her students, though; they were curious and full of questions at even the busiest time of the school day. Right now, she didn’t need the questions or the knowledge that the answers would be spread among the general public.

  It was the right decision for her, at this time. It just sucked to have the decision made for her.

  “She needs to rest,” her aunt Ella spoke up then, her tone confrontational as she glared from Rafe to her niece. “And she’s refusing to stay here.”

  Rafe slid his fingers back, allowing Cami to turn her gaze from his, thankfully. She swore she was staring death in the eye. There was such latent violence swirling in his gaze that she had to suppress a shiver.

  “I’ll be fine, Aunt Ella,” she assured her.

  “You’re not going home by yourself,” Cami’s uncle protested, though this time he had that tone normally reserved for his son.

  “I’ll be fine.” She had no other place to run to, and she wasn’t going to her aunt and uncle’s. Cami loved them, but the thought of living with them terrified her.

  “I’ll take care of her.” Rafe’s tone brooked no refusal, and as she slid him a quick look beneath her lashes she realized she was hesitating to argue back as well.

  The tension that rose in the room was unmistakable.

  “I said I’ll be fine—,” she began to protest again.

  “Like you were this time?” Rafe growled. “Because you were too damned stubborn and ashamed to let anyone know what was going on.”

  “Ashamed? Me?” She stared back at him in surprise. “I’m not ashamed, Rafe. I’m practical. Something you don’t seem to be. And I did tell you.”

  “Really? You didn’t adequately explain” he argued sardonically as he crossed his arms over his chest and stared down at her with irritating arrogance. “Practical is hiding the fact you’re getting threatening phone calls until someone actually tried to rape and murder you in your own home. Right?”

  She winced before glancing quickly at her aunt and uncle. Cami swore Eddy paled before he swallowed tightly to regain his equilibrium.

  “That was uncalled for.”

  “It was the truth. Now, you can stay here, in this nice, sterile little room, or you can stop arguing with me and I’ll take you home. Those are your choices. Now pick one before I pick it for you.”

  She so did not like being ordered around like this. If it weren’t for the headache, as well as the exhaustion, she would have argued with him.

  “I want to sleep in my own bed.”

  There was no way she was going to be able to sleep in a hospital bed. She loved her aunt Ella, but each time Cami had dozed off Ella had been there for blood or some other nursing reason.

  Rafe gave a sharp nod of his head.

  “She shouldn’t be leaving, Rafe,” Ella spoke up then. “The doctor wants her to remain until tomorrow morning for observation. A concussion is nothing to mess with, and he suspects she may have some cranial bruising.”

  “Don’t listen to her,” Cami told him mutinously. “She gets paranoid.”

  Ella rolled her eyes before turning back to Rafe. “Are you paying attention to me, Rafer Callahan?”

  Rafe’s brows arched as Cami glanced at him, though he seemed more amused than angry.

  “Yes, ma’am, I am,” he assured her. “In this case, you may have to settle for a Marine medic, though.”

  Ella propped one hand on her lush hip and stared back at him, suspicious. “You’re a medic?”

  “No, ma’am, but I have one.” He grinned back at her. He had no intentions of telling them who the medic was or that Logan had had training that could have gotten him a job in any hospital as a physician’s assistant.

  “You two just are not going to listen to reason, are you?” Ella finally griped.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing, Ella,” Eddy spoke up. “I just want her safe. And this is a public hospital. If her attacker’s determined, he’ll not have too hard a time getting to her.”

  Cami could see what he wasn’t saying, though. What if they were wrong and Rafe and his cousins had been the ones to have killed Jaymi and, as many believed, framed Thomas Jones?

  It was in Ella’s and Eddy’s eyes and in their voices each time they spoke and in their gazes as they shared one of those speaking looks that only true soul mates shared.

  Eddy was rough talking, loud, and confrontational whenever his petite wife wasn’t around. But once she was there, he went from growling lion to tame little house cat.

  “Are you ready to go?” Rafe asked then. “Logan and Crowe are waiting in the hall for us.”

  Cami lifted her gaze to her aunt.

  “Callahan, I wanna talk to you first. You and I can walk out in the hall while Ella helps her finish getting ready and gets her signed out.” Her uncle wasn’t growling, but he wasn’t exactly the tame pussycat either.

  Rafe stared across Cami’s head at the older man, seeing more than simply the command in his gaze. Eddy Flannigan was pissed off, but he wasn’t pissed off with Cami or even with Rafe this time.

  Rafe gave a sharp nod before bending his head, his lips pressing the top of Cami’s head. “Be good,” he warned her. “Don’t try to run on me.”

  “Rafe, if I had to run for my life right now then I think I’d probably have to just go ahead and die.”

  He doubted that. According to the doctor Rafe had talked to, she had put up one hell of a fight.

  “I’ll be right outside then.” He let his fingertips caress down her back before he moved away and returned to the hall, the normally verbally abusive, smart-assed Eddy following behind him.

  As the door closed behind them, Eddy held up his hand quickly as both Logan and Crowe straightened from their positions on each side of the door and glared at him fiercely.

  “I’m not interested in fighting you boys, yet,” he warned them.

  Rafer crossed his arms over his chest and stared back at him curiously. “Then what do you want?”

  “Did she tell you about the phone calls she was getting?”

  Had she told Eddy? �
�The sheriff did,” Rafe informed the other man. “Cami hadn’t mentioned the full extent of it.”

  Eddy’s shoulders sagged a little as he rubbed at the back of his neck in irritation. “Likely he heard it from the same place I did: Jack Townsend?”

  Rafe nodded.

  Eddy shook his head at the response or whatever thought Rafe could see darkening his gaze.

  “Her aunt just got off the phone with her father,” Eddy told them then. “Normally, this ain’t no business but Flannigans’, but I saw her face, and her daddy did nothing to keep his voice low enough that it didn’t carry on the phone.” He quickly went through the conversation, ending with the final insult to Cami when Mark had called her Callahan trash.

  Rafe could feel the anger building inside him now.

  “What the hell happened to him?” he sighed. “Mark Flannigan was a good man once.”

  Eddy snorted at that. “No, my brother, unlike me, likes to hide his faults and appear perfect in public. Me, now this is what you have.” He held his arms out to his sides as anger filled his voice. “You’re stuck with me exactly how I am. Mark, he likes to have all those pretty words said about him; he always did. And don’t get me wrong; he loved Jaymi something fierce. Her death killed a part of him, I think. But Mark was never loving with Cami, Rafe. He was never a father to her. He resented her birth and he resented every time he had to balance buying for her with buying for Jaymi. Every time Jaymi had to share something, or couldn’t have something, he blamed Cami’s birth. The day of Jaymi’s funeral he stated it was unfair that his Jaymi was gone, that she had suffered. If one of them had to die like that—” Eddy seemed to shudder as he blinked back a sudden moisture in his eyes. “He said it should have been Cami.” Eddy lifted his gaze as Rafe fought to hide the horror that a father could ever say or do anything so atrocious. “And she overheard him.” He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Like I said, this should stay Flannigan business.” He glared at Rafe as though it were his fault the story was coming out. “But that girl has enough on her shoulders right now; hearing her daddy call her trash wasn’t something she needed. One of these days, she’s going to accept to her soul that she doesn’t have a daddy, and when she does, if you’re there—” He broke off as though uncomfortable.