Midnight Sins

by Lora Leigh

  For the briefest second it seemed as though misery and a plea were reflected in the emerald depths of Amelia’s eyes before she quickly turned away.

  “We still have that meeting to make,” Crowe reminded Rafe as they headed to the car.

  At that moment, Wayne detached himself from the Corbins, his expression dark with irritated anger as his fingers curled around his daughter’s upper arm and pulled her along after him.

  Rafe and Cami drew to a stop, watching as Wayne neared them. As he drew closer, Rafe carefully slid her between his back and the cousins behind him.

  She nearly rolled her eyes as she pushed from between the three men, her elbow pushing warningly into Rafe’s stomach as Wayne and Amelia stopped in front of them.

  “Rafe.” Wayne nodded to the men in general.

  “Wayne,” Rafe drawled.

  The fact that Rafe hadn’t addressed him more formerly had Wayne’s lips tightening for a second as Amelia pushed her hands into the dark peacoat she wore and looked down at the ground. If Cami wasn’t mistaken, Amelia might have been hiding a smile.

  “We’re going to have to reschedule the meeting we had this afternoon.” Wayne lifted his head, his nostrils tightening as though he smelled something rotten. “I’ll have my secretary contact you to reschedule.”

  Rafe’s arms crossed over his chest.

  Narrowing his eyes, Rafe watched Wayne suspiciously. Cami could feel the tension that began to radiate in his body and the sense of distrust that filled the air around the three men where the county attorney was concerned.

  Amelia was aware of it as well.

  How strange, Cami thought, that even after all these years she could read Amelia as though they had never spent the past three years as all but enemies.

  “I’ll see you later then.” Rafe gave a short nod of his head as his arm once again curled around Cami’s back, his fingers lying close at her hip.

  Wayne didn’t acknowledge the agreement; he merely turned on his heel and stalked away as though the simple courtesy of saying, Good-bye, See you later, or, Fuck you, Callahan, didn’t apply in the least.

  Amelia moved more slowly, and as she turned she pulled her hand from the pocket of her coat and a piece of paper dropped free.

  Rafe’s foot immediately covered it, and just in time.

  “Amelia?” Wayne turned back to her, his gaze going past her to Rafe, Logan, Crowe, and then Cami, as though searching for something, as though he had expected Amelia to try to stop and talk or, perhaps, to attempt to warn them of something.

  “I’m coming, Father.” Her hands were back in her coat, as though they had never slipped free.

  God, what was going on?

  Cami couldn’t take much more. She couldn’t handle the hell that Corbin County was turning into any longer or the haunting agony the past and the present merging was creating.

  It was her fault her best friend, the one person she had had who believed in her, who loved her, whom she could trust, had turned into this unemotional robot that Amelia had turned into.

  It was all Cami’s fault, because she had allowed Wayne Sorenson to learn the secret that Amelia had held close to her heart and had never told anyone but Cami.

  The fact that Crowe Callahan had kissed Amelia. That he had held her and made her want more. That he had filled her with such a hunger for him that she had told Cami she understood why the loss of the child Cami and Rafe had created had nearly destroyed her.

  She could feel her hands shaking. She could feel something inside her stomach trembling, as though the tremors attacking her fingers had begun in her stomach and refused to dissipate.

  As several firefighters, Archer, Jack, and Jeannie moved between Rafe, Cami, the Corbins, and Wayne Sorenson, Rafe quickly bent and retrieved the folded note from beneath his shoe.

  Turning his back on the group, he held it between his fingers as he watched Cami expectantly.

  Allowing Rafe, Logan, and Crowe to shield her, she took the note and slowly unfolded it.

  The house is being watched. Trying to get there. Kick some ass. Love you. Your twin.

  Cami felt her lips tremble. Why, after all this time, was Amelia making contact?

  “She’s going to try to slip to the house.” Cami frowned, confused. “Why would she have to slip over to see me?”

  This was going beyond fear of gossip or of Amelia’s father being angry. It was going beyond the fact that the Corbins rewarded anyone who stood against the Callahans and punished those who stood with them.

  And Amelia had signed the note: Your twin. They had always sworn they were somehow kidnapped at birth and taken from loving parents to be forced to exist with those they suffered through. They called each other twin when they were afraid of being caught passing messages during the frequent groundings they both had suffered as young girls and as teenagers.

  Amelia was afraid of someone finding the note or learning she had written it.

  Her twin. If anyone had ever been meant to be Cami’s twin, then it was Amelia. And to learn that at least something had survived the past three years and the horrible mistake Cami had made had tears wanting to fill her eyes again.

  She hadn’t been this emotional since the first six weeks of her pregnancy. She had cried at everything then, and that was what she felt like doing now. Sobbing, because there was nothing that made sense anymore except the thought that she had to find an alternative to leaving her home if it was truly bugged. She wasn’t ready to leave. She wasn’t ready to leave the security and the memories of her mother yet.

  “Crowe, get Tank out here,” Rafe muttered. “Get the house checked over for bugs, and until he gets here we need something that will generate a cover for anything said there.”

  “She’ll be at the house tonight,” Crowe said quietly. “She’s going to end up endangering herself if she does that.”

  Cami shook her head. “The fact that I was attacked in my own home and that whoever it was is trying to mimic Thomas Jones will keep her in. She wouldn’t risk herself like that.”

  “You did,” Crowe pointed out.

  She stared back at him, his expression and the somber tone of his voice instantly registering with her.

  Amelia would be there to see him if she could find a way to slip past whoever was watching.

  “Keep an eye out for her,” Rafe told him. “Unlock the back door and see if you can spot whoever’s watching.”

  “If they’re watching, I’ll find them.” It was Logan’s voice, pitched low and filled with danger that had a chill racing up Cami’s spine.

  There were rumors he, along with Rafe and Crowe, had trained as snipers in the Marines. That they were three of the military’s sharpest, coldest killers.

  She could believe it. The lives they had lived hadn’t exactly been easy in Corbin County. That dark bitterness could have easily transferred into a rage that would see Rafe going after more than one target.

  “Let’s go,” Rafe said, his voice carefully low. “I want to give Crowe time to meet the agent from our security company in Aspen to pick up some equipment we need.”

  “And I want to make damned sure if she slips into the house that I’m there to greet her.” There was nothing welcoming in Crowe’s voice as he turned and began leading the way to the SUV they had driven to the ruined garage in.

  “This is getting out of hand,” Cami protested as the fear still crawled through her system like a potentially killing virus. “What are they hoping to accomplish? Why do you and your cousins’ presence threaten them to the extent that they would go to these lengths?”

  “We remind them of the past,” Crowe stated quietly. “And of a loss they don’t want to accept.”

  “And you accept that?” she asked, more surprised than she would have thought she would be. “That’s not a good enough reason, Crowe, and it’s gone far enough.”

  “Evidently it hasn’t gone far enough,” Rafe answered her, his voice cool. “They’re still pushing, Cami, and I have no
intentions of leaving this county again. They’ll find out fast enough, they can’t run us off now any more than they could do it twelve years ago. The Callahans are home to stay.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Cami stood at the wide bay window of the breakfast nook just off the kitchen and stared into the backyard that night, her arms crossed over her breasts, her fingers curved over the balls of her shoulders.

  And she waited.

  Darkness had finally rolled in. That pure pitch dark that only came when winter was putting up its final battle before acceding to the coming spring warmth.

  The back porch light was turned off. The house lights were out and Rafe, Logan, and Crowe were sitting at the breakfast table, their voices low, barely discernible amid the static pouring from the AM radio sitting in the center of the table.

  Static, Rafe had explained, would cover their voices if they had somehow missed the bug that might have been placed within the house. Or not. Either way, he explained, it was insurance.

  Her lips thinned. Insurance. Insurance against their conversation being overheard as they discussed the past and the possible reason why?

  Why did the Corbins, the Raffertys, and the Robertses want the Callahans out of town so desperately?

  Why did the citizens of Corbin County follow three families who had turned on their own grandchildren? Even more important, at the time they were the only grandchildren those families had.

  Clyde Ramsey, Rafe’s uncle, had taken all three boys in. He had called each of them his boy and would stand in any man’s face, or woman’s for that matter, red faced, his gray eyes bulging, his heavy nose twitching, as he defended each of “his boys” against the dictates of crazy old men — Saul Rafferty and James Corbin — who thought they had to attack children for the fact that their daughters had had minds of their own and hearts of their own.

  Clyde had been known to say often that he hadn’t approved of his sister’s choice of husband, but by God, his wife’s parents hadn’t cared much for him either. But they sure as damned hell, he’d claimed several times, had not disowned their beautiful little baby girl.

  Saul and Tandy Rafferty, Logan’s grandparents, had doted on Logan, as long as his mother, Mina, had been alive. When she had died, Logan’s grandparents had joined the Corbins in attempting to take the inheritance that went to Logan on her death, just as the Corbins attempted to do with Crowe and Dale and Laura Ramsey had done with Rafe.

  It just didn’t seem reason enough, though.

  “Clyde knew something,” Rafe murmured. “He called before the accident, but I was on an operation and didn’t get back in time to return his call. At the time, I didn’t think a lot of it, but it was rare for Clyde to try to get hold of me while I was out of the country.”

  Because he knew what Rafe did, Cami suspected, and knew it would do very little good to try to get hold of him.

  “He could have called one of us,” Crowe reminded Rafe.

  “He didn’t trust us enough to tell us what was going on,” Logan sighed, the words barely decipherable above the noise of the generated static.

  “Hell, he wouldn’t even allow us to stay at the house when he wasn’t there.” Rafe’s voice held a thread of amusement.

  Cami could see both Logan’s and Crowe’s expressions as well as Rafe’s. They all thought Clyde hadn’t trusted them.

  “Perhaps he thought we were going to steal the silver,” Crowe stated with an irritable breath.

  How three supposedly smart men could have such tunnel vision she wasn’t certain.

  “Maybe he didn’t want any of you hurt.” Cami turned away from the window, keeping her arms in place as she watched the three men in exasperation. “Did Clyde ever say he didn’t trust you?”

  The three men looked back at her, their expressions knowing and suspicious.

  “He said blood would tell,” Rafe stated somberly. “He obviously simply didn’t trust Callahans.”

  Yet these three men had cared for Rafe’s uncle, and even more, they’d respected him. But they were so wrong about Clyde.

  “And you’re certain he was talking about you?” she asked. “Or was he talking about the Corbins, Robertses, and Raffertys? Three families who have been known, for generations, to strike out in violence if needed. Perhaps he was more worried about his ‘boys’ than he was about his silver?”

  “And you come up with this how?” Rafe sat back in the chair, arched his brow inquisitively, and stared back at her, his eyes so deep, such a dark blue, she wondered if she could drown in them.

  But the question held her attention. She knew the answer to it, despite the doubt she saw in his eyes.

  “Because the year my mother was the assistant principal when you were in the eighth grade, Rafer, just before she retired for medical reasons, Clyde Ramsey had occasion to pay her a visit, and during that visit he informed her quite frankly, and quite furiously, that there wasn’t a single one of his ‘boys’ that would steal so much as a drink of water if they were dying of thirst.”

  Rafe’s gaze narrowed on her.

  “You remember that, don’t you?” she asked him softly, careful to keep her voice low, just as she had from the first word she spoke.

  “The principal, Todd Collingsworth, had accused us of stealing brass from the science lab to sell,” Rafe remembered, his expression thoughtful.

  “I don’t think Clyde ever believed you’d steal. I think he didn’t want you there alone, because it was so far from town and anyone could have struck out at you with no one knowing. But at the town socials, if you stayed there, or later if you went camping on those weekends he was out of town, then you were much safer.”

  The three of them watched her. The doubt she had seen earlier was still there, but there was also the knowledge that it was possible she was right. They were considering her argument; that was what mattered.

  “Anything’s possible,” Rafe finally admitted. “It doesn’t change the fact that he never told us of any of those battles and there were only a few of the fights we were aware that he had with the Corbins.”

  The fights with the Corbins had been bad, but the ones he’d had with his father and mother, Rafe’s grandparents, had been particularly brutal several times.

  “Did you hear of the arguments he had with Dale and Laura Ramsey?” she asked.

  She didn’t call them Rafe’s grandparents. The disrespect to Clyde and to Rafe was more than she could bear.

  “Let’s say, we caught wind of them,” Rafe sighed. “Just as we noticed that neither of them were at the funeral when he died.” Rafe’s voice hardened as his eyes looked like chips of ice for just a second. “Clyde never told us about them, though, and he never admitted to them.”

  Of course he couldn’t admit to them, Cami thought. If the stories her uncle had told over the years had been true, and Eddy wasn’t prone to lie, then Clyde had nearly attempted murder the first time his father and mother showed up in court against Rafe to claim the inheritance Dale’s daughter had left to her son.

  “He did it to protect you. Jaymi told me of several times Clyde came to the high school after she began there as a substitute. The principal was known to run and hide when his truck was seen pulling into the parking area.”

  Jaymi had always believed Clyde Ramsey had loved each of his “boys” and had done his best by them. Cami had always argued that he could have done so much more.

  “None of this answers the question on the table, though,” Logan pointed out. “Why were you warned away from Rafe, then attacked when you didn’t obey the demand carefully enough? And why was Jack Townsend’s place just blown to hell and back this morning?”

  “Are we sure it began here?” she asked them all. “Jaymi was receiving the same phone calls. Maybe we’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe she wasn’t a random choice by a crazed serial killer. The FBI said there were two men committing those crimes, not just one. Maybe Jaymi was targeted for other reasons? Because she refused to do as she was told.”


  “Why would anyone care to kill the women we sleep with, Cami?” Crowe asked incredulously. “Why give a fuck? There are no heiresses left in Corbin County with the exception of William Corbin’s daughter, and she’s rarely in Corbin County, let alone around any of us.”

  At that point, Cami’s hands fell from her shoulders to allow her to rake her fingers through her hair in frustration. “I didn’t say I knew why,” she admitted. “But as you said, why give a fuck who you fuck? Why call Jaymi and threaten her? Why do the same with me? And why resurrect a monster? Unless there were two killers and one of them has decided to start killing again.”

  Her gaze met Rafe’s, and she saw the suspicion her questions had raised, but she also saw doubt. The cousins didn’t want to accept that Jaymi could have died because of her tie to Rafe, but Cami had accepted it a long time ago. She had simply believed the past was dead.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t dead.

  She could feel it, like a chill racing across her flesh, like the whisper of unseen force at her ear.

  There was so much more going on here than three families’ disowning their grandsons because of who their fathers were and because the boys’ mothers refused to love anyone else. No, there was something more sinister, and she had a feeling that finding the answers to the questions she had raised could be a long time coming. And asking those questions where other ears could hear would be more dangerous than she might have anticipated.

  As she began to turn and move toward the counter and the coffee left in the pot, one of the cell phones in the center of the breakfast table began to vibrate imperatively.

  Rafe’s hand flashed out, gripping the phone and flipping it open before hitting the call button in a seamless move as he brought it to his ear.

  “Yeah?” he answered quietly, and waited a second, a frown brewing between his brows.

  “How long have you been there?” His voice seemed to harden, his sapphire eyes gem bright and just as hard as he listened.

  Pulling her gaze from his, Cami moved to the coffeepot and refilled the empty cup she had set in front of it earlier.